The consequences of human interaction.

I’ve been pondering the topic for my paper for a week now, and on Sunday, over lunch in a slightly disappointing Indian restaurant (never drink salt Lassi!) I mentioned the idea to two of the smartest people I know (one of whom is an almost purely online friend – this is only the second time I’ve seen him this year and it was for his birthday and the first time was for my birthday, so go figure).  But before I get ahead of myself, here’s the idea:

Identity has become another social product.  It is a conscious, strategic construct, an often narcissistic representative text, and it can be changed hourly, to coincide with whatever is required in a specific online milieu. People had private journals: now they have public blogs.  Nothing is sacred. Everything is exposed for general scrutiny, trivialised, and forgotten so very quickly. Which leads me to the matter of impermanence, a particularly fascinating issue for me.  In the past, ephemera were often kept, for their value as keepsakes: love letters were squirreled away in secret places, and ticket stubs and invitations to events made their way into scrapbooks.  Photographs were showcased in albums with thoughtful and amusing captions.  People bought CDs (only after careful thought and consideration, because they weren’t cheap) with beautiful inserts, the lyrics included, and listened to the songs for years after their purchase.  They subscribed to magazines, like National Geographic or Reader’s Digest, and kept all the back issues. Essentially, memories were cherished, embodied in small items, inconsequential at face value. 

Those are things that I did, anyway, and for me, things seem very different now. Almost everything seems ‘more’: more options, more disposable, more available, more current, but not more quality or more memorable. Few people bother to print photographs – it is possible to take so many and store them all digitally.  No-one writes letters any more, most invitations are e-mailed or posted on Facebook, and inboxes need to be kept tidy and free of clutter. Tickets for films and shows, even flights and holidays, are all booked online.  Our memories are out of place, disembodied and disoriented, and ultimately, weaker and less meaningful.  David Gray and Jade Petermon agree with this, in ‘Memory, Space, Media’ (2012) but they also show how media can be used to create a storehouse of collective memories which were previously scattered and unacknowledged.

At face value, this change does not seem particularly meaningful, but it may well be a symptom of a deeper malaise: the 21^st century disease of sensory overload, excessive communication without satisfaction, of loneliness despite a permanent lack of total privacy and solitude.

So this leads to two problems:  are social media making us lonely, and is the loss of embodiment (i.e. the tendency towards digital memories) something worth worrying about?  My super-intelligent friends seem to think not.  They think it’s no big deal, that we can archive better than before, and that the medium for the archiving does not affect the meaning of the content. For them, it’s like the difference between DVDs and Blu-Ray. I’m not so sure though, and I won’t be until I’ve done a lot more reading on the topic.  From what I’ve come across so far in a 2010 article by Lea Schick and Lone Malmborg called ‘Bodies, Embodiment and Ubiquitous Computing’, my friends seem to have the right idea in some respects.  Disembodiment allows us the potential to use technology in truly pervasive yet non-intrusive ways.  We can let it become as natural as getting dressed, and it allows us the potential to be so much more than we are right now.

BUT we’re not there yet, and I don’t care what any wise-ass says: look at a picture of your old Grade 1 classroom.  Connect with your old teacher and classmates on facebook.  And then, get hold of a copy of your old Grade 1 reader: smell it, see Jack run, feel the thickness of the paper. And tell me which version – embodied or disembodied – affects you most.