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
