Stretched Conversation
You walk into a room and someone on the other side catches you eye. Start mingling with other people, but you catch yourself glancing over at them thinking why aren’t we in the same conversation. You see them glance back with a look saying that they are thinking the same thing. Both of you know you won’t be there forever. Just go over there. Say hi. Are they going to come here? You don’t want to leave without something, a chance. There’s something there. You can feel it.
You make an account an fill out your profile. Put a few somewhat recent pictures of yourself on there. Good enough. Alright now a list of people show up and start clicking on the ones that give you some interest. Ooh. Bad pic. Next. Hiking? Not for me. This one seems pretty good. Doesn’t want kids though. Hmm. Well let’s shoot them a message anyway. If it’s meant to be they’ll write back. And send.
There’s something to be said about time and the limits it puts on us. When we talk to one another, face-to-face, everything happens in real time. We have to look at them, listen, and reply. It needs our undivided attention, to be in the moment, and be a part of the conversation. Once telephones were invented, it was possible to talk to people over longer distances. Of course, you couldn’t see them anymore but you had to be there when the phone rang. And when the conversation was over it was over.
In the computer age things started to take a much bigger shift. It started with the humble webpage. Once the internet became common enough, many people made their own personal sites, a little shrine for themselves on the interwebs. Eventually, delivered messages started showing up through email. The other side of things were chat rooms and instant messaging. These were interesting because like a phone call, both parties had to be online at the same time to message each other. Unlike a phone call, there was a whole list of friends and conversations to juggle while you were on.
Eventually phones started to become more like computers and texting was born. Now you could leave messages for other people without them having to be there right away to receive it. Basically mini-emails. This changed everything. You could message people during small breaks and know that they’ll get it. Whether they’ll reply is another issue, but one that hadn’t existed before. Suddenly ghosting emerged before we knew what ghosting was. The time in between the message and the reply was no longer in real-time, but now indefinite. This set the precedence for posts, comments, and every other way of communicating online. A stretching of time and space between words.
Computer memory has fundamentally changed how we think about time. TV, movies, music, radio (aka podcasts), have all become on demand. There’s no day of the week to make sure to gather around with your friends and family to watch that show you look forward to every week. No, we each have our own devices and are all consuming different things at different times. Even when we are in the same room together we all get different messages and notifications from our own little digital shrine we’ve made for ourselves.
Modern communications is fundamentally fragmented and desynchronized, and along with it the way we interact with one another. It was a trade of shared time for individual time, and it comes with its benefits and deficits. We can ensure that information doesn’t get lost easily, that it will always be delivered and stored somewhere. We also have access to more information because of this. We can draw threads to more people than ever before. What is lost is the sense of urgency and the weight a conversation can carry. The words that are used have become light and disposable in the vast ocean of text. We have become more connected than ever, yet the threads are thin, pulled in many directions rather than focused in a few.
This has brought on many unintended consequences, like ghosting mentioned above. It also creates new environments that can breed toxicity. Comment threads and feeds become contaminated. Egos can be inflated giving power to unlikely individuals. Hatred is able to persist and spread.
The phase of the computer era that we are currently in has generated a whole new creature of filter bubbles. Because the ocean of data has grown exponentially, the sheer amount of information is impossible for everyone to consume. And, so every major tech company kickstarted the recommendation race to construct the algorithms that dictate what you see. Suddenly conversations weren’t only stretch across time, but also across space. Only certain messages would reach certain people, and this is mainly dictated by the social networks we have formed for ourselves. The algorithms and our own biases constructed echo chambers that repeat the same messages to ourselves over and over. The left feed the left. The right feed the right. And the openness of dialog was divided by a digital wall, which is arguably more effective than any physical wall.
Not all hope is lost. This hyper-connected age also brought forth revolution and helped the masses unite over controversial issues to fight against giants. And I believe that we are at the peak of polarization. The pattern has been recognized. Only when a problem is acknowledged to exist, will there be attempts to find a solution. Trial and error. Over the next decades of technological progress there will likely be significant changes to how the sorting and distribution of information will be addressed. My personal prediction is that things will somehow move away from the online world back into the physical one. Tech will help us to find people to connect to, not on the end of an optic fibre cable, but in the very cities we inhabit in growing numbers. The memes, the videos, the news won’t go away, but the dominance of online, on-screen, interaction may give way to a whole new way of computing that we can only imagine. Enough with the walls.
