Awkward ambience

The New York Times Magazine is one of my favorite things to read every week. It’s something I’ve long counted on for interesting cover stories, occasional ethical insight, and relatively outdated and boring fashion write-ups (mostly because as a sometimes-labeled hipster type, my style seems to constantly regress more than follow FASHION in NEW YORK). But the recent article about the Facebook News Feed and Twitter made me so angry that despite my usual laziness to write about how much I hate and have disowned much of the en vogue communications technology after adopting it early on, I was finally able to articulate some of my social media discontent.

Let me first say that I despise social media for many of the reasons other people love it. I don’t want status updates: I crave real time conversations. I quit Twitter more than a year ago when I found it was making me feel isolated and lonely, believing that my tweets might actually be important or that others’ were to me. But why should I have thought that way? With no preexisting relationship, I should suddenly form one with people just because we use the same online technology or devices for communication? Unlike people who claim it keeps them in touch with their loose ties, I didn’t want to be so intimately informed. If I never talk to someone, how are ambient updates bringing us closer? Relationships are built on two-way communication, which we still basically don’t have when all of our text is essentially one way. How am I to sift through these snippets of information? What’s really important? Why do I care when we barely speak in the first place? Why the fuck do I need an update on what some girl from my high school is doing today? And if I know she’s reading my short, mostly useless updates, should I care or think she does?

In the article, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is quoted as saying, “A lot of this is just social norms catching up with what technology is capable of.” But why do our psyches need to learn to adapt to a set of code? The implication that we’ll have to react to technology instead of adapting it our needs essentially means that Zuckerberg - and the rest of those who follow his example - are cool with a post humanism that I firmly reject. I am a person. I am physical information. I have a fleshy body, am notta cyborg.

The implication that we’re moving back to a more primitive time reeks of imperialist myths we perpetuate to soothe our colonizing selves. In the old days, whatever we mean by that, whoever we claim that includes, some of us may have kept in touch with our childhood playmates, but that was also because the world was smaller - literally. We weren’t moving away from the towns where we grew up. You couldn’t escape those people, even if it was better to have done so.

But why do we use that as a model? History is always referenced as our reason for continuing patterns of behavior. Yet history also shows us hideous examples of centuries-old judgments gone wrong. How long did it take us to figure out how fucked slavery is? Aside from the fact that many still haven’t learned, I’d argue the majority of that thought still took much longer than it should have. But given our fallacy to fall back on what we know rather than hope for a better future, we imprisoned other human beings for millennia. What about the degradation of women? Just because we’ve treated a group as lower class means we always should? What about the ways we exploit animals in modern society? In the past, if you look beyond the redone narratives we’ve come to believe are our collective history, we respected and valued our animal friends. We relied on them, and we cared for them appropriately. If you use the history model, you had better be prepared to consider that history alone does not provide a substantiative answer for anything.

Hearkening back to the good old days, we have to question why community insularity and maintaining connectedness are values someone is hoping to recapture. It’s easy enough to say that when it fits what you’re doing - supposedly ambient (I’d argue intrusive) technology that allows (or forces) you to keep up with the minutiae of other people’s daily lives. But what about being able to disappear as a concept? Why is this being shunned? More than a few people benefit from moving on in life. Abusive relationships end, and partners need to start over, often with the assistance of those whose job it is to help others hide, refresh, move on safely. People have wide ranges of experiences, positive and negative, that alter them for life. If you’d kept in touch with only the people you knew from infancy, would your worldview really be the same as someone who has traveled extensively, lived around the world, experienced an arguably greater variety of people, places? I’m not arguing one can’t be well-read, knowledgeable, educated within a specific geographic space. But I do think it would be naive in our increasingly global world to say that staying home with your technology is a substitute for meeting new people, eating different foods, exploring varied cultures.

I get that weak ties make me more well-rounded in theory, but I’m too much of an introvert for that. And whatever happened to just speaking to someone to know how they are? Isn’t that how we form relationships anyway? From conversing with one another, examining body language, coming to the table with few expectations and going from there?

We’re on the move a lot this month, hitting several northern European capitals, depending on what you consider northern Europe, I guess. So here are three lumiere videos about space, awareness, and togetherness, from a slow girl in a fast world.

click for train window (in a new window)