Tio
I have not been able to write on here much lately. For the next week or so I will also not be able to because I have a million and a half things to do. I am also not on the Internet much anymore because I am working on papers on my laptop.
So what is with the Internet anyway? I would say that my peer group spends 10-15 hours a day on here just blowing time. This is not counting time spent at work. I am just talking about people that come home directly to the computer and sit there in front of it all night.
I do my things in the morning now because the computer is in use here all night. This morning I checked my email, read the news, and checked two webpages I check daily. This took me 30 minutes. Now I am bored out of my mind and ready to shut this thing off. How do people spend an hour on here, much less 10?
Admittedly, I am not, nor should I be, the social paradigm. I am less socially engaged than most people I know even in non-debased or perverse forms. Can we all agree that there is still something fundamental to being physically with the person you are engaging with? Having a conversation with someone sitting across a table from you?
One of the more subtle and difficult things to get used to when living in different societies is the implicit social coding on meeting/conversational etiquette. This seems to be more dramatically different than most other things. Pop culture bleeds out of California, the market is global, media and communication is international, English is almost universally spoken in Western Europe, but one thing that remains localized is the physical component of social engagement.
People in different places greet each other differently, they comport themselves toward each other differently and stand at different distances from one another. A lot of this you do without knowing, you are not taught these things explicitly. If you violate one of these little rules you make the person with whom you are engaged subtly but pervasively uncomfortable...your social currency goes through the floor. This is very important I think...the rules are coded, but the ill-at-ease feeling you get when you are engaged with someone who is not well-habituated is instinctual I think. It is a way that the herd animal tells itself that it has met someone who may not be a member of the herd, or may be a wayward and potentially dangerous member, or perhaps simply unfit and therefore unworthy of your time. This series of stimuli and the reaction is undercut by virtual interaction...there is no coincidence in the number of abnormals and inept people who frequent Internet society. This was a first refuge for the refuse of the social, and now with the mainstreaming of such society we are coding for abnormality in the herd itself.
I am not very engaged, but I am an avid watcher of people. I see how people around me engage and it is usually easy for me to replicate. I also know a wide berth of useless things, always ready to deploy in the kind of yacking that goes on in casual talk. Swedish people are notoriously rigid and distant. They are very friendly, but they are not easy to meet at all.
Anyway, the Internet is destroying the world. We are now becoming disembodied awkward animals. We actually need real engagement to sustain the species I think. Imagine a dystopic future where the body has been rendered completely void by computer communications...does anyone want to live in that world? That is the world I envision us going toward. I would even like to see people spend more time on the couch watching TV. Anything to break the death grip these boxes and the aspatial ether world have on our species.
I have not been able to write on here much lately. For the next week or so I will also not be able to because I have a million and a half things to do. I am also not on the Internet much anymore because I am working on papers on my laptop.
So what is with the Internet anyway? I would say that my peer group spends 10-15 hours a day on here just blowing time. This is not counting time spent at work. I am just talking about people that come home directly to the computer and sit there in front of it all night.
I do my things in the morning now because the computer is in use here all night. This morning I checked my email, read the news, and checked two webpages I check daily. This took me 30 minutes. Now I am bored out of my mind and ready to shut this thing off. How do people spend an hour on here, much less 10?
Admittedly, I am not, nor should I be, the social paradigm. I am less socially engaged than most people I know even in non-debased or perverse forms. Can we all agree that there is still something fundamental to being physically with the person you are engaging with? Having a conversation with someone sitting across a table from you?
One of the more subtle and difficult things to get used to when living in different societies is the implicit social coding on meeting/conversational etiquette. This seems to be more dramatically different than most other things. Pop culture bleeds out of California, the market is global, media and communication is international, English is almost universally spoken in Western Europe, but one thing that remains localized is the physical component of social engagement.
People in different places greet each other differently, they comport themselves toward each other differently and stand at different distances from one another. A lot of this you do without knowing, you are not taught these things explicitly. If you violate one of these little rules you make the person with whom you are engaged subtly but pervasively uncomfortable...your social currency goes through the floor. This is very important I think...the rules are coded, but the ill-at-ease feeling you get when you are engaged with someone who is not well-habituated is instinctual I think. It is a way that the herd animal tells itself that it has met someone who may not be a member of the herd, or may be a wayward and potentially dangerous member, or perhaps simply unfit and therefore unworthy of your time. This series of stimuli and the reaction is undercut by virtual interaction...there is no coincidence in the number of abnormals and inept people who frequent Internet society. This was a first refuge for the refuse of the social, and now with the mainstreaming of such society we are coding for abnormality in the herd itself.
I am not very engaged, but I am an avid watcher of people. I see how people around me engage and it is usually easy for me to replicate. I also know a wide berth of useless things, always ready to deploy in the kind of yacking that goes on in casual talk. Swedish people are notoriously rigid and distant. They are very friendly, but they are not easy to meet at all.
Anyway, the Internet is destroying the world. We are now becoming disembodied awkward animals. We actually need real engagement to sustain the species I think. Imagine a dystopic future where the body has been rendered completely void by computer communications...does anyone want to live in that world? That is the world I envision us going toward. I would even like to see people spend more time on the couch watching TV. Anything to break the death grip these boxes and the aspatial ether world have on our species.
posted by Lenin | 6:48 fm
3 Comments:
Does anyone else think its ironic that Lenin posted an essay blasting the www on this site, which would be inaccessible without the internet?
I too am a socially progressive conservative who embraces the traditional forms of human interaction, though such confrontations are not a huge part of my daily life.
The only good thing I can say about this odd configuration of vast satellite and wires is that I can keep in contact with people I care for- who live across the world!
It's similar to the invention of the airplane!
Again, I enjoy reading letters, and would be comfortable in 1980s land of Depesh Mode, pink scrunchies, telephone conversations (not cell phone), trips to the library, nintendo, the dawn of the Simpsons, No internet- and MOST importantly, a less crowded San Diego...
where was I going.....?
Anyway, thought for the day: happiness comes in simple ways- and is a completely RELATIVE concept in every respect (no universal) ok, discuss.
1) i agree to a large extent, but
2) you have a lot of nostalgia for a potentially authentic human interaction that i doubt ever existed.
I do not think I am getting at anything special or Romantic here. I think the interaction exists because I have it from time to time. That is simply being in the same room with your social circle from time to time. My main point is that socialization is much much more than dialogue, especially disembodied dialogue. People are not properly socialized when they are able to get out of the other 87% of interaction. Unless we find a new means of socialization that allows people to form something like a community with norms and constructed identities that can be done wholly in the non-space of the Internet. Until then we spawn people who are poorly integrated when they are allowed to live 98% of their lives in a room by themselves with a computer.
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