New forms of personal connection

There have never been more ways to communicate with one another than there are right now. Once limited to face to face conversation, over the last several millennia we have steadily developed new technologies for interaction.

The digital age is distinguished by rapid transformation in the kind of technological mediation through which we encounter one another.

Face to face conversation, land line telephone calls and postal mail have been joined by email, mobile phone calls, text messaging, instant messaging, chat, web boars, social networks, photo sharing, video sharing, multi player gaming and more.

In this time of rapid innovation and diffusion, it is natural to be concerned about their effects on our relationships.

When first faced with a new barrage in interpersonal communication media, people tend to react in one of the two ways:

1.       People express concern that out communication become increasingly shallow. For many, the increased amount of mediated interaction seems to threaten the sanctity of out personal relationship.

2.       For others, new media offer the promise of more opportunity for connection with more people, a route to new opportunities and to stronger relationships and more diverse connections.

Both of these show that digital media are changing the nature of our social connection.

·         New media, new boundaries

The place of digital media in our lives, and their consequences for our personhood relationship with others:

Technologies affect how we see the word, our communities, our relationship and our selves when they are new. Even electricity, telegraph or telephone creates a point in history. This leads to anxiety.

The fundamental purpose of communication technologies from their ancient inception has been to allow people to exchange messages without being physically co-present.

Until the invention of the telegraph in the 1800s, this ability to transcend space brought with in inevitable time delay. Messages could take years to reach their audience. The telegraph changed that by allowing real-time communication across long distance for the first time. It collapsed time and space.

Digital media raised different questions:

•  How can we present yet be absent? 
• What is self if it is not in a body? 
•  How can we have so much control yet lose so much freedom? 
•  What does personal communication means when it is transmitted through a mass medium?
•  What is a mass medium if it is used by personal communication? 
•  What do private and public mean anymore? 
•  What does it mean to be real?

 

We are described as struggling with the “challenge of absent present”, worrying that too often we inhabit a “floating word” in which we engage primarily with non-present partners despite the presence of flash-and-blood people in our physical location. We may be present in one space, yet mentally and emotionally engaged elsewhere. Let me give you one example: the dinner partner who is immersed in his mobile phone conversation. Since he is physically present, yet simultaneously absent, the very nature of self becomes problematic. Where is”he”?  This is the collapse of borders between human and machine.

Some people feel that their “real self” is best expressed online.

How do we know where, exactly, true selves reside? What if the selves enacted through digital media don’t line up with those we present face-to-face? Or if they contradict one another? If someone is nurturing face to face, aggressive in one online forum and needy in another online forum, which one is real? Is there such a thing as a true self anymore? Was there ever?

New media offer us “volume control” to regulate our social environment and manage our encounters. We can create new opportunities to converse. We can avoid interactions, we can manipulate out interactions, doing things like forwarding nasty emails or putting people on speakerphone. We can use non-verbally limited media such as text messages or emails to shelter us from anxiety-including encounters such as flirting or ending relationships, but just we can use these media to manage others more strategically, others can also more easily manage us. Our autonomy is increasingly constrained by the expectation that we can be reached for communication anytime, anywhere. We are “perpetual contact” now.

One of the most exiting elements of new media is that they allow us to communicate personally within large groups.

This blurs the boundary between mass and interpersonal communication in ways that disrupt both. When people gather in an online space to talk about a T.V show, they are a mass communication audience, but the communication they have with on another is both interpersonal, directed to individuals within the group, and mass, available for anyone to read it. If the conversation and materials these fans produce for one another are incorporated in to the T.V show, the boundaries between production and reception of mass media are blurred as well. 

.... to be continued