change of pace

driving home from watching Wallace & Grommit today, I was, for some reason, thinking about friends in distant places and Flickr, research ideas and this silly, mostly useless blog.

Some weeks ago, I'd realized that I actually seem to have lots of these random little potentially interesting thoughts that are never written down anywhere. This blog is certainly a space for such. Instead I use this space for useless links to all things wireless. It's time for a change of pace/space/use. I have been shaping thoughts in my head into an attempt at a model of social interaction and technology use. Trying to take all the myriad random pieces I've been collecting and put them together into something that may at some point resemble a coherent whole. Funny enough, this has been happening in my personal life as well as research (but that's a story for a different blog).

On the way home, I was thinking that technology does alter the way we relate to each other, but, sometimes, in ways we do not expect. In some cases, the outcomes are good, in others, they are not. As human beings, we are adaptible and creative. We use tools, that are available to us, in ways that let us reach our goals. These uses are often creative. The key thing, I think, is that initially, when a technology becomes available, the goals don't change, but the ways of reaching those goals do. Yet the end result, because of technology mediation, may be subtly different or may have more than just the expected outcome. This is where the whole "impact" story starts. Not at the "reaching the goal" but afterwards.

I am getting ahead of things. For now, here is a short idea on how "goals" can be good AND bad. Anyone who's ever procrastinated doing something productive, knows how bad procrastination feels after a while (no sense of accomplishment, just mounting stress and frustration), and how hard it is to break the habit. Anyone who's had minor addictions to Flickr, Bloglines, Friendster and the like, knows how dangerous an Internet connection can be when the job that needs to be done merely requires a CPU. I need to read up a little bit more on habits and intervening goals in psych, but the idea here is that we may have high level goals, and technology may help us achieve them, but the ease with which it allows us to achieve low level goals may actually be a distraction from focus on behavior that would lead to high-level achievement. In a very strange way, this may sometimes play out not only in terms of behaviors such as writing a paper (wich, for example, i am currently procrastinating), but for social interaction as well!

Now back to Flickr... I have a feeling that I may be actually interacting less with those of my long distance contacts, who frequently post on flickr. Partly because I feel I know what is going on in their life without having to ask, partly because I happen to see their pictures and the act of looking through those pictures fills up the time I would have used to write an email, partly because it gives me an excuse. Yes there is a feeling of presence and an awareness of someone elses' life in a way that is both intimate and curious. Yet I think there may be something to a small substitution effect, which actually happens only with ties of a particular strength - i.e. these are not strongest nor weakest ties - these are the ones in between. The ones that, ironically, need most care and nurturing to grow. I wonder if there is a way to observe this empirically.