Jordan, in a brilliant comment on Steven Winn's SFGate article titled Turn on, tune in, drop out -- today's motto talks about the fearmongering properties of sensationalist media and how the author essentially misses the point of technology use and sociability patterns in his rush to scare his readers into yet another chicken little scream of people turning anti-social with popular technology's help. I am sure Apple appreciated the advertisement.
Of the techno-deterministic statements of technology is bad or it is good or the sky is falling... the "destruction of the public sphere" is not new or different. Yet I wonder if there isn't a minor grain of truth to the statement, however, small and, ultimately, insignificant. The grain of truth may lie in the idea that people engaged with music media, with their ears plugged up by headphones are just slightly more unapproachable than those reading a book. In fact, the jacket of a book can provide an intersting form of common ground, providing basis for contact rather than detracting from it. How often people meet (have met) on buses or in subways? probably less often than in other public spaces more directly designed towards social interaction. So, the percentage of affected possibilities is very very small...
Maybe that's the case... or maybe not. A couple of years ago there were exhuberant articles in NYT, Wired and others about the social possibilities of ipods - people swapping music for a moment, allowing each other to "jack into" each others' ipods. The white headphones signified an exclusive club of people who were somehow similar, if only in their technology use. Maybe after a certain point of saturation this feeling is no longer present or relevant, but it WAS there.
so what's the point? technology provides us with ways to achieve our own goals, but some of these goals are interpersonal and people have a fascinating history of using technology designed for individual consumption as a vehicles for interpersonal interaction. Reduction in interpersonal opportunities in one public sphere may lead to increases of interpersonal experience in others. We are certainly NOT islands. Most of the negative rhetoric screams bloody murder under an odd assumption that we talk to each other merely because we have to. Give us a reason not to and we will just stop interacting flat out.
and yet... and yet i think there are technologies that change the way we interact, that may lock us into our existing social circles and remove external pressure to meet new people (an uncomfortable process for many), that may reinforce our small echo-chambers, making people less tolerant and open to ideas of others rather than more. Expecations of positive impact are just as fraught with determinist rhetoric as the shrill warnings of the pessimists. What we need is a careful assessment of human social behavior and the changes this behavior can undergo in the circumstances of technology adoption... tough one... working on it :)
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