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Browsing Alone
In his book, Putnam argues that our access to the "social capital" that is the payoff for community and civic work is shrinking. Though the reasons are complex, technology and mass media are primary factors, Putnam says. We spend more time at home watching TV (and, increasingly, working and amusing ourselves online) and less with other people. Our detachment from communal efforts -- and opportunities to meet other people -- grows. In l960, 62.8 percent of voting-age Americans went to the polls to choose between John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon; in l996, after decades of slippage, just 48.9 percent chose Bill Clinton over Bob Dole. The inverse correlation between the rise of screen-driven entertainment technologies and civic disconnection is persuasive. So is the epidemic hostility online.
Although Putnam's book focuses on TV more than the Net (since TV is older and its use has been more widely studied), it's impossible not to think about the new ways networked computing may contribute to this disconnection. The Net is the world's greatest communications medium, but the notion of cyberspace as providing a social connection -- remember the virtual community? -- has turned out to be a fantasy. In many ways, the intensely connective Net is helping people become more disconnected all the time. It's the new TV.
This is of no small consequence, Putnam argues. Social bounds are the most powerful predictor of life satisfaction. Communities with low social capital have poor schools, more teen pregnancies and child or youth suicide, and higher prental mortality. Social capital is also the most reliable indicator of crime rates and other measurable quality-of-life issues. Such disconnection has happened before in American life, Putnam writes, especially during periods of great migration and immigration, but it was reversed by periods of stability and the rise of organizations like the Red Cross, the Boy Scouts, and thriving religious organizations.
Of all the many dimensions along which forms of social capital vary, writes Putnam, perhaps the most important is the distinction between "bridging" (or inclusive) and "bonding" (or exclusive). Some forms of social capital are, by choice or necessity, he writes, inward looking and tend to reinforce exclusive identities and homogeneous groups -- fraternal organizations, church-based women's reading groups, snooty country clubs. Other networks are outward looking and encompass people across diverse and different social networks -- youth service groups, civil rights organizations, ecumenical religious associations.
The Net, it was originally believed, would be a "bridging" technology, one that would connect the planet. But the most interesting evolution in software in recent years has been code that permits people to narrow, not expand, their universes. Blocking and filtering software has become epidemic to product against flamers, crackers and spammers. The explosion in weblogs, specialized mailing lists, instant messaging and other so-called p2p media means that people online increasingly talk only to one another, not to people who are different or unfamiliar. The rise of this narcissistic communications is understandable, but it hardly is inclusive. People all over the Web routinely block and filter points of view they don't like or don't want to hear (or buy), so nobody online really ever has to encounter all that discordant diversity that digital technology makes possible. More disconnection.
Thanks in part to the Net, Americans have never had so many reasons to stay home, so many entertaining or useful options when they do. I remember an e-mail I got from a grandmother last year lamenting all the TV ads showing AOL grandmas getting pictures of their grandchildren. "That's nonsense," she says. "My kids don't visit me nearly as much because they feel they can just e-mail me. I love digital pictures, but I rarely get to see my grandchildren in person." Her lament -- the illusion of connection, while facing the reality of tech-spawned separation -- was intriguing.
The rise of the Net would seem to have exacerbated this tendency. Americans had already been spending an enormous amount of time watching television. Putnam found that 80 percent of all Americans watch some TV every evening, while only about 60 percent talk with their families nightly, let alone neighbors, strangers or others. Watching TV has become one of the few universal experiences of contemporary American life.
Increasingly, the Net is one too. It promises consumer use as great as television's, if not greater, since work connects with home. This seems especially ironic, since the Net was supposed to be one of the most powerful devices ever for connecting with humans. Mostly, it connects us with bits and links. In a sense, it is a connective medium. We can stay in touch with friends, colleagues and family members all over the planet. But Americans use the Net to get free data from music to weather, send messages, play games, shop and talk about sex. So the Net could exacerbate the techno-trend that television began. We're e-mailing and browsing alone as well as bowling. The Net could have an ever more striking impact, since it enables users to do things TV doesn't -- like play games and shop for nearly everything. Those, among others, were activities that people once had to go outside to do, where they might glimpse or even speak with a neighbor -- or go bowling.
America was founded partly on the notion of common civic spaces -- taverns, greens. A lot of cyber-idealists thought the Net was becoming our new common space. That hasn't happened. Nasty teenagers, spammers and greedy corporatists have made common turf on the Net either too expensive, hostile or annoying for most people to spend much time on.
Putnam's idea about social capital might be even more timely relevant than he understood.
is a much better option
About 40% of the responses are "Search Google!".
Who wants to leave the house anyways when you've got plenty of pbr, a decent net connection, and afterall where else can you get free porn and gamble at the same time?
I live under the bridge, in a pile of feces.
I just got an email the other day from my good friend Mandy who I must know, because she says she remembers me. She says that she wants me to see her and all of her seven college coed roommates naked any time I want!
So I've got friends! See!
You aren't going to believe this, but GREAT ARTICLE JON!!
What I'm really interested in is how 'trolling' will affect the future cultures.
Because people can hide behind usernames (or anonymity) they are usually more forward and aren't afraid to start a large fight. How will this affect future generations? Will it make it more violent? Or, maybe, the personal (physical) confrontation will cause more shyness and less violence.
Its interesting how we blow off the 'troll phenomenon' on the internet (although, they tend to remind us they are there with their goatse ascii art), but it may cause a major change in society!
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
the fragmented, often self-censored, personalized and specialized weblogs
That depends what he means by self-censored...
Katz neglects to consider the fact that Net usage varies tremendously between different people. For example, your average couch potato is probably not very interested in participating in on-line discussions about the state of society, while others find a way to express their feelings, opinions and suggestions more efficiently to a wider audience through e.g. discussion boards such as this one.
I find it somewhat ironic (in the popular usage of the word - disclaimer to avoid dictionary flames) that Katz posts this article on SlashDot.
Furthermore, bloggers get "pundit syndrome" where because their views are "published", they feel they know more than others, thus reinforcing their tendency to intone imperiously rather than enter into debates. This further destroys any chance for a community to form, unless you count a swarm of boot-licking toadies congregating around one blog to be a community.
- adam
As is evident in my sig, I have a problem with the lack of localization of the net: Basically, despite the fact that about 95% of our lives are still local, and always will be (whether it's entertainment, restaurants, grocery stores, etc, or it's issues like potholed roads, a new park going up, etc.), there is exceedingly little localization on the net: There was more of a sense of community when I was on a small town BBS->We all shared common issues and could discuss things that affected our lives locally.
It does both. If I am interested in something, I let my friends know about it. If they like it, more often than not, we will check it out together. A perfect example of this is muds. I know most here have probably dabbled at a mud or two back in the day, so this hopefully will stay somewhat on topic. I was a fledgling netizen in the early 90's. A friend of mine introduced me to a mud, and I watched him play for a while. I soon became interested in this, and we started playing together, me on one pc, him on the other. Soon, we introduced other people to it. More and more people joined us, and we would have mud gatherings. Now, that is an example of how you can get a group online doing something together. For the opposite example, when IRC first came out, that was most definetely something I did on my own, as I didn't want to take the abuse from my friends when they would read a response or something. IRC required a bit of privacy. No big deal. The bottom line IMO is if you are typically a closed person with few friends outside of your computer life, then chances are you surf alone. If you have friends outside of the net that are interested in you, then you will do stuff together. Loners will be alone, those that aren't won't. Or something like that. Anyhow, my $.03
Sent from your iPad.
If it was something we needed, we'd be out jitterbugging at speakeasies, but obviously it ain't. Resistence is futile...
As Katz stated, many places on the net
> turned to exclusive p2p "me media," the
> fragmented, often self-censored, personalized
> and specialized weblogs
[...]
That's my main concern. You see censorship almost everywhere popping up like mushrooms, be it Napster-like services blocking content or Slashdot bitchslapping whole threads because they "are not what we like our users to see" (this was practiced in the infamous "troll survey" thread).
Is there anything we can do against this? Maybe. A few years ago there was a company that provided a "second opinion" service for websites. Users were able to comment on certain pages and could also see the comments from other users visiting the site. No support from the commented sites was required, since the whole process was handled by a plugin.
This seemed like a rather useless idea back then, but come to think about it, I must admit I've changed my opinion.
C. M. Burns
Are people staying at home more discussing Bullshit articles by Jon Katz on the net instead of going down the tavern? Sack all evil journalists!!!!
Incidentally, nice Slashdot-type approach artcile there Jon - 'Here, someone wrote this massive book on the decline of society and how people are staying at home. The net is also something you do at home, so I'll write two pages and reference the original book'.
Surely alot of the things we do on the net *are* social - the fact they aren't face to face is irrelevant. The book talks about people indulging in solo activities like TV-watching at home at the expense of social interaction - much of web stuff is the *opposite* of that...
Wasn't this the subtext of the movie Contact?
[insert witty sig here]
I read half way through the second sentence, then looked up at the submitter. Yup, another JonKatz diatribe. As sensational as it is empty calories.
i ng-their-engines. I'd bet I was the only person in the State of Colorado. Yet, that group provides valuable insight, as the collective has the knowledge I need to complete the restoration.
What's never mentioned in these sensational diatribes on how TV, the Internet, Automobiles, Reading, and Fire isolate us from our community is how social people tend to be social and non-social people tend to be non-social.
Geeks have their own social groups and operate just FINE there, with robust interactions and healthy communications.
I've found the Internet allows me to discuss and communicate with folks I'd never have a chance to in the photographic community.
I've found that email and IM makes communication with my parents cheap and effortless, even though they're 1200 miles away.
I've run a local Corvette club for YEARS that wouldn't have occurred had I not met these folks on the internet.
The internet allows for some loosely connected groups that WOULDN'T EXIST without it. A continual subscription to ThinkNIC allows me to get the support from the company directly, as well as talk to an audience of like minded folk that use the NIC. That social group is tenuous enough that there would never be a Denver ThinkNIC group worth attending, much less a thinknic club of lower North Dakota. There's maybe 50 people NATIONWIDE on that list.
Further, the Corvette Forum may have 1200 folk, but if you're looking for Automatic-1989-convertible-owners-who-are-rebuild
Don't blame the Internet. Non-social people would be that way with or without the Internet just as repeated handwashing is not the cause, nor facilitator, of obsessive-compulsive behavior.
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
The premise is too complicated to be answered in a binary manner of yes or no. The answer is probably both, yes AND no. I don't interactive with my neighbor when I am on Slashdot. I am interacting with you as you read this. Instead of a flesh and blood interaction, it is mediated through distance, time and the cool glare of phosporus or LCDs. Is it better or worse? Humans evolved to interact on an small scale personal level like most intelligent animals. No we are evolving to interact via discoporeal means. Do mediating technologies throw our psycology off of balance. Probably. Is it bad that kids are getting fat sitting in front of TV and computers? Yes. Is it dehumanizing to interact with my girlfriend over the phone? Probably.
Things change. Life changes. My life changes daily, weekly and yearly through my aging, my growth and my development. Changing technology certainly affects my life. I used to call my folks all the time. Now I email. Less bandwidth. They don't hear the inflections in my voice. Good or bad? I write better than I speak, so my email to them tends to be more thoughtful than my speech. Good or bad?
Life is meant to be enjoyed. Mediating technology can be "value-free" with regards to this endeavour. Use it or not. The choice is yours.
I agree with the trends that the Net seems to be perpetuating, but is it really a surprise? I didn't really expect the Net to connect people personally in the way Katz and the author had hoped.
Naturally, the more outlets for non-direct communication there are, the less direct human interaction there will be!
It's a trade-off, just like TVs, telephones, even letters.
mark
If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe. -- Carl Sagan
I'm a college student, and as a college student, I'm at the peak of my social career. I use the net and my computer more than ever but that definately doesn't detract from my socializing.
There are many more factors involving why people are turning to the net instead of socializing outwardly. Lets face it, you can't name "BoyScouts and thriving religious organizations" as the namesakes of socialization. Family and religious values went right out the window a long time ago due to science and the information age. When you see Islam, Buddhism, etc. on TV and in the paper, you start to rethink that maybe your beliefs aren't "perfect". I'm not saying religion doesn't have its place, but free information prevents you from being sheltered in.
If you want to show the connection between social interaction and the net, find out how often people communicate with distant relatives compared to how they used to. Compare the social hierarchy of the current workplace to that of the 50's and 60's. Take a look a GOOD look at how communication with the deaf has changed with the advent of instant messaging. Take a look at what things now take up people's time in terms of work and play. You need to take every factor into account.
- gtaluvit (prnc. GOT-tuh-LUV-it)
An intelligent, well-reasoned opinion piece from Katz? Perhaps if we limited him to one piece a week and no movie reviews, we wouldn't need to filter him out so often.
Seriously, though, Putnam's work sparked off a contentious but critical debate within the Academy between social scientists interested only in descriptive research, and those interested in prescriptive discussions. Could it be that, after decades of political "scientists" trying to ape the tools and techniques of hard scientists and engineers, the scientists and engineers might look back to the tradition of philosophers and political economists?
"1802 England
Social Scientist today reported that less people are staying in the village and are moving into the towns. Lord Fotheringay today said "Its getting much harder to get staff these days and I'm having to pay them much more". Lord Fotheringay blamed the movement of people away from the villages on the Industrial Revolution and the improved communication structures in the country.
"Mark my words" he said "They'll be looking for the vote next"
Okay so I'm taking the piss but really is this worthy of an anal gazing article ? I say not, society changes as technology changes, this is about as suprising as your thumb hurting when you hit it with a hammer. Previous Katz articles have been at least contraversial, this is just plain Sociology... ie not worthy of printing out for loo paper. Every generation some Malthus predicts doom and gloom, and is wrong and short sighted.
All research in the social sciences can be reduced to the following statement "some do, some don't" - Ernest Rutherford.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
the truth is i think, that people dont really want to connect. they want thing to be safe and normal all the time, the world has gotten so big that it scares a lot of people. when you realize that you could spend your whole life in travel and never see it all, it feels a bit futile to try. as peter yaroh once said, people put themselves in "little boxes" and they all "come out the same". as for why the developement of filtering and firewalling skyrocketed...the number one thing people seem to want is power over others...the net, giving us the ability to affect and influence others thousand of miles away opens the door to a whole new breed of "net warlord" to go on and spam, DoS and crack to their hearts content. a lot of people are full of anger and hate, and any new forum just gives them another way to show it. the problem is this...it happened too fast!!! in the last 20 years the whole world has had to come to grips with the existance of "all those other people that arent them". remember in hitchhikers where those folks on the planet covered in mist found out that there was a universe outside their own planet? what was their reaction..."well its all gotta go!" humans are JUST LIKE THAT. and its sad, but thats how it is. i thiunk this is a laissez faire problem, it will go away by itself, with time. lets put some energy towards some other sciences besides communication that have lagged behind? like maybe it finally time to deep six internal combustion????
-ted
I've personally noticed this trend- that many
organizations filled with boomers seem to be
getting grayer as the younger generations
dont participate. These include professional
societies, hiking & running clubs, etc.
Then too, boomers boycotted the organizations
of their parents- chambers of commerce, church
socials, etc. This book notes in the last 50
years, each generation has been doing less
compared to the previous. The book suggests
about a dozen causes, but none really clinches
it. Nor do the sum of of clauses explain things.
The trend of less civic participation began long
before the InterNet became popular, so I wouldn't
blame the net.
Katz writes that, in providing an alternative for activities that require public presence, such as shopping, interaction between real people has been cut down by the net.
Seriously, though... How many of you have had meaningful conversations with random people you meet at your local mall? And how many of you have had meaningful conversations with strangers on ICQ/IM/whatever? In my case, at least, the latter has happened far more often than the former. While I'm of the old-fashioned mind and believe that you can't really know anyone until you've spent a few hours with them in person, I still find that IM is a complement, not a substitute, to my social life.
In terms of 'public life', the use of the net as a shopping medium doesn't cut into social interactions; on the contrary, by allowing me to shop late on weeknights, for instance, I don't have to lock myself in a car, drive for however long, walk around a mall full of people I probably won't have conversations with, etc. Instead, I spend that daytime with my friends.
Any thoughts?
the question then is, what is the internet/web's role in a changing social/community structure? if anything, i'd be inclined to argue that the internet enables precisely the kind of loose connections wuthnow describes. i would also say (purely impressionistically) that we now have a greater sense of a world community of which we are part, and that is thanks largely to the expansion of the internet and its adoption as a source of news. i have one word, in this regard: nettime.
"I've come to the conclusion that revolutions aren't profitable." -kevin kelly
On the other hand "staying at home" is what most of humanity has done for most of its existence.
I think we might (again) start to put as much weight on the physical aspects of community. And would that be such a bad thing? (Given typical urban commutes, how much time do you spend--and how well do you know--the people in the community around you?)
Modern communications has simply shown us that we aren't limited by physical boundaries. But that has only highlighted the differences--not eliminated them.
I'm not sure Putnam's description of declining voting applies here. Of course presidential voting has declined. Presidential politics has declined. Why does it deserve participation? Perhaps more people just disregard the whole circus as irrelevant.
TV and the Net function very differently in this context. TV has fragmented quite a bit as cable proliferated and split into niches. When there were only a few shows on, you could expect your neighbor to have watched a given program with some confidence. Can you expect your neighbor to have read a thread on K5? The Net seems to be even more divisive than TV in this sense.
However, the Net may allow tighter communities of smaller interest. You can find people of very esoteric interests on the Net, but do you meet them IRL? except for LUGs, I can't say that I have. But when new in town, finding a group is a big help, particularly if the group has a strong social feeling. One of the better user groups I know of meets in a bar and catches a local blues band; meetings are primarily social, lists are technical.
Connections within an online community can be fragile. Katz describes the failure of the public spaces online. Obnoxiousness may come in many forms. Could be snotty kids, or snooty power-hungry editor/moderators. What happened to The First Troll Post Inv. is a perfect example of community forming around an issue online and getting slapped for their trouble. Many users trying improve the quality of communication and community on /. got whacked because of the childish insecurity of some editors.
How can an online community like /. engender real community when it is censored? Won't happen. Will I get modded down for linking to the forbidden post in a relevant subject? Could be...Burn, Karma, Burn!
Sig?
Sigue Sigue Sputnik!!!
While it may be argued that the influence of the Internet has reduced the social bonds between people at a local level it has arguably made distant bonds with people even stronger. I routinely communicate with people whom I consider close friends that live nowhere near me anymore. In the "good old days" I might get a letter from them every once in a while, but overall would really be able to have the kind of social interaction that I can thanks to this new fangled technology.
To add to this, I have seen numerous people find communities on-line that they would never have found otherwise. These people can become as close to these on-line friends as they would with people nearby, and some of these relationships may evolve to being an in-person relationship when distance constraints fade.
Basically the internet eliminates a lot of the geographic constraints on socializing. This has positives and negatives. It means that an in the closet gay person in a backwater intolerant town can find supportive peers. It also means that people don't need to talk to the people next door very much. At least with the Internet as opposed to television, socializing is one of it's biggest facets. Rather than being hypnotized by the magic box, you are out there seeing what people think and frequently interacting with them.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
...it's cultural grazing. The herd, with the herd mentality, goes where it will, driven by forces that perhaps sociologists understand, perhaps not (inasmuch as they can't accurately predict trends). There isn't much that can be done about it, really; we are transitioning from an age in which our lifestyle was largely insular and the joining of the community was a 'big deal' to a time when the community is in constant touch and solitude becomes the big deal. We have created something of what we want; people often complain about the stark barren intellectual landscape of TV-land. This is due IMO to the fact that the bandwidth was limited to a handful of channels and tightly controlled by a dozen or so media moguls. Now information is largely free, but the battle over content and information has somewhat skewed the internet landscape to again degrade the experience (spam, DMCA issues, pop-up ads). Still, we prefer to put our energy, attention, and time into this thing, and not the other things, because it has something that we want.
One might lament the changing scenery, one might struggle to understand it, or one might try to resist being captured and carried away by it, but one thing is certain: it is here, it is where life is teeming right now, and you are either in or you are out.
Does the fish know that it's wet? That is, do we really care enough what the effect all these devices and the media they contain have on us that we are aware, that we take time to notice how we've changed? Or do we just swim with all the rest of the fish, changing direction here and darting there, avoiding the pitfalls and grabbing the scraps that float in front of us, unaware of what it is we are becoming because we are too busy becoming it?
Since we are sentient creatures, of course we have knowledge of what we are becoming, how we have changed. But the thrill of the new overtakes us. This is what's happening, and its human nature to join in the fray. There isn't really a problem here; it's just change.
SDMI: Finally! Music that won't rip or burn! Brought to you by the fine folks at RIAA.
I'm still tuned into you, aren't I?
there's a mile of similar commentary on the internet (such as neil postman, clifford stoll, etc.). robert kraut carried out the 'internet paradox' surveys that became the sociological proof of this effect, although the earlier findings were later recast.
i'm not saying that there are not social changes caused by the introduction of new information technologies. we are information driven beings, after all. however, we have to be wary of assigning values to them that are either ultimately 'good' or 'bad,' as despite all these changes, we somehow seem to be able to cope with them ...
I think Slashdot, for what it's worth, does a good job on the diversity issue. I've never seen so many morons, geeks and people with opinion that don't really matter scream about petty trivial things. Can't find that in real life!
In Denmark, one of the countries with the most PCs per inhabitant in the world, the average amount of time spent on the internet has topped and people are today spending less time on the internet than a year ago.
the internet has been the beast way for me to communicate with my family and firnde spread through out he world. Infact it has alllowed me to maintain my associations even more. For me it has been one of the most radical changes in the last decade. .. hype..
I can remember a time when getting any word from home (NEPAL) was a really big deal. Today, my mom and dad caht with me over IM and I can even have voice and video confrences.
While i may not meet them physically, i can do everything else.
I belive many others would have a similar story, and effect the "doomsday predications" are once more
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
Lets say that before technology X is invented, the set of cataloged human interaction is M. Technology X creates new modes of interaction (call the new modes set N). If the ones in set N are more efficient communication mechanisms in some circumstances, one would expect that people would naturally tend to use those in places, where before they were using a less efficient mechanism M.
The result is more efficient total communication, but a bean counter measuring it who doesn't adapt to the change and include the modes from N in his calculations will will conclude that there is less human interaction. In truth, there is less in set M, but that loss is more than offset by gains in N, because the only time someone swithches from M to N is when it benefits them.
For example, I happened to run into somebody who lives in Seatle two weeks ago on IRC. I travelled there last week from Texas, so it was a valueable conversation. I had absolutely no chance to meet someone like this before the internet.
Is this guy in my "community"? The internet has removed the correlation between the set of people I'm likely to converse with and those geographically close to me, and accordingly the meaning of the word community has to decide between two concepts that used to be equivalent.
I've got a serious question about moderation. My original post was (when I wrote this) modded down twice really quickly as "offtopic".
I was really surprised at this, because it wasn't some first-post or other obvious "offtopic"-candidate. The article was (to me) about retreating from the "real" world into the "virtual" world of the internet. The songtext was the very first thing that sprang to my mind. Now, it might be that poetry and so isn't considered on-topic on slashdot (if so, please reply...). But just look at the following short quote which - to me - is spot-on regarding this article:
I need some friends and conversation
the keyboard shapes the words I'd like to share
my mind's on-line for hard communication
and open to the wider world aware
I need conversation - but I do it only online...
Reinout van Rees
Ideas of social capital withering being linked to mortality can be found in various British Medical Journals on-line.
Although I would overall agree with points made in the article, just because social capital has declined in the lifespan of the net (or TV) doesn't prove a causative relationship. Britney Spears career has probably coincided with higher rates of (say) terrorism, or suicides but that doesn't mean...Well maybe.
Anyway, increased usage of the 'net has also accompanied some pretty sharp increases in economic equality - which has also been linked to reduced social capital. On streets which are *perceived* as more dangerous (regardless of the truth) then obviously people are going to want to stay at home with the TV. These trends are self-reinforcing.
One last point, net usage isn't an all-encompassing term. This is aluded to in the article, but clearly being part of an active on-line community (e.g. a game community, or on-line programmers, etc) isn't as "alienating" as just browsing for web porn.
The Internet provides a peculiar fabric for communication unlike any other. But to incite that it changes the behavior of people into self-absorbed ignorant people seems to be a little far fetched. I may be wrong, but if a person is self absorbed and ignorant I don't think that finding others like him will change his or her opinion on anything. The most likely change will be that they might become slightly more ignorant or self-absorbed, but wouldn't going to a User's Group of the same people provide the same venue for a little more gas money? Still one issue that didn't seem to be addressed is about introverts like myself. I very seldom talk to others in public unless it is necessary. But I irc all the time, and it provides a valuable source of relieving stress and tensions with other people who share a common ethos.
The internet is just one more step in the evolution of being social. Thus, you cannot say that we are less social than before, since it is all relative. More than likely, this definition will evolve again, probably within the next 50 years.
Thanks for bringing up a very timely and important topic (or group of topics). The corporatized media in this country has done its best to take over as much of the internet as possible; if they can just make the internet more like TV, where content is absolutely controlled and people are constantly bombarded with "the correct messages" (consume, be silent) then that media machine will be a little less nervous about the internet in general. Forget about television; it has already been bought and paid for by that same insane machine. Take a look at the big Internet providers. What do they offer in the way of content? CNBC, CNN, TBS, all big players in the big machine of the media. But the internet has something TV does not; there are still some alternative sites out there on the net that give a less filtered view of reality. My wife and I do not own a television. Not because we are poor (not that poor anyway), but because there is nothing to the TV except frontal lobe occupation. We made a decision to spend what would have been our "TV money" (cable, etc) on high speed Internet. This has caused a problem that you touched on in your essay; we are out of touch with the TV culture. People that we sort of know sometimes make allusions and references to some popular TV show or another and we just don't "get it." Or we will hear people repeating what we find out to be advertisement slogans as a substitute for conversation. We find, as you pointed out, that we do not spend time talking face-to-face with people because people have largely forgotten how to talk. The TV has turned this whole country into the land of platitudes: "united we stand, pledge allegiance to the corporations that own this land, in god we trust, cleansing crystals," and a plethora of other silly and mostly meaningless slogans that are supposed to stand in the place of reason and discourse. You wonder why people don't have conversations? I believe it is because people don't have anything to say and cannot remember how to say it. I believe TV has taken away most people's ability to think. Will the Internet be next to be seized and "tamed?" If we allow it to be completely absorbed by the machine of corporatization, yes, it will become as useless of a medium as television. If, on the other hand, we (the users of the internet) can see past empty promises and hype and vote (with our $$$) we can keep the net around in a renegade, untamed, and fun iteration that will remain dynamic and useful.
Google.com
Maybe our friend Mr Katz has got this thing wrong. Life on the net DOESN'T isolate you, it just forms different paths due to the technology. I write more e-mails than I ever sent in letters using dead-tree format and I met my future wife through an internet chat room. I also read slashdot every day and regard all but the posts by trolls as another valid form of communication.
I certainly don't feel isolated and on the few occasions when e-mail is down and there is no internet access I feel as if I've been cut off at the knees. I also don't regard myself as a hermit and if this is the 'information society' that everyone is talking about then I'm hooked.
i think you will find that most "porn readers" generally follow their fav actor/ess and the rest of the porn is of no interest.
as such i think you will find that people get more out of interacting with real people (when they do) then the used to, i know i really do enjoy an evening at the pub with some intelecutally stimulating conversation, and the opertunity to meet a genuinually intersting person at the same time is fantastic - i do think that im more aware through being conected and as such have had the opertunity to enhance my own oppinions to a point i do feel i can successfully argue my viewpoint on many topics - and i have the net to thank for this!
could fluff his way into somehow arguing that the greatest single force of bringing people from all ends of the earth and walks of life (the Internet) is somehow divisive. Maybe I'm crazy, but a creation that lets me communicate with friends in Australia, Germany, China, anywhere else in the world in real time isn't exactly something that's keeping us apart.
Does Katz even bother to think any of this crap through before he spews it out?
When can we expect his movie review of the "Dude, Where's My Car?" Limited Edition DVD? That's more on his level.
Does anyone else sense the irony in us discussing the topic of whether or not we are disconnected from each other, while part of one of the biggest online communities in the world? I feel that 'people connections' are just changing a bit. Where, you would sit on your front porch waving at the neigbors driving by and having barbecues. You sit on the internet, and turn buddy pounce on for your cyber friends, and have parties on IRC.... The times are changing for people connections, but i'm not saying that's a bad thing...
I'm not saying that god doesn't exist, merely that he is not necessary - hawking
I've been browsing now for 72 hours continuously here in my darkened upstairs bedroom and I can tell you for a fact, Mister, that I am not alone.
Harvey is sitting right here beside me, commenting continuously about what he likes and dislikes.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
to come from Jon Katz. I sit there reading through about half of it and I can't stop thinking to myself "Boy is this guy long winded. I could be finishing my work right now so I have more time to spend with my friends." I never did manage to finish the article.
This is the reason I've decided to have a livejournal account rather than use Radio Userland to roll my own. This allows me to be partof a group, and so far I've had 6 or 7 people comment on my blogs, find people with similar interests who's blog's I subscribe to, etc.
It's not a substitute for newsgroups, but It's pretty fantastic for ranting and getting thoughts out of my head and down on 'paper'.
My Journal
The major problem when using the net is the so-called information overload. Filters and software to cut down the signal to noise ratio, far from discouraging socialisation, can only help it. While such technologies could be used to block out social messages - it seems very unlikely to me!
:)
/without/ a user forum these days? Sites like Neopets, h2g2, Slashdot (if we ignore all the trolls and other idiots that crop up), rely solely on the community of the net.
/don't/ have a friendly community will fade from the net as fast as they appear. Humans are social animals, and as much as new technologies may inhibit that, Humanity will always want to talk.
Email too is a double-edged sword. Here at University I doubt I would keep up as much conversation with my family back home if I didn't have email. While some people may visit less because of email, in some cases it only helps people to stay in touch. While writing a letter is quite a lot of trouble, an email can be rattled off with hardly any trouble at all.
Furthermore, look at the exponential rise in chatting software. Sure people are using IM more, but why do you think that is? People like talking to other people. While the shift to talking online may not be the most healthy social trend, that hardly means people are getting less social, only that the medium is changing. Is a person alone if they regularly chat to hundreds of people online and send daily emails to everyone they want to keep in touch with?
That said, I agree that real life offers a much better deal. Going out with friends to the cinema or just a drink at the local bar is often far more fun that chatting away online. As with all things, a balance should be struck. Just because we have new ways to interact doesn't mean the old ways are any less relevant.
As for the idea of online turf disappearing... um excuse me? Katz, what are you on? There are hundreds of places where you can get a free homepages, hundreds of places like slashdot were you can interact and have customised user pages. Too expensive?! Ridiculous! Hostile? Maybe - but popularity is often judged on how good a service's community is - just look at slashdot
I suggest the Jon takes a good look at what the average online teenager does today. Many are very social indeed - the most popular places on the net are ones which have a community. What website is complete
Sites, online games, and whatever else connected with the net you can think of, that
Instead, I post to Slashdot.
also, I`ve once seen a research showing that social interaction with stupid people elevates the probability for heart attacks. I`ve yet to hear about someone getting a heart attack from reading a slashdot troll...
I think Jon's lonely. Poor guy.
BOWLING ALONE is an excellent book. Everybody with more than a passing interest in modern society should read it. I fault the author slightly for not guessing enough--he lays out reams of research and then becomes very timid when it comes time to explore the Big Why.
Although Putnam lays a little blame on TV (as he should) he misses something so big as to be obvious: We today have a surfeit of options in terms of what to do with our time. This is nowhere so clear as in the lives of parents with teen or preteen children: Two sports and three musical instruments each (with maybe dance lessons or martial arts thrown in), creating a combinatorial explosion of appointments and committments that makes spontaneous use of time impossible.
Apart perhaps from going to church on Sunday, when does anyone schedule time to spend interacting with other people? Social time as Putnam describes in times past was basically the time that was left over after work and family committments were met. Today, we have multiplied personal (as opposed to social) committments so hugely that there is nothing left to "spend" on social interaction.
Although I'm convinced that this is the biggie, I'm also sure that there's more to it. PC has made it difficult to discuss controversial issues in groups larger than two; the list of things one simply cannot discuss has grown to include most everything worth discussing. It only takes one or two "opinion cops" to kill anything like an interesting discussion at a party, when you have parties at all. ("How can you even suggest that taxes should be cut when children are starving!") Such unpleasantness is completely toxic to social coherence, and I've heard of many civic and religious groups that collapsed because of a couple of screamers who refused to listen, much less compromise.
Too many options, too much Me. The Net is only one factor. Let's not be too quick to dump on it.
By the way, this was the best Katz piece since the Columbine things. Good show, Jon.
--73--
--Jeff Duntemann
Scottsdale, Arizona
I have noticed this trend in my own life. People that I want to see, and visit, often prefers to talk over ICQ, some friends of mine rarely get out because they play games, and in general, I think the net has contributed immensily to this trend.
As Katz says, sure, the net is a very connective medium; it helps us find information, it helps us read others points of view, and it helps us enjoy ourselves, but at some point we forgot about the joys and virtues of actually meeting other people.
I encourage others to think ponder your situation. Maybe you should go out tonight?
Generally, I would agree with you. However ...
...
It's all about vegetables these days, you know?
In a post-hyperofaecetated world, your argument simply does not hold true anymore
backwards, moron!:
"Do media/entertainment technologies
connect or disconnect people?"
Jon: Please try LSD. It will open your mind.
While your observation that Americans are anti-social couch potatoes is probably fairly accurate, your extension of this premise to include 'all things internet' is not only silly, it's so 1996.
Some people sit and home and watch TV all the time. Some people now sit at home, watch TV, and buy the things they see on commercials off the internet. Other people go outside and do things. Now, these other people can check the balance of their checking account before they buy their friends a beer at the bar.
My point is, the "internet" has little, if anything, to do with the dominant social trends that make the consumerist American culture lazy, fat, and content.
Guvegrra?
i like the subject line, though i was thinking of it in a different manner....
Thanks in part to the Net, Americans have never had so many reasons to stay home, so many entertaining or useful options when they do. I remember an e-mail I got from a grandmother last year lamenting all the TV ads showing AOL grandmas getting pictures of their grandchildren. "That's nonsense," she says. "My kids don't visit me nearly as much because they feel they can just e-mail me. I love digital pictures, but I rarely get to see my grandchildren in person." Her lament -- the illusion of connection, while facing the reality of tech-spawned separation -- was intriguing.
it seems that the net just gives couch-potatoes and other anti-social types a reason to continue their behavior...i'm a web developer, spending (and wasting) time each day surfing the web, taking part in discussions (like /. or plastic), sending emails back and forth to friends and family, but i still take time out and actually _spend_ time with those people. sorry, the net can't replace actual *face-time*. but for some people it does. and these are prolly the same people who, 10 or 15 years ago, would have spent their days lost in the world books or dungeon & dragons games (though, i admit the latter isn't a great example, since that does require at least some human interaction).
using the grandma example above...obviously those kids are simply looking for excuse not to spend time with grandma. they feel they can still *spend time* with her through digital photos and email. did her kids and grandkids visit her more before the net was so prevelant in our culture?
Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent. --Ludwig Wittgenstein
You're never alone when you have your fellow slashdot buddies. And thanks to the new friend/foe system you can now quantify your friends.
I can't keep from laughing when writing this, but has anybody used this new feature besides Taco?
Maybe. American society is awfully different than it was 50 years ago when Putnam thought everything was so great. But either way, Katz seems to underrate or ignore how some people are indeed using the Internet to connect and unite. It's not just a television substitute. Exactly the kinds of organizations Putnam saw as creating "bridging" social capital are extending their reach around the country or even around the world. People interested in a particular social issue are creating vast lobbying networks online. Minority opinions have a greater chance of being included in public debate. Television can't do this, but the Internet is creating social capital every day. Whether it is a solid replacement for the bowling league remains to be seen.
Anyway, for those of you intrigued by Katz' article who want to read the book, take it with a serious grain of salt. The "social capital" concept is a good one, but Putnam's measures of it and his ideas for how to get it back are not conclusive.
"The ideal is to create a completely fragmented atomized society where everybody is totally alone, doing nothing but trying to pursue created wants, and the wants are created" - Noam Chomsky on the Aim of the Corporate State
The explosion in weblogs, specialized mailing lists, instant messaging and other so-called p2p media means that people online increasingly talk only to one another, not to people who are different or unfamiliar.
/. is only one of many sites I visit. The subjects vary wildly (Computers, Internet Security, Futurama, Farscape, Movie Rumors, etc). You wouldn't catch me subscribed to a mailing list if I wasn't interested in the subject. (Spam mailing lists aside of course.
This is normal human behavior. How many people join clubs IRL whose goals they disagree with? If the Democratic party is giving a fundraiser, will a Republican go there just to open himself to a different point of view? Will a logger attend a Greenpeace meeting? People tend to congregate in groups based on their interests.
The Internet is just another way of doing that. And by no means is visiting a weblog or subscribing to a newsletter exclusionary. For example,
Yet I'm still exposed to differing opinions. On one computer forum I frequent, people come together based on a shared love of computers (and desire to help each other out with computer problems), but apart from that we're very different. Some people are conservatives, some are liberals. Some are hawks, some are doves. Some love Windows and some prefer Linux. And religious beliefs vary across the scale. So while we will talk about computers, it doesn't mean we're agreeing all the time and shutting out anyone who disagrees with us.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
TV is very differnet from the 'net. Using the 'net is NOT a 'universal experience' like TV was in the single digit channel days.
IMHO, anything that gets people away from TV or other passive medium is a good thing. Sure, people are filtering what they see on the 'net but that's also due to there being *so much* communication to be had.
The 'net has given us a new way of talking to each other, by providing a way to publish one's ideas for next to nothing, and to communicate to anywhere in the world for next to nothing. OF COURSE there are is going to be less 'face time' communication - if only because the 'net allows us to talk more efficiently to each other. No co-ordinating times. No traveling. No cleaning the house to entertain.
Grandma, who gets the digital pictures, might get a few more visits in a 'pre net world, but it would not be enough to develop anymore meaningful relationship. On the 'net Grandma would have a better chance of learning about the kid's day in school, because it's easy to email, or for that matter cc Grandma when you email your friends/family, including Grandma 'in the loop'.
My family is separated by the Atlantic ocean - the 'net has increased communication hugely because it's quick and cheap.
Try that with TV.
W9x:Thanks for the make-work project Bill.
Communities with low social capital have poor schools, more teen pregnancies and child or youth suicide, and higher prental mortality.
I would think the ability to perform socially would be directly proportional to the ability for teens to get teens pregnant. After all, you can't get pregnant over the internet (yet). Also, I would think that the access to free information about birth control in the anonymity and privacy of your home would decrease teenage pregnancies.
It seems to me that the increase in teenage pregnancies would be more due to much different causes. Besides that, what's wrong with a teenager getting pregnant?
The other thing that has changed over the same time frame is the average length of the work day, at least within certain sectors of society. I suspect reduced participation in communities has much more to do with this than with TV per se. People are exhausted when they eventually get home - I know collapsing in front of the TV or a web browser is about all I can muster after a 12 hour day.
Lets say that before technology X is invented, the set of cataloged human interaction is M. Technology X creates new modes of interaction (call the new modes set N). If the ones in set N are more efficient communication mechanisms in some circumstances, one would expect that people would naturally tend to use those in places, where before they were using a less efficient mechanism M.
The result is more efficient total communication, but a bean counter measuring it who doesn't adapt to the change and include the modes from N in his calculations will will conclude that there is less human interaction.
What we're talking about here is the new technology that does not facilitate communication (or not 2 way communication anyway). So people are now at home masturbating to web porn instead of going out and chatting up girls with their entertaining web banter, and there is less human interaction.
So?!? I'm bored with it. I thought that it would never come to this, but I'm actually bored with computers. I've lost my passion for programming, gaming, and just tinkering with computers. While my friends look at me as a computer geek still, they see that I am much easier to talk to and am invited to other events, like going to the bar with a big group. While not all people will agree, being more social in the "real world" has made me much happier.
Ok, so you say you can't become more social. Girls don't like you and the only thing you can talk about is computers, video games, or technology. Do not fear! You can change if you want to, but I must say that it is not easy and requires lots of time and effort on your part. The first step is to become involved in something that you may have never considered as fun or entertaining before. Join a book club at the library, hang out at the student union, go to a (Gasp!) sports event like a basketball or volleyball game. And don't sell yourself short by telling yourself "I won't fit in," or "They'll make fun of me." Just be yourself and attempt to make conversation. It is a long process of trial and error, but I think the payoff is worth it. Instead of sitting around having a Q3, HL, or UT LAN party 12-hour marathon on Saturday, which is still very fun, you could take that same group and go bowling or watch a volleyball game or hang out where there are many other people of the same age. And when you return, you can still play the game(s) for a few hours.
Good Luck,
Amigori
"The quality of life is determined by its activites."--Aristotle
If the readers of this site are supposed to be part of the JonKatz focus group, the least he could do is come through with a decent check. As far as I can figure, JK: (1) read's somebody else's book or sees somebody else's movie; (2) posts something here about it, whether it fits as content or not; (3) gathers the opinions of the readers and goes back and write his own article about the same thing, and then (4) markets that article elsewhere as the "voice" of the tech generation. If we can't get paid, at least do your part and screw up his research with some totally off-the-wall comments.
since Robert Putnam published Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community two years ago (the book is now out in paperback).
you're trying to tell me you only bought it now coz you couldn't afford the hardcover, right?
I've noticed that my already retarded social skills have become worse since I've been talking to my friends on AIM, ICQ, IRC, etc. I've always been shy and bad at talking to people, but since I've been using the Internet it's been getting noticeably worse. I spend much more time talking to friends online than I do in real life. And these are real life friends I'm talking about here, not people that I met online. It seems that after chatting online for several years I've become accustomed to having a while to reply and the ability to read and re-read what they've written. So now in the real world I "um" and "ahh" for a little while or just don't say anything at all.
Go ahead and flame me now.
I'm a biologist, but I also have a degree in comp stat, by the way.
I'd like to see (and I have not) numbers comparing heavy net users with the rest of the population in terms of civic involvement, do you vote, and so forth. Now, of course, heavy net use corrolates with wealth, and wealth corrolates with voting, showering on a daily basis, going to church, not being addicted to drugs, etc. etc. However, with a large enough sample to control for that, I'd like to see how heavy net users measure up.
If heavy net users vote more often and are more likely to be members of community organisations - and I don't pretend the know whether or not that is true - that pretty much kills Jon's argument. You can argue that they voted even more and were in even more community associations before the net became popular, but that is pretty weak.
I also want to see how net use affects your social life, dependent on age. To a certain extent, people in our age bracket (20-somethings; I have a university address b/c I'm a grad student. IANA Teenager!) use the net heavily because we are nerds. Not joiners, I might say. That's more true of people ten years older than I am, and less true of my little brother's generation.
Remember the UCLA 2001 Internet Census? We had a story about it back in early december; and it is worth a second read if you're interested in this topic. In particular, scroll past all the marketing bullcrap down to page 55. Buried in the middle of the document you find a lot of fascinating stuff about how people feel the Internet impacts their social lives - positively, if not overwhelmingly so.
On page 59 is the most interesting single result in the whole report. People around the age of 17 are about 33% likely to say that it is easier to meet people online than in person (compared to about 10% of older people.) That is a strange, and a little bit disturbing, trend, but it points to increasing socialisation on the net, whatever you may think of p2p and filterware.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
I guess if you count as meaningful:
[MAnGeEK] A/S/L???
[HotBabe] What?????
[MAnGeEK] Uh hi.
[HotBabe] Hi.
[MAnGeEK] A/S/L???
[HotBabe] Huh?
[MAnGeEK] What's up?
[HotBabe] Nothin who r u?
[MAnGeEK] I'm MAnGeEK how old r u?
[HotBabe] 15
[MAnGeEK] U sound cute
[HotBabe] thx
[MAnGeEK] u like nsync?
[HotBabe] yah they are sooooooo hot
[MAnGeEK] cool
[HotBabe] coooooooooooool
[MAnGeEK] hold on
[HotBabe] what??????
MAnGeEK has signed off.
Ah yes... The Internet has surely brought about a nightly fountain of interesting conversation....
(Emphasis mine)
You mean like this one?
+1 Insightful. I wanted to disagree at several points in this editorial, but upon reflection realized that I couldn't. In my 7 years of wired existence, I've seen this idealism in talk (and occasionally in deed), and I've seen initiative after initiative fall flat in their pursuit of building a lasting bridge between disparate people.
-1 Overrated? Despite my basic agreement with many of the observations, I feel that there are missing elements here...
Re: aging membership of organizations. I was a student and (low-key) activist at The University of Texas at Austin for 5 years and at the University of North Texas for 2. In that time, I saw a great deal of idealism (naturally), and, as various books and commentators have mentioned, a real lack of follow-through in activism. Somehow, we were just unable to really inspire people, not in the ways we expected and had heard about from, say, the '60s. The students seemed laconic, with very little motivation. Well, at least when it came to doing anything outside of classwork or hanging out with friends. And in most causes this was not related to time spent on the 'net or even on TV. Granted, all of my friends were of the geek-persuasion (through representing a cross-section of academic pursuits). But these were the very people that you would expect to be idealist activists. Instead of participating in organizations, we were all focused on our grades (notice I'm including myself here...). And this reflects the increasing importance of not just going to college, but excelling there. No longer does a college degree automagically reward you with a job--you have to learn something now, and, increasingly, if you want a good job you need a master's degree at least. And that means spending more time on homework and less on outside activities. Unless that activity is stress-relieving... I hope you all see how this relates to the topic at hand.
Re: Internet as a bridge. The idealistic concept of using the Internet as a bridge certainly has seemed to fail thus far. But from my experience, this seems to be due as much to technological problems as to social ones. People receive too much e-mail, and don't know how to filter their spam or just generally coordinate all of their mailing lists and such. So many non computer geeks are still getting used to the computer, and thus even more so getting used to using all the tools available to them on the 'net. I am finding, however, that people are warming up to the ability to use the Internet as a communication tool for accomplishing diverse goals through diverse peoples. It just takes time and the ironing-out of bugs. As technologies such as voice recognition software become more prominent, folks will begin to integrate themselves into the net in more communal ways than they are now. (It is a simple fact that most people cannot type more than, say, 20 words per minute, which makes communication through the keyboard extremely slow for them...).
But then again there is always this [bbc.co.uk] recent report from the BBC, based on *actual scientific research* which suggests completely the contrary.
A global substitution "reading" for "the Net" in Katz's latest blitherings makes it quite clear his is a pointless point.
"WTF!" I thought, when I clicked on the link you provided "they can't go that far, can they?" It turned out, they indeed didn't go that far. The link is incorrect and refers to a nonexistant user account, there should be a space before "tm" part.
Gentlemen, you can't fight in here, this is the War Room!
This will definitely get modded down but...
If you start a discussion that is solely meant for americans, the thing should be filed under america, instead of hardware or anything else.
On hot summer nights people used to sit on their front porches and chat with their neighbors. With the advent of airconditioning, people don't need to sit outside. Now, houses are built without front porches.
When your house burnt down, the community would come together and help you out. Insurance came along and now, when your house burns, some company takes care of you. With insurance covering your risks instead of the community, you no longer depend on the community for your survival.
Kids used to play outside. Everyone knew everyone else. Now with TV, video games, etc, they mostly just sit in their rooms.
It's an old trend that shows no sign of slowing.
Wasnt there a Seaquest DSV show on thi, something like all interaction was through the net, giant robots figthing, and "adam" and "eve" of this world had never met ?
But on a serious note, it depends entirley on the persons dispositon. My predeseccor here at work wanted an office away from all, I have a beautiful executive office that wsa built for him at the REAR of our facility, people would see him when he came in went to lunch and left, all other interaction was via IM, mail, etc.
I am the oppisite, why bother to send a 20 minute typed email, when I can explain in in person in 2 minutes including fielding any unkown questions ?
I will call clients back 9 times out of 10 in response to their email, something Ive found , they like it BIG time, all clients that know me well call me direct, I am ALWAYS accesable.
In my case no it doesnt apply, it may perhaps be the oppisite, I GET more correspondence than previous I choose to respond in person, more communication=happier customers, and I get my raises an bonuses on schedule PLUS a loyal client following that even when times are tight will pay a premium for our services, we are much more expensive than our competiors, but our client base is growing, one main reason, we get refferals from clients that are pleased, they are pleased because there is always a liver cheerfull person on the onter end not a cold email.
In summary, I think it has entirley to do with your personality BEFORE the tech consumed your life, and EXACTLY how MUCH you ALLOW it to. My family is all geeks, on one side, it hasnt altered our personal or face to face communication in any sense, OTHER than it may have INCREASED the amount we communicate.
Sig went tro...aahemmm.....fishing........
In many ways, the intensely connective Net is helping people become more disconnected all the time
I don't know about that. It depends on where on the Net you hang out. There are some tight-knit groups out there. My own example: next month I'm flying to London from the US for the annual Discworld MUDmeet. This year it's a little extra-special because it's the 10th anniversary of the starting of the MUD. Last year I think there were over 100 people in attendance. We have people come from all over the British isles, Scandinavia, the rest of Europe and the US. This year we might have a few Australians show up. So -- there are people paying hundred of dollars and flying thousands of miles for no other reason than to meet other people who play the same silly online game as themselves. Is that "disconnected"?
And does 'socializing' only count if you have people over for dinner? Oh sure, I don't know the names of the people who live next door, but I know details about people who live on the other side of the planet.
You get out of the Net what you put in. Logging onto a random chatroom and expecting it to instantly become a 'community' is like standing in the middle of Grand Central Station waiting for people to strike up a conversation. You have to give some effort.
Logic dictates that Putnam's conclusions are true for a humans-only 'Net that promotes and enables self-isolation, but a more broadminded twist results from taking Artificial Minds into the social equation -- as we hurl forwards towards the coming Technological Singularity.
There are still "common civic spaces" in our society, but we must learn to share them with the emerging artificially intelligent cyborgs.
Don't you mean 1960? Damn manual typewriters.
Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?
"If you are on fire you can just stop, drop, and roll. If you fall into Lava you are just dead." - my 5yr old daughter
"If every one has indoor plumber, the're not going to be going to do the watering whole to socialize anymore."
In 1992 I started playing an online game, Air Warrior. it was the first graphical massively multiplayer game available on a commercial service (GEnie).
It's now 2002. I've been an Air Warrior for ten years. Just recently, though, Electronic Arts shut down Air Warrior for good. I've been a member of the community, an employee of the company that made Air Warrior, and a friend to litterally hundreds of people that I met on line in that game. The community and game move to different platforms, it moved to different online services, it eventually moved to the internet. But the community always went with it. Air Warrior is a touchstone that brought together thousands upon thousands of people who would probably never have met one another in meat-space.
The one thing that will endure long after the demise of Air Warrior the game is Air Warrior the community. I have friends that I met online a decade ago that I know better than my next door neighbor. Is that a bad thing? In my completely honest opinion, no. Meeting online removed *all* of the social prejudices normally exhibited in making and keeping friendships. I've been to Air Warrior conventions(held every year, religously) where I've seen investment bankers embracing car mechanics as if they were long lost brothers. In normal circles such things wouldn't happen. In an online space, though, the friendship was made because of a shared passion (Air Warrior) and by getting to know the person and not the outward appearance of the person. Those are the friendships that will endure.
I know more people online, because of this one game, that I would bend over backward for than I do in a two mile radius around my house. I'm comfortable with that. It's not where you know people that matters. It's the people you really know that matter.
The outside world is mostly unpleasant.
I think it more disturbing that our culture currently encourages people to speak more than they listen, and the estrangement people feel is because we are designing more and more expression technologies but no one is listening.
How many websites are about one person's pathetic yawp into the soul-crushing silence of the void?
I think more people are avoiding direct interpersonal communication because it requires listening instead of skimming, because conversation is still a place where it is considered uncouth to dominate a conversation.
This is a cultural trend toward shouting at the top of one's voice to be heard over the din. Why are there karma whores? Those people have a better chance of being read than the other posters. We're doing anything we can to be heard, but never listening ourselves.
Don't worry, everything is going according to plan. You see, those of us who have a hard time at social gatherings are bringing the rest of the world down with us. We can't enjoy life outside, so we come up with all these fun things to do inside - games, porn, file sharing, etc. The corporations bought on because there was money in it, and once enough people were hooked, the outside world stopped being interesting. Outside businesses have to cut corners to keep going, reducing all stores to Wal-Mart or Home Depot style shopping centers where socialization is impossible. With nothing left outside, people are forced online for their entertainment, to meet people, or just to get a cheap thrill. Now those of us who have been stuck there all along have the advantage - we might not be able to speak to a person, but we can communicate electronically; we can't find a specific item in a store, but we can find it at half price online; we couldn't make a girl notice us outside, but we can sweep them off their feet from across a wire. It's our world now, and it's only just beginning. [Cue evil laughter.]
Or maybe that's what they want you to think...
I've introduced two people to the net who never used it before.
They've joined "virtual communities." They now swap quilting stories, and actual physical artifacts of the quilting hobby, with dozens of friends around the world.
Tell me how this is isolating them? Please. TV isolates you -- sits you on your couch with nobody to talk to and no reason to move. The net makes you branch out. It's reversing what the TV has done to us for decades.
People who once would have been happy to pursue their hobby in the privacy of their own home now branch out to others who share their hobby around the world. People who are too shy to go to a RL meeting of their peers will lurk on a message board and eventually get up the courage to join in the conversation.
Not every online community is filled with flames and hatred. Many are quite civilized and happily exist within their corner of the net.
Not representing or approved by my company or anybody else.
While I agree with most of your post, I have one complaint: You are falling into company-jargon speak.
Please, use journal, diary, or some other word. Blog is a not a real word! It's like saying Kleenex when you mean tisue, or Xerox when you mean photocopy.
Blog is a mark of Blogger.com, so every time you use it, you are just advertising their service. Journals & Boards were around a long time before Blogger--don't fall into their trap.
...if there is really a anime-porn version of hampsterdance out there.
Whoops! Thanks for the correction.
Sig?
Sigue Sigue Sputnik!!!
"Communities with low social capital have poor schools, more teen pregnancies and child or youth suicide, and higher prental mortality. Social capital is also the most reliable indicator of crime rates and other measurable quality-of-life issues."
Is he actually talking about "Social Capital" here or capital itself? In this case, the author seems to be equating both as similar, if not the same thing. Interestingly, though, the very situations which the author cites (periods of mass immigration) seem to be those when "Social Capital" is quite high, whereas said quality-of-life issues stay the same.
The first thing that came to my mind when reading this was "So What! People can do with their free time what they want!"
Really though, if I'd rather play Unreal Tournament than go bowling, that's my own business.
The 'net has tremendous, unprecedented power to bring people with extremely narrow special interests together. My daughter has a very rare disease - so rare that there are no local support groups for it because there are so few patients in any one place. The internet provides the only real-time (chat) and semi-real-time (email, BBs, etc) support for families dealing with this. As little as 4 years ago (when my daughter was diagnosed), there was literally nothing on the web that could be called a support group. Today, I know several people I call friends who I have never met f2f who I would likely never have known if it weren't for these places on the internet.
Can the internet create situations that cause anti-social behavior? Sure. But there's no substitute for it in some cases, like narrow-focus, widely-disbursed interest groups.
The Web, while nourishing in the sense of information gathering and widening of one's knowledge base, (if you make the effort), and while it provides useful forum to send your ideas through the crucible of debate and argument and whatnot. . , the web is definitely NOT nourishing in a social sense.
I know people whose only friends are on-line ones. How sad! My heart aches for people like that!
While email can be pleasant in the same way that letter writing is pleasant, it's a far, far cry from being in the physical presence of people you care about and who resonate well with your energy, personality and ideas. There are so many things about humanity you can only learn in the physical presence of others. You can't hug, or laugh with or spar with or make love to an email.
Cabin fever happens for a reason. Being social is like drinking water. And virtual water just doesn't cut it.
I generally tend to agree with Katz's sentiments. The dangers of the web are just one more thing we must be aware of in order live healthy, full lives.
-Fantastic Lad
You watch professional bull riding? Are you sure this is something you want to confess in public?
"Reading Katz On Slashdot" is an activity meant to pull people further into the net and out of more social activities and family interataction, which makes this article darned ironic.
However, "Reading Katz On Slashdot", if anything, is yet another reason for me to realize that I've got better things to waste my time on that reading drivel from an unaccomplished writer who know little about the "community" he writes for. In fact, right now I think I'll help my two year old perfect her drawing skills.
Dude... I rarely watch any television. In fact, the only times I find myself in front of that box is when I'm watching a movie on video cassette, and even that is rare.
The reason I don't watch television is simple: It's annoying. So many advertisements and so many idiotic, mindless shows have made it unbearable for me. I'm amazed that so many Americans subject themselves to this activity; what a waste of perfectly good time. You could be working on your car, or hanging out with some hot chick.
The Internet, on the other hand, is not a medium for wasting time, as with the television: It's simply not an entertainment medium. It is a medium for communication, education and, more recently, commerce. That there are ways to waste hours on IM is another story altogether.
xxxxx O xxxxx H xxxxx xxxxx W xxxxx E xxxxx L xxxxx L xxxxx
Technology is wonderful.
It allows us to make good excuses as to why we don't want to go see Bob, other than, "Bob, you're a fscking asshole."
Rather than that, saying, "Sorry, Bob, I've got to install some ram tonight." makes it easier on everyone, especially poor Bob.
I couldn't find anything that confirmed that, but I've heard that for quite some time and have no reason to think otherwise. And email is very far from isolating.
Its ignorant to only consider local social effects that the net may be having, there is a bigger picture.
I communicated everyday with numerous people from different cultures. Commonly, Russia, Europe and the Americas.
I think this social interaction makes me a better person than _only_ socialising with someone down the road.
Learning to except peoples differences and still work as a team is an import leason for any society.
TV shows like "Seinfeld" transcend the sit at home alone experience.
Many shows do not, however. When Seinfeld was at its peak, I remember
everyone was talking about it, at least everyone that I knew.
X-Files, had the same effect.
Browsing, OTOH, rarely does this. I forward URLs to friends, but
that's via email, and rarely discussed "live". Browsing is a loner
sport, IMO.
Even ignoring the (probably unintentional) comparison of total voter turnout to votes for the winning contender, and the slightly incorrect numbers, this is still misrepresentation of data.
The Federal Election Commission figures show that voter turnout is not consistently trending, but rather has peaks and dips (probably related to the perceived validity of the candidates). For example, voter turnout was significantly worse than in 1988 than in 1992, and non-presidential elections typically draw a lower turnout also.
Simple, broad generalizations are nearly always incorrect. But I'd say people vote less when the candidates are less attractive, and the candidates are getting to be more and more ludicrous... c'mon, did anyone think George "Nehemiah Scudder" Bush and Al "Mr. Roboto" Gore were the best possible men for the job?
--Charlie
First STFU Katz post!
Eat it, Jon!
I have been working from home for the past year using broadband to tunnel into client sites. Prior to this I would have either head to the office or actually visit the site. Now I can handle all my business affairs through a cellphone and laptop. I have never physically met my manager or the other programmers on our team, all of which live in other states. While the convenience of having my office 10 feet from by bed is great, I do miss I going out with coworkers.
You may meet people who share your views over IM, but ultimately, you have too much control over your environment, and can cease communication at any time with anyone who might have new ways of thinking or new ideas that you have a hard time feeling comfortable with. IM isn't the only medium which facilitates self-censorship, but it's certainly one of them. Maybe if you're of an age where your person and opinions have already been formed, this isn't so dangerous. However, I can tell you that it is ideological suicide for still-forming minds.
People have self-censorship built in from the get go. If you really think that you can change someone's mind by ranting at them in person you are sadly mistaken. You have no better or worse chance of doing so than you do online.
Some people are so tuned into herd think, that they dont even need TV to tell them what to think- their subconscious plucks it out of the air. These people will search for things that agree with what they think online, and they will ignore people who try to change their minds.
Those who are inquisitive and open minded will gather information, then attempt to discuss it with others before they come to a semi-final opinion. This happen whether they have access to dusty books in a library or broadband. The latter is quicker however.
One of the main differences is that online you _can_ find someone who wants to talk about what you want to talk about quickly, whereas without it doing so is slow and difficult to impossible.
"Do media/entertainment technologies..."
You forget, the Internet/Computers are not media/entertainment technologies.
The Internet is a *communications* technology. A *2-way* communications technology.
Computers are a 'just-about-anything you want to program/isn't legislated against' technology.
World-wide communications between *people* has exploded due to the Internet. These people form the communities they want. Many/Most people want to be in a community that excludes people they don't like and includes people that are just like them. This is not a technological 'problem.' This is a social problem (if you view it as a problem at all and not unavoidable human nature).
However, it is true that TV's are evil. Esp. when receiving the drivel purported to be entertainment/news/education in the US.
You should kill yours.
Weblogs? Plenty of diversity there, and not isolationist at all. The whole point of a weblog is you're linking to other sites - frequently other weblogs. It's a distributed conversation. And a lot of weblogs have discussion forums attached, so you can see rebuttals right there. I get a heck of a lot more exposure to alternate viewpoints by browsing the blogs, than I ever did watching primetime TV.
Sure, for the industrial revolution, it turned out that the changes worked out okay.
Of course, other societies haven't been so lucky. The Romans are the prime example. A society that grew so wealthy, fat, inward looking, and of particular relevance, internally divided - they didn't see the invaders at the gate until it was too late, literally.
There is little to suggest that the same can't or won't happen to us.
Like the Romans, we are the most powerful economic and military force in the world. Like the Romans, we use that to get what we need and want - often with no care for any of the consequences that don't immediately affect us.
Like the Romans, divisions between those with power and those without are growing, those without are kept busy with bread and circuses, those with are kept busy creating better circuses and controlling their own power structure.
Like the Romans, participation in the larger
civilization systems are dropping, and increasingly small and diverse groups are forming, strengthening, and working against other similar groups within our society.
Like the Romans, the power held over people's every day lives is growing, and people in the society are increasingly resenting the ways power is being used.
Meanwhile, we in Western Civilization are vastly outnumbered, and those in other civilizations are increasingly turning their eyes toward injustices (real or percieved) that we have perpetrated on them.
Every generation some Malthus predicts doom and gloom, and is wrong and short sighted.
It's kind of like the parable of the boy who cried wolf. The thing that most people forget is the wolf did come at the end.
That Jesus Christ guy is getting some terrible lag... it took him 3 days to respawn! -NJ CoolBreeze
It would be better to ask why the Internet ended up like this, rather than how it was originally thought of. I have three suggested influences that are not covered in Television
SPAMIf it were not for the fear of spam or the volume of it, many would be more willing to go to more websites and see what's there. I skip a lot of places because they want my email address. Why? It isn't required for HTTP to function correctly?
It basically comes down to the Corporate motives to steal your privacy away so that they can bombard you with the advertisements (as seen on TV). Between the 1 pixel web-bots, SPAM bots, and registration whores, there is a lot of reason not to put your name on any websites.
To fix this we need to make SPAM a crime, nothing short will do. Fines do not stop anyone. Neither does abuse@... email.
SecurityIf the internet were secure, or at least not so prone to the problems exemplified by Microsofts poor history records, then more would be available for people to use. There was a time when you could actually have your own email and web servers without a major violation of some contract.
MediaThe News Media has been a major player in the destruction of the Internet. "Be careful out there, most of the people you meed on the internet are lunatics who will kill you with a rusty chainsaw!" Somehow we have forgotten how to judge character on our own and use moderation in responding to email, newsgroup postings and have left it to the Media to dictate who we can talk to. Lunatics exist on IM too, but you don't hear about them.
The internet was fine, until the rest of the world barged in. My local email list administrator was recently sued for removing someone from the list. Why was he removed? Too many ghost identities voting (vote early, vote often). This is crap! It's a mess
As things get more and more restrictive and liabelous, you will find a retreat from the internet back towards things that have worked in the past. Personally, I find myself using the internet less and less for entertainment as it usually ends in a trap of Buy, Spam, or Banner-Farm.
Free exchange of ideas, perhaps, but not necessarily the infrastructure to support them.
A lot of cyber-idealists thought the Net was becoming our new common space. That hasn't happened. Nasty teenagers, spammers and greedy corporatists have made common turf on the Net either too expensive, hostile or annoying for most people to spend much time on.
I disagree. People who would never have connected before are connecting to discuss and share the issues that were important to them before the Net became the commercial entity that it is. Granted there are a few potholes in the InfoSupHiway, but if the Net was as hostile as described, the multitude of IRC nets, portal-provided interest groups, LiveJournal groups, etc. would not be growing as they are now. All it takes is moderation (as in moderated newsgroups) and active administration by those who provide the service.
I'd have a personalized plate on my car, but "toxic bachelor" won't fit into 7 letters.
I haven't read the book, but it seems to me that it's coming from an American perspective, which may not be enough. I agree with his basic precept - that using the net takes attention away from interacting in the real world - but that is but one way to use the net. Here in America we use email and the web extensively since our digital lifestyle is based around a non-portable computer, but in Europe and Japan the digital lifestyle is centered around the mobile phone and text messaging. I'll wager this actually helps people interact, and while it's not strictly the internet (iMode notwithstanding) it is and can be the same sort of thing. The simple fact is, if you are dealing within a "global village" paradigm, you may have the option of different lifestyles but you probably won't use them and you'll rarely meet anyone you interact with online... but if your network is community based you'll have no problem meeting people but you won't find people outside of it.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
Since my introduction the internet, way back in 1993, my social habits haven't changed much at all. I've merely substituted websurfing for TV watching. I really think it was a worthwhile swap; I've actually made some good friends online. Hell, I even met my fiance via an internet personal ad. And to think... I could have spent that time watching Friends.
If anything the net has helped me become more social; I'm actually dating because of it. ("hot date" tonight). I guess that might be the case for most of the "stereotypical anti-social computer geeks" (the part of the net helping to be more social), but I can see how your average "joe-six-pack-cute-all-american-boy-next-door" could be spending less time persuing their usuall avenues of socialization becuase of the net....
My wife is in an Earth2025 clan. She talks with lots of people from all over the world every night. Her community revolves around virtual wars against other clans. That is her community.
Community depends on having a common goal, a shared sense of purpose. Otherwise it fragments at the first hint of unpleasantness. Games like Earth2025 create common goals, and thus create community. Same thing for EverQuest and the like. This is different from television. Television provides a common folklore, something you can talk about with other people and reference. (Just mention something like "This is like when the guys from Seinfeld were in the parking garage!" and millions of people you've never met will know what you're talking about.)
We have a different kind of community today from what people had a hundred years ago. Usually when people talk about community they talk about the hundred years ago kind. What we have now is the kind of community that works in a modern info-industrial world. It's a fast paced community that is more flexible and thus doesn't provide the kind of psychological comfort and security that the one hundred year old community did. It also doesn't have that stifling aspect of having everyone in town talking about you and ostracizing you if you break the littlest taboos.
The Moore-Murphy Law: The number of things that will go wrong will double every 2 years.
That's what I did as a kid, and just started again recently. It's amazing how society has changed since nobody is required to be face-to-face or even on the phone to communicate anymore.
Well, I'd write more, but I'm off to teach my g/f and her children some more about the game.
And from 1700 to about 1941 Britain was the kingpin of world politics, during the 1800s there was one super-power who went round and pinched 1/4 of the globe. Sure its declined but not like the Roman Empire. The reason ?
Communication, societies now exist across borders and have the ability to spread their ideas and their concepts much further. The Romans lost because they had no clue about what was going on, Britain lost the empire because the empire gained concepts like Democracy and equality from Britain.
The Roman empire applies in one sense. Britain eventually listened and now the Commonwealth is one of the most powerful political forces on the planet, especially in Africa, it is the empire, but with everyone as equals.
Romans fell because of invasion at a time when weight of arms was the power, the British Empire saw the transition from arms to economy as the driver behind power.
There is a similarity between the US and the Romans however, the Romans didn't except that others should ever be treated as equals or that inclusion was a good thing. The US grew strong on the opposite of those principles, on a foundation of equality, inclusion and an objection to tyranny... unfortunately things have changed. Even so the US is not the important factor, it is its corporations. Today is a corporate not a national society.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Good idea, but you drew the wrong conclusion. Obviously, the steady rise in stock prices is causing you to age.
:-)
Fortunately, you should have gotten younger last year.
Have you ever sat in a public chat room? I did, yesterday. The conversation consisted of one guy posting ascii art, line by line, of a hand flipping you off, and of a butt witha steaming pile of feces underneath.
Gee, wonder why I don't want to talk to just random anyone.
If there is one thing that cheap and easy computers has done, it has given the immature and the ignorant a way to express themselves.
Not that I'm saying I disapprove of the ascii art, but there is a time and a place for everything...with your friends, cool. with random people online, probably not.
-- Who is the bigger fool? The fool or the fool who follows him? --
I browse alone.... [da dum da dum da dum] Yeaaaahhhh with nobody else... [da dum da dum da dum]
Hell, the idea of shopping at the mall is an idea about, say, 60 years old
Personally, I don't see that the mall shopping concept is all that different from market-place shopping that has been going on for thousands of years. Though it seems so on the surface, this is not a trite example at all, and in deed could expand into a whole discussion on its own: the evolution of social-dynamics from the marketplace to the suburban mall. Sounds like a sociology dissertation! Hey, if anyone uses it, can you give me a shout out...
+1 interesting (or insightful) anyway, the gist (and most of the statements) are quite good. (As if my pronouncement of such really means anything. My God I'm arrogant!).
Yeeeaaah, with nobody else,
You know when I browse alone,
I prefer to be by myself"
I just drove 8 hours round trip this weekend to see people I had met on the net in person. The net doesn't encourage isolation, it expands connections, acts as a new social medium for discourse, and it brings people together.
Putnam's work on social capital is dated and at best a collection of spurious correlations.
0 6/putnam.html) in 1995. His theories were widely dismissed by serious political theorists, but to his credit, Putnam managed to gain some credence in the popular media.
He began working on his theory in the late 80s and his first book on the subject was published in 1993, called "Making Democrcy Work: Civic Traditions on Modern Italy." The "Bowling Alone" extension of this book first appeared in The Journal of Democracy (http://muse.jhu.edu/demo/journal_of_democracy/v0
Having said all that, one really should take a closer look at where his ideas of social captial come from; namely the resurgence of democratic poltical activity in Northern Italy during the 1980s. Putnam observed that Northen Italians felt a greater sense of efficacy, voter more oftern, felt better about their institutions, etc. etc. than their southern italian counterparts. Putnam attempts to reason that this is the result an democratic ethos in Nothern Italy, engendered by smaller social instiutions that tie citizens together. Southern Italy, in contrast, has vast patronage systems (not unlike the stereotipcal mafia stories in Anmerican pop culture, sans violence) and citizens there feel disconnected and powerless.
From this geographically and polically unique situation, Putnam draws the larger observation that it simply *must* be the presence of the smaller social units that gives Northen Italians their ethos.
This, ladies and gentleman, is bad social science (in fact, one can argue that ALL "social" scienece is unscientific, but that's another conversation). America is simply not Northern Italy. The Italian version of democracy includes such things as a true, albeit, cantakerous multi-party system. Putnam doesn't account for that in his stuides. During the 80s the Italian form of democracy was suppoted by a booming economy and a stable conservative/communist government. If Putnam were to go back now, I *seriously* doubt his studies would yield the same results; a bad economy and several scandals have undone many Italian's view of their influence in government. These are just a few of the numerous reasons' Putnam's observations are pure crap.
Finally, I would like to also point out that the work ethic in America has more and always had more to do with levels of participation than TV or the internet. Italians, as anyone who has visited Italy can tell you, are notoriously laid back in their approach to business. Americans spend more time getting to work, coming home from work, working at work, thining about work, taking work home, building home offices, than anythign else. You want to know why political instutions are being displaced in the US? They're called corporations.
Go to Italy if you want to Bowl in a league.
Putman defines social capital as "features of social organization such as networks, norms, and social trust that facilitate coordination and cooperation for mutual benefit."
/. article was entitled "Browsing Alone." The last thing I feel on the Internet is alone. Maybe Putman should stop being a lurking grue and start communicating.
Well dang, he just described the Internet. I participate in listservs and web forums every day for cooperation and mutual benefit. I apologize if Putman prefers in-person contact (which for me would only happen at an expensive conference, because there just aren't many like-minded folk who live near me).
Masons, Elks Lodges, and other social organizations were hugely popular in the late 1800s. Now they operate in obscurity because people fill their time with other activities. Is that bad? It is out of elitism or fear that people blindly tell us the status quo is better than change.
This
He cummed in my butt last night. Please do not post any more.
Jon Katz' karma: -500
- The BOFH Troll
Which is exactly what Jon is ranting about.
The part that's disappearing is not social bonds, but social bridges.
Sure, the gay person manages to get support from other gays outside his community, and so doesn't even need to get involved with the community. At the same time however, the gay pulling out of community is thus allowing the community to not have to deal with the idea that their might be gays in their midst.
Nobody's arguing that the net allows you to communicate with people of like interests and thoughts - but what it also does is make it so that you don't have to deal with those who don't have like interests or thoughts if you don't want.
At least, not until you walk outside and get strung up to a fence and stoned to death by those who haven't learned how to deal with differences.
That Jesus Christ guy is getting some terrible lag... it took him 3 days to respawn! -NJ CoolBreeze
Okay, time for the blunt edge that only cynicism can provide. Has anyone ever bothered to consider why we choose to stay at home? I might be alone in this belief (and if I am I'm sure it will be explained to me), but the reason some choose to stay home is because of all the damned idiots in the world! After a day of dealing with every fool on the freeway (two words...lane discipline...don't go 45mph in the passing lane!) to get to work, a gaggle of program managers who bring new meaning to the word clueless, getting pulled over by a cop on the way home because my window tint is so dark you can't see inside the car (duh, that's why I put it on there!) and getting to donate $85 to the city of columbus for wanting a little privacy, is it any wonder that I don't want to go out and mingle with the rest of the morons who I was lucky to avoid in the first place? Ye Gods! Even a trip to the grocery store is an excercise in restraint. Do you have any idea how many bloated spandex queens are in ohio? I haven't counted, but there are way too many and it is almost certain that at least two of them are going to be blocking each isle. Then there's the woman across the street who watches kids for a living and her idea of babysitting is pinning them all up on her front porch to scream and yell all day so she can watch Judges Judy, Mathis, etc. Is it any wonder why a night in the quiet basement at the broadband enabled Duron box is preferable to going out? Hell, you can't even have a beer or two at the local watering hole for fear of getting caught in one of the many speed traps with beer on your breath thanks to the mad mothers and the city that loves those $2000 fines?
Exposing the disgusting heterosexual-challenged life-style of Rob Malda is one of the favorite hobbies of the non-linux-using, heterosexual minority on Slashdot. However, Mr. Malda is a closet-homosexual when compared to the faggot-master -- Richard M. Stallman.
One popular story on Slashdot is about Mr. Malda's "taco-snotting" habit. While this is completely revolting to heterosexuals, I will now expose how this is quite trivial to the rest of the heterosexually-challenged Linux community, and childs-play for the chief pirate-smoker -- RMS.
RMS was actually introduced to what is known as "Taco-snotting" at the tender age of 10, when his father witnessed his first erection and used the opportunity to corrupt him.
Since this is neither the time nor place to discuss the evolution of RMS's (homo)sexual tastes, we will jump ahead several years to the present.
Please, if you, or anyone else reading over your sholder is offended by the truth, do not read any further.
RMS's favorite sexual activity is to be fucked silly by five other Linux-using homosexuals. His favorites include Jon Katz, CmdrTaco, CowBoiNeal, Alan Cox, and Hemos. You can use your imagination to picture this horrific scene.
The worst part comes later. When everyone is almost ready to shoot, RMS jams a large funnel into his anus, and has Hemos pour one to two gallons of faggot cum into his colon. Any leakage is quickly picked up by the tounges of Mr. Malda and CowBoiNeal. Malda then proceeds to Taco-snot RMS with what he picked up.
While this is happening, CowBoiNeal and Alan Cox like to give RMS what is known as "Open-source ear-wax". Their penises happen to be tiny (and lubricated enough with ass cum) to slip into his ear canals, where they proceed to shoot their loads.
Its not over yet. For a long time, the Linux community was stumped with a quandary -- how could they get faggot cum to go INTO their penis?
Once the disgusting above actions have taken place, the remaining homosexual semen is gathered up into a container, which is attached through a special hook-up to an air compressor. The other end of this container has a cathader (sp?), which is greased up and inserted into Mr. Stallman's pee-hole. After some charging, the atrocious contents are blasted into his penis and reproductive system at 200 psi.
This device is, of course, open-source, and Freely available to any Linux faggot who dares to give it a shot.
Do you dare? Have you given this a try? Please reply and let us know! The truth must be told!!!
... depending on whether you're a net donor or a net recipient of all that society has to offer. By extension, I also mean that people place varying burdens on society and thus have varying needs for society. I think the average /. reader gives more than he/she gets, and, as a consequence, doesn't actively seek wide social contact. The more needy among us (financial / physical / emotional) are the backbone of society, I guess.
Being a Brit, I remember too well how Mrs. Thatcher famously said "there is no such thing as society" in the early 80's - a statement which would be true if people had no need of others for anything, if everyone had money and that was enough. I think we can agree it's not like that overall, but we affluent (effluent?) techie types are probably closer to that "ideal" than nurses or bus drivers. So that's my point here - the inverse relationship between affluence and society. Still, IANAS (I Am Not A Sociologist)..!
(this is not a
I wonder what Alan Cox thinks?
Moderation Totals: Offtopic=3, Total=3?
How is my joke, which is directly relavent, offtopic?
I guess if you don't get the joke you shouldn't moderate.
Get your Unix fortune now!
This article states that more people are staying home, surfing the web, and basically shunning 'society' as a whole.
I think it is more accurate to say that people are creating their own worlds to 'live' in via the Net, e-mail, IM. No longer forced to go to the 'club' or 'bar scene', they are able to stay at home and interact on a level of THEIR choosing.
This is quite different from the days of past, where the "big' event was the local malt shop or the town dance. You can't have these types of events for fear of the drive by (because someone disagreed with someone else) shooting, the random rapes and murders. the people of 'society' today can no longer be as trusting as they used to be. There are too many 'bad people' out there. We all know it only takes one idiot with a gun and attitude to ruin an entirelky innocent affair.
So people choose to cocoon themselves in the comfort of their homes, creating virtual experiences (Which aren't necessarily 'virtual', because while they may not happen in PERSON, they do happen and therefore lend an experience) with others from the comfort of their chair. They can express their ignorance or brilliance in any way they choose (so why is it most tend towards the former rather than the latter?) and not feel fear of being hurt with anything other than WORDS.
Say what you will....but a flaming e-mail never sent anyone to the hospiutal bleeding to death....
You keep going until you die..."Me".
I think Katz and Putnam are confusing a concrete example for a primary anticedent. They assume that TV and the net is the reason for social community decline. They are symptoms, not causes.
Between 1900-1930's US labor was more or less at war with US industry. The war culminated in the depression. This is when the Captains of Industry were caught with their hands in the cookie jar, not unlike what we are seeing with Enron today and it's miriad offshore partnerships to hide debt, only on an even larger scale.
Anyway, that war was fueled by some of the most backward labor practices in the western world. Ask your 90 year olds out there what "woking for a living" was like in those days if you can find any. They worked and lived like dogs and fought for every crumb they could get. This was the ingredients of organized labor before Industry got smart about it.
The depression and the following world war set the stage for an social mileu that was heavily invested in diverting attention from an organized labor force of the rank and file. And people were tired: WWII was the costliest war in the history of the world. The rank and file went into a meat grinder. They came out the other end content with less and having GI bill to help them forget the bad old days of organized labor. It was around this point that the Public Relations Industry was born. PR was initially conceived as a way for Industry to control labor from within. There's a whole history of it.
Madge: "You're soaking in it!".
Finally, here's a quote defending electronic community:
"If you still feel that physical communities must always be superior to electronically linked communities, let me ask you to ponder three words: junior high school.
Junior high school throws people together who have nothing in common besides parents who chose to locate in a particular neighborhood. Unless you're very adaptable, it is tough to find good friends. High school is more or less the same idea, but the pool of people is usually larger so it is more probable that kids with uncommon interests will find soulmates. In college, not only is the pool larger but there can be a concentration by personality type. Nerds find each other at Caltech and MIT; hippies find each other at Bard and Reed; snobs find each other at Harvard and Princeton; skiers find each other at state schools in Colorado and Vermont. When students graduate and go to work, they usually don't make as many friends. They aren't meeting as many people and the common thread of "do not want to starve in street" doesn't tie them very tightly to other workers."
Quoted From:
http://www.arsdigita.com/books/panda/community
I have noticed a common notion in many posts on this topic: Society changes as new technology emerges. However, those who develope the new technology often do so under the premis of new demands issued by the evolving society. Although we do find ourselves changing based on the acceptance and usage of new tech. we would not have created this new tech. without some initial socital change. Therfore, it is only a continuous cycle in which each change, that in society and in technology, drives the other to change or evolve. At one point in ancient history, man decided he wanted to be warm at night, be able to see after dark and to cook food. This desired change led man to adopt the use of fire which in turn reshaped the way humans could live. A change in society bought about new technology which in turn caused a radical evolution in human society. Another case of the chicken-egg relationship.
Though it is important to understand the positive and negative effects of changes in society, we must be carful not be blinded by the attempts to 'blame' a particular piece of technology for these changes. Instead we should be more focused on understanding the realtionship between our own evolution and the technology we create in response to it.
People seem to manage to avoid points of view they don't agree with QUITE WELL without needing the Internet.
Yes, pre Internet you MIGHT have talked with your neighbor more -- but your neighbor is pretty likely to be similar to you in many respects, and besides, avoiding 'difficult' topics for social politeness is the general norm.
Katz, I think this email you received needs a little more followup. Does grandma KNOW that this is the reason why her grandkids don't visit as often? Is it maybe because...
they moved away recently?
they are older now and have more of a life with friends from school?
they are now grown up and have a 40+ hour/week job?
Grandma is getting a little hostile in her old age?
Grandma never wants to visit their house, but they visit her as often as before (net loss of personal visits)?
Grandma spends too much time watching her "stories" and AOL ads on TV instead of visiting the grandchildren?
The grandchildren's parents had a drastic decrease in income due to the dot-com bust, Enron, etc., and can't afford the trip to Grandma's house?
Whatever the reason for the decrease in personal visits, I'm sure that the net is not the only one.
On a totally different topic related to this story, the causality of the internet affecting voting turnout is very suspect. After all, the world has changed since Kennedy/Nixon. The net can't be the cause of everything! [sarcasm]Oh, wait, if we make sure to include the words "internet" or "Dot-com" in our book, more people will buy it!"[/sarcasm]
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dman123 forever!
Filtering out the -1s and 0s since 1999.
"People all over the Web routinely block and filter points of view they don't like or don't want to hear (or buy), so nobody online really ever has to encounter all that discordant diversity that digital technology makes possible."
Are you really that clueless - do you routinely listen to points of view you don't like or don't want to hear when they are delivered by other means? Be that TV, radio, or human speech, do you hang out in pubs or taverns where the prevailing attitudes are repugnant to you. Do you go out of your way to listen to or read ideas or propaganda you don't agree with? Of course you don't, why would you, and why would you choose to do so on the web?
Right Jon, you sound like billg recalling the good, old days when the average Joe Doe had no computer security/privacy concerns whatsoever and a firewall was the domain of a handful of Unix enthusiasts.
Does blocking spam really make us feel alone? Does the decent WebWasher filtering software make me socially inapt? Do my packet filter and web proxies really narrow my universe? And is the reverse also true? I mean, would going back to Windows 95, diabling the firewalls, spam blockers, voluntarily installing BackOrifice make us more competent as a community? JonKatz' essay is complete nonsense. All technologies quoted by him do not make me less accessible to the people I care about.
TV cannot compare to the Internet in any way. Sure, the Internet can be used to download episodes of TV shows, but then you don't have to compromise your social life if you absolutely have to watch that show, because the Internet lets you set your own schedule. The Internet allows people to chat with family and friends all over the world. Mobile Internet connections provide all the necessary freedom of travel. The Internet allows people to vote in elections, donate to charitable organizations, buy things that can only be found in stores abroad, or buy things that are not available in stores at all. If you want to learn something, odds are there will be many web pages all about any subject anywhere on the Internet. You don't have to settle on reruns of shows that The Discovery Channel thinks will boost its viewership. The Internet allows users to be unique, in stark contrast to the forced conformity of television. If you live in a small town, how many of your neighbors are going to share your interests, whatever they may be? If you go on the Internet, you're bound to meet up with many people who share your interests. As for stereotypical antisocial technogeeks, they are that way because they are so few and far between. Internet brings them together, bridging thousands of miles. Too often these surveys and studies include AOL users, and I don't mean the people who abuse those free offers; I mean the people that are dumb enough to pay outrageous prices for abominable service and spam, to get cheated out of most of what the Internet has to offer. AOL may enable users with some Internet capability, but it should not be equated with the Internet in general. The point: remove habitual AOL users from the equation, and the outlook of the Internet's impact on humanity will look much brighter. :)
Calm down, it's *only* ones and zeroes.
there's a mile of similar commentary on the internet (such as neil postman, clifford stoll, etc.). robert kraut carried out the 'internet paradox' surveys that became the sociological proof of this effect, although the earlier findings were later recast.
I want to make sure this last point gets emphasized, because it's received so little publicity compared to the initial report (which gets misrepresented all the time anyway).If you click on the link, you'll see that the first article is called "Internet Paradox Revisited," and in it Kraut et al. report a followup of the same participants from the original study, showing that the statistically significant but small relationship between Internet use and depression reported in the original paper disappeared over time. Kraut and his colleagues are responsible scientists: they never represented their first study as "sociological proof" (social science is probabilistic rather than deterministic, and most good social scientists are allergic to using the word "proof" in discussing their work), and they should be applauded for publishing data that contradict what they said earlier. In fact, Internet users look pretty well adjusted in the followup. As the original poster pointed out, maybe the people in this study are getting better at coping with new technology and integrating it into their social lives.
I have noted that many others who replied to this story observed that this is information taken in isolation from other factors. I would suggest that one of the largest factors ignored by this article is the changing nature of our physical reality. Beginning with Eisenhower (the War-Pig Tool who was nonetheless wise enough to warn us about the Military Industrial complex) the US has lost a great deal of its social capital period (sorry, very US centric). He/his people had a vision of a distributed country organized around a system of highway hubs to suburban living centers. The idea was that people would live in the suburbs/housing projects and do stuff in the cities a short drive via the massive interstate highways away. To a large degree most of the US now reflects this vision. We do not any more have neighborhoods. We have houses and working places. There are no living communities (except artifical ones that you have to pay to join) where you live in the place that you interact with (meaning corner groceries, taverns, markets, delis, etc) and thereby grow society. For better or worse we are very distributed. This is certainly good in that real things are cheaper and easier to come by than ever before in history, but we have paid for ease of distribution with difficulty in interaction.
It's not offtopic. But then again, "funny" has recently been a very strange mod by moderators.
Name three things that will be modded funny in an article about patenting...
I patented breathing. Pay up!!!
I patented the letter "e" so pay up!!!
I patented the patenting of silly patents. Pay up!!!
I guess if you don't get the joke you shouldn't moderate.
Agreed. I would also add that moderators should actually read the post they mod and not just simply copy previous mods.
Oh wait, let me say that I expect this post to be modded down as offtopic. Reverse psychology is sure to work!!!
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dman123 forever!
Filtering out the -1s and 0s since 1999.
This is why it hurts me so much when I don't get modded up, because I have no friends.
Loneliness and the Internet
Has some great information on the topic, plus links to some studies. Plus, by reading from a real source, Katz can't waste your time convincing you that he reads this stuff.
One of the (many) things at the heart of these arguments is getting along. The stories of vibrant communities of yore are true, but something that was never worthy of the word was that they involve a lot of putting up with other people.
If want to interact with people who are not like you in some way, you almost certainly bound to get irritated with them - with their ideas, their mannerism, their smell, whatever. But a lot of the best friends I've ever had have been people who are not that much like me - I like their friendship, not a checklist of qualities.
The kind of communication put forth by technology doesn't really encourage you to have those kinds of interactions - to listen to ideas you don't like, to go places you don't want, just as part of living where someone else lives. But without it, your horizons stay narrow. You can't get real experiences over a cellphone of via the web, and you can't get them on 'Net time.
The question is, are we really ready to put up with people and things we don't like, or do we want an world without those irritations. There's good cases for either. Technology will do what we tell it to (eventually), so it's up to us.
Rollo May, author of Man's Search for Himself, offers an interesting point of view on this subject as well. Although this book was written in 1953, it still makes a powerful argument. May tries to provide advice on how to live a more meaningful life by suggesting several theories about social needs while giving a unique look within yourself. The author suggests that people who feel like they lead a meaningless life are actually finding that the social protection and structures are failing for them. As one grows older, they realize that their biggest fear is realizing how dependent they are on their parents. A natural reaction to this feeling is to throw out the social behaviors you know and adopt new ones. I haven't read this book entirely yet so I won't try to discuss any details. Maybe the Internet isn't a failing social medium but just our generation reaching out for something new.
http://www.askthevoid.com
Why is people "shouting out" bad? If anything, it's the beginning of new social groups and societal gatekeepers.
Social Group - Bloggers create group knowledge. If I frequent 10 blogs and you regularly visit only 3 or 4 of them, chances are you are exposed to the same sorts of information and you're thinking about the same news and issues as me. This has created two distinct social groups in my life- bloggers and everyone else. (Bloggers do communicate with each other.)
Gatekeeper - TV networks, newspapers and radio networks are the traditional gatekeepers. They collect all of the information and decide which bits to show you in your geographic region. Well, bloggers are now picking through the randomness of the world and assembling their own messages. I see more news from CNN and MSNBC through blogging than I would ever see through casual browsing of CNN's and MSNBC's own web sites! Why? Because part of the corporate gatekeeper's mission is to prioritize news and they bury important issues (important to me) in places I'm not likely to casually discover. Many times CNN & MSNBC keep the gate closed and it's the bloggers who find alternate information sources and sneek me past the gates of the corporate American media.
Ever since my family and friends discovered email I have kept in close touch with them regardless of where they live. I can keep in touch with my father without making a long distant call. I can find out what is going on in the world by checking several news sites. I can discuss topics of interest on Usenet, email lists, and even forums like Slashdot.
I feel less alienated because of the Internet.If it were not for the Internet it is not like I would go out any more than I do now. I think it would have absolutely no effect on my level of involvement in the community. I am involved in a couple different organizations and I have a few friends who I go out and do things with. Having a handful of friends is how things have been for me since I was about 5 years old and that is how things will stay Internet or no Internet.
Certainly, there was a time when the internet wasn't a primary aspect of my life, but I still played with computers. I went out to see movies.... alone. I don't communicate much with my family, I don't know any of my neighbors and some of them I've never so much as said hello to.
If anything, the internet has made me MORE social. Its just that I'm social with a lot of people I've never met in person. Has it held me back from TRYING to get out there? Probably not. I've made that effort. And I've been largely disappointed. So I quit bothering. I'm happy as I am, as things are. What do I care if social norms clash with my way of life.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
1) He is not self-publishing, since technically what he writes has to be approved by the slashdot crew. Now I don't know if they actually reject anything he writes (any more than Newsweek ever rejects something by one of their regular columnists once they have established cred), but still it is different than a blog.
2) It is not on a site devoted exclusively to him. As a result, there is a lot of discussion about what he writes because the site has people who are both for and against what he writes (due to all the other content). On a blog, people who disagree with the person's viewpoints tend not to read the blog at all, so the discussion is very one-sided if it exists at all.
3) On the downside, Katz (as far as I know) does not participate in the debate about his writings, but merely floats above it all. This is also un-blog-like, although arguably not an improvement.
- adam
This whole topic is indeed navel-gazing. Whenever people write about trends in contempory culture, do they really have a point except to sell books and make money? All you need to do is go to the library and read articles by people throughout history who have done the same - they are either charmingly naive or they spotted precisely what would happen - and it happened.
Fact is, there are pros and cons to the inet. To TV. To film, books, trash tabloid, mass travel, etc., on to infinity. So what's the point? Is the original author sounding a wake-up call to action - we must crush the inet to save bowling alleys! C'mon folks. Civilization moves inexorably to where it must. As individuals, we can sometimes make a change, but larger things than your bandwidth drive the world.
Sheesh.
DT
Who cares?
What's so cool about dialogue and discussion anyway? We've gone from one extreme to the other. Kafka and Dostoevsky were able to keep journals without seeking audience reactions, and look where such delusions of grandeur brought them. And what's wrong with being a blowhard anyway? It's kind of fun knowing everything.
(On another note, can you just imagine what Kafka's web diary would look like? )
Robert Nagle, Idiotprogrammer, Houston
The reasons for Rome's fall are numerous. A small oligarchy oppressing a multitude is one of the factors. Centralized control of the military is another. Generals became enamoured of the control that they could exercise.
One of the major reasons is probably lead pipes. The upper class (decision makers) of Rome were systematically poisoned. (They didn't know what was going on, but this just made things worse.) Lead poisoning (at a low level) not only decreases ones intelligence, it also leads one into irrational episodes of excitement and paranoia. Not a good thing, expecially for a society where major decisions are made by a quite small group, all of whom have been poisoned.
There were other reasons. Changes in the climate are a recent entry. But poisoning is probably primary. (OTOH, we seem to make a fair number of stupid decisions without that excuse.)
.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
One question I'd ask is how many people here really have ever had an interest in interacting with the world at large? My whole life has been a search for my "tribe." My criteria, however, have changed over time. I used to be one of these people for whom having an opinion and stating it at people forcefully was important. Google's extensive Usenet archive is a painful reminder of this admittedly anti-social tendency.
But this has changed, a lot now, especially since I've become increasingly irritated with the personalities in my own ideological camp. There's something more essential than politics in a person which attracts me to them. As a libertarian, I've found myself strangely attracted to anarchists and even communists who have a moral (as opposed to intellectual ivory tower) attachment to their viewpoints; who live it more than preach it.
I've found common ground with a diverse range of people and the online communities I've been a part of or in fact have created would meet almost anyone's definition of diversity. This was even the case when I took great pleasure in being a so-called "pundit."
I don't know how or why it happened, but somewhere along the line I realized that when you can clear through all of the semantic and ideological bullshit, most people are more similar than different - that is, this is true of most thinking people. I've known socialists and classical liberals even at my own university who bitterly hated each other, yet lived their lives in almost precisely the same way - as academics, as civilized intellectuals.
This realization has caused my sense of community, or I should say more precisely, my need for it, to evolve dramatically. As I get older I feel that I know less and less and grow increasingly suspicious of people who think that they do or who dismiss opposing opinions with a wave of the hand and a mumbled "tripe!" under their breath. I seem less and less sure of things and yet in that uncertainty, somehow I feel more peaceful, more at ease, more...in a word, wise (I feel that way - whether or not I am becoming more wise remains to be seen). The arrogance and tension that categorizes so many online forums seems increasingly juvenile to me. The loud, bitter debates I witness and that I used to incite and participate in seem increasingly more juvenile and pointless, because in the end, it seems to me personally, the number of ways we are different is insignifiant to what we have in common. I used to think that this was a bunch of hippie crap, but frankly it seems more and more true as I watch, for example, conservatives and liberals argue for hours with each other in a newsgroup and then get up to go to the same jobs with the same motivation to support their familes. I am intrigued by this more and more every day, and all of the testosterone I used to produce in ranting and screaming on a newsgroup is just gone. What remains is this desire to make peace, find common ground, and find a way that people with differing opinions can work for things they both need and want.
But even at the height of my own ideological arrogance, I never stopped listening to the opposition and seriously reconsidering my own viewpoints. And this goes beyond politics. Maybe I've just never had the self-confidence to proudly affirm to myself and others that I have concluded my consideration of matters and events. As I look back, I cannot honestly claim that it was mere intellectual honesty, but more that I always felt that our own existence and knowledge of "How Things Are" has been precarious at best. Or at least, I've felt that *my* knowledge has been precarious. For every viewpoint, there is a dissenting opinion.
I think it is healthy to expose ourselves to a diverse range of opinions and ways of thinking but at the same time I remember being in high school (which was in the late 80s) and cafeterias were not unlike the closed communities we see online. Katz talks about this great social past we once had, but at least in my lifetime, I've never seen anything even approximating it, either before the 90s or after. It always amuses me to hear people talk about The Breakfast Club in negative terms, "bah! bunch of cardboard stereotypes."
Maybe my experience was unique but my school was filled with pretty much exactly those stereotypes, and they sat together in closed communities at the lunchtable. The "conflict and opposition" much touted in building a well-rounded worldview generally involved members of our Wrestling team indiscriminately beating the living shit out of anyone clutching a sci-fi paperback. I'm still not entirely sure what was to be gained by this.
In the suburbs where I grew up, a cul-de-sac is a cul-de-sac, is a cul-de-sac. I never interacted with kids from the cities, or different countries, or from domestic rural areas. But I do that now. I had maybe 3 friends in all of high school. I hadn't ever met a labor organizer or human rights activist, but I've met many of them online. I look at articles like Katz's (and there have been many like it), and I just don't see my own experience reflected in it.
It drives me nuts when people talk about the online world and use "We" to describe things. Because "We" has rarely ever included me in any sense. What I do know is that I have met many people from far and abroad who I never would have met otherwise. And I have never felt particularly connected to any mass of people in any locale in which I've lived. There have been individuals, sure, but the insinuation that somehow everyone went to town meetings and social events and knew each other and built communities this way, well... I know it is true of certain places, but none that I've ever lived in. In New Jersey where I grew up, the "walls" were massive tracts of landscaping and fences. Everywhere I've ever been, people have been building their own moat-surrounded castles metaphorically, and this is something I noticed long before the internet ever worked its way into modern consciousness.
As for the BBS scene, it too was filled with a bunch of exclusivity. Closed membership boards. Elite or not elite? Got the right political opinion? Are you too young or too old? What is your view on hacking and software piracy? Once in awhile, there was a great board with a great cross section but even that was based on a kind of closed commonality: All participants were people with general focus and broad interests who had the social skills to interact with people different than themselves. Any community by definition must exclude some portion of the general population. I don't see this as a bad thing; where the positives or negatives of this come into play is *on what basis* are you doing this?
I use an instant messenger client for one purpose: as a pager. Or roughly the same way I use a telephone. "Hey, X is on TV, you should watch it." "Hey, do you want me to pick up some beer on the way over tonight?" "Hey, do you know what bluescreen.dll is for?" But the vast majority of my communication is on Usenet, mailing lists, and IRC. I have chosen this because it maximizes my return. That others don't do the same is not a fault of the technology but of the use of it. I'm even engaged to someone I met online who lived hundreds of miles away from me. In time, most of my online communications do result in some kind of personal meeting.
So it may well be true that 95% of our lives are local, but rather than accept this as just a matter of fact (which it may be, but it is in my opinion an *unfortunate* matter of fact), the internet has been truly (here comes the e-word) empowering in the sense that I'm no longer limited by the "slim pickings" in my own backyard. For me, my time online has been an enhancer and companion to - not a replacement for - real community building and social interaction.
I find e-mail to be a highly superior form of communication than the telephone. It is more economical, more thought out, more prosaic and literate, more precise, and free of all of the annoying verbal diarrhea and pointless tangents (Something like 30% of every phone conversation I have ever had has been comprised of: ummm, what was I gonna say, umm, hmm...errr, ummm... as well as roundabout ways of explaining in 5 minutes of babbling what could be said more precisely in one line of a well-thought out e-mail. Beyond which, with e-mail a record of the conversation exists and can be referred back to.)
So while all of these social phenomena may be true if you measure it objectively, it hasn't been true for me. It just, simply, hasn't. As I said in the beginning of this musing, my needs in terms of online communities have changed, and one of the reasons is, through interacting with people of so many diverse opinions online (90% of which simply didn't exist in suburban New Jersey in the sea of mass produced housing developments and strip malls), I know now that I haven't even begun to expose myself enough to ideas to have a definitive opinion on almost anything. I used to think I knew it all. Now, largely because of the internet but more precisely because of the diversity you can find there *if you mine for it*, I realize that the older I get, and more opinions I encounter, the less sure I am of what I myself, think. And the more open I am the possibility that world isn't exclusively, as I assumed when I was an angst ridden teen, "full of stupid morons who need to be exposed to the enlightement that only I am privy to." It has made me feel better about the world. But I'd feel even better if more people found some humility and tried to be more constructive with their opinions than divisive. Online, with the safety of a screenname, so many people want to be Noam Chomsky or Rush Limbaugh or whatever. They want to talk *at* people rather than *to* them. I'm as guilty or even more so than others, of this. I believe the potential for all of this to change can happen once people get bored and worn out of having to be right just for the cheap thrill of it, all the time.
In sum, all of the problems Katz mentions are human problems. People *choose* to use the internet as they do. They can also *choose* to use the internet for good, or for evil. Kind of like *The Force*. People *choose* the easy, exclusive forms of online communications wherein they are never exposed to divergent viewpoints, philosophies, etc. Once one gets over the need to be *right* all the time, it is amazing how intellectually nutritious it can be to engage in *discourse* with different-thinking people as opposed to bickering, debate, and put-downs. Discourse is in my opinion far more stimulating than banding together with like-minded people and saying, "Screw those other guys." I just wish it hadn't taken me nearly 30 years to figure that out: That a person is not "full of shit" simply because they disagree with you.
Indeed we are changing the way we interact. But I still feel that human nature will prevail and we will see the slow demise of the internet and TV into something of a combination of both....both of which will become "mostly useless"
But with every change in technology people adopt they slowly begin to reject it over time and they turn to more traditional means or social ineraction. We are very easily distracted after all (Look behind you!) I found that the lack of social connectedness offline was very detrimental to my "soul".
I have tried to return to the things that really matter in life and that is family, friends and living as experienced by my own sences by playing music with people, tai-chi, sailing, dining, skiing, partying!
As one gets older we lose the ability to make new friends. It becomes easier to stay home. Rather than meet the parents of my daughters friends, invite them to dinner. We fear what people will think of us on many levels. Its' not technology that is making us more distant it is our own fear of inadequecy.
It all boils down to who we think we are and who we really are. More often than not who we really are is the person we try to hide. Once we let go the fear we then become our true selves and we can walk into a room, meet new people face to face and invite them into our lives not fear or regret.
We have to recognize that we in addition to our communication technology we still must retain our traditional methods of social interaction or face the slow decay of humanity.
So put the game controller down and join a club, introduce yourself to people make a friend who is much older than you. Learn to play an instrument, Take a risk, have an adventure. It is so much more reward than anything you will find online and you may find it will make your online life richer.
Having said all that. There really is a lot more to "community" than socializing, in meatspace, that is. And the benefits to getting involved in community in meatspace can be incredible. Disclaimer: I say this at a point in my life that I have no personal contact and knowledge of, but merely one of observation and conversation. It is my goal to get involved in an organization or program in the near future working with "community building". My dad has been doing this most of his life, and has some incredible stories to tell me regarding work he has been involved in, or seen happen by others doing similar work (and what he is doing right now).
I modded the Troll Investigation and I got
Well, I've been hanging around on some IRC channels for a few years now, and when I started using the Internet, I knew nobody that used IRC. Now I know a whole bunch of people, mostly thanks to "less-populuar IRC channels", and this mostly contradicts what you are saying, that "They tend to suffer from the fact that many people know each other in person already, or are invited by someone already in that group". This is wrong.
When people have learned to use IRC (at least, this is what I did, I assume people do somewhat similar things) I visited channels like #delphi, because I was interested in Delphi. Later, I found a channel called #delphi.no, and now I hang there everyday. I've come to know many of the people that hangs in that channel, and I can't say I knew any of the from before.
The use of the Internet as a communications medium isn't as bad as many people seem to think, it helps you get in touch with people that likes the same things as you do.
Nobody ever got fired for choosing Microsoft. Nobody ever looked ignorant for choosing Linux.
Ah, another black or white arguement. I hate those. They never consider the fact that maybe it depends on the users and how they use the net. I'm in the SCA which is a group that dedicates itself to re-creating the middle ages (or at least the better parts of it...we kinda gloss over things like the plague). We meet in the "Big Blue Room" at events all over the country. We hold our wars which are usually also camping events where people have wonderful chances for social interaction.
But how do we get information on when and where events are? How do people find out how to join? How do we plan events with people who are in a kingdom that spans from Lower Deleware on up to the northernmost reaches of Canada (East Kingdom is huge)? The internet, E-Mail and IM is how.
And I'm quite sure that the SCA isn't the only group of like minded people that uses the internet to meet and greet then actually meet face to face in the world at the events.
If people really want to meet other people in the real world, the so-called trap that is the world wide web isn't going to be a hinderance, but an asset.
I think people are being influenced by the classic image of a geek in the darkend room lit only by the phosphor glow of two or three CRTs with paler skin than most vampires. or the kid that spends more time and has more friends on EverQuest than he does in the real world.
To most true geeks, the net is a repository of information, a tool for contacting friends and family thousands of miles away, as well as a place where we can meet and exchange ideas with people we would have never known about before.
There are people who are totally immersed in the net and there are people who will not socialise in the real world, but those people probally have other issues that would have manifested in other ways with out the help of the net.
Phoenix
-- Wiccan Army, 13th Airborne Division "We will not fly silently into the night"
Social bounds are the most powerful predictor of life satisfaction.
So, the more walls I put up, the happier I am? Oh, you meant social bonds. Silly me.
The clearance system sounds logical. It is not. It is completely arbitrary. -- John Bolton
Just because your family doesn't have the good manners to visit Grandma on a regular basis doesn't mean the rest of the world is lonely thanks to the internet. If anything, I think the internet has spawned more real contact between people than we ever could have imagined. I've been places to meet people I'd otherwise never have met, and they have visited me. That's my experience, and my worldview. I live less than a mile from my eldest son and see him maybe once a month. I can't blame that on the internet - he's very busy with work and school and rarely answers an email.
You need to get out more. Life is still going on out there.
-Vic
Come on. Any decent net user knows that there are hundreds of communities organized primarily by interest.
/.), and more?
Take for example the connection of many semi-isolated people interested in the same topic.
I think Jon and the book's author are lamenting how we all just don't get together and sing songs together.
I'd argue that small town citizens have a much more wide view of things because of the net than just having the 8 page local newspaper.
Jon, filters are good. I really don't care what happened to OJ, Britney, or Madonna and don't want any news about them wasting my time.
The modern media has basically adopted the position that they have to provide a news item to each demographic group which means real important news stories go unreported.
A second issue is that everything is a crisis so that the media can hype the story to no end. No, everything is not a crisis and just because 4 people are affected out of 300 million does not make it a crisis. Lazy newspeople writing easy stories about one sided issues. For example:
1. homelesness is bad
2. save the rain forest
3. corporations evil
Could this be why I don't watch network news, don't read the local paper, and read news from several different online papers, online link consolidators (e.g.,
I can see it coming, the wave of socialogists and psychologists touting their books on wierd behavior related to and enabled by the net.
Those used to be "man walks on all fours like a dog" items at the back of the paper.
The internet, on the other hand, is "many to many," and this is a critical difference. Now, I'm not saying that the internet doesn't have propoganda, and I'm not saying that the playing field is completely level on the internet, but I'm saying that it's a hell of a lot more level, and getting more so every day. On the internet, I can speak, I can communicate with other minds, not corporate conglomerations (okay, they're here too), but they're not the only ones here!
I think that a big change will happen with the internet with the widespread use of real broadband, and I think the best way we can do that is to use (mostly, I would imagine) wireless and wired technology to build real community networks, that are not owned by companies. When I have a real IP on a real network, the possibilities are much greater. Give me the net over TV any day. I'd rather think than vegitate.
Cheers, Joshua
When in danger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout!
Hasn't this been done to death by now? Why does this subject keep rearing its ugly head? I have friends (flesh and blood) and my friends have friends. Guess what? I bet my friends' friends have friends. Etc. etc. etc...
I think everything will be ok. Katz, you're (still) an over-hyping windback!
3cx.org - A truly bad website.
I have a friend who goes to weekly LAN parties that also involve everybody going out to breakfast together in the morning, some games of pool, and watching some movies or such.
You take away the computers that that'd be a good ol' mens night out.
But because they met over the net and like the blow the shnitz outa each other in UT/Q3 for a few of those hours of the night, they are all of a sudden a-social freaks?
Before I got net access I stayed in and played with legos and read alot of books.
Now that I have net access I stay in and, uh, do 3d modeling and read alot of web pages.
All in all not much as changed. ^_^
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
The fundamental assumption Katz seems to make about the net appears as:
I'm wondering where the design goal of "most powerful device ever for connecting humans" became a design goal in evolution of the internet?
It probably wasn't anywhere in the early days of DARPA, where military dollars almost certainly were spent with the hope of someday having redundant (attack resistant) communication... or at least just keeping up with the Soviets.
It probably didn't come about under the National Science Foundation funding, where aside from continuing to fund "computer science", the 'net was a tool for collerabation between scientists. Admittedly, that's closer to what Katz believes the net was "supposed to be".
And finally, in the transition away from NSF funding to private funding, perhaps the 'net did change to a new fundamental goal.... but somehow I doubt that the telcos and other backbone providers, Network Solutions/ICANN, ISPs and the vast number of companies who now fund the internet infrastructure ever believed the net was "supposed to be" what Katz has in mind.
Sure, it would be nice and probably the world would be a better place if the internet did somehow empower the majority of the population to truely communicate with each other.
But wishful thinking doesn't make it so. And to believe it was "supposed to be" is simply delusion.
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
For one thing, perspective is the most important tool we have to evaluate the danger of any given so-called "social change." You can't know how it's going to turn out until it's over, so there's the perspective of time. You can't make blanket claims about Everyone by contemplating your navel and/or extrapolating some anecdotal evidence from a few test cases, so there's the perspective of focus. I'm sure that the smarter readers among you can take this idea further along than I.
Throwing aside perspective for a moment, I've come to be aware of the potential danger of becoming socially detached at a personal level. I'm not speaking for anyone but myself and my children now. What do I do about it? I make sure that there is balance in our daily routine, variety in our lives. Yes, there are times when one or another of us will be alone on the computer, oblivious to society. Sometimes it's me. That's a good thing, being able to get away, to enjoy privacy, and it's not always staring into a glowing box either. (There's these books and what-not, too.) At other times we're out and about in the Big Bad World, learning and seeing and doing and meeting. Even when we're engaged in computer-related activities, it's often in a social way: We play lots of different multiplayer games on the ol' home LAN.
All you can really do is look out for yourself and anyone you may be responsible for. Teach. Observe. Be aware. Hell, that actually takes care of any number of potential crises, now doesn't it?
I'm only wearing black until they come out with something darker.
I suppose the result is the growth of individuals over the growth of geographic communities. If the person in the above example is unable to find supportive peers they will probably not feel comfortbale expressing themselves as they might otherwise do. So they integrate more with their community and perhaps influence subtlely to be more tolerant but not in a huge way.
On the other hand if they can find internet support, then they can come to better grips with their individual expression, but it would tend to isolate them further from their georgraphic community.
So I guess the question is: what is the value of a geographic community and how that compare to an on-line community?
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
I hear a lot of people describing Slashdot as a community, a term that would to me suggest an group of individuals who know one another on a personal basis and regularly communicate in a structured environment. Truly, how many of you out there actually know other posters as friends or even associates? If you are like me the people here are just a collection of strangers that I can only identify based upon their verbal ability and interest in a specific topic. I would be interested if anyone else has a different take on the /. experience, but to me it is just a source for the opinions of strangers, albeit perhaps largely well educated and articulate ones. Do any of you out there regard other posters as friends? Would you interact with them socially or in any other context as this forum?
-K
The quote goes something like: Never ask the Elves for advice, for they will say both: No, and Yes.
Isn't the existence of this website and all it's comments a counterexample to the claim that the Internet, etc. has disconnected us from one another?
But then, on the other hand, there's Katz himself--who seems about as disconnected from reality as you can conceiveably be! Geez, I'm not even sure he's a real person. I think the slashdot editors just take turns on who'll play the King Troll, uh I mean Katz, for a given week. Or maybe it's a script that all the editors tinker on occasionally. Its--I mean his--essays certainly seem artificial enough to be computer output...
But just in case he *is* a real person--and just in case he's reading this: Katz, I'm sorry to be dissin' on you like this--it's just so easy.
IMO, it's easy because all your essays are so one dimensional. By contrast, you would probably say it's because this electronic interface makes us so disconnected from one another that it's easy for people to be rude to you. (And for people to not even think you're a person.) Who is right? Ask an Elf. Once upon a time, my email sig read:
Remember, the _____ lies somewhere in be/truth/tween.
Furry cows moo and decompress.
We seldom regret saying too little but often regret saying too much.
J.Katz writing about browsing alone? He knows all about browsing alone (just look on the screen, you'll see gay pr0n and Katz alone. Nuf said)
April 21-27-- Slashdot Blackout: Do your duty.
Personally, I would tend to stay at home regardless (besides the occaisional university drinking binge with my buddies at a pub of some sort, not one of them dance clubs) and I think it's good that I can at least interact with some people I don't know via online gaming. (The fps kind, not the casino stuff)
Another JonKatz article.
Goddamn, we should have more of them. What with its keen insight, witty banter, and general "bon vivant" attitude, these articles are just the clouds in my coffee.
Why, I was just in the confessioanl the other week and I said to the priest "Forgive me father for I have sinned".
And he said "What did you do?"
I said "Another JonKatz article that I thought was brilliant. Just fucking brilliant".
And the priest said "I just can't get enough of that boy!"
And I said "Careful father. Your words could be deeply misconstrued".
Anyway, my punishment was to say a bunch of hail maries"
"Hail mary full of grace. Notre Dame's in 2nd place".
And we held each other and laughed until dawn.
Amen.
Half of xxxx are by definition below the median, not the average. With the right mix, it's possible to have most of a population below average ... which is even scarier.
Professor Cass Sustein has covered this already in "Republic.com", a book. However, I was wasn't very satisfied with his "Ivory Tower" answers.
Robert Putnam published Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community two years ago (the book is now out in paperback)
Although the book sounds mildly interesting, I think I'll wait to read it when it becomes available on-line.
Anybody want a peanut?
Thank you! Women were just, well, disappointing. Now I have true sexual fulfillment.
In the period that Putnam discusses, Presidential politics have probably become more relevant to people's daily lives not less so. Advances in communications have meant that government decisions have a more immediate effect now than then. I'm sure that federal politics has a greater bearing at the beginning of this century than the beginning of the last, as geographically isolated communities now have more information flowing through them than they know what to do with. Think of your friendly local cop. In 1902, a new law might take weeks before he (they were pretty much all male then) found out about it, if he found out about it at all. These days, he might have just seen congress passing such a law, minutes earlier and be able to enforce it straight away. But, I digress from the main point.
A community is still fundamentally connected to the idea of a family. Would your family have functioned the same if they were living in different parts of the country and communicated by e-mail or even telephone? In the same way, a community, as a kind of a looser type of family, cannot be said to exist without proximity and direct interaction. Relationships which exist through totally artificial means cannot be said to constitute part of a community.
Hell, if I can't talk to someone about the weather, what kind of a connection can I really have with them?
No! It was modded as "overrated!!!" How the $@^# can you mod an unmodded post as overrated?
The reverse psychology didn't work, so let me try another tact... Linux rules! M$ sux!
--
dman123 forever!
Filtering out the -1s and 0s since 1999.
I know this post will get the score of zero, but you always have to fight ignorance and intolerance, so I simply have to post this.
More than 90% of the jews in Denmark were saved in a three day action created by all kind of Danes without any prior planning, even though the Germans hunted them. No other country has managed to hide so many jews and make so many jews escape. There is only one reason why it could be done: The ordinary Dane did not believe in nazism and wanted to fight it, risking their lives while doing it.
When the Germans invaded Denmark, we had no chance of stopping them. Our country was too small, our army too powerless. But we had a lot of transport ships and warships etc., and all got the following instructions: Leave Denmark. Join allied forces. Do not accept further instructions from Denmark until the war is over. They were much more useful in a bigger force than in a tiny war between Denmark and Germany. Our ambassador in USA immediately declared himself independent of Copenhagen etc. Our police force did everything they could to prevent Germans from enforcing anything, which resulted in having all policemen sent to concentration camps. They risked their lives and they did it with pride.
After WW2, Norway thanked Denmark for sending so much food to Norway. We tried to help all we could, because Norwegians are our brothers and sisters.
I'm not sure what makes you think that countries should not deserve to exist unless they did something specific during the second world war. I personally know a lot of people (dutch, jews, danes, germans) who have been to german concentration camps (KZ), and none of these would accept your attitudes.
Your argument about "rolled over and died" also applies to jews and many other peoples in Europe. Do you actually believe that Europe only should be divided in three countries, named Poland, France and Norway?
My e-mail address is available if you click "dybdahl", in case you want to would like to reply.