We’ve only been in an “always on” world for a handful of years, and we’re still figuring out the limits of what amount of technology in our life is good for us. Not just how much technology we should use, but when and where. Ellis Hamburger’s “We are all Glassholes Now” captures one area of our attempts to figure out this relationship, in terms of taking photos at concerts.
In this new world of hyper-documentation we’ll have to figure out what feels right and what doesn’t — new etiquettes and customs and mores. These new norms will focus on utility and also social acceptance.
Since seeing the band Savages last year, I’ve been trying to obsess less about documenting concerts, so as to be in the moment, but the debate expands far beyond just holding up a screen at a concert. When we pick up a pen and a notebook to write, or we play the “Phone Stack” game at dinner, we make a conscious choice to define the terms on which we use our technology. Even something as simple as “no computers or smartphones” in the bedroom is a powerful dividing line in establishing a limit in our technological relationships.
I don’t think this is a new pattern. Certain people, people like us—nerds—think about this stuff a lot. The why they think about it part varies. Maybe they get paid to do it, or maybe they’re just the kind of person who easily gets obsessed with new shiny gizmos. Or both. We’re the early-adopter types, and when things get too much, we’ll be the first to try something else. And tell the world about it. It’s easy for us to throw our lives out of balance because we’re so addicted to whatever glowing, buzzing, shiny thing is next on the must-have list. After a while, self-realization kicks in, and we try to change something.
As much as we grumble about the amount of time we spend on Facebook, the piles of apps we never use on our smartphones, or how our iPad apps aren’t being updated, we know there’s some utility to the technological things in our lives. Facebook keeps us in touch with our family and friends we never get to see. The one random app on our Smartphone comes in handy about once every blue moon. Our iPad replaces our television. It takes time for us to figure it out what these things are for, and even longer to figure out why.
When I see people in my circles talk about “going analog,” I don’t see it as rejecting technology. I see it as self-regulation. If you can’t handle infinity in your pocket, try leaving infinity in your desk drawer and locking it. If you can’t get your writing done on a computer, whip out a pen and paper. As we figure out what all these things are for, and redefine our relationship to our gadgets and the network they connect us to, we find our own balance again. We cut the trail that the people behind us, the new adopters, walking down the street glued to their screen will eventually follow.
This past January, I took a few weeks off from social media: Facebook, Twitter, App.Net, Instagram, Tumblr—all the various streams that dominate my online time. The goal then was to free my mind and my time for more constructive things—writing, reading, making my own moments. Instead, I blew most of the freed up time playing SimCity and finding other diversions. While it did set me off on a goal of being more judicious in what I opt to consume online, the entire endeavor must be rated a failure.
Even though I failed in my first attempt to sublimate a Facebook and Twitter addiction, the idea of breaking up and finding some distance between myself and the firehose of streams has remained an ideal in the romantic sense. To free my mind and my ego from the petty concerns of the stream—not just the empty sharing of thoughts and ideas, but checking to see who’s “Liked” my statuses, who’s fav’d and RT’d me on Twitter. Enough.
It was a Twitter conversation back in June, I think with S. V. Macias, that had me thinking of trying a new social media sabbatical. The ideals were the same, but I’m thinking about my approach in a different way. Instead of sublimating my social media time with other time spent on the computer, this is time I could spend doing things I need and want to do. I’m putting hard limits on my options, and even opting to just plain disconnect from time to time as necessary to live my life, and live it away from the streams.
I am going to miss the streams, though. In the last few weeks, I’ve had some great Twitter conversations, especially with Sid O’Neill. We’ve chatted about the role of technology in our lives, the business of tech (and how little we care for it), diversity, and even the third rail of faith and religion. I’ve loved every minute of it, though I don’t know if Sid has. (I kid because I love.) I also worry, as a number of my friends are musicians, and use Facebook to announce events and shows. Even if I’m trying to avoid the Fear of Missing Out, I don’t want to miss a chance to support my friends for some curious notion of re-finding a balance in my digital life.
But this is the risk we take. We had ways of keeping in touch before Twitter and Facebook, and those ways haven’t gone around. If I take a picture of my lunch, and don’t post it to Instagram, it still exists. I’m taking an extreme measure, because I feel it’s the best way to figure out just how much I need these things in my life. I already know they need me to feed the machine. I just need to know if what I’m giving up to them is worth what I’m getting back.
There’s all this time. Time to listen to music, take walks through my neighborhood, time to read books and time to make words. I want to do all those things, and be present. There’s also time to cook the dinner, wash the dishes, run on the treadmill, do the laundry, and hug and kiss my partner. I want to do all those things, and be present too. I want to be in touch with the smart, funny, and interesting people of the Internet. I want to do that, and be present. Only that last one requires a screen, and an Internet connection, as well as time. I’m using too much of that time on the being in touch, and not enough of it elsewhere. It’s time to rethink that.
So much of our technological “innovations” are either about flinging existing bits from Point A to Point B, or making new bits to fling from Point A to Point B. We consume bits, and we create bits, most of us consuming far more bits than we create. Those bits take the form of TV shows, video games, photographs, books, music, Tweets and Facebook Statuses, and pithy blog posts about technology, but they’re all just bits. We can make them faster, and we can fling them faster, but they’re still just bits.
There are so many problems that cannot be solved by flinging bits. No matter how many bits we can fling per second, those bits won’t clean someone’s filthy drinking water, slow down global warming, or any of a number of problems that require flinging real things, which requires real people. Sure, sometimes flinging bits can result in flinging a real thing, but those bits aren’t the thing, they are just the signal that a real thing is needed. You fling bits to Uber, Uber flings bits to a driver, the driver comes to you.
That’s all well and good. But you can’t fling bits to get clean water. Many people without clean water don’t even have a device to fling bits with. Even if they did, it wouldn’t do them any good until they have the infrastructure to fling bits.
There’s so much brainpower and money locked up in making and flinging bits. If we applied that same money and brainpower to flinging real things, what miracles might we bring about?
As women, we’re often told that this Internet harassment is “not real,†that it’s “just the Internet,†that we need to expect it and develop “thicker skin.†Women internalize these ideas, too, or at least accept that we can’t turn back the tides of abuse that we have to deal with…
And yet, as women, we know that, no matter how thick our hides might be, the emotional effects and physical dangers of Internet harassment are all too real.
It’s not that email is broken or productivity tools all suck; it’s just that culture changes. People make email clients or to-do list apps in the same way that theater companies perform Shakespeare plays in modern dress. “Email†is our Hamlet. “To-do apps†are our Tempest.
An interesting point of view from a programmer on the prevalence of new apps that try to solve the same old problems we thought the last set of apps solved. The problems aren't the same, and neither are the solutions, at least to a programmer. More importantly, and what Paul misses, is that the there is never going to be a one-size fits all solution for how any of us choose to work.
What's problematic about the glut of email apps and to-do lists, is that they have a low barrier to entry (at least, for to-do lists), and to the average end user there's not a lot of difference between Wunderlist and Things, or between Dispatch and Mailbox. It's why I'm glad something like The Sweet Setup exists, to carve through the glut for us. But that glut is so large that it looks like, at least to outsiders, there's nothing groundbreaking happening. That's a dangerous image to have in a crowded market of undifferentiated goods.