This Article Is Like 80 Tweets Long
A piece I wrote about a month ago I, rather ironically, forgot to post to the Internet
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This article would be so much more to the point if it were just a tweet. Or perhaps a note on my Facebook page, or even a quick little snippet from my Tumblr.
If any of these terms are not embedded in your daily lexicon or are confusing to you, then perhaps this article is for you. The way in which society interacts in 2009, specifically the youth of America and beyond, is so intrinsically different from any generation before it. It has come to the point where we interact less face-to-face, or even by phone, with every passing day, thanks to the Omniscient Internet. Even writing about it for print publication seems quaintly anachronistic, rather like the recent resurgence in the popularity of vinyl albums. We have become ingrained in communicating through layers of technology, like never before, in this last decade. And it seems with every new year a new website or web-tool pushes a new part of our personality onto the Internet, and I intend to investigate why we’ve become so dependent on the net for interaction, what happened to the phone, and which sites are shaping our future.
A wonderful new phrase was recently coined by an MIT professor to describe how we in the 21st Century interact without actually interacting. Henry Jenkins considers our non-physical Internet-based communicating to be “tele-cocooning”, such that we never have to leave our own little cave-like worlds but can still interact with billions of individuals around the world. Interestingly, a similar subject was tackled by another professor, Pierre Lévy, in the book Collective Intelligence, which seems to suggest that the benefits outweigh the risks. The Internet, and web-based devices, allow us to be connected to others constantly, so information and ideas can be exchanged and enhanced at blinding rates. Apparently the fact that we could in theory lose all social skills by never interacting on the same personal level with others that we would have to if all we had was a phone, or pen and paper. Even a decade ago, when I had just started high school, I remember going home with my friends, sitting in complete silence all the way on the subway, having basically nothing to say to each other, but then talking up a blue streak on AIM (AOL’s seminal instant-messaging client) when we got home. Perhaps soon we will all prefer a Martix-like existence, inside an internet-cocoon which we will have no desire to awake from.
I decided to ask around in my peer group, the children of the Digital Age, the dotcom bust and post 9/11, to see how they felt their lives were affected by digital communication. Hannah Louie, a Freshman at the University of Pennsylvania, has used instant messenger clients for over seven years, starting out on the American staple of communication, AIM, and recently graduating on to Gchat – Google’s embedded chat client in its Gmail website. While she enjoys the multitasking that talking online allows, she believes that “it’s so easy to be fake”, that anyone can assume any persona online, and while she doesn’t like that she does it, she acknowledges that it becomes so much harder to concentrate on your friends – “you just allot a couple of seconds to somebody; you can’t really ever focus on just them.”
Sites like Facebook, started by Harvard grad Mark Zuckerberg in 2004, which allow you to create profile pages for yourself and connect them to your friends’, seem to have taken up where instant-messaging left off in terms of distancing oneself from friends. Since the introduction of the “Newsfeed” section, which is essentially a self-updating stream of real-time information for whenever every single friend updates some aspect of their page, or comments on another user’s activity, allows you to watch your entire group of friends at once from a distance. Other sites have taken this stream-of-consciousness structure to heart and incorporated it into their work.
Tumblr, a blog hosting website, has its front page set up in such a way that every new post from the blogs of your friends that you are connected to will spill down from the top as they are created. Its structure is not as hard to follow as Facebook, if just because on Facebook you may have hundreds of friends updating at any given time, you most likely will not have hundreds of bloggers you are connected to updating as frequently. Or perhaps I’m just not as popular as I thought I was.
While one can argue that most of the content that any given user generates on these sites involves their friends in some way (either they are in it, or it is intended for them to see), you really no longer have to physically interact with your friends to have meaningful friendships.
According to alexa.com, a traffic-monitoring website, the average Facebook user spends about 25 minutes on the site per day, and Gmail is the most-used webmail service in the world. Both sites are five years old, and essentially have a controlling stake in daily web traffic. At least sites like Facebook, which has its own embedded chat client, or Gchat, still require some level of actual interaction with your friends, especially with Gchat’s new video-chat function, and Facebook’s ability to record and upload videos to your friends’ pages. You may not be able to shake their hand or give them a hug, but at least you can see them and hear their voices. It seems, though, with every step forward, we take one step back as well.
We have moved on from the chatrooms and IM clients that dominated the early years of high-connectivity, known to you and I as the 90s, to vid-chats and vlogs (video-blogs). However, we also now tweet more than the assembled choir of all birds. Our tweets, though, are not sonorous melodies emitted by winged animals, but rather 140-word messages, full of cryptic site-specific shorthand and code, posted to Twitter.com, from their site, iPhones, Blackberries, text messages and third-party programs with wonderful names like TweetDeck, Twitterific, Tweetie and Twuffer. This bizarre pun-filled universe is quickly becoming the method of choice for communicating one’s thoughts, be they personal and inconsequential, or corporate and sponsored. Barack Obama and Britney Spears have at different times been the most popular tweeters.
Twitter, founded in 2006 by Jack Dorsey in San Francisco, has become the preeminent example of “micro-blogging”, where its users are restricted to a small word limit to get their thoughts across. Unfortunately, there’s no limit on the amount of posts one can make. As a result of this, every blowhard the world over has flocked to the site, such that it has really morphed from beyond its original intention as a site to aggregate your friends’ quick thoughts and web links into a mess of spam messages and corporate shilling. One of the worst offenders, I feel, is the New York Times. While the content they post is almost always just links to their online articles, which is fine, they tend to publish like they would their paper. A few times every day the NYT twitter posts about 5 tweets at once, usually all on the same section (so all the sports articles will get posted at once, for example). You could actually set your watch by their updates; every day at the same time. This seems contrary to the point of the benefits of our ‘tele-cocooned’ society – information available at the drop of a hat – and is one of the many examples of older generations attempting to grasp what the youth is in to, and how they can exploit it for their own gains. Even Mark Zuckerberg, a seasoned veteran at this point at age 24, realized the potential of Twitter, and attempted to buy out the company for $500 million. Dorsey and the others over at Twitter, Inc. decided to turn down the offer, deciding to maintain its relative ‘indie’ status among social media sites – it is ranked third in overall traffic behind Facebook and the ageing behemoth that is MySpace.
At this point, one is left wondering how all this affects the way in which we are interacting. It should be a pretty good indicator though, that a company, stated to be worth about $15 billion would want to buy out a startup for about 1/30 of its own net worth. Millions of tweets are tweeted (twotted?) each day. People have always used the Internet as a distraction tool while procrastinating, but increasingly there is a substitution from interaction to distancing as a result of this tweeting and Tumbling trend.
Many offices have Microsoft’s business-specific suite of programs installed, the most infamous being Outlook. This frustratingly difficult email program has been the main form of communication between 9-5 stiffs for about a decade now, but became more decentralized with the advent of the BlackBerry, which allowed for emails to answered rapidly from any point on the Earth’s surface, as long as a cell tower was in range. This desire for rapidity gave rise to the increase in use of another program in Microsoft’s Office suite; Windows Messenger. While for a long time instant messenger clients were disallowed in offices to disallow idle workers chatting to their friends, but the stripped down, admin-controlled nature of WM allowed for businesses to enter the 1990s midway through the 2000s. Of course, instant messages started to replace verbal conversations as workers realized that it was easier to type something to a co-worker than walk 50 yards over to them. I remember at one office I worked for, my boss, who sat directly behind me (as in, he could turn around and tap me on the shoulder without moving more than his torso), IM’d me if I wanted to join him for lunch. I answered him with my voice and he was startled. I cannot imagine what offices are going to be like another ten years.
Penn senior Boris Fedorov had some interesting words to sum up where our society seems to be at this point. He suggests that if he didn’t have these proprietary tools, like Facebook or Twitter, then there would probably a certain amount of his acquaintances that he would have no sustained contact with. “I hate it though when an old friend from high school tweets or posts on my [Facebook] wall to ask me to come for a visit, when he or she could have easily called me and gotten an instant answer,” he added. Perhaps instant messages really can’t live up to their name as well as an old-fashioned phone call can, especially if the person is away from their computer. Fedorov suggests that all interactions now fall into two categories – delayed and instant – and until the Internet and all of its add-ons can react fast enough to be considered instant, we will be going backwards as a society by relying on them. “Tweeting is fun,” he decides, “but I still enjoy calling people.”
While it is difficult to make a value judgment on the usefulness of all these Internet tools, it does seem that our society has changed forever. “Just Google it” is a phrase heard considerably more often than “why not consult your local library?” in 2009, and YouTube is almost as viewed as the boob tube. People are even getting married after meeting on dating sites every day. I’m not entirely sure what to make of it all, but I hope when we get together for socials in twenty years, they won’t be on Second Life.
Don’t know what that is? Don’t get me started. This rabbit hole of Internet connectivity will continue to deepen with each new fad site.
