Technology and Anthropology

[€uroMeinke]

3894's intro post triggered a pet interest of mine about the ways technology is changing (or not changing) the ways we relate to one another. Many of us at one point or another, looked to our experience on the Disney boards and said "we ought to write a book about that." But I think the experience is not limited to our Disney board experience but much broader and more universal.

I was reading an article in Wired about a Murder that evolved around a group of My Space friends, (http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.12/murderblog.html) that such a thing could take place is no real surprise to me, but what fascinated me was the mention of people's MySpaces continuing on after death becoming tribute sites for the dead. Again, the dead always leave artifacts and have memorials, but these are relegated to cemeteries, and places away from most people's ordinary lives.

The connectedness that technology brings us also seems to change things a bit. I can be in contact with my chosen communities at any time, and almost from anyplace. I catch up on email and do my Live journal posts while I commute. At work I can check in on LoT and see what's happening. Even traveling abroad, I never need to lose touch, never be alone. And yet focused on our machines we can easily ignore the strangers sitting next to us. The occupants of the real world alienated from us, and perhaps even self-selected away.

Anyway, those are my random musings for the moment. I'd like to hear from others how they think things have changed - or remained just the same.

[Bornieo: Fully Loaded]

Interesting subject.

ITs my feeling that technology has moved the whole dynamics of social life from what used to be people hanging out at coffee shops or the mall in a group or in-person contact situation, to one where everyone goes home and signs onto Yahoo or buries their nose in their laptops, cellphones or whatever. Oddly enough with the technology I would have never met any of you and thanks to message boards and the such, I hope, you have all gotten to know me as more than my "social in-person" status. If you were to take what you know about me from my posts, etc. and then think about how I am in-person, would my acceptance into this "group" really be possible. Use of this technology makes use of a whole other set of social skills. Instead of face, hand gestures, vocal inflections and personal presence, the "technologies" have words and usage of language. Because, as we all know way too well, you could say ANYTHING in this setting and 10 people can read it 10 different ways. That changes the whole playing field socially and it’s all due to the technology. I think it breaks down some of the stereotypical in-person boundaries and unfortunately creates whole new ones in the sense that alot of the people we interact with online could be anyone, unless we’re lucky enough to meet them in person and know how they are. And that’s sort of an exercise in sociology, which I’m sure someone like SCAEagles would know what I’m talking about.. If there were no pictures of me or if no one had met me, what would you think of me? Maybe I was asian, 5’ 4”, black hair, glasses, skinny, mid 40’s? Or maybe I was a female just pretending to be someone else.

That’s my little ramble... I guess...

[alphabassettgrrl]

I have a love-hate relationship with technology. On the one hand, I can chat with all of you and that's wonderful. I enjoy Disney more now that I have people to hang with on occasion.

On the other hand, it's easy to pretend to be someone else and it's not easy to know who to trust on-line. It's easy to disappear. I tend to keep my virtual circles somewhat separate from each other- a few people know multiple ways to contact me but most of you do not. I'm not one of those people who has everything in my sig line. Personal choice.

I do like that on-line one can present different faces; we do this in real life as well but on-line it's easy to keep them separated. For the most part, I try to present a united face to everybody but it's natural that some of it sifts out. On the whole, my identity as a stagehand doesn't apply much to our discussions of Disney. My identity as a student sometimes has validity. My identity as wife rarely does. My identity as a gay girl sometimes comes up.

I'm a chatty girl, which is generally clear. I can on occasion have a good eye for detail- which is something on which this group thrives.

Technology has enabled us to widen our contact pool, but I think in some ways that pool has become more shallow with the occasional deeper well. We can pursue the appearance of intimacy without actually risking ourselves.

It's fascinating.

[€uroMeinke]

I think things are evolving to where there isn't such a dichotomy of online versus real life friends. More and more among the people I know the two blend. Real life friends join each other's social networks which beget new friends that often you eventually meet in real life. Lisa and I have met people in Paris and Tokyo that we never had seen before in real life and got along just as if we had.

To be sure you can spoof your identity, change your gender, and all that, but I think more and more that becomes a diversion and not an everyday practice. I see parallels to the work life and home life dichotomy, we assume certain identities at work, have relations with our colleagues, that are separate but often blend.

[CoasterMatt]

Are we not men? We are DEVO!!

[wendybeth]

I think we are definitely at an evolutionary crossroads with regards to technology and interpersonal relationships. The thing that fascinates me about the whole online experience is how very tenuous the whole thing seems to be- not that much has to happen, either naturally or by design, to knock this whole experiment on it's ass; then it's back to letters and ponies. I plan on enjoying it while it lasts, and adapting if it bites the dust. In the meanwhile, I am grateful for all the wonderful people I've become friends with, and for having a forum to express thoughts and feelings I might not otherwise.:cheers:

[3894]

In the old-fashioned world of tribal societies, all human relationships are immediate and face-to-face. As societies get larger and more complex, the relationships tend to become less immediate, more distant and the consequences of behaviors are less profound. Obviously.

Anthropologists who have studied small-scale hunting-gathering societies are always struck by the high degree of social control. On the internet, people can choose when, how, and in what manner to communicate with people. I don't have to respond to you; I can move shop to another board; I don't have to deal with anything, really. I'm safe in my home or in my office or wherever. You're not "real" so I don't have to deal with differences.

It's a mixed bag. Electronic devices allow you to be very selective in who you interact with and when. The internet is a shortcut to finding people with similar interests. People need to ask themselves, Am I sacrificing diversity for an increased comfort zone in my interactions? Am I sacrificing variety for more control and personal security?

My own answers to the above are that the internet increases the diversity of people I meet.

[innerSpaceman]

All of the above.




With the proviso that - safe and selective as it may be - I have little interest in non-face, techno relationships that don't eventually and periodically cross the line to IRL.

To the extent the tech can add a wonderful dimension of inner thought sharing and other communications not usually found in face-time social settings ... I think it's a wonderful newish component of friends-and-lovership. By itself, however, I think it's a poor substitute.



And when I'm dead, I want all my posts and profiles and live journal entries erased.

[Cadaverous Pallor]

When I'm dead, I want all my posts bound in a book and published. ;)

I love all your posts, you guys really nailed it in your own ways. I've tried many times to write a book on this message board thing and it's too big an idea for me.

The stigma IS going away, and it's a wonderful thing, as well as an obvious conclusion. When only freaks and weirdos spent time on the net, saying you met someone there was embarrassing. Now that most people (in certain income brackets) have an online presence, everyone understands that the person you met online is just another person.

I believe our little board here is a wonderful case in point on internet relationships. We met on a larger board with a broader appeal. Those of us that stuck together and remained here have one huge thing in common - our posting ability. We all use punctuation, capitalization, and pretty good grammar and spelling. (Yeah, there are plenty of exceptions, but have you BEEN to most message boards??) We do a very good job of explaining what we mean, and most misunderstandings are cleared up quickly. To steal an analogy - we are the highly evolved versions of message board posters, and as such, we have survived for years in this same format.

Speaking of evolving - I feel like a chimp every time I need to text message on a phone, especially when I see a 13 year old blazing away on one. For the first time in my life, a popular technology seems out of my reach, but not because I don't have the smarts, but because the technology has splintered so much that I'm not a part of that side of the revolution. This tech thing has become bigger than anyone can really master, unless you're still a hardcore geek. Can you really be a perfect message board maven/text messager/console gamer/Warcraft master/digital cam wiz/photoshopper/manic mp3er/etc etc etc? A lot of invested time and practice is required to use all the myriad tech devices correctly....or maybe I'm just excusing myself from falling behind.

So what's the same......I'd say, finding people that click with you. Chemistry online is still chemistry, though a different kind of chemistry....but as we've seen, it transfers rather neatly to personal relationships IRL. Much like any pursuit that gets people together, posting is a great way to bond with people, and once you have met them IRL, your posting experience is greatly enhanced. I remember the early days of putting faces to names and then coming home to post and read - it was a heady time. It's still endless interesting to REALLY get to know people in person and see their posts in a whole new light.

[€uroMeinke]

At one time we were called a nation of joiners. People belonged to Bowling clubs, fraternal societies, knitting circles, etc. in many ways I think this is what replaced that.

I think also the anonimity of the internet is fading. We all strive to protect our privacy but more and more of our "private" lives are being carried out in public and available for the scutiny of those willing to search. I think of the whole Lonelygirl phenomena, a media experiemnt that was quickly revealed as fiction. The story I linked to above is also a sobering reminder that the "safety of your own home" illusion is just that.

At one time historians feared that this would become a blank era as the electrons holding our correspondance vanished with the next power outage. But it seems our electronic selves has a presence afterall. If anything future historians will have an overwhellming amount of information of how we live our lives today.

Like anything, it's still fragile as Wendybeth noted, but such is the way of progress, more is preserved as we move forward - but moving backwards could distil it all to landfills full of monitors and hard drives.

[Stan4dSteph]

When I'm dead, I want all my posts bound in a book and published. ;)Even the ones that no longer exist in cyberspace?

I find it depressing that most of my relationships outside of work exist only in cyberspace. I have not found a good way to meet people where I moved, so I've pretty much just maintained the ones that started virtually, morphed to IRL, and now have moved back to virtual again.

[mousepod]

What a fantastic thread!

Pre-internet, I traveled in a few large and casual social circles (living in NYC makes it easy to do that) but had very few close friends. Once social networking became popular via the web, I tended to linger on the outside - I was either too busy or just didn't see the point. My reluctance to join my fellow generation x-ers in the grand social experiment pinned me as a lurker, a term that's unnecessarily pejorative. Once I moved to San Francisco in 1996, I found that my vast social circles were gone, and while I was able to make one or two close friends, there was a noticeable void in my social life. The void remained for the better part of a decade, until I was invited to join the party at LoT. I think that the unique qualities of the group here so eloquently described by CP above are the reason that I stay. I plan to be living in Southern California in the next few months, and my hope is that I'll be able to maintain my internet friendships in a face-to-face real life setting.

I think that idea that social networking through the internet alone via MySpace and the like is so widespread is probably fallacious. In my own case, it filled a need that was created by my own social expectations based on my personal history. I sincerely doubt that technology, particularly the internet, is bringing about a massive shift in social mechanics the same way it's affecting things like commerce and privacy.

[Alex]

To expand on Euro's thought about the internet being less about anonymous participation and increasingly about public participation you might fiind Michael Kinsley's recent Slate editorial of interest ("On the internet, everybody knows you're a dog" (http://www.slate.com/id/2154507/)).

I think one thing that needs to be kept in mind is that this new fangled social network isn't nearly so pervasive as it may appear. Part of the problem is that most of the people who talk about societal trends are also people who are involved strongly with the internet (academics, journalists). Most people I know do not have web pages, do not belong to message boards, to not belong to social networks.

The number is getting larger, of course, but I think a lot of people immersed in these things are starting to think that everybody is now immersed in these things.

It has been an interesting transformation. I joined my first message board (on a dial-up BBS almost 20 years ago). I know that there are people who have been doing this stuff far longer than me, but I'm definitely in the top 0.1% in terms of longegivity. I've been a lurker, I've been active. I attended my first internet based "meet" in 1992 when a group of people got together to talk about the MUD they all played.

So unlike most of you, this technology hasn't changed the way I socialize, it has always been part of the way I socialize (I'm old for this to be true, but it is increasingly true for today's children).

It is hard to say if it has molded how I form relationships in real life (though unlike many people I've never had a romantic relationship that grew out of online) or if it is just a good fit to how I am. I move on quickly from social groups and without looking back, both online and real life.

It has been five years since I last talked to someone I went to high school with. It has been longer since my last undergrad contact. I haven't spoken to anybody from grad school since I graduated in 1998. I go years between talking to my sisters. Six months after leaving Wells Fargo I literally could not remember the name of a person I had worked with every day for five years.

The same is true online.

As for larger social impacts, I think eventually it could have one harmful effect. Intellecual cocooning. The vast majority of people don't like to be confronted and forced to think about their beliefs and ideas. Their intellectual framework is preferably a passive thing. This is not new and has always been true. But in the past it was difficult to avoid exposure to ideas you didn't like.

Now, you can immerse yourself in a community where everybody thinks exactly as you do. You don't ever have to here a discouraging word or think about the underpinnings of what you think.

Left or right, square or kinky, less filling or tastes great, you can live a life that deludes you into thinking that everyone is just like you. And that is a harmful delusion because everybody reacts poorly when something tries to puncture strongly held delusions.

[CoasterMatt]

When I'm dead, I want all my posts burned onto a massive black monolith, and the monolith I want launched into orbit around Jupiter.

[Motorboat Cruiser]

As for larger social impacts, I think eventually it could have one harmful effect. Intellecual cocooning. The vast majority of people don't like to be confronted and forced to think about their beliefs and ideas. Their intellectual framework is preferably a passive thing. This is not new and has always been true. But in the past it was difficult to avoid exposure to ideas you didn't like.

Now, you can immerse yourself in a community where everybody thinks exactly as you do. You don't ever have to here a discouraging word or think about the underpinnings of what you think.

Left or right, square or kinky, less filling or tastes great, you can live a life that deludes you into thinking that everyone is just like you. And that is a harmful delusion because everybody reacts poorly when something tries to puncture strongly held delusions.

I think we have been seeing the results of this in the political division we have seen over the past few years. It is now possible to listen to radio shows where everyone agrees or go to message boards where everyone agrees. Personally, I find these kinds of places to be boring to the extreme (even when I happen to agree with them), but too many people would prefer to only hear from those who are like-minded.

Technology has definitely made it easier to avoid being challenged in our beliefs. I think we all suffer a bit from that.

[€uroMeinke]

Technology has definitely made it easier to avoid being challenged in our beliefs. I think we all suffer a bit from that.

I'm still not so sure of that - in the past you just moved to like minded communities, whether that be a state of the right color, or a religious group you associated with. There aren't that many social groups we enter into without some sort of selective choice. Even when born into a community you disagree with, there are always the subcultured "liekminded" rebels.

[Alex]

Yes, but except for the few groups that did (try to) isolate themselves they still lived most of their daily social lives within a larger community of some sort. And even if there is a self-selected sameness it was much harder to filter out "intrustions." There were also fewer filters of the world out there so for the most part everybody had to work with the same filters and then pervert them to their own ideas. No you can just go out and find the filter that fits you perfectly and never even think, just parrot.

To a large extent I think we may be swapping physical homogeneity with intellectual/emotional homogeneity.

[Cadaverous Pallor]

Even the ones that no longer exist in cyberspace?Before I owned a computer I was a teen with a telephone. I used to wish I had every wonderful late-night phone conversation transcribed or recorded so I could keep them forever and ever. I still have every note I passed in high school. When I began emailing I horded my emails as a gold mine of history - when I wasn't sure how something went down, I could search my emails for it - but eventually the file was corrupted. I very nearly cried.

My obsession with such things is probably because my memory is so bad. These days I'm not as concerned with documenting every step of my life. Still, every few months or so I'm back at Mousepad, searching up some minor detail of my history. Just a few weeks ago I used an old Mousepad post to figure out which family we go to for Thanksgiving on even years and which on odd years.

Anyway, my post above was more of a joke than anything. I would like to publish a book of poetry, but if not that, then a "Best of Lounge of Tomorrow's Open Mic" would be great too. :)

[Alex]

To follow up a little bit on my last post.

Part of it is also the scale. In the "olden days" you could self-select groups but it was mostly self-limiting as the granularity you could achieve. They were, after all, generally limited to physical proximity.

With the geographical requirement removed by modern technology the ability to coccoon yourself to a very narrow cocoon is amplified. In the entire Bay Area there are probably only a couple dozen people who would subscribe to my mix of atheism, skepticism, and libertarianism. But with modern technology I could (if I chose) essentially limit all of my "social" interactions to such people and also allow them to filter all of my interactions with those outside of that group.

[lashbear]

Still, every few months or so I'm back at Mousepad, searching up some minor detail of my history. Just a few weeks ago I used an old Mousepad post to figure out which family we go to for Thanksgiving on even years and which on odd years.

Spooky - particularly after I went back to MP to dredge up 3894's Lashbear Sig immortalised in this thread (http://mousepad.mouseplanet.com/showthread.php?t=20777).

I expect there will be traces of me around WAY after I'm gone - which is kind of nice.

[€uroMeinke]

With the geographical requirement removed by modern technology the ability to coccoon yourself to a very narrow cocoon is amplified. In the entire Bay Area there are probably only a couple dozen people who would subscribe to my mix of atheism, skepticism, and libertarianism. But with modern technology I could (if I chose) essentially limit all of my "social" interactions to such people and also allow them to filter all of my interactions with those outside of that group.

I understand what you're saying, but even with that kind of immersion, you're still not divorced of the physical world you live in, though you could be a hermit geek I suppose. I guess I just have a hard time fathoming someone who would want to do this, though I suppose I've done it in the negative so why not.

Do you think this may be what's happening with radical Islamists on the net? They certainly seem to exist in a cyber-environment as well as the real world?

[innerSpaceman]

I was actually very excited recently to discover that a message board I've been posting on for months actually skews very conservative politically. I find it somewhat boring to have discussions involving "me, too" and "I quite agree." I thought that being the scaeagles of another message board would be very interesting.

Alas, along with the conservativeness came the rudeness and immaturity and downright nastiness that tends to confirm some of my worst suspicions about the breed. Stepping outside your comfort-circle can be a hostile experience, perhaps on the 'net even moreso than i.r.l. (because of the anonymity factor). And while I relish stepping outside the comfort zone of ideas, I don't want to give up the comfort feeling of peacefulness as a trade-off.

* * * * * * *

In the last decade, the vast majority of my new real life friends have had a strong internet component. Either I've met them i.r.l. after being part of their message board community, or I've met them i.r.l. and kept in contact afterwards via being part of their message board community. My whole modern sense of friendship is tied up with it. Conversely, my many friends from before this period tend to have email as their most tech-forward means of staying in contact.

Although I met my last lover through a general message board meet, I've yet to become involved with someone solely from an intent-to-hookup connection on the net. That's likely going to change in '07. Though I can't rule anything out, I'm kinda at my limit of being able to get enough face time with the friends I've already got. And, well, there's no lover potential anywhere amongst those 50 people.

So, probably within the first quarter of the brand new year, I'm going to make that further tech step - - and try to form a relationship over the net with the express intention of bringing it into real life for the most important relationship in my real life.

It strikes me as sorta scary, but it seems the logical (and necessary) progression in the tech-assisted relationships curve. A brave new world that will require some personal bravery.