Friendship and self-centeredness in the age of the participatory Internet
One thing Andrew Keen said near the end of that video gave me pause. He said something similar in his book, and it is something I have been thinking about, idly, for years. It is that the Internet is making us more selfish, or more self-centered. I have thought for a long time that we don’t talk together face-to-face so much anymore — or, I am honest enough to admit that I don’t. I don’t see my friends as much. Partly I’m sure that’s because I’ve gotten busier, and now we have a baby. But I think we are becoming more self-centered as a society. While I am an individualist in many ways, I also believe we are social and political animals, and as another gentleman said in the video, we are not fully human if we are cut off from others.
And I have to say that my talking to you on this blog does not count as full-blooded social relations! Should I be telling this to a friend? Well, I can speak to more people this way, and have a bigger impact. But in doing so am I ignoring a subtle negative impact that the medium has on me?
Our lives would be very sad and weak indeed if all of our social relations were mediated by the Internet. I think perhaps we are already seeing what this might look like among young people, whose social lives are mediated by FaceBook (or the social networking website du jour) and texting, who complain that there isn’t dating any longer, who more often “hook up” rather than develop serious relationships.
In our radical new digital world, who or what will teach us again how to spend and enjoy time together face to face –especially those of us who do not go to church, or are not in school, and otherwise have few opportunities for truly meaningful social interaction?
I have absolutely loved the PBS Jane Austen series. (Anybody agree? I’m so disappointed that it’s over. That Pride and Prejudice miniseries, from the 1990s, is absolutely magnificent.) While I have little romantic nostalgia for early 19th century manners and society — well, it would be nice if some of that politeness were back in style – I was struck by how people would pass the time, hours of it, in conversation with friends and family. That is charming. I suspect that serious face-to-face conversation makes us better and more human. It seems to me that we are now much more perfunctory in our communication.
Of course, there is an old complaint that television is ruining the arts of conversation and friendship. But the participatory Internet makes the problem worse, because it gives us an outlet for social relations, but it is by its nature a self-centered and self-directed outlet, and it is not fully embodied. This is a problem.
Now, I love self-determination and self-actualization as much as anyone. I come from nonconformist Protestant stock, but I’m a free-thinking philosopher; I’m also a Reedie, an Alaskan, and an American. I remember my old 11th grade chemistry teacher telling me the platitude, “Be true to yourself for you are your own best friend.” I was already taking that seriously. This is why it is easy for me to work online for small, risky companies, buck prevailing Internet trends, not use my Ph.D. in philosophy to get an academic job, leave trendy Silicon Valley for a small Ohio town, etc. I am so far off the beaten track, I don’t even know where the track is anymore. I say all that to establish my credentials as a nonconformist and iconoclast. My life has been extremely self-directed, and perhaps that is why I am drawn to the Internet: you can do what you want, when you want. Freedom and independence are prized online.
I don’t pretend to be terribly unusual in my independence. There are many other people, especially online, who are equally independent, in all sorts of ways. They too are very self-directed. The problem for us is that in being so self-directed, when we converse online, we choose the topics we’re interested in, we choose who to listen to, we often choose who hears us — and this all happens without the many benefits of being there in real time, situated and embodied with other people.
Can we still have friendships, real friendships, if we spend so much of our free time this way?
Especially those of us who work online (and increasingly, I suspect, all of us will, one way or another), and who want to keep conversation and face-to-face, full-bodied friendship alive, will have to choose to maintain friendships offline.
Perhaps we should start 21st century salons, offline, where many different people come together, physically, to talk, with our mouths, where we do not all necessarily agree, but where we practice the virtues of civility that make it possible for people who disagree to remain friends.
Hi Larry,
I’m not exactly sure if I differ from you on this, but in my view, the Internet really does not pose an unsurmountable problem as far as social relations go. It’s true that the Internet makes it much easier to be anonymous and be shallow, but it also makes it easier to maintain a much deeper level of interaction with people when it’s just not possible to meet them face-to-face.
For instance, I’m an Indian student in the United States and if it weren’t for the Internet, I would find it more difficult to keep in touch with my vast array of friends in India. Traveling to India to meet them is impractical, and in any case I cannot do it more than once a year.
It’s true that if we enter the Internet without thinking and absorb the “culture”, that may not be good. But I don’t see it as impossible to consciously seek to inject the positive elements of face-to-face conversation in online conversations. This is not to say that I’m a great success at this, but I try to often deliberately consider what I’d do if I had face-to-face contact, and then implement those ideas in distance-based contact, as I’ve discussed in a bit more detail in this blog post:
http://thinkingbeyondcompetition.wordpress.com/2008/04/03/more-on-choice/
I agree with you that it makes sense to mingle multiple modes of communication: online interaction can be tempered with occasional voice chatting and occasional face-to-face meetup, to strengthen the understanding of the other person. For me, the people with whom I chat most regularly are those with whom I really look forward to talking face-to-face, and the value and utility from face-to-face conversations has actually increased for me. For friends with whom I do not have regular online interactions, there is less of a base of interaction to draw upon when interacting face-to-face.
It seems to make more sense to me if people encourage themselves to bring in the positive elements of offline conversation into online conversation, rather than passively accept certain norms that may have developed in online interactions.
Comment by Vipul Naik — April 8, 2008 @ 5:37 pm
“I was struck by how people would pass the time, hours of it, in conversation with friends and family”
Pride and Prejudice was about the upper class - they could afford it. In the 19th century, most people passed the time in grinding labor. Moreover, there weren’t a lot of choices for entertainment. No records, no radio, no TV, not even a lot of books.
I’m not a big fan of e.g. blogging-as-connection. Again, that’s a game for the wealthy. Indeed, for everyone else, it’s possible for “social networking” to be alienating and isolating. But the 19th century holds no charms for me.
Comment by Seth Finkelstein — April 9, 2008 @ 6:46 am
Seth, thanks for informing me that Austen’s books are about the upper class! I thought that everybody lived that way — but now I know better, thanks to you! How embarrassing that I was so ignorant!
Sheesh. Talk about a failure to communicate…
But I do thank you for the comment. Maybe it will lead to some meaningful insight. Now for one thing, I think it is a huge mistake to dismiss my concerns as the concerns only of the wealthy. Surely you aren’t so much of a class warrior that you place political points above simple observation and common sense? After all, Seth, I’m not wealthy at all, but I blog. I am sure that the vast majority of people who blog aren’t wealthy, either. It’s not about class — it’s about our humanity and our collective habits, which are independent of class.
Moreover, the poorer folk (they used to be called “peasants,” didn’t they, Seth? I am so ignorant of these things) indeed did spend long winters entertaining each other with conversation, stories, and music. (Isn’t that where we get what is called “folk music” and “folk tales”? Again, I am so ignorant…
) Indeed, that sort of life is still in living memory, in rural areas.
So the peasantry, too, was less self-centered and this fact directly impacted how they related to each other and got their entertainment. My point, then, is that life on the self-directed Internet has made us more self-centered, and distracted us from the sort of conversation that made deep friendship possible.
Comment by Larry Sanger — April 9, 2008 @ 9:01 am
Keen’s comments about “fragmentation” were noteworthy for me. There’s something about digital communication and universal participation that is very much “small picture” as opposed to “big picture,” and I fear that it has turned my sense of history and politics into mush.
Since 1982 I have read and indexed 900 investigative books, and thousands of newspaper and magazine clippings, in connection with NameBase. In 1993 I was still writing essays about mega-issues: cold war history, multiculturalism, Carroll Quigley and conspiracism, philanthropic foundations as an arm of U.S. foreign policy — big-picture stuff, whether you agree with my politics or not.
Since about 1995 I’ve continued indexing for NameBase, but have also spent a couple hours per day surfing the Internet for tech news, search engine news, privacy issues, programming tips, and so forth.
Now I can’t think “big picture” anymore — at least not enough to write anything like the essays I used to write. The speed of the Internet and high-tech, plus the muddle of globalization, have increased the noise level and have buried important signals. There’s something I cannot get from hurried copy and paste and file, that I once got from reading a nonfiction book someone wrote after months or years of investigative effort.
I’m wondering if it’s possible to go back. I doubt it, because almost no one writes or reads investigative books anymore, and essays based on them aren’t read either, even if they’re posted on the web.
There are too many high-tech journalists chasing and endorsing the spin put out by Silicon Valley and Web 2.0 fans. It slowly fries my brain cells, and it’s already too late for me to throw my computers in the dumpster.
A sustained economic depression might be the only thing that can save us from today’s digital diarrhea, and begin, slowly but surely, to re-educate the next generation.
Comment by Daniel Brandt — April 9, 2008 @ 10:46 am
Larry, my core point is that fictional portrayals of upper-class life aren’t a meaningful model of “our humanity and our collective habits”. And those are NOT independent of class - how much leisure time people have is a definite class issue. The other part of my comment is approval of widely available professional entertainment. The cultural analog of the Noble Savage idea is bemoaning some mythical past era where people lived in, not perfect, but at least better, harmony. The reality is more like nasty, brutish, and short.
And yes, I think it’s important to bring this up, since there’s a strain of thought about our degraded state from a better time. Often, it really wasn’t better at all, that’s a myth.
There’s a flip side to net-evangelism, which a kind of pop-humanism. Everything’s going to hell in a handbasket, what’s the matter with kids today (”“hook up” rather than develop serious relationships”), it’s not like the Good Old Days. I detest net-evangelism, but turning it around is no improvement.
Comment by Seth Finkelstein — April 9, 2008 @ 9:38 pm
Seth, your (stated) core point, however valid, is irrelevant to my core point, which is this: we are spending less time in face-to-face conversation and friendship-building, first on account of television and now even more on account of disembodied Internet communication. All classes, regardless of how much leisure time they might have had, did in fact entertain each other and develop deep friendships by spending time conversing face-to-face.
The suggestion that I am endorsing any variant of the notion of “Noble Savages” is completely silly, of course. (Are you arguing against me, or someone who who isn’t here?) The peasantry (a member of which is still alive and in my family!) had time to form friendships by conversing face-to-face, and entertain each other with music and stories. That is of course an obvious fact, a fact that was true independent of class. You can think all you want about the stupidity of nostalgia; I don’t care. The point of my post is that when it comes to being self-centered and having good old-fashioned friendships, we might want to think of some of the unintended consequences of the ascendancy of Internet communication. Try thinking of this point by itself, if you can.
Comment by Larry Sanger — April 10, 2008 @ 9:41 am
There’s an Isaac Asimov ‘Robots’ novel (the name escapes me at the moment) set on a world where all the humans live apart, and almost never come into actual physical presence of each other. I wonder if that’s where we are headed?
Comment by Noel Chiappa — June 7, 2008 @ 9:59 am