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January 23, 2011
The social web is well established and Facebook's power lies in tips from friends and contacts. Increasingly our life---according to Facebook--- will be navigated through our social graph, our network of contacts and friends; it will be their recommendations that will prompt us to dip into the water. The volume and reach of data produced by Facebook's users – and the promise of the future of the social web – has investors so excited that they have just valued the company at $50bn.
Jodie Pfarr in The Age says Flick Facebook and tune in to real life understands her experience on Facebook as one of a daily fix of a weapon of mass distraction and becoming deactivated.The word 'fix' implies addiction addicted to a controlled substance which further implies that it is closing down my ability to function and so it needs to be stopped just like a controlled substance.
The article is not just about her experience--her addiction and being over social media--- as Pfarr adds a criticism of the technology of Facebook:
It also bothers me how Facebook has removed part of our humanity, becoming the acceptable medium in which to announce monumental news. Does such impersonal interaction not diminish the joy? You can't share squeals of delight online.
This cyber-sceptic appeal to face-to face contact is a part of the widespread backlash against social media. A recent bestseller in the US, The Shallows by Nicholas Carr, suggested that use of the internet was altering the way we think to make us less capable of digesting large and complex amounts of information, such as books and magazine articles.
Other books include The Dumbest Generation by Emory University professor Mark Bauerlein – in which he claims "the intellectual future of the US looks dim"– and We Have Met the Enemy by Daniel Akst, which describes the problems of self-control in the modern world, of which the proliferation of communication tools is a key component.
James Harkin in Cyburbia: The Dangerous Idea That's Changing How We Live and Who We Are is a critique of cybernetics, which he argues, is the birth-discipline of the internet. He assumes that because the creation of online networks treats people as nodes that’s what we are when we’re sitting in front of a screen. There is a blanket dismissal of blogs, the herd behaviour on the Facebook loop, and the explosion of creativity in music, video or photography enabled by cheap digital tools and internet distribution channels.
Sherry Turkle in Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less From Each Other rejects the thesis she embraced 15 years earlier, as she states that the online world is no longer a space of freedom and re invention.
She highlights the banalities of electronic interaction--the way our range of expression is constrained by our gadgets and platforms---and argues that technology is threatening to dominate our lives and make us less human. Under the illusion of allowing us to communicate better, it is actually isolating us from real human interactions in a cyber-reality that is a poor imitation of the real world.
In this interview on Frontline: Digital Nation Turkle states:
If you're spending three, four, five, six hours in very fun interactions on Second Life, there's got to be someplace you're not. And that someplace you're not is often with your family and friends sitting around, playing Scrabble face to face, taking a walk, watching television together in the old-fashioned way...Many exciting and interesting things can happen when you are in virtual places, but for every hour of life on the screen is an hour not spent on the rest of life. And it's well past the time to take the measure of what are the costs.You have your face-to-face [life], and you have your virtual life, and you have your Second Life -- it doesn't take into account two things: the limitation of hours in the day and the seduction of the virtual, not just for teenagers but for all of us who don't want to do all the hard things that are involved in having relationships with other people.
Ultimately, she says, we are creatures with bodies, and the pleasures of our bodies are major. So real life should have priority over virtual life. She says if you don't learn how to be alone, you'll always be lonely, that loneliness is failed solitude. We're raising a generation that has grown up with constant connection, and only knows how to be lonely when not connected:
There is a wonderful Freudian formulation, which is that loneliness is failed solitude. In many ways, we are forgetting the intellectual and emotional value of solitude. You're not lonely in solitude. You're only lonely if you forget how to use solitude to replenish yourself and to learn. And you don't want a generation that experiences solitude as loneliness. And that is something to be concerned about, because if kids feel that they need to be connected in order to be themselves, that's quite unhealthy. They'll always feel lonely, because the connections that they're forming are not going to give them what they seek.
There is the need for stillness; to be deliberate; to live in your life and to never feel that you're just resigned to how things need to be.
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the digital age has created one of the largest generational rifts in modern history.
Bauerlein claim is that intelligence of a whole generation (generation X) will continue to drop until it eventually threatens democracy as we know it. essentially, a collective loss of context and history, a neglect of "enduring ideas and conflicts."
He says that survey after painstakingly recounted survey reveals what most of us already suspect: that America's youth know virtually nothing about history and politics. And no wonder. They have developed a "brazen disregard of books and reading."
Bauerlein ignores the fact that the generation before was just as disinterested in high art (and the traditionalists blamed MTV), and the generation before them also seemed more interested in teen escapism than classical music or Victorian literature (and the traditionalists blamed rock and roll).