In doing a bit of reading for a couple of courses I’m teaching this semester, I was struck recently by the concision with which Mark Deuze pings how mediated so many aspects of our everyday lives now are - and how he deftly places this constant mediation - through email, mobile phones, the intertubes, and so much more - in its sociological context, leveraging off the work of Zygmunt Bauman. Some day, when I have time, I’ll have more to say about that, and there’s lots of nifty academic research - a fair bit from my colleagues at QUT’s Creative Industries Faculty - which is exploring many of the ramifications of everyday mediation. Loath as I normally am as a sociologist to believe the new new anything really is fundamentally new under the sun, I am starting to be convinced that a shift in the conditions of our everyday lives is taking place, though I’m totally unconvinced by claims that it’s “dumbing us down” or whatever.
It’s a real pity that the dead tree media still choose to frame all these complex and overdetermined shifts in “internet and technology evil” or “internet and technology brilliant” dichotomies - the latest, though by far one of the least egregious, being sleep deprivation and increased stress from social media and entertainment technologies - not, mind you, from the effective disappearance of any boundary between work and non-work for many folks, which may in fact be much more serious an issue. Laurel Papworth has a neat post satirising the latest “OMG!” meme, but I thought it might be interesting to throw it open for discussion and to treat it seriously - what are the downsides and upsides of being “always on”?
Start with the obvious one: fractured concentration/lack of depth ?? That Aaron Darc post is the longest online thing I’ve read for awhile. It’s just not a medium (well, for baby boomers) that suits long, thoughtful reading. I think differently when reading print.
If you wanted to know what the extreme ends of “always on” looks like, just ask any member of the IT fraternity who had to carry a pager during the 1990’s. We used to call it “beeper madness” that involved an involuntary flexion every time something in the room beeped (no matter what it was, microwave, digital watch etc.).
What’s intriguing about this in 2008 is just how many people voluntarily submit to a strange form of “beeper madness” without any kind of monetary gain. I’m mostly reminded of Skinner’s pigeons, but that’d be cruel.
(and yes, I’m working, stupid as that sounds)
typically, i’m commenting on this while in the office, writing. Gaaaaah.
I wrote the post with my laptop on my lap in front of the tv watching Andromeda on dvd. Resolutely avoiding any work related emails, though I worked til 9pm, but doing a bit of LP admin emailing and keeping an eye on FB.
Now I’m going to turn the thing off and read a novel. While still watching Andromeda though!
Noooooooooo …
That’s not ‘reading a novel’ — that’s ‘looking at pages’!
Yep, I know! But it’s a really light sf novel.
I’ve been in the habit of reading in front of the tv for a very long time indeed. Most of the time it’s work/study stuff - which you can actually absorb a lot of given that a lot of it runs in predictable grooves with half an eye on it. I don’t have a lot of time for actual novel reading, sadly. I used to think - maybe more post phd. Now I tend to think - in my next incarnation.
I think Laurel makes a wonderful point about the anxiety of being “always on”. The sources of these anxieties are nothing new, of course - the potential was always there - but what the technology has done is enable them in a way we have never had. I have a friend, for example, who is “trying” to get over a breakup. We know it’s failing, because she spends all day glancing at her phone, to check if there are any messages, and jumping on a comp, to check her emails. Detachment from something is an important part of getting through something, so “always connected” can go terribly wrong, when you’re always connected to a source of anxiety (such as Laurel’s instance of the bullied child who anxiously checks the net for the next attack). In the case of bullying, it’s also connected to the problem of the level of aggression with which people communicate on cyberspace (I think that’s one of the biggest problems with the cyber gen), but even so, it’s made worse by the opportunity the narrative has to be so constant and complicated - there’s never a moments rest from it, because any minute “something might happen”. It’s an unhealthy focus - something probably a lot of us have been guilty of at some stage (I have promised myself, however, that I will now go to bed, and not refresh the page that has user comments to my article on it
)
The question is whether communication technology is bringing us closer or driving us apart…
“The network society as …an amplifier of the conversation society has with itself”?
The blogosphere is often like the conversations that take place in the cab. Lively, topical, ephemeral. A bar without booze.
I find making video for the net the most time consuming and addictive. And the most rewarding. When you head off for a media free trip up the Gunbarrel Highway, your audience are “always on” and the videos have a continuing life. Sometimes it feels like no one is viewing and then suddenly, after the e-free holiday, the warm glow of the watched returns when you check your channels.
PS. There is a more discerning audience at Teachertube.com the Youtube. They never belittle the authors because they never comment. It’s the kind of conversation that happens in a cinema. Unless some Gen Y uses their mobile.
I think we need to start turning away from technological determinism in such theory…in fact most interaction in’cyberspace’ occurs despite the barriers it places to perception.
Let us not confuse the tool for the task…and this comes straight out of Goffman who argued that we should not see new technology as informing interaction but how interaction works its way to inform technology. (See his ramblings on the car and stop lights - and getting to the destination) Of course he wasn’t talking about the internet…but i think the telephone perhaps…?
Always on? Thats called being awake!
In my position of four years sudying the game Second Life, I have seen that really technology is a great way to find a world in common with people that usually we would not have access to, of course we need to devlop new skills to overcome face to face communication, but its pretty amazing from my vantage point to see how participants can bring unique knowledges together in these emerging social interfaces.
Go forth and embrace the new world is my recommendation!
Deuze writes about how we’re putting ourselves into a state of continuous electronic engagement in which many of us are always connected and engaged in continuous cultural production as the domains of work and life are increasingly spilling over into each other. He observes that life is now lived “in the media”. McLuhan presaged this (as he did so many things) when he described the development of electronic media as promoting an “age of anxiety”.
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