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textualdevianceYou know, there are a few interesting points in this piece, but they're completely drowned out by the OMG EVIL TECHNOLOGY!! nonsense, not to mention the reeking hypocrisy. (Seriously: You're going to use a video hosting site and Skype interviewing to try to make a point about how mediated communication is dehumanizing us?)
For the record, there is one truth in the hand-wringing about technology and human interaction: Many of us have less physical contact with other people these days, and that does make a difference. Skin-to-skin contact has major physiological benefits, and it's important for us to get a lot of it. Long-distance contact, regardless of whether that happens through old-fashioned snail-mail letters or more-modern means of communicating with people who aren't in the same room, is not enough on its own.
That aside, it's absolutely preposterous to suggest that people are somehow dehumanizing others merely because we have more-efficient means of communicating than we have before. In fact, I'd argue that the reverse is true.
What's become obvious, after seeing many of these Luddite rants over the years, is that what they're really lamenting is a sense of automatic community based on where one happens to live. They all seem to be nostalgic for some sort of stereotypical mid-20th-century neighborhood where everyone knows your name and you borrow cups of sugar from your neighbors. An era in which you identified yourself not by your interests or state of mind, but by your place of residence. Regardless of whether you actually had anything in common other than physical location, you were expected to bond with others on your street, in your city, in your state, in your nation. You were drafted, involuntarily, onto a team of people you shared physical space with, and told that those were your family, and everyone outside of that space was the competition.
And you know what that got us? A crapload of war, that's what.
Instant communication with people all over the world has enabled a global community that would never, ever have been possible even a couple of generations ago, and one of the major side benefits of this is that it's made it increasingly impossible to dehumanize people merely because we don't actually see their faces or know their names, because they live so far away. In my childhood, there was a popular perception of the Soviet Union being this dark, monolithic mass of Evil People whom we were expected to drop nukes on if they started acting up. Today? We get video of the Trololo guy giggling at his newfound fame.
It should be no surprise that most of the people who support violence as a foreign policy of first resort are people who are very disconnected from any sort of real global community. They are people who live close to where they were born, who live in communities with little cultural diversity, who get virtually all of their news from people who look and talk exactly like them. They can call for us to bomb the crap out of Iran because they've never in their lives known or even talked to someone from there. Meanwhile, those of us who have ventured further beyond our front doors, whether physically or virtually, readily hop on Twitter to support the uprising in the wake of that country's screwed-up election. We don't see Iran as a monolith because we see the actual words and faces of individual people who are trying as best they can to struggle against an oppressive government.
People who are bound to the idea that DNA or zip code is not just enough of a social commonality in itself, but a preferable one have told me that there's something wrong with me because I don't socialize with my relatives and don't really know my neighbors, and yet spend a great deal of time communicating online with people who live across the country or on the other side of the equator or Prime Meridian. Me? I wonder what's wrong with people who are so afraid of interacting with people unlike themselves that they're terrified to venture into online socialization.
Don't get me wrong: I'm a big fan of in-person socialization. Hell, I'm an enormous cuddle slut. And I do lament that time, distance and scheduling make it difficult to go hug the people I love regularly. There are times I wish I could teleport my entire flist into my living room so I can glomph them for real instead of just with words. But there's no way I'd give up the opportunity to have known these people at all just because I was busy trying to make connections with locals with whom I otherwise have nothing in common.
For the record, there is one truth in the hand-wringing about technology and human interaction: Many of us have less physical contact with other people these days, and that does make a difference. Skin-to-skin contact has major physiological benefits, and it's important for us to get a lot of it. Long-distance contact, regardless of whether that happens through old-fashioned snail-mail letters or more-modern means of communicating with people who aren't in the same room, is not enough on its own.
That aside, it's absolutely preposterous to suggest that people are somehow dehumanizing others merely because we have more-efficient means of communicating than we have before. In fact, I'd argue that the reverse is true.
What's become obvious, after seeing many of these Luddite rants over the years, is that what they're really lamenting is a sense of automatic community based on where one happens to live. They all seem to be nostalgic for some sort of stereotypical mid-20th-century neighborhood where everyone knows your name and you borrow cups of sugar from your neighbors. An era in which you identified yourself not by your interests or state of mind, but by your place of residence. Regardless of whether you actually had anything in common other than physical location, you were expected to bond with others on your street, in your city, in your state, in your nation. You were drafted, involuntarily, onto a team of people you shared physical space with, and told that those were your family, and everyone outside of that space was the competition.
And you know what that got us? A crapload of war, that's what.
Instant communication with people all over the world has enabled a global community that would never, ever have been possible even a couple of generations ago, and one of the major side benefits of this is that it's made it increasingly impossible to dehumanize people merely because we don't actually see their faces or know their names, because they live so far away. In my childhood, there was a popular perception of the Soviet Union being this dark, monolithic mass of Evil People whom we were expected to drop nukes on if they started acting up. Today? We get video of the Trololo guy giggling at his newfound fame.
It should be no surprise that most of the people who support violence as a foreign policy of first resort are people who are very disconnected from any sort of real global community. They are people who live close to where they were born, who live in communities with little cultural diversity, who get virtually all of their news from people who look and talk exactly like them. They can call for us to bomb the crap out of Iran because they've never in their lives known or even talked to someone from there. Meanwhile, those of us who have ventured further beyond our front doors, whether physically or virtually, readily hop on Twitter to support the uprising in the wake of that country's screwed-up election. We don't see Iran as a monolith because we see the actual words and faces of individual people who are trying as best they can to struggle against an oppressive government.
People who are bound to the idea that DNA or zip code is not just enough of a social commonality in itself, but a preferable one have told me that there's something wrong with me because I don't socialize with my relatives and don't really know my neighbors, and yet spend a great deal of time communicating online with people who live across the country or on the other side of the equator or Prime Meridian. Me? I wonder what's wrong with people who are so afraid of interacting with people unlike themselves that they're terrified to venture into online socialization.
Don't get me wrong: I'm a big fan of in-person socialization. Hell, I'm an enormous cuddle slut. And I do lament that time, distance and scheduling make it difficult to go hug the people I love regularly. There are times I wish I could teleport my entire flist into my living room so I can glomph them for real instead of just with words. But there's no way I'd give up the opportunity to have known these people at all just because I was busy trying to make connections with locals with whom I otherwise have nothing in common.
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But I'd like to think that's actually a minority of people who communicate a lot online, and that there's a lot of community policing that goes on to keep the trolls in check. I also think that a lot of these trolls would probably be just as rotten in their offline lives, too. Having new means by which to bully people isn't what makes a bully.