So, my online life partner and web guru (guru in the jazzmatazz/hip-hop way, not the lame monkish enlightenment way) has taken up the cause of why so many of us who are so intimately connected to the best of what the world wide web has to offer are so often dissatisfied with its intended or unintended effects. Actually, no he didn't; I just projected that onto his writing. But it's something that we grapple with all the time, and something that has yet to be meaningfully or substantially addressed.
We are still in the infant stages of fully grappling with the internet's sociological impacts. In spite of the great strides we have made with regards to communication (IM, blogging, RSS, media access, YouTube etc.), collaboration (wikis, shared documents, the symantic web, etc.) and information generation, dissemination, and retrieval (Google, JStor, etc.), sociological analysis of the web remains, paradigmatically-speaking, static. We discuss, with great regularity, the dangers of MySpace (which used to be the perils of the chatroom), the oxymoronic nature of technology in the workplace (not always a boon to efficiency), privacy and civil liberties, and the implications of pervasive or ubiquitous computing. But there are very few discussions of how the
web really seems to be affecting the vast majority of us for which the web provides some vital service that sits uncomfortably between over-occupied diversion and full-blown escape, and worse still, we have even fewer discussions on how to cope with this.
All we really know how to do is laugh at the codification of arbitrary interactions without really understanding how they affect our psyche: poor blog etiquette, the difference between facebook wall posts and private messages (to say nothing of pokes, superpokes, scrabulous games and instant messages), craigslist and ebay postings, among many more. But these interactions do not happen in an emotional vacuum. How do we really make sense of the impact that these interactions have on our real, physical day-to-day lives? And what do we do about it?
I think Tyler's point on the lack of anything that will ever supplant physical interaction is both self-evident and profoundly forgotten. While the internet, cellphones, voip and other services allow us to be more interconnected to our previous-life social circles than ever before, these devices only provide a rendering or sampling of what many of these relationships actually mean to us. Not only that, it can be almost damaging to devote too much time to maintaining these relationships at the cost of cultivating the relationships in our current physical lives. But more and more, services like facebook and gmail seek to monopolize more of our time while providing a narrower spectrum brand of social relationship maintenance in their current form. Is the answer more technology, or less?
My gut says less but recent historical anecdotes seem to prove otherwise. Has DVR really made me watch less TV or more? It's hard to say. On the one hand, I don't channel surf as much as I used to, but then again, without DVR maybe I'd be more discouraged from watching TV at all. Does having perpetual access to e-mail improve my ability to communicate with friends? To a degree, but maybe I'd be more inclined to be making those plans to fly out to visit them if it weren't so "easy" to keep in touch.
Well, all of this doesn't really change the fact that I've been promising Tyler a trip to Columbus for over a year now. He's been the most incredibly generous friend you could ask for, and if all he asks for in return is a trip to come visit, then it would be almost Spartan of me to decline. I could enumerate the reasons why Tyler has been so great, but maybe you should just actually get to know him. And if you already know Tyler, maybe you should call me up so we can figure out a weekend in the near future to hop on a plane and spend the weekend wandering Columbus, seeing the sites, and staying the fuck away from our little digital friends.
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