Too Connected – Utopias and Dystopias of Communication
August 18th, 2008 | Posted in blog 14 Comments »
Some people feel that the ability to connect with anyone, anywhere, anytime is one of the utopias the Internet brings. For any question you have, the answer is a keystroke away. Google leads you to the site or person who can help. Country walls are irrelevant in the reach of information. You can connect with people in Malaysia, Australia, or Zimbabwe as if they lived next door. With this connectedness, all the silos and walled gardens tend to crumble as people, once strangers, connect and communicate with each other in milliseconds.
Last week while walking past Temple Square my friend John, a product manager where I work, painted a very different picture of connectedness. John asked me about Twitter, and as I was explaining it, Twitter seemed liked just another of the dozens of social media site out there.
“People always talk about how great it is,” John said, “that new media allows you to communicate and connect with each other, but that’s exactly what I don’t want. I don’t want all these people I don’t know emailing me and pinging me through Twitter, and Plurk and Linkedin and so on. I don’t see why anyone would want that.”
Too much communication becomes like noise and leads to a dystopia of connectedness
As we walked, I started to wonder why I myself would want it. Each day I’m bombarded with enough information to bury me. Email, tweets, instant messages, phone calls, SMS, blog comments, trackbacks, pingbacks, spam, newsletters, invitations to LinkedIn, Pulse, Plaxo, RSS feeds — it all gets to be like noise. Communication noise.
In my inbox now, I have 784+ unread messages. Most I’ve never opened because they aren’t … anything. In my RSS feeds, Google Reader constantly tells me I have 1,000+ unread posts. The comments on my blog pour day after day, whether I write new posts or not.
Sometimes the communication noise is even louder. Last week an anonymous lady called me at dinnertime to ask how to convert her WordPress.com site into a shopping cart to sell her art. Then “Sam” from New York (no idea who he is) called to say he’d followed my instructions on adding WordPress photo galleries with lightboxes but could not get it to work. He went on and on as if we were old friends.
(By the way, I now no longer answering my phone to see who it is.)
The more you blog, the more people you attract through Google. The more search-engine-optimized your posts are, the more people find you. The more tweets you send, the more people follow you. The more social networks you join, the more people add themselves to your page. The better posts you write, the more people subscribe to your RSS feed. The more content you generate – in whatever form and media – the more trackbacks and links people generate about you. The more you produce, the more emails and questions you get. You become like a content cloud – attracting Google searches.
Last week my kids pulled out an old home movie taken about 5 years ago — before we were all sucked into the Internet and Web 2.0. We seemed to have all the time in the world: sitting on a couch, or on a picnic table outside. (Yes, outside! in the sun, surrounded by …. nature, and grass! Haven’t seen that in a while.) On the video we smiled and laughed. Time moved much more slowly. No one was checking his BlackBerry, or posting to Twitter, or staying up late to blog. No feelings of concern about email. This was before the Web 2.0 deluge, before we received 100+ emails/comments/feeds/tweets a day. It seemed back then life was so different — before connectedness enveloped me like a fish net.
If connectedness is such a dystopia, why not just cut the wire, or unplug the cable? No one forces me to stay online. If the game is getting boring, no one’s preventing me from going home before the final buzzer.
Truthfully, I am somewhat addicted to connecteness. While 75% of it all is meaningless noise, there are some contexts that become extremely meaningful. Having a public space to write and publish my thoughts — where people actually read what I write and respond with comments or email or trackbacks — it’s motivating. My words no longer live solely in Word documents on an old hard drive, intended to be published in an obscure literary journal after months of slush pile dormancy. My writing freely propagates around the Internet. It freely connects with others. (No doubt for some, I am communication noise.)
Overall, to have a space to write and publish, to wake up the next morning and see half a dozen new comments on a post, to throw out a Tweet in a moment of total consternation at the grocery store, to read meaningful insights from others about topics I’m interested in — whether from social networks, RSS feeds, blogs, comments, listservs, or Twitter – it gets my mental wheels turning. The network cables are already too deep and intertwined to unplug them from my nervous system.
Nonetheless, I admit that I am conflicted. My oldest daughter is seven. She has her own blog. Should I encourage her to post more, and respond to comments from Heather, her little seven-year old friend (who also has a blog, and whom she has met once in Arizona)? Or should I encourage her to play outside, enjoying her offline childhood?
It’s not entirely an either/or scenario, but I’ll let her define her own paths in or around Web 2.0.
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photo from Flickr
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Tags: ambiguity, Blogging, communication, instant message, noise, plurk, Twitter, twitters, Web 2.0
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Oops! I’m wondering if I should bother you with a comment…:)
Despite the fact that you’re deluged with comments etc from us readers, I must compliment you on the excellent job you’re doing of responding so promptly to us! Great job! And thanks!
Ayesha, thanks for the comment. I really do enjoy reading complimentary feedback (who doesn’t?). Re response time, I’m actually surprised to hear you say this, because I have probably 30+ comments I haven’t responded to. I usually respond quickly, though, when I think the comment is semi-urgent (or else just really interesting).
These days I am deliberately disconnecting. I work all day on a computer. I used to leave my computer at home on all the time. Now I don’t.
When I got home, I used to feel obligated to check my email and do a little surfing to keep up. I was losing a little more of myself every day. And I wasn’t doing any reading. Plus, the real killer was my wife called herself a Web Widow. That did it.
Now I turn my home computer OFF. And I love it. Yeah, I am missing out on things on the Web, but I am slowly catching up on my reading. That is more important to me.
It is hard to keep on with news. I don’t like the radio because I can’t mute the commercials (which cater to the lowest common denomenator). In the car I listen to CDs. I listen to the news long enough to catch the weather, then I go back to CDs.
I don’t watch TV news. I can’t stand politics. The whole process leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
I get my news from the web, and when I’m at home, I try to leave the computer off as much as possible. Am I losing out? Yeah, somewhat. But I know someone is screaming about the price of gas, or offshore drilling, or the latest polling results. No one will remember this crap in 20 years.
Meanwhile, I am curling up with a good book I will remember. And I am disconnecting except to work on my Blog when the mood strikes me, and to keep up with a handful of websites. That’s it.
I loved this post and agree wholeheartedly. It’s about time someone countered the “bleating” with a measured view.
You definitely have a point we do spend more time online then offline. Yet you can’t escape the fact that the networking and marketing, and just plain connecting with people of this generation opens up opportunities which years ago we could not have even imagined could exist.So Maybe it’s worth all the trouble?
“you can’t escape the fact that the networking and marketing, and just plain connecting with people of this generation opens up opportunities which years ago we could not have even imagined could exist.”
I really don’t want to threadjack, but I have to ask: what are some of the opportunities you (or others) see?
It’s the unique ability to sit at home and be able to connect to people all over the world. We live in a time where sharing ideas and getting feedback from people anywhere from marketing managers to CEO’s is instant.
It’s the ability to connect with people who share similar hobbies and interests. It’s proven in the fact that regular people are becoming famous through blogging, podcasts etc. They did this simply by sharing a passion or giving useful advice or just sharing their lives with the public. The internet keeps growing and as technology advances connecting with the entire world will be possible,faster, and it will keep getting easier.
I love the connectedness, but only when I don’t feel overwhelmed by it. I have enough trouble keeping up with RSS feeds and email, to the point where I deliberately decided that I wouldn’t even investigate Twitter and the like. I have a Facebook account I rarely use (except to play the occasional online word games with friends overseas), and a LinkedIn account that I look at occasionally. I’m a member of some of the tech writing Ning groups, but rarely stop by. I read forums occasionally, but try not to sign up for notifications. I post date my blog postings, so I’ll have a rush one day then not write anything for a week or two.
I want to do things other than sit at a computer all day and all night. There are books to read, TV programs and films to watch, friends and family to visit, gardens to weed, hobbies and crafts to absorb the mind and hands…
I already spend WAY too much time on my computer each day, and my physical (and possibly mental) health is likely suffering as a result.
Oh, and on all this connectedness, I want a mobile phone that is a PHONE — not a camera, not an MP3 player, not an internet-connected device — just a phone. Is that too much to ask for??
Rhondas last blog post..Inches to pixels converter
I echo everything that Craig and Rhonda said.
I’m not on FaceBook…there’s only so much of me that I want to put out there, and I don’t have the patience to set up rules that dictate which friends see what information. I’m on LinkedIn, which has added some value…and some noise…to my professional life and frankly, it’s enough.
Like Rhonda, I decided not to get involved with Twitter. I have a lot coming in to my RSS aggregator. I belong to two active lists/forums. I work all day, teach online and at night, am VP for a non-profit group, and new manager for an STC SIG. I have personal, work (day job), work (freelance), instructor/classroom, and non-profit e-mail accounts that require daily attention. Periodicals to read, news to keep up with, a couple of blogs to maintain, etc.
I simply don’t have the bandwidth to handle more. More accurately, I suppose, I’m unwilling to make the sacrifices and compromises in other areas of my life that would be necessary in order to create more bandwidth for all the other “stuff”.
Like Craig, I turn off my computer quite a bit. I turn off my business cell phone after 6 on weekdays and all weekend. Am I affecting the size of my network? Yes. Am I affecting the number of work leads that come to me? Yes. Am I missing out on stuff on YouTube and blogs and other sites? Yes.
So be it. My happiness quotient goes up as my “wired-ness” goes down. I’d rather be known for being a good daughter, a loyal friend, a helpful community member, and a good human being. At the end of our days, we’ll measure the success of our lives by the time we spent with those most important to us — not by how often we updated our social networking pages and contributed to the noise on Twitter.
[...] Johnson heads for the hills for a bit of peace and quiet amidst the musing on the Utopias and Dystopias of Communication: The more you blog, the more people you attract through Google. The more search-engine-optimized [...]
I have been pondering some of these same questions myself. I am not as submersed as you are. I hate RSS feeds because they read like another to-do list. I hate email newsletters because I rarely have time to read them when they come and after that I’ve lost interest and they also read like another to-do list. And… I haven’t figured out what a trackback really is, yet. Same for pingback. I thought I knew… now not so sure.
My husband doesn’t understand the motivation to blog. Some friends don’t either. So, it got me thinking. I wrote just a little bit about that in my most recent post.
Like you, I love this connectedness. I love hearing the ideas and experiences of others and not knowing them personally is irrelevant. Aren’t we all brothers and sisters, after all?
Nice to “meet” you.
Natasha Becoming Somethings last blog post..How blogging has made me a better person. For reals.
I totally agree. And I only read blogs when I happen to search for something and they lead me there, which is how I found yours.
I think I am slowly becoming something of a willful luddite – I use less and less “tech” in my personal life, limiting the number of people who have my mobile number, refusing to buy an iPhone or Blackberry, rejecting anyone on Facebook that I have never met in person, going to the pub more often and connecting with the other regulars and the staff, tryin gto turn my life into a Cheers episode; they all know my name, and they are all glad when I come. Even so, I want some peace.
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