Clive Thompson, a columnist for Wired, contributed a fascinating piece to Sunday’s New York Times Magazine. “I’m So Totally, Digitally Close to You” examines the phenomenon of “ambient awareness” that has been developing alongside the evolution of the Web. Thompson brings a balanced perspective to the debate over the influence that the Internet has on our lives, a debate which recently has been dominated by alarmists who claim (often with little data) that the digital millennium will actually take us a step backwards as a race.
Ambient awareness is the term applied to the “incessant online contact” that characterizes the current developments on the Web. From the Facebook News Feed to Twitter, users are currently preoccupied with accessing an aggregation of tiny details to form a larger picture. The metaphor Thompson chooses is beyond perfect:
Each little update — each individual bit of social information — is insignificant on its own, even supremely mundane. But taken together, over time, the little snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your friends’ and family members’ lives, like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting.
And so the mystery behind the obsession with keeping on top of our friends and their “updates” is revealed, even to those who think they had it figured out. It’s not the trees that fascinate us; it’s the forest. It’s on a level just beyond passive perception. We skim and absorb the information, choosing only to dive into the details only when something piques our interest.
So is this good or bad? A step forward, or a step back?
There were two pieces of Thompson’s essay that especially struck me. The first was his early reference to the social gazettes of the 18th century in describing the Facebook News Feed. I couldn’t find any information on these after a few rudimentary Google and Wikipedia searches, but maybe someone can enlighten me? Whatever they were, it fascinates me that a parallel might exist across such a huge span of time.
The second part of the essay that struck me arrives towards the end of the piece:
This is the ultimate effect of the new awareness: It brings back the dynamics of small-town life, where everybody knows your business. [...] “It’s just like living in a village, where it’s actually hard to lie because everybody knows the truth already,” [Zeynep Tufkci, a sociologist] said. “The current generation is never unconnected. They’re never losing touch with their friends. So we’re going back to a more normal place, historically. If you look at human history, the idea that you would drift through life, going from new relation to new relation, that’s very new. It’s just the 20th century.”
As Thompson goes on to note, “our modern awareness tools reverse the original conceit of the Internet. When cyberspace came along in the early ’90s, it was celebrated as a place where you could reinvent your identity — become someone new.”
No more. People don’t go on the Internet to escape or to seek isolation. They go online to share, to create, to participate. Daily private journaling is giving way to hourly, public Twittering. We narrate our lives with text, photos, videos, and our voices, all to be digitally chronicled and indexed for later retrieval. The news cycle, already losing latency with live blogging and the like, will reduce to real-time. As Thompson astutely points out, the time we spend outputting our memories and thoughts is making us exceptionally reflective and self-aware. Call it digital enlightenment.
In some ways this is an epic human achievement; the sum of human knowledge will be more deeply and widely accessible than ever before. Yet in some ways, it could herald an epic human disaster. We could become so used to putting everything online that we’ll come to define ourselves by that very connection; we could be so used to storing and retrieving our stream of consciousness online that, when the plug is pulled, we are literally dumbfounded. If you’ve seen Wall-E, you know what I’m getting at.
The key will be to balance those two epic potentials. The ability of man to freely and openly chronicle his life, share it, and have access to the experiences of others — in short, searching for and sharing knowledge — is perhaps one of life’s greatest quests, and one our greatest missions. But we must be careful to remember the key word in that statement: life. The trees make a forest; the dots make a painting. Let us not make the method by which we experience and improve our lives an obsession, but rather balance that science with daily appreciation and enjoyment of the stuff that life is made of.
Whitman said it better in his poem “When I Heard The Learn’d Astronomer”:
When I heard the learn’d astronomer;
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me;
When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and
measure them;
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much
applause in the lecture-room,
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;
Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.
Image used under a Creative Commons license courtesy of Flickr user fensterbme.
