“Futures made of virtual insanity
now always seem to be governed by this love we have For useless, twisting, our new technology
Oh there is no sound for we all live underground”
Last week, my boss asked me to sit in on a “webinar” on the benefits of “social media” utilities such as blogs, Facebook, and Twitter. For those of you who don’t know, a webinar is basically a glorified power point presentation streamed over the internet; in this case, it was accompanied by a one-way audio dialogue of a guy/girl guiding you through the slides. It was arranged by a firm called “Firstgiving” who, as is suggested by its utilization of the savvy presentation medium, extolled the opportunities social media presented for the fundraising operations of not-for-profits. Although I thought the presentation itself could have been a bit more convincing, the base idea behind it – that the networking opportunities offered by the Internet hold endless possibilities – seems to be consuming western society like wildfire.
Admittedly, my own buns have been thoroughly toasted. Despite the fact that I initially viewed Facebook as nothing more than a virtual plebe-filled People mag, I’ve increasingly bought into its virtues as of late. As someone who’s studied /worked in the international development field, I recognize that civil society engagement and community building are some of the most powerful ingredients of an effective campaign: mediums such as Facebook and blogs are able to extend a common banner over individuals from vastly different walks of life. Whereas I may have been able to have a conversation such as this one over a pint with a few friends on a Saturday night in a world without blogs, this forum grants me an unprecedented opportunity to share my thoughts with people whom I’d never have a reason to wet my whistle with. Such an evolution could easily be casted as a social revolution, which has enabled people to advocate and mobilize for good causes at a level never before seen. Every revolution has its guillotine, however, and all to often heads are rolling before anybody notices.
If one can get past the seemingly blatant hypocrisy of a synthesizer-saturated band like Jamiroquai preaching the vanity of our obsession with technology, it’s easy to see that the lyricist has a point that can be applied to the social networking craze. From what I can see, the verse that I’ve quoted above – the chorus from the band’s song “Virtual Insanity” – conveys a view that technological advancements have consumed us to the point that our individual and collective futures are controlled by them – a reality that we remain largely oblivious to. I recently watched a PBS Frontline documentary called “Growing Up Online” that attempted to profile the demographic that grew up literally “snared in the Net”: those born in the early 90’s and onward. It assembles a fairly diverse panel of academics, parents and teenagers, all of whom reserve widely ranging views on the cumulative impacts the ubiquity of the Internet is having on young people. One thing they all agreed on, though, was that your average American 13 year old has been absolutely submerged in an ocean of social networks: as Jamiroquai so funkily asserted, their deaf to any world outside of Myspace.
I'm stumped as to whether I should consider myself fully part of this generation. Granted, I've been using computers for must of my life: since Grade 3, a portion of my schoolday has been designated for some software-based activity, whether it involve slogging through touch typing drills or fighting off cholera on the Oregon Trail. It wasn't until I was about 11 or 12, though, that my family got "wired", and another one or two years before I'd ever dabbled in e-mail or instant messaging. Whereas my mom was still making me send snail mail to my cousin on his birthday when I was 8, a tyke of the same age in 2009 has likely never tasted envelope glue.
Granted, extent of exposure aside, I feel fully caught up in the fast-pace, “now now NOW!” culture that’s largely the offspring of the advent of cyberspace. My laptop decided – rather inconveniently – to “take a break” on an ill-fated night in mid-December, and during it’s R&R-filled holiday at the technicians’ place over Christmas I was, at times, absolutely, hopelessly lost. Although it’s really not that hard for one to get access to a PC in Guelph in 2008 – there’s plenty at the university library – the prospect of having to get up every morning and catch a bus in order to access the almighty Internet perturbed me mightily. At times, it was an almost unbearable inconvenience. Indeed, this sounds melodramatic – but many of you, I’m sure, would agree. If I feel like getting up at 4 am to re-watch Barack Obama’s inauguration speech for the 6th time, I damn well should be able to do it!
No matter how much I rely on it, though, the Internet – and, more specifically, social networking – is mostly still purely practical for me; essentially, it’s a glorified means to an end. Not so, for the group of kids examined in the aforementioned PBS documentary: all of them admitted a certain type of psycho-social dependence on social media, and that they would be totally lost without it. Kind of like a draft horse without a load to haul, to utilize an Aggie-inspired metaphor. Even more alarming were the observations of a couple of the more thoughtful, perceptive interviewees that they developed alternate identities on the web, easily distinguishable from their everyday personas. One girl, for example, described herself as “happy-go-lucky” social butterfly by day, self-degrading anorexic by night (in a depressing admission, she identified the latter as closer to who she really was).
The development of this type of duality and disconnection scares me far more than any role that social media may plan in allurement and abduction. As one expert points out in Growing Up Online, the vast majority of Internet-related cases of physical and sexual harm are a result of an active engagement in risky behavior on the part of adolescents themselves, and God knows that teens were putting themselves at risk far before the advent of the web. “The Predator”, despite his universally feared status, is as much a creation of urban myth as an object of reality. From what I can see, there’s a much greater danger of losing our children to holes dug deep inside themselves, than to some grimy back alley behind the 2-for-1 pizza joint.
Kids are going to make bad decisions. In most cases, they turn out “just fine”; in much rarer ones, they end up losing their lives as a result, or at least a good deal of their prospects. Does this risk justify building walls around our loved ones - locking them into the safe "havens" that parents such as Evan Skinner (in the doc) have so lovingly and intentionally constructed (truthfully, no sarcasm there)? I think the benefits of social media, as outlined by folks such as my Firstmedia webinar leader, are far too promising to keep from the future leaders of society. Rather than developing introverted communities that are primarily concerned with looking after our own, we need to learn to confront the world around us, with all of its blemishes - this includes the Internet. What we do need to ensure, however, is that our most vulnerable don't get lost in the vastness of the world during the course of the interaction, as Jamiroquai warns. When people, including kids, lose hold of the tether of family during the spacewalk of life, they'll inevitably become lost within themselves.
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