“The online experience” |
| Posted: 22 Dec 2010 08:47 PM PST The spat between Max the Outsider and Mary Garden on the previous thread has got me thinking about the online experience. Or to be more accurate it has fed into the thinking I've already been doing, prompted by various articles I've read, mainly about the Facebook film The Social Network. And though the jury is still out, I'm leaning towards a conviction on the question of whether the online experience is degrading our lives. Now, I don't for a second undervalue the importance of the internet in improving our lives, and especially the lives of so many who are worse off than us, in terms of access to information, to education, to communication, to commercial opportunities and so on. But I'm thinking here about people like us. People who Tweet and Facebook and blog and so on. I regret the Max-Mary thing, at the simplest level because I don't like to see people's feelings hurt, and Mary's clearly were. But at a broader level I regret it because I feel it ultimately was a dispiriting experience rather than an enriching one, and I feel responsible for being the one who started it off. As an aside, that raises another issue: quality control online. Because I'm busy in my print media job, I don't spend as much time as I should vetting and editing people's posts on my blog. I don't give it the same attention I do to work I'm preparing for print, nowhere near it. While that's partly due to my print background, I suspect it's broadly the case for many people who run blogs and so on. There's a laissez faire approach. Speaking for myself, that's going to change in the New Year. I'm going to retain my existing policy of putting up all comments (aside from the Viagra sales ones, polite though they are) but I am going to vet the words more closely. As Max demonstrated, the power of words to wound isn't diminished by them being online. Here's the thing about the online experience, in my opinion: it's not a conversation. Even when various people were putting in their two cents' worth on Max and Mary and responding to each other, they weren't really conversing. It's more a series of individual statements. I find the same with Twitter. Every night I check in to see what people are saying. The first thing that strikes me is that so many smart people feel the need to Tweet the most banal details of their lives. Literally what they had for breakfast. But, hey, live and let live. More importantly, and I'm sure people will disagreee with me, Twitter doesn't read like a conversations to me, for all its reTweets and @ acknowledgements. It reads like a series of individual attention-seeking statements. I get the impression that no-one is really listening. Sure, they scan something one of their friends has Tweeted and slap a reTweet on it, but that's not a conversation, in my opinion. It reminds me of what happens when your kid first goes to pre-school, You're told about - and you soon witness - parallel play. That is, the kids are all in the same room, all playing next to each other, but they do not play together. They do not interact. They soon do, of course, but there is that period where they look like a group of friends but are not one. The always stimulating Mark Mordue has some interesting things to say about all of this in a piece The Australian published this week. Talking about The Social Network, he writes: It also mirrors the feeding frenzy that social networking and online commentary invite: overlapping, not-quite-in-step posts that come thick and fast, not flowing so much as jagging along in a sequence of jokes, snipes, trivialities and asides.I I think that is a very acute observation. Mordue ends his piece with a defence of the novel, focusing on Jonathan Franzen 's Freedom. I'll quote a chunk of it because, again, I think he's spot on: We increasingly think we know everyone and everything via the advantages of social networking and digital communications, but the truth is our insights have only become thinner, feebler and more instantaneous. Franzen's novel gives us back a little complexity and elusiveness, some time to slow down and think again as we read. His characters grow and change, twist and turn. He shows us that, often, we are not even who we think we are. It's a treatment of character that is not only more authentic, but more compassionate. It's this empathy in Freedom that suggests the novel may still be the most important machine we have for looking both inwards and outwards in the so-called digital age. Its silence and solitude are the real commodities we crave in a faster, brighter, brasher world. You can read the full piece here. And a little while back I mentioned Zadie Smith's NYRB piece on The Social Network, and Chris Oliver linked to it at the time. It's a good piece to read in concert with Mark Mordue's, and in the context of this post, so I'm going to link to it here. Having said this, I will continue to embrace the online experience, though mainly for professional reasons. Any journalist who doesn't probably has a very limited (working) life expectancy. Indeed, the minute this post goes live, I will Tweet it. Ok, over to you. I won't wish everyone a merry Christmas just yet, as I'll be working tomorrow and have a Friday Word Watch planned. So, until then. This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php |
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