These days I look up at any crowded area, and rarely is the crowd not involved in interacting with their electronic device (I am right now). I see people Facebooking, messaging, emailing, watching movies, listening to music (consuming media), and I'm even almost relieved at an actual phone call. It is overwhelming, and I've already found myself involved in just this behavior. Anxious, of I don't know what, of missing the events of this instant, of not knowing what everyone else does. What's fresh? What's funny now? Maybe the new funny is hilarious, why would I miss it if I can avoid it? "I need to know this, I need to talk to him, to watch that, to use our time to keep up with the events of my friends and the world".
The anxiety is real, the need is not. Highly varying per age range, social status, and life habits, of course, but as a guy with tech-oriented education, who has seen the progression of these habits sprout and spread since such predecessors as ICQ, and a set of quirks I sometimes describe as light OCD, I've felt this anxiety grow with the spread of connections available, which I used to strongly support. When I got my first blackberry smartphone, I was quick to install and login to all messaging applications I was signed up for, and I remember labeling myself "Forever Online".
Two laptops, three smartphones, and five years later, my attitude towards perpetual connectivity has changed. After the first few months with my blackberry, I realized that e-messaging my friends didn't make us connect much more, nor did it allow us to hang out more often. In fact, it seemed to me that I myself was too busy talking with everyone at once, finding someone to connect with, caught up in the e-fever, that I found no time to choose a single person from my hundreds of e-friends from my dozen e-circles to talk to personally, or even by phone. And though my ability to express myself through short text strings developed nicely, my face-to-face skills withered.
I didn't realize it at the time, but in hindsight, my social strategy could hardly work out well to develop a fruitful, social circle for me. Everyone else out there either already had satisfying personal relationships or they didn't. If they did, they either weren't online at all, or wouldn't be interested in connecting with anyone else on such a narrow channel as text. And if they were also needy like me, they'd probably have a similar strategy to mine - every green ball beside a name was an opportunity for connection, an invitation for a "hey", and before they knew it, they were handling six different contexts through six different text rectangles, each of which was either also playing social butterfly, or was getting annoyed at how unattentive this e-person was.
It did happen though, that a real connection would sometime spark through the texts, and I'd spend hours on end talking to this person (most often female) on the other side of the rectangle, and each day anxiously waiting for the next time we had hours on end to talk. As probabilities would have it, though, the other side of the rectangle was also often on the other side of the world. Even if it were only on the other side of the state, a busy schedule from either party was enough to disallow meeting face-to-face. And while I did find a few precious real gem friends scattered throughout the online social network, I found the effort-to-connection ratio much too high.
I feel I've tangented off the topic a lot. In short, I don't see online social connectivity as a tool for social-savviness and popularity anymore. I don't think being able to choose to talk to a friend through either Email or Whatsapp or Facebook or Skype or text message or phone call helps me tell a friend what I want to any better. I think it does make me have to figure out and remember which of these channels are preferable/available/speedier for each of my contacts, and for those who handle all channels continually, it makes little difference. I think it can create excuses for sneaky recipients who do not want to deal with some message just yet.
As the magic of instantaneous communication became commonplace and it pervaded my every day, I found some of these channels transforming from perpetual opportunities into perpetual burdens. Gradually, I began to think of that smooth slate in my pocket less by what I could do with it, and more by how cumbersome it was to tell it what I wanted, by the duties it gave me of charging it and of being within earshot (almost like a baby), by the pressing, if ever-so-slight attention (receptiveness) I owed it in case of anyone texting or calling me at ANY time, and by the constant 1900MHz keep-alive signal it radiated directly into my pelvis. As you can gather, I've become less inclined to acquire the best and latest communication technology.
Actually, it was through this process that I was better able to discern some dynamics of social phenomena from the pre-Internet epochs. (Granted, the Internet is older than I am, but at least the first half of my social life occurred in pre-Internet style; cellphones and ICQ became moneyed novelties smack in the middle of my adolescence). The duties to our social circles were not born from the Internet. We've had them for ages for sure, and I know I've had them for the entirety of my social life. A connection, any connection with a person, determines part of your social graph (these days easily visualizable in most social network analysis papers), and it projects forces upon your life. Whether attractive, repulsive, supportive, or awkward, the sum of these forces influence what you do, what you think, and what you feel. They project upon you ideas and values, opinions of people or political parties or car brands or TV series. Whether as means or ends, these connections are both bridges to new landings and the bars of our own cages. Through them we can slide in Life, day by day, stage by stage, into new friends and lovers, new jobs, new skills, hobbies, new places and perspectives in Life.
They also constrain our paths. Some may disagree, but I stand by it. How can the same connections both open up possibilities and disallow them? I might want to be more precise. They pave some of our paths while they hinder others. These forces are not absolute, but their "softness" can achieve marvelous solidity. Think about it. You have your own system of ideas and values. Do you like surrounding yourself with people who think in the same terms, many of them who think in similar ways? It's natural to do so. We tend to do what we are and become what we do, and people is a LARGE portion of what we do. Everytime we talk or we write, we do so to people (and now sometimes automated systems). Almost everything you do at the job will affect other people (excluding perhaps TPS reports and such). Your colleagues will understand what you do, and value similar output and skills. Your friends will talk with you about topics of common interest. Your enemies and rivals will disagree on common topics, or compete for common goals. Your awkward connections will share with you that unspoken moment through the quick searching-eye-contact/optional-tiny-smile/off-glance combo too familiar to some of us. You share SOMETHING with EACH of your connections, from the street you grew up on to your shared love of psychedelic-country classical violin remixes to the seat you shared on the train, and changing any of these parts of yourself risks cutting some of your social ties. Oh no.
Now, I speak only from personal experience (and what else), but I imagine this effect is similar in most socially able people. Yes, some people define their identity more independently from their social connections than others, but aside from true hermits and particularly quaint individuals, few people can truly claim to be unconstrained by their social life.
Not that they'd want to. These "constraints" come together with flavors and diversions that the vast many of us would find Life Vulcan-dry without (Not a Star-Trek fan, but I just watched the last movie (in 3D!)). Then why am I bringing it up? Because as I said, I've gradually thought of my social connectivity less in terms of opportunities and more in terms of hindrances. I've realized that the upkeep required to maintain the meaningful portion of my 680+ Facebook friends up to date in my mind is more than I care to invest anymore, and even with the smaller subset that I am particularly fond of - I realized that the parts of myself that I share with them, fairly deep values, have become immutable, and not because I would not or could not change them, but because of those invisible bonds that have grown so close to me and around me. But they are not truly part of me. And I realized then that I have rarely, if ever, truly known the "full and real" me.
I know myself as when I am around people, and as when I do things around other people. I have alone times, but rarely can I plan and imagine without considering my connections, my friends, or my family. My social graph itself is but an emergent effect from the seed that was my birth, my family, and the state of the world at the time. Yes, there is something in me that drives me beyond all that, that chooses what I do and what I say and what I like, but I don't know it. I can trace many values and ideas of mine back to someone that introduced them to me. Would they be mine now if they had not? Was my acceptance of them among others meaningful? How can I know?
I'm not sure. But when I think of myself within my social graph, I see my connections as sticky trails of green gum that I can't unstick from, whichever side I pull onto, and I see myself like a fly in the middle of a green spider web. And my area of the web is not particularly dreary - it's actually a nice convenient area. But I have an urge to know the "full and real" me, and I've realized the near-impossibility of doing this while still connected to my web. Hence, I've decided to prune my social connections and reboot my social life. My intention? To explore myself, beyond my connections. I hope that a sufficient amount of solitude and personal search, uninfluenced by the "shoulds", "likes", "wants", "rights/wrongs", "carefuls", "clichés", "tackys", "ewws", and other such idiosyncracies from other people, will help me do this.
As social graph experts would know better though, local social graphs are notoriously well-connected, and social triangles abound. I estimate my adjacent social graph consists of no more than five (meaningful) disconnected subsets, so cutting off a connection necessitates cutting off a myriad others. This is why I'm not disconnecting only from a subset of people, but from all connections I have. How can one truly cut off, in a time of such constant and instant connectivity? Well, I'm giving up my email, my phone, and all social networks (at least for a while). Basically, social suicide. But I prefer the term social coma. Hardly likely will I meet one of my few thousand direct connections while somewhere I don't know I know anyone from, but I gather that eventually the Poisson (or nostalgia) will catch up. But I won't pose estimates for these.
Anyway, that's why and that's what. Yes, I've heard likenesses to "Into the Wild", Steve Jobs, and Buddha already. No, I haven't read their books or seen their movies. I did read the story of Prince Siddhartha from a comic book when I was a kid.
The anxiety is real, the need is not. Highly varying per age range, social status, and life habits, of course, but as a guy with tech-oriented education, who has seen the progression of these habits sprout and spread since such predecessors as ICQ, and a set of quirks I sometimes describe as light OCD, I've felt this anxiety grow with the spread of connections available, which I used to strongly support. When I got my first blackberry smartphone, I was quick to install and login to all messaging applications I was signed up for, and I remember labeling myself "Forever Online".
Two laptops, three smartphones, and five years later, my attitude towards perpetual connectivity has changed. After the first few months with my blackberry, I realized that e-messaging my friends didn't make us connect much more, nor did it allow us to hang out more often. In fact, it seemed to me that I myself was too busy talking with everyone at once, finding someone to connect with, caught up in the e-fever, that I found no time to choose a single person from my hundreds of e-friends from my dozen e-circles to talk to personally, or even by phone. And though my ability to express myself through short text strings developed nicely, my face-to-face skills withered.
I didn't realize it at the time, but in hindsight, my social strategy could hardly work out well to develop a fruitful, social circle for me. Everyone else out there either already had satisfying personal relationships or they didn't. If they did, they either weren't online at all, or wouldn't be interested in connecting with anyone else on such a narrow channel as text. And if they were also needy like me, they'd probably have a similar strategy to mine - every green ball beside a name was an opportunity for connection, an invitation for a "hey", and before they knew it, they were handling six different contexts through six different text rectangles, each of which was either also playing social butterfly, or was getting annoyed at how unattentive this e-person was.
It did happen though, that a real connection would sometime spark through the texts, and I'd spend hours on end talking to this person (most often female) on the other side of the rectangle, and each day anxiously waiting for the next time we had hours on end to talk. As probabilities would have it, though, the other side of the rectangle was also often on the other side of the world. Even if it were only on the other side of the state, a busy schedule from either party was enough to disallow meeting face-to-face. And while I did find a few precious real gem friends scattered throughout the online social network, I found the effort-to-connection ratio much too high.
I feel I've tangented off the topic a lot. In short, I don't see online social connectivity as a tool for social-savviness and popularity anymore. I don't think being able to choose to talk to a friend through either Email or Whatsapp or Facebook or Skype or text message or phone call helps me tell a friend what I want to any better. I think it does make me have to figure out and remember which of these channels are preferable/available/speedier for each of my contacts, and for those who handle all channels continually, it makes little difference. I think it can create excuses for sneaky recipients who do not want to deal with some message just yet.
- "Which report that's due when? What message? Oh, a TEXT message? Sorry, I didn't have my phone with me!"
- "You sent it on Skype? Man, I rarely log in there anymore!"
- "Why wasn't I at which meeting? Oh I'm so sorry, my Google Calendar somehow didn't sync with my phone!"
As the magic of instantaneous communication became commonplace and it pervaded my every day, I found some of these channels transforming from perpetual opportunities into perpetual burdens. Gradually, I began to think of that smooth slate in my pocket less by what I could do with it, and more by how cumbersome it was to tell it what I wanted, by the duties it gave me of charging it and of being within earshot (almost like a baby), by the pressing, if ever-so-slight attention (receptiveness) I owed it in case of anyone texting or calling me at ANY time, and by the constant 1900MHz keep-alive signal it radiated directly into my pelvis. As you can gather, I've become less inclined to acquire the best and latest communication technology.
Actually, it was through this process that I was better able to discern some dynamics of social phenomena from the pre-Internet epochs. (Granted, the Internet is older than I am, but at least the first half of my social life occurred in pre-Internet style; cellphones and ICQ became moneyed novelties smack in the middle of my adolescence). The duties to our social circles were not born from the Internet. We've had them for ages for sure, and I know I've had them for the entirety of my social life. A connection, any connection with a person, determines part of your social graph (these days easily visualizable in most social network analysis papers), and it projects forces upon your life. Whether attractive, repulsive, supportive, or awkward, the sum of these forces influence what you do, what you think, and what you feel. They project upon you ideas and values, opinions of people or political parties or car brands or TV series. Whether as means or ends, these connections are both bridges to new landings and the bars of our own cages. Through them we can slide in Life, day by day, stage by stage, into new friends and lovers, new jobs, new skills, hobbies, new places and perspectives in Life.
They also constrain our paths. Some may disagree, but I stand by it. How can the same connections both open up possibilities and disallow them? I might want to be more precise. They pave some of our paths while they hinder others. These forces are not absolute, but their "softness" can achieve marvelous solidity. Think about it. You have your own system of ideas and values. Do you like surrounding yourself with people who think in the same terms, many of them who think in similar ways? It's natural to do so. We tend to do what we are and become what we do, and people is a LARGE portion of what we do. Everytime we talk or we write, we do so to people (and now sometimes automated systems). Almost everything you do at the job will affect other people (excluding perhaps TPS reports and such). Your colleagues will understand what you do, and value similar output and skills. Your friends will talk with you about topics of common interest. Your enemies and rivals will disagree on common topics, or compete for common goals. Your awkward connections will share with you that unspoken moment through the quick searching-eye-contact/optional-tiny-smile/off-glance combo too familiar to some of us. You share SOMETHING with EACH of your connections, from the street you grew up on to your shared love of psychedelic-country classical violin remixes to the seat you shared on the train, and changing any of these parts of yourself risks cutting some of your social ties. Oh no.
Now, I speak only from personal experience (and what else), but I imagine this effect is similar in most socially able people. Yes, some people define their identity more independently from their social connections than others, but aside from true hermits and particularly quaint individuals, few people can truly claim to be unconstrained by their social life.
Not that they'd want to. These "constraints" come together with flavors and diversions that the vast many of us would find Life Vulcan-dry without (Not a Star-Trek fan, but I just watched the last movie (in 3D!)). Then why am I bringing it up? Because as I said, I've gradually thought of my social connectivity less in terms of opportunities and more in terms of hindrances. I've realized that the upkeep required to maintain the meaningful portion of my 680+ Facebook friends up to date in my mind is more than I care to invest anymore, and even with the smaller subset that I am particularly fond of - I realized that the parts of myself that I share with them, fairly deep values, have become immutable, and not because I would not or could not change them, but because of those invisible bonds that have grown so close to me and around me. But they are not truly part of me. And I realized then that I have rarely, if ever, truly known the "full and real" me.
I know myself as when I am around people, and as when I do things around other people. I have alone times, but rarely can I plan and imagine without considering my connections, my friends, or my family. My social graph itself is but an emergent effect from the seed that was my birth, my family, and the state of the world at the time. Yes, there is something in me that drives me beyond all that, that chooses what I do and what I say and what I like, but I don't know it. I can trace many values and ideas of mine back to someone that introduced them to me. Would they be mine now if they had not? Was my acceptance of them among others meaningful? How can I know?
I'm not sure. But when I think of myself within my social graph, I see my connections as sticky trails of green gum that I can't unstick from, whichever side I pull onto, and I see myself like a fly in the middle of a green spider web. And my area of the web is not particularly dreary - it's actually a nice convenient area. But I have an urge to know the "full and real" me, and I've realized the near-impossibility of doing this while still connected to my web. Hence, I've decided to prune my social connections and reboot my social life. My intention? To explore myself, beyond my connections. I hope that a sufficient amount of solitude and personal search, uninfluenced by the "shoulds", "likes", "wants", "rights/wrongs", "carefuls", "clichés", "tackys", "ewws", and other such idiosyncracies from other people, will help me do this.
As social graph experts would know better though, local social graphs are notoriously well-connected, and social triangles abound. I estimate my adjacent social graph consists of no more than five (meaningful) disconnected subsets, so cutting off a connection necessitates cutting off a myriad others. This is why I'm not disconnecting only from a subset of people, but from all connections I have. How can one truly cut off, in a time of such constant and instant connectivity? Well, I'm giving up my email, my phone, and all social networks (at least for a while). Basically, social suicide. But I prefer the term social coma. Hardly likely will I meet one of my few thousand direct connections while somewhere I don't know I know anyone from, but I gather that eventually the Poisson (or nostalgia) will catch up. But I won't pose estimates for these.
Anyway, that's why and that's what. Yes, I've heard likenesses to "Into the Wild", Steve Jobs, and Buddha already. No, I haven't read their books or seen their movies. I did read the story of Prince Siddhartha from a comic book when I was a kid.
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