This is how it goes:
We train our brains to interact like that.
We believe the internet to be unreal space, that the world outside our computers isn't "real". So what we're doing on the computer is not "real", and therefore doesn't "count" the same way as if we did it in the "real world".
All the while, spending more and more time interacting in "unreal world" ways.
Our brains are body parts. They are not computers. Our brains are made of meat. They don't come with warranties.
You can't call up tech support when your brain isn't working the way you expect it to, and demand excellent customer service or get a freebie coupon if the guy on the other end had a bad day and says something you didn't like and you complain to his manager.
We train our brains to screw each other all day long,
to defy reality
to paint the world like a big fake playground imaginary happy land, where we can systematically eliminate people who don't annoy us by blocking them from our friends lists and banning them from our chat rooms and tweaking your settings so their misspelled YouTube comments don't show up on your screen, at all, ever,
but it doesn't count
because the internet is not real, so we aren't really doing it.
We are screwing ourselves.
This is just a taste of how badly we are screwing ourselves.
Does anyone see a way out?
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peaceofpie- one eyed one horned flying purple choir singer
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Computers are an incredibly powerful and flexible tool for communication and mediation. This is one of the reasons things feel "unreal", things are mediated to an unprecedented extent. And this causes lots of people of people to not act like normal people on the internet.
That problem, I think, is simply a matter of time. People who socially interact online come to realize those interactions are "real", and that's becoming more common. The internet and computer media change at a rapid pace, so it's taking people a while to adapt, but I expect people will adapt to new forms of online communication just as fully as they adapted to mail and the telephone.
Now, there's another problem referenced in that post that you link to, which is that marketing screws everything. A bunch of people trying to exploit the system will ruin the system, and it's a prisoner's dilemma. The reason I'm not worried about this is that the internet is still incredibly flexible. Systems have better or worse ways of defending themselves against that problem, and there's plenty of room for new systems. So the idea that "social media" is "dead" strikes me as ludicrous, even though I'll agree that Digg is awful, the quality of the social aspect of Delicious is declining (although it's still a useful search tool), MySpace is a cesspool, Blogspot is spam central, etc., etc.
A lot of people still carry around the idea that this mode of interaction is less genuine. As long as they believe that, they'll treat it that way. It's changing, in bits and pieces, as more people grow up used to the internet.
There are ways in which, regardless of whether internet interaction is "less genuine" than face-to-face interaction, that I find it to be less healthy, and less serving of the needs I have for healthy communication and relationship development. From my perspective, our entire culture is going in a direction that I judge to be serving us poorly, and the increased dependency on internet communication is contributing to this.
I hear you saying that this is an "old" belief system. I'm challenging that, because it's not an "old" belief to me. I have reached a similar conclusion to others who perhaps have held onto beliefs that they are "still carrying around", but I did not get there the same way.
I am personally afraid of a culture in which more people grow up "used" to the internet. I think people need to also be used to the real world. I don't want to live in a world where people aren't used to the real world, and I already feel like I'm in that world, and I feel powerless to stop it.
Hrm. While I could agree that many cultures, including some of the ones we might each count ourselves members of, are going in unhealthy directions, I find it hard to blame internet communication wholesale. Furthermore, there are many people for whom internet communication makes a tremendous positive difference, and as one of those people, I'd be very leery of any serious attempt to get rid of it or discourage it's use.
But then, I've made friends all over the country and the globe; ones who've become friends in meatspace as time passes, and ones who haven't.
(Also, I'm not sure I actually did say this was an "old" belief system; I can't see my original comment from here, but I don't so much view it as archaic or "old-fashioned", as just the sort of edge effect you're going to get between serious transitions in how society operates.)
Your last paragraph...mrf. I guess I just don't see where you're coming from there. To me, a person who's "used" to the internet, it's a medium in which I feel the need to treat people with respect, their feelings as genuine, and their trust as sacrosanct (and vice versa). Deception, failure to comprehend, inattention and emotional distance from people happen all the time offline...there's no danger inherent in online communications that we don't already experience.
Also, um, I didn't suggest people should be used to the internet to the exclusion of everything else...
The same way I account for the popularity of spirituality and literature, respectively.
Agreed with it being somewhat a matter of time and familiarity, though. The internet allows an entirely new approach to mediation, and a very powerful one. It fits our natural tendency towards such :)
That strikes me as somewhat of the natural life-cycle of such systems. Maybe I've just been online too long, but communities form and dissolve. They just seem to do it faster online :) (And some communities do a good job of protecting themselves against gaming, such as Slashdot's comment system. Going strong many years later!)
Television works this way too, although it's a lot more centralized and under somewhat stronger control by a smaller number of entities. It's funny, but watching TV imported from the UK or Canada often struck me as watching something from another time, just a few decades previous...it compared to American media from the same period, in a subtle way. The US media is generally considered the most-developed, and I think one side-effect of that is that it's had longer to become predominantly commercial and progressively less-substantial in many ways. Though this also seems to go hand in hand with tightly-controlled, one-way distribution channels; their only feedback effects are indirect. Potent, but indirect, and driven almost exclusively by market interests.
That actually makes a lot of sense for a post-scarcity economy, though. Is the book itself worth reading, do you know?
I think my main objection to whuffie is that, unlike Slashdot, it lacks the meta-moderation check. Conversely, Slashdot uses a friends-of-friends and foes-of-friends systems rather than the "left and right handed" weighting.
Slashdot also tells you what someone got rated on, solving one of whuffie's flaws. Especially since you can then personally weight based on those factors.
Overall, Slashdot seems like the superior implementation :)
As spam and spammy marketing flood social media more and more, people are getting hungrier and hungrier for real quality and real people. The people who are honest and have something of value to say and to offer will shine through like diamonds in the rough. They may not shine through on Digg or Twitter, but they'll shine through where it counts -- in the opinions of your friends and your friends of friends. Now that social media is broken, people will fall back to using it as it was originally intended: to have conversations with their friends. And if your friends find a diamond in the rough, they'll tell you about it.
So that's my prediction. Word of mouth is the way out.
This post has inspired me to blog about this topic. Would you prefer I link to this post, don't link, or whatever? (:
Since posting this, I've talked to a couple people offline about it and it's blowing my mind how many people read this post to mean what they want it to mean, and not what I actually said or meant.
(One of my comments in your book is about how the internet is the prime breeding ground for the Usual Error. It just FESTERS here. It's like...people see text, it looks like the text they type when they type text, so it must mean the same thing as what it would have meant if they typed it!)
Ah. So it just makes more obvious what people do all the time anyway.
Since posting this, I've talked to a couple people offline about it and it's blowing my mind how many people read this post to mean what they want it to mean, and not what I actually said or meant.
Have you never encountered this in speech? Because if not, I want to meet these magical super-people you know, who never put their own spin on things and magically divine your meaning exactly as you intended it.
Speaking for myself, your words were phrased in such a way that several interpretations were valid. Going with the one that seemed likeliest to me at the time may not have been correct, but it's a perfectly normal human response and the sort of thing that happens online or off...