“As human beings become increasingly intertwined with the technology and with each other via the technology, old distinctions between what is specifically human and specifically technological become more complex. Are we living life on the screen or life in the screen? Our new technologically enmeshed relationships oblige us to ask to what extent we ourselves have become cyborgs, transgressive mixtures of biology, technology, and code. The traditional distance between people and machines has become harder to maintain.”
-Sherry Turkle, page 21
Monday, December 15, 2008
Technologically enmeshed relationships: are we cyborgs?
So, how about that living mediated lives?
Communicative technologies have been changing at a dramatic pace during the past few decades. Humans are social creatures by nature, and so advances in communicative technologies thus have an especially large influence in changing the way people live their everyday lives. Unlike the case of just twenty years ago, people of privilege are most of their time connected to and accessible from a vast network of people and knowledge. An individual can be called while is hiking the wood or instant messaged while working on a school paper, and information about them can be accessed from any location in the world that's connected to “the cloud” via Facebook, Google, and other such websites. The younger generation, having grown up in this information-rich and communication-constant world, are more comfortable with the implications of an increasingly connected (and thus decreasingly private) existence, but still nervous about what the future might bring. Overall, attitudes toward this posthuman future are mixed: apprehension, anxiety, excitement, and optimism characterize people's often contradictory emotions when considering the future.
In order to better understand the ways people are experiencing and thinking about mediating technologies, I interviewed a diverse range of individuals with a wide variety of experiences (though all come from socioeconomically privileged backgrounds and have had Internet access for at least several years). They represent different age groups and nationalities, men and women, and with varying extents of familiarity with virtual existence. Here are brief profiles of each person with whom I conducted an in-depth interview:
Now, being constantly connected to “the cloud” has become the default mode of existence for many people, and certainly for Wesleyan college students. As I sit in the library working on this project and describing it to my friend Joan, she says, “Ugh, I hate technology.” As she says this, Janet, standing next to her, points out that she is simultaneously sending a text message under the table. The dual nature of attitudes toward technology – guarded suspicion paired with utter immersion and a sense of possibility – is one of the few constants of these attitudes over time. Nowadays, such connective technologies are increasingly viewed as a normal part of life and an extension of the physical space we inhabit everyday, as opposed to a simulated and virtual alternative space to real life.
Turkle's Life on the Screen describes the emerging Internet's relation postmodern conceptions of identity. Her emphasis is on the ways in which it allows individuals to take on new identities and simulate real life in exploratory ways. To Turkle, past conceptions of the world (including computer programming) were hierarchical, centralized, and and carefully planned. As technology has expanded, however, it has opened up new alternative spaces programmable and inhabitable by anyone.
However, the core of Turkle's argument is now outdated. She describes a world that is becoming decentralized and represents fractured, different identities through various, separate spaces. She discusses that “Fredric Jameson wrote that in a postmodern world, the subject is not alienated but fragmented. He explained that the notion of alienation presumes a centralized, unitary self who could become lost to himself or herself. But if, as a postmodernist sees it, the self is decentered and multiple, the concept of alienation breaks down. (49)” However, it is clear that over time, the decentralized aspects have remained, but the individual is becoming less fragmented. Instead of separate spaces in which to exist, real life and various simulations, technologies connect the different spaces in which we reside to form a continuous system to which we are always connected. It is decentralized, for sure, and it is no longer clear precisely what constitutes the “real life” that used to be at its core, but it is no longer fragmented. To Turkle, the most transgressive it could get was simulation. We're way past that now. We are pushing the boundaries of what real life is and what constitutes physical space. She and Rheingold both worry about the possibility that reality is becoming simulacra, that we might lose all that was authentic in a series of copies of reality that obscure the fact that real reality no longer exists. Rheingold questions, “Are virtual communities simulacra for authentic communities, in an age where everything is commodified” (325)? Turkle extends this to talk about the simulacrum of the self, writing that “when each player can create many characters and participate in many games, the self is not only decentered but multiplied without limit” (185). Rather than multiple selves and multiple identities, we have intersecting identities that move and mesh together and form a Deleuzian/Spinozan body.
Deleuze's ways of thinking about things and bodies are, in fact, extremely relevant to these new technologies. People and information move as particles and combine seemingly without intention and without clear boundaries. Turkle quotes an interviewee who describes the World Wide Web: “It's like a brain, self-organizing, nobody controlling it, just growing up out of the connections that an infant makes, sights to sounds... Sometimes I'll be away from the Web for a week and a bunch of places that I know very well will have 'found' each other.... No way you could have built by planning it” (45).
But can we escape the boundaries? Do means and method of communication still matter? If so, the containers in which we exist are still essential. To experiment with this idea, as I conducted various interviews with people, I explored the ways in which medium changed our communication. I have done my best to represent accurately the results of differences in interview type: clips from Skype video conversations are recorded onto Youtube, instant messaging (IM) conversations are represented in their standard format, and transcripts of verbal speech was typed as it was spoken during cell phone conversations. The differences are intriguing: verbal slip-ups and incomplete thoughts are still included when they occur naturally in phone conversations; body language is available to be viewed in webcam conversations as much as it would be normally; IM conversations tend to have lines that are edited, screened, and thought out before the interviewee ever pressed “Enter”. In recording their words, I've allowed interviewees who answered questions out loud to ramble on without too much editing with the purpose of accurately representing the type of communication I encountered during each of these interviews.
If these trends hold, then shape still holds the story prisoner to some extent. Whether someone is more “real” in face-to-face communication versus an IM chat is debatable, but it's certain that there are real differences between the experience of the two.
Several interviewees made the point that all communication is inherently mediated. Lisa, a 56-year-old woman, explains that “There's a degree to which nobody really knows anybody else; people don't share their innermost selves with anyone. We all present some piece of ourselves to others.” Janet, a 22-year-old woman, similarly says, “I think that no matter how much time you spend with somebody, how much they tell you about themselves, you can never really know them as well as they know themselves. You can talk to them online, you can talk them on person, but it's just how much you know them – you never know them completely.”
Nevertheless, those I interviewed tended to see some types of communication as more mediated than others; in particular, written and typed communication was viewed as having more mediation. The extent to which people see this as a good or bad thing varies, however. Across the board, people saw how this could be beneficial to people who were introverted or particularly adept with the written word, but how it could also ease the use of deception with negative consequences. Gijs, a 21-year-old Dutch man, describes the filtered nature of textual communication:
Ami and David also both further explore ideas about the extent to which emotion and feeling can be communicated through text:
Lisa isn't sure that the ability of people to represent themselves differently online is a good thing. Deception and bullying are major problems in her mind: “I think at this point there's pretty substantial evidence that people will do something online and in text that they might not do in person. For example, among adolescents, there's bullying that goes on online, or saying bad things about another person, where if the people involved had to say those things to the person while they were standing there, they wouldn't do it. I think being more removed disinhibits people to a certain degree, and I think that's mostly not healthy.” However, she also understands that there may be benefits people more adept at the written word than in speaking, as well as for shy people: “I can see where someone who is more shy might feel more comfortable saying something to someone on the phone or on the Internet than they would if they were face to face.”
Most of the subjects interviewed saw a hierarchy in the range of media through which people communicate. Lisa viewed this hierarchy primarily through the lens of how much sensory information individuals were able to receive through each medium, telling me about textual communication: “I think that you have less information about how the other person is reacting. When you talk to someone face to face, you can hear their tone of voice, see their facial expressions, look at their body movement. I don't think that talking online and talking on the phone and texting are all the same. Talking on the phone conveys more information than talking online or texting. Talking on the phone you have the added information of someone's voice.” David, on the other hand, adds in the factor of intimacy in determining this hierarchy. To him, speaking textually in a multi-user environment like IRC [Internet Relay Chat] is less intimate than chatting textually individual-to-individual. While he believes that for the most part, he hasn't been surprised about the real-life personas of individuals he initially met online, he thinks this is because he built up relationships with each of those people by communicating with them in increasingly more intimate ways before meeting in person:
Are people represented as the same people in person compared to when they're represented through various mediating technologies? My whole family is pretty geeky, and we've each had our little online niches. I played MMORPGs, my mom played online multi-player word games, and my dad played online multi-player bridge. All three of us have met in real life people we originally met through our online games of choice. My mom, Robin, is skeptical about the extent to which the people represented online match up to their real life counterparts, though part of this stems from her long-held belief that most people are stupid. “I don't consider them in the same league as my real friends, and I didn't meet anyone that I just clicked with, when I met them in real life after meeting them on the Internet. On the Internet, you really can't get a complete sense of what a person's like. The Internet in a way kind of cuts down your, removes prejudices, that you have about people – but then when you meet people in person, they don't seem as intelligent... You can be more discerning meeting people in person. People can put on a better act on the Internet than in person. I don't think it's intentional – the Internet, you don't get as finely detailed a picture of someone as you do when you actually meet them in person. Less nuanced. That's the word I want. Nuanced. You can just get a much better sense of a person. People who Dad has met through his bridge partners over the Internet – I haven't been that impressed with them either. But I'm very snobby.” I questioned her about my ex-boyfriend David, who I met through the game of Runescape. “Oh, I really liked David, though. I was impressed with him in real life. He's a good guy.” I feel vindicated. Maybe I just have better online taste?
One of the most positive aspects these new connective technologies, in many subjects' minds, is the ability to bridge distances and space more easily than in the past. My mother recounts how it was a big deal to make long distance phone calls before cells: “It was such a big deal to have a long distance phone call because it was so expensive. But now with cell phone plans it doesn't cost anything, so you don't think of anything of calling across the country – or across the Hudson as the case may be [where her immediate family lives]. When I was in college, I'd speak to my parents once a week, not because I didn't want to talk to them, but because long distance phone calls were expensive, whereas now I speak to my mother every day... When you were in Budapest and I could just talk to you like you were in the next room, I found that mind-boggling. You were half a world away, and yet it didn't seem that way when I could communicate with you just as much - I probably spoke to you more while you were in Budapest, than I did to my parents when I was in college.”
David similarly describes the ways in which he feels closer to people around the world. His physical space has been expanded to include more, and thus to interact with a wider variety of people. He's transcended being just British and has a better understanding of different cultures:
Language itself is something that mediates communication. In the case of Ami and her boyfriend Jasper, language is a significant force: Jasper's first language is Dutch, and while he's fluent in English (the language in which they communicate), he still doesn't ever think in English. Gijs, on the other hand, says that he does sometimes think in English, though it also wasn't his first language. Still, he sees himself as different sometimes when he speaks in either language, though he can't quite pinpoint why:
Wesleying, a Wesleyan student blog, has the explicit purpose of creating an online resource and community outlet for Wesleyan students. Still, its blog posts are thematically very different; in addition to local campus events and news, it posts international news and random videos that the target audience might find interesting. Parents, alumni, and prospective students read it to get a sense of current campus culture. Blogs like Wesleying very much connect local cultures with the larger world, providing an opinion spin on external news as well as communicating local news to everyone else who is interested.
The availability of traditional news and the popularity of blogs have revolutionized the way we see our role in the larger world. Anyone can blog and broadcast their own opinion for the world to see; as Rheingold would suggest, there is a tremendous democratizing force inherent in giving everyone agency to create their own news and spin on already-existent news.
What about romantic relationships? Can they legitimately be formed and conducted without face-to-face interaction? Janet met her current boyfriend online, but didn't start dating him until after they'd met in real life. Of the fact that they met online rather than in person, she says that “I think the only difference is that we don't... that our lives really only connect to the extent that we are in a relationship together. If we'd met in real life, we might have some of the same friends, or know some of the people or having something in common... but because we met online, we don't. I think that's really the real difference.” Ami similarly described the lack of connecting points as a difficulty in online relationships, and how Runescape served as one of the only real initial connecting points she found with people she met online:
Rheingold uses IRC [Internet Relay Chat] as an example of lack of connection. He writes that “IRC is what you get when you strip away everything that normally allows people to understand the unspoken shared assumptions that surround and support their communications, and thus render invisble most of the web of socially mediated definitions that tells us what words and behaviors are supposed to mean in our societies.” Long distance relationships are, in general, difficult. When asked about the most difficult part of being in a long distance relationship with someone he met online, Shawn* said “Lack of pussy.” Indeed, in romantic relationships, lack of physical intimacy (as innocent as hand-holding) can be tough:
As a chat room, an IRC channel is a pseudo-physical space that thus may develop its own culture. While #darkwebz culture did have some aspects that related to the larger IRC culture (such as an appreciation for bash.org, an indexing site of humorous IRC quotes), there were also distinct parts of #darkwebz culture. At times when a large number of users were in the room, often a ToT (Truth or Truth; like Truth or Dare, but easier to play online) game would start up. Each member of the channel had a social role to play. There was also a masculine bent to the room, which far more males than females comprising “the regulars.” I can't put my finger on quite the explicit differences that separated #darkwebz culture from Internet culture in general are, but it was distinctly felt.
It has been made clear from the ethnographic data presented so far that times are changing. So what's the future going to look like? As technology becomes an increasingly more important mediator in human interaction and communication, will this be a good or bad thing? “Many of the institutions that used to bring people together – a main street, a union hall, a town meeting – no longer work as before. Many people spend most of their day alone at the screen of a television or a computer. (Turkle 178)” The range of emotions subjects felt about this future was wide and varied. There's a great deal of worry that human relationships are deteriorating and that, as we spend increasing amounts of time online, we are losing something essential from the real.
Are the bonds that connect us less strong than they used to be? Lisa worries that “technology can affect people's social development. I suspect that it may hinder people having deeper relationships. It's made it easier for people to have a quantity of relationships, but I think it may well be harming the quality of relationships, especially in your generation.” My own mother expresses a similar sentiment, noting that “It's frustrating when you have children who spend a little too much time online. First of all, just it detracts from the old-fashioned kids-going-out-and-playing-on-the-street-with-other-kids. They need fresh air and kid-to-kid contact outside, instead of being in their own little bubbles online. And because it is a somewhat artificial relationship when you're online. It shouldn't replace real life friendship.”
There's also worry that people may become too immersed in Internet activity and stop paying attention to what's going on around them, and that there isn't much room for privacy when you're always connected to this large “cloud” network. My mom worries about what it means for family members to bring laptops on vacation with them: “It detracts from family communication and from enjoyment of things other than the Internet. You go on vacation to look at the ocean and enjoy each other and enjoy the beach, and if you're on the Internet the whole time that defeats the purpose. It lets the outside world interfere with your vacation.” Similarly, Lisa is concerned that “particularly for young children at key times in their development, spending significant amounts of time in front of a computer screen is very damaging to their social development. Whether or not that the computer itself causes a problem, while they're in front of a computer or tv, they're NOT interacting with other people around them in real life.”
Somewhat as a counter to that, Justin doesn't see what the problem is. He describes his relationship with his iPhone, and points out that there's plenty of opportunities to just not connect yourself to that cloud when you want privacy:
There's also something good about being connected all the time; there's a sense of the presence of the social bond. Even in the 90s, people started to associate new technology to a sense of connectedness. Turkle describes her experience typing on a computer: “The dynamic, layered display gives me the comforting sense that I write in conversation with my computer. After years of such encounters, a blank piece of paper can make me feel strangely alone” (Turkle 29).
Among those of us who have spent a very large amount of time communicating online, there's a sense that all this worry and apprehension that many people feel about “too much technology” is temporary and misguided, and that our attitudes represent the future. My conversation with Ami included the following interaction when I was discussing my project after our interview had technically ended:
The future is unclear. It is, however, clear that attitudes have changed since Turkle and Rheingold wrote in the '90s. None of the seven subjects interviewed said that communicating online meant existing in an alternate, simulated space; all said that, to some extent, it was an extension of the space they currently inhabit on a day-to-day basis. Overall, the subjects have put postmodern identity crises aside, seeing their identities represented differently through various media, but with a certain sameness of identity underlying each representation, with each slightly different identity comprising some part of “who they really are.” This ultimate identity, “who they really are,” is no longer purely centered in the space of the body; “real” existences and virtual existences are merging. Is this the posthuman? As Turkle queried in the opening quote, it is possible that we are becoming transgressive cyborgs as we become further enmeshed with the technology that surrounds us in the way we interact with others. Time will tell just how far these connective technologies will go, and what will become to our still-human selves.
In order to better understand the ways people are experiencing and thinking about mediating technologies, I interviewed a diverse range of individuals with a wide variety of experiences (though all come from socioeconomically privileged backgrounds and have had Internet access for at least several years). They represent different age groups and nationalities, men and women, and with varying extents of familiarity with virtual existence. Here are brief profiles of each person with whom I conducted an in-depth interview:
- Janet, age 22, student at Wesleyan University; met boyfriend on dating site OKCupid; interviewed in person
- Justin, age 22, student at Wesleyan University; bought iPhone the day it came out; interviewed in person, video recorded
- Robin, age 53, my mother; plays word games socially online; interviewed over phone
- Lisa, age 56, mother of a Wesleyan student; met her at “ Moral Machines: Teaching Robots Right From Wrong” lecture during Homecoming; interviewed over the phone
- David, age 23, student at University of Nottingham; we met online and dated for two years; have met in person on 4 separate occasions for a total of about 1.5 months; interviewed over Skype webcam conversation
- Gijs, age 21, just graduated University of Amsterdam; we met online and have met in person on two separate occasions for a total of about 3 days; interviewed over AIM
- Ami, age 21, just graduated UC Riverside; we met online; she has been dating Jasper from the Netherlands for the past three years; interviewed over Skype text IM
Now, being constantly connected to “the cloud” has become the default mode of existence for many people, and certainly for Wesleyan college students. As I sit in the library working on this project and describing it to my friend Joan, she says, “Ugh, I hate technology.” As she says this, Janet, standing next to her, points out that she is simultaneously sending a text message under the table. The dual nature of attitudes toward technology – guarded suspicion paired with utter immersion and a sense of possibility – is one of the few constants of these attitudes over time. Nowadays, such connective technologies are increasingly viewed as a normal part of life and an extension of the physical space we inhabit everyday, as opposed to a simulated and virtual alternative space to real life.
Turkle's Life on the Screen describes the emerging Internet's relation postmodern conceptions of identity. Her emphasis is on the ways in which it allows individuals to take on new identities and simulate real life in exploratory ways. To Turkle, past conceptions of the world (including computer programming) were hierarchical, centralized, and and carefully planned. As technology has expanded, however, it has opened up new alternative spaces programmable and inhabitable by anyone.
However, the core of Turkle's argument is now outdated. She describes a world that is becoming decentralized and represents fractured, different identities through various, separate spaces. She discusses that “Fredric Jameson wrote that in a postmodern world, the subject is not alienated but fragmented. He explained that the notion of alienation presumes a centralized, unitary self who could become lost to himself or herself. But if, as a postmodernist sees it, the self is decentered and multiple, the concept of alienation breaks down. (49)” However, it is clear that over time, the decentralized aspects have remained, but the individual is becoming less fragmented. Instead of separate spaces in which to exist, real life and various simulations, technologies connect the different spaces in which we reside to form a continuous system to which we are always connected. It is decentralized, for sure, and it is no longer clear precisely what constitutes the “real life” that used to be at its core, but it is no longer fragmented. To Turkle, the most transgressive it could get was simulation. We're way past that now. We are pushing the boundaries of what real life is and what constitutes physical space. She and Rheingold both worry about the possibility that reality is becoming simulacra, that we might lose all that was authentic in a series of copies of reality that obscure the fact that real reality no longer exists. Rheingold questions, “Are virtual communities simulacra for authentic communities, in an age where everything is commodified” (325)? Turkle extends this to talk about the simulacrum of the self, writing that “when each player can create many characters and participate in many games, the self is not only decentered but multiplied without limit” (185). Rather than multiple selves and multiple identities, we have intersecting identities that move and mesh together and form a Deleuzian/Spinozan body.
Deleuze's ways of thinking about things and bodies are, in fact, extremely relevant to these new technologies. People and information move as particles and combine seemingly without intention and without clear boundaries. Turkle quotes an interviewee who describes the World Wide Web: “It's like a brain, self-organizing, nobody controlling it, just growing up out of the connections that an infant makes, sights to sounds... Sometimes I'll be away from the Web for a week and a bunch of places that I know very well will have 'found' each other.... No way you could have built by planning it” (45).
But can we escape the boundaries? Do means and method of communication still matter? If so, the containers in which we exist are still essential. To experiment with this idea, as I conducted various interviews with people, I explored the ways in which medium changed our communication. I have done my best to represent accurately the results of differences in interview type: clips from Skype video conversations are recorded onto Youtube, instant messaging (IM) conversations are represented in their standard format, and transcripts of verbal speech was typed as it was spoken during cell phone conversations. The differences are intriguing: verbal slip-ups and incomplete thoughts are still included when they occur naturally in phone conversations; body language is available to be viewed in webcam conversations as much as it would be normally; IM conversations tend to have lines that are edited, screened, and thought out before the interviewee ever pressed “Enter”. In recording their words, I've allowed interviewees who answered questions out loud to ramble on without too much editing with the purpose of accurately representing the type of communication I encountered during each of these interviews.
If these trends hold, then shape still holds the story prisoner to some extent. Whether someone is more “real” in face-to-face communication versus an IM chat is debatable, but it's certain that there are real differences between the experience of the two.
Several interviewees made the point that all communication is inherently mediated. Lisa, a 56-year-old woman, explains that “There's a degree to which nobody really knows anybody else; people don't share their innermost selves with anyone. We all present some piece of ourselves to others.” Janet, a 22-year-old woman, similarly says, “I think that no matter how much time you spend with somebody, how much they tell you about themselves, you can never really know them as well as they know themselves. You can talk to them online, you can talk them on person, but it's just how much you know them – you never know them completely.”
Nevertheless, those I interviewed tended to see some types of communication as more mediated than others; in particular, written and typed communication was viewed as having more mediation. The extent to which people see this as a good or bad thing varies, however. Across the board, people saw how this could be beneficial to people who were introverted or particularly adept with the written word, but how it could also ease the use of deception with negative consequences. Gijs, a 21-year-old Dutch man, describes the filtered nature of textual communication:
gijs: email and chat are all filteredAmi, a 21-year-old Californian woman who describes herself as shy, tells me about her experiences with written communication, over Skype IM:
gijs: you choose what to share
gijs: and what not
gijs: in real life, that can be more difficult
madjoyish: How do you think that filteredness affects your communication? Positively, negatively? Qualitatively?
gijs: ehm
gijs: probably positively
gijs: we can rethink what we're say many times before saying it
gijs: *we say
gijs: if we're unable to function without having a few minutes for filtering
gijs: then I'd think one would have to fix that
gijs: ie, become better at communicating without that filter
madjoyish: Yeah :)
gijs: just from a practical point of view we can't rely on that filtering being available
Ami: While I'm not so shy and awkward as I used to be in real lifeDavid, a 23-year-old British man, describes why he believes the Internet is good for introverted people over a Skype webcam conversation:
Ami: I still can't really express things verbally as i do written
Ami: Written I can always go back and edit as appropriate if I feel it doesn't look right
Ami: Rather than go "Uh.. I mean" etc. like I do in real life
madjoy: Do you think that makes it more or less real? Or does it not affect it?
Ami: I guess it all comes down to the person and their purpose
Ami: For some it makes it more real because they can express their feelings better
Ami: For others it may seem fake because they have an opportunity to hide their real feelings and not be detected
Ami and David also both further explore ideas about the extent to which emotion and feeling can be communicated through text:
madjoy: do you think that people can tell how you're feeling online? can people tell when you're upset?
Ami: For me personally my typing style changes
Ami: I usually don't tack on periods at the end when I'm chatting informally
madjoy: can your closest friends pick up on that?
Ami: I know Jasper [Ami's Dutch boyfriend who she met online] can
Ami: Some people not so much because people see me as the kind of person who likes to use proper spelling and punctuation
madjoy: Yeah ^-^
Ami: But once they chat with me more they'll realize I do tend to drop out the periods and whatnot at the end of my messages
Ami: And only tack them back on when i'm upset heh
Lisa isn't sure that the ability of people to represent themselves differently online is a good thing. Deception and bullying are major problems in her mind: “I think at this point there's pretty substantial evidence that people will do something online and in text that they might not do in person. For example, among adolescents, there's bullying that goes on online, or saying bad things about another person, where if the people involved had to say those things to the person while they were standing there, they wouldn't do it. I think being more removed disinhibits people to a certain degree, and I think that's mostly not healthy.” However, she also understands that there may be benefits people more adept at the written word than in speaking, as well as for shy people: “I can see where someone who is more shy might feel more comfortable saying something to someone on the phone or on the Internet than they would if they were face to face.”
Most of the subjects interviewed saw a hierarchy in the range of media through which people communicate. Lisa viewed this hierarchy primarily through the lens of how much sensory information individuals were able to receive through each medium, telling me about textual communication: “I think that you have less information about how the other person is reacting. When you talk to someone face to face, you can hear their tone of voice, see their facial expressions, look at their body movement. I don't think that talking online and talking on the phone and texting are all the same. Talking on the phone conveys more information than talking online or texting. Talking on the phone you have the added information of someone's voice.” David, on the other hand, adds in the factor of intimacy in determining this hierarchy. To him, speaking textually in a multi-user environment like IRC [Internet Relay Chat] is less intimate than chatting textually individual-to-individual. While he believes that for the most part, he hasn't been surprised about the real-life personas of individuals he initially met online, he thinks this is because he built up relationships with each of those people by communicating with them in increasingly more intimate ways before meeting in person:
Are people represented as the same people in person compared to when they're represented through various mediating technologies? My whole family is pretty geeky, and we've each had our little online niches. I played MMORPGs, my mom played online multi-player word games, and my dad played online multi-player bridge. All three of us have met in real life people we originally met through our online games of choice. My mom, Robin, is skeptical about the extent to which the people represented online match up to their real life counterparts, though part of this stems from her long-held belief that most people are stupid. “I don't consider them in the same league as my real friends, and I didn't meet anyone that I just clicked with, when I met them in real life after meeting them on the Internet. On the Internet, you really can't get a complete sense of what a person's like. The Internet in a way kind of cuts down your, removes prejudices, that you have about people – but then when you meet people in person, they don't seem as intelligent... You can be more discerning meeting people in person. People can put on a better act on the Internet than in person. I don't think it's intentional – the Internet, you don't get as finely detailed a picture of someone as you do when you actually meet them in person. Less nuanced. That's the word I want. Nuanced. You can just get a much better sense of a person. People who Dad has met through his bridge partners over the Internet – I haven't been that impressed with them either. But I'm very snobby.” I questioned her about my ex-boyfriend David, who I met through the game of Runescape. “Oh, I really liked David, though. I was impressed with him in real life. He's a good guy.” I feel vindicated. Maybe I just have better online taste?
One of the most positive aspects these new connective technologies, in many subjects' minds, is the ability to bridge distances and space more easily than in the past. My mother recounts how it was a big deal to make long distance phone calls before cells: “It was such a big deal to have a long distance phone call because it was so expensive. But now with cell phone plans it doesn't cost anything, so you don't think of anything of calling across the country – or across the Hudson as the case may be [where her immediate family lives]. When I was in college, I'd speak to my parents once a week, not because I didn't want to talk to them, but because long distance phone calls were expensive, whereas now I speak to my mother every day... When you were in Budapest and I could just talk to you like you were in the next room, I found that mind-boggling. You were half a world away, and yet it didn't seem that way when I could communicate with you just as much - I probably spoke to you more while you were in Budapest, than I did to my parents when I was in college.”
David similarly describes the ways in which he feels closer to people around the world. His physical space has been expanded to include more, and thus to interact with a wider variety of people. He's transcended being just British and has a better understanding of different cultures:
Language itself is something that mediates communication. In the case of Ami and her boyfriend Jasper, language is a significant force: Jasper's first language is Dutch, and while he's fluent in English (the language in which they communicate), he still doesn't ever think in English. Gijs, on the other hand, says that he does sometimes think in English, though it also wasn't his first language. Still, he sees himself as different sometimes when he speaks in either language, though he can't quite pinpoint why:
madjoyish: Is it the same "you" whether one speaks to you in English or Dutch?For much of the online world, connecting new people and information that otherwise wouldn't be connected is an explicit purpose. Soliya.net, a website which kind of connects online pen pals from the West and the Middle East, has the mission of “developing a global network of young adults and empowering them to bridge the divide between the 'West' and the 'Arab & Muslim World.' Using the latest in 'social media' technologies and cutting-edge methodologies, Soliya is providing a new intercultural generation of young adults with the skills, knowledge and relationships they need to develop a nuanced understanding of the issues that divide them.”
gijs: I don't think it is the same 'me'
gijs: but I have no idea how to explain why not
gijs: or rather
gijs: I actually don't know why not
gijs: nevermind being able to explain it
Wesleying, a Wesleyan student blog, has the explicit purpose of creating an online resource and community outlet for Wesleyan students. Still, its blog posts are thematically very different; in addition to local campus events and news, it posts international news and random videos that the target audience might find interesting. Parents, alumni, and prospective students read it to get a sense of current campus culture. Blogs like Wesleying very much connect local cultures with the larger world, providing an opinion spin on external news as well as communicating local news to everyone else who is interested.
The availability of traditional news and the popularity of blogs have revolutionized the way we see our role in the larger world. Anyone can blog and broadcast their own opinion for the world to see; as Rheingold would suggest, there is a tremendous democratizing force inherent in giving everyone agency to create their own news and spin on already-existent news.
What about romantic relationships? Can they legitimately be formed and conducted without face-to-face interaction? Janet met her current boyfriend online, but didn't start dating him until after they'd met in real life. Of the fact that they met online rather than in person, she says that “I think the only difference is that we don't... that our lives really only connect to the extent that we are in a relationship together. If we'd met in real life, we might have some of the same friends, or know some of the people or having something in common... but because we met online, we don't. I think that's really the real difference.” Ami similarly described the lack of connecting points as a difficulty in online relationships, and how Runescape served as one of the only real initial connecting points she found with people she met online:
Ami: Strangely enough there wasn't anyone I really could consider a real friend until I started playing RuneScape
Ami: I guess there was a connecting point
Ami: Just plain random chatting... there wasn't anything to connect us other than the fact that we use the same chat protocols
Ami: I guess it's kind of like real life that way
Ami: You make friends through connections - Work, school etc”
Rheingold uses IRC [Internet Relay Chat] as an example of lack of connection. He writes that “IRC is what you get when you strip away everything that normally allows people to understand the unspoken shared assumptions that surround and support their communications, and thus render invisble most of the web of socially mediated definitions that tells us what words and behaviors are supposed to mean in our societies.” Long distance relationships are, in general, difficult. When asked about the most difficult part of being in a long distance relationship with someone he met online, Shawn* said “Lack of pussy.” Indeed, in romantic relationships, lack of physical intimacy (as innocent as hand-holding) can be tough:
Mad: Another question: What has been the hardest part of being in a relationship that's been conducted mostly online?The IRC [Internet Relay Chat] community, #darkwebz, where I became close with many of these people had a unique culture and family feeling. There I became close with Gijs, Ami, and Jasper; David was also a member of the #darkwebz community, but I'd become close to him before this community existed. #darkwebz consisted mostly of individuals who had played the MMORPG Runescape at some point, though Runescape was almost never discussed. Rheingold describes IRC as a fairly unique social phenomenon: “IRC does not fit well with conventional theories of human communication because CMC technology makes possible something that human communicators could not do previously – a geographically dispersed group of people now can use the written word as a conversational medium. So much of what scientists and scholars know about human communication involves physical presence of even potential physical presence, both totally absent from IRC.” This is an important point – social interaction in IRC is conversational in that many people are speaking at once, often at the same time. As conversation continues, previously discussed items scroll off the screen; it's a very in-the-moment system of communication. However, Rheingold also suggests that “one of the fundamental forces that holds the IRC culture together” is “a minimum certainty about the identity of all participants in discourse” (187). However, this varies significantly from my own experiences in IRC. Individuals in #darkwebz (and other channels in which I was an active member) were encouraged to get to know each other personally and learn about each others' real life selves. Indeed, much of our conversation revolved around things that were going on in our lives outside, but we didn't make clear distinctions between online and “IRL” most of the time. Such conversations flowed right into each other.
Ami: I guess missing the stereotypical physical contact ... like you've been emotionally with this person for so long
Ami: But to not have held their hand until later..
Ami: That first hug I gave Jasper at the airport
Ami: and the first kiss
Ami: It was like WOW that's what I've been missing all these years
As a chat room, an IRC channel is a pseudo-physical space that thus may develop its own culture. While #darkwebz culture did have some aspects that related to the larger IRC culture (such as an appreciation for bash.org, an indexing site of humorous IRC quotes), there were also distinct parts of #darkwebz culture. At times when a large number of users were in the room, often a ToT (Truth or Truth; like Truth or Dare, but easier to play online) game would start up. Each member of the channel had a social role to play. There was also a masculine bent to the room, which far more males than females comprising “the regulars.” I can't put my finger on quite the explicit differences that separated #darkwebz culture from Internet culture in general are, but it was distinctly felt.
It has been made clear from the ethnographic data presented so far that times are changing. So what's the future going to look like? As technology becomes an increasingly more important mediator in human interaction and communication, will this be a good or bad thing? “Many of the institutions that used to bring people together – a main street, a union hall, a town meeting – no longer work as before. Many people spend most of their day alone at the screen of a television or a computer. (Turkle 178)” The range of emotions subjects felt about this future was wide and varied. There's a great deal of worry that human relationships are deteriorating and that, as we spend increasing amounts of time online, we are losing something essential from the real.
Are the bonds that connect us less strong than they used to be? Lisa worries that “technology can affect people's social development. I suspect that it may hinder people having deeper relationships. It's made it easier for people to have a quantity of relationships, but I think it may well be harming the quality of relationships, especially in your generation.” My own mother expresses a similar sentiment, noting that “It's frustrating when you have children who spend a little too much time online. First of all, just it detracts from the old-fashioned kids-going-out-and-playing-on-the-street-with-other-kids. They need fresh air and kid-to-kid contact outside, instead of being in their own little bubbles online. And because it is a somewhat artificial relationship when you're online. It shouldn't replace real life friendship.”
There's also worry that people may become too immersed in Internet activity and stop paying attention to what's going on around them, and that there isn't much room for privacy when you're always connected to this large “cloud” network. My mom worries about what it means for family members to bring laptops on vacation with them: “It detracts from family communication and from enjoyment of things other than the Internet. You go on vacation to look at the ocean and enjoy each other and enjoy the beach, and if you're on the Internet the whole time that defeats the purpose. It lets the outside world interfere with your vacation.” Similarly, Lisa is concerned that “particularly for young children at key times in their development, spending significant amounts of time in front of a computer screen is very damaging to their social development. Whether or not that the computer itself causes a problem, while they're in front of a computer or tv, they're NOT interacting with other people around them in real life.”
Somewhat as a counter to that, Justin doesn't see what the problem is. He describes his relationship with his iPhone, and points out that there's plenty of opportunities to just not connect yourself to that cloud when you want privacy:
There's also something good about being connected all the time; there's a sense of the presence of the social bond. Even in the 90s, people started to associate new technology to a sense of connectedness. Turkle describes her experience typing on a computer: “The dynamic, layered display gives me the comforting sense that I write in conversation with my computer. After years of such encounters, a blank piece of paper can make me feel strangely alone” (Turkle 29).
Among those of us who have spent a very large amount of time communicating online, there's a sense that all this worry and apprehension that many people feel about “too much technology” is temporary and misguided, and that our attitudes represent the future. My conversation with Ami included the following interaction when I was discussing my project after our interview had technically ended:
madjoy: this topic really interests me because of my relationshiph with davidThere are still obviously limitations to non-face-to-face communication. Even webcam chat, which allows for body language, tone, forced response time, some extent of eye contact, and many other things typically cited as “missing” from text chat, is still quite imperfect, as this section of my interview with David demonstrates:
madjoy: where... whenever I tell people we were in a romantic relationship before having met in real life, they seem flabbergasted
madjoy: but... I definitely felt that our emotions were real, our relationship was real, etc.
Ami: I think we're just part of that society that's accepted it early on than others
Ami: Keep in mind that a lot of people back then met the people who were around them
Ami: And stuck with them after that because they know where they're from, know how they were brought up etc
Ami: On-line for others just seems to be a stretch, but more and more are engaging in it
Ami: So it's not so "taboo" as it used to be
The future is unclear. It is, however, clear that attitudes have changed since Turkle and Rheingold wrote in the '90s. None of the seven subjects interviewed said that communicating online meant existing in an alternate, simulated space; all said that, to some extent, it was an extension of the space they currently inhabit on a day-to-day basis. Overall, the subjects have put postmodern identity crises aside, seeing their identities represented differently through various media, but with a certain sameness of identity underlying each representation, with each slightly different identity comprising some part of “who they really are.” This ultimate identity, “who they really are,” is no longer purely centered in the space of the body; “real” existences and virtual existences are merging. Is this the posthuman? As Turkle queried in the opening quote, it is possible that we are becoming transgressive cyborgs as we become further enmeshed with the technology that surrounds us in the way we interact with others. Time will tell just how far these connective technologies will go, and what will become to our still-human selves.
Photos of People Interviewed
The following set of photos show interactions between various people interviewed and described in this paper. It might be interesting to consider each picture and compare for oneself if there are differences in our facial expressions and the way we hold our bodies, depending on the nature of the medium of our original interactions.
Gijs, while in London, pours Vla for me. Vla is a Dutch custard-like dessert which I had no idea existed until Gijs brought some as a gift - merging of cultures? David photographed this picture.
Me, my mother, and my mother's mother at a family wedding.
Janet and I interact at a college party (Senior Cocktails).
Gijs and I give each other a parting hug before he leaves to take the train back to the Netherlands.
I meet David at the airport in New York for our first extended visit with each other.
David and I pose at the top of the Empire State Building.
Gijs, Eva (a real life friend of mine), me, and Jasper pose together at the airport in Amsterdam.
Ami and Jasper pose together in California.
Justin and I pose together at a college birthday party.
Gijs, while in London, pours Vla for me. Vla is a Dutch custard-like dessert which I had no idea existed until Gijs brought some as a gift - merging of cultures? David photographed this picture.
Me, my mother, and my mother's mother at a family wedding.
Janet and I interact at a college party (Senior Cocktails).
Gijs and I give each other a parting hug before he leaves to take the train back to the Netherlands.
I meet David at the airport in New York for our first extended visit with each other.
David and I pose at the top of the Empire State Building.
Gijs, Eva (a real life friend of mine), me, and Jasper pose together at the airport in Amsterdam.
Ami and Jasper pose together in California.
Justin and I pose together at a college birthday party.Works Cited
Turkle, Sherry. Life on the Screen : Identity in the Age of the Internet. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997.
Rheingold, Howard. The Virtual Community : Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. New York: MIT P, 2000.
Rheingold, Howard. The Virtual Community : Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. New York: MIT P, 2000.
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