Personal Connections in the Digital Age-Ch.1

Nancy Baym’s book Personal Connections in the Digital Age discusses the effects of the different aspects of communication technology on our lives. The first chapter gives an overview of the main arguments presented in the book such as: who uses the internet, what is its effect on us and what are the specific capabilities of particular forms of communication and how these change the way we connect with people.

 So...we now have multifaceted personalities. Is this ‘online persona’ we all assume just breeding an entire society with Dissociative Identity Disorder? It seems all these means of communication can confuse our perception and understanding of ourselves. These questions are raised in the chapter in a broader sense: What does it mean to be me anymore?

“How can we be present yet also absent? What is a self if it is not in a body? How can we have so much control yet lose so much freedom?” (3)

Can we really think of our online selves and our ‘real selves’ as different people? I say no. They are essentially the same and will undoubtedly have consequences on each other. Evolving forms of communications are changing the way in which we relate to others in the sense that we almost have no choice in communicating as people can communicate with us without us even knowing (voicemail, email, writing on our Facebook wall...). Your real self will eventually have to respond to all the communicating your online self has been a part of. Times have changed. We used to be able to shut out the world when we were alone, and now we can never really shut off anymore. We can...but we don’t seem to want to. We are now held accountable for things that we couldn’t possibly be held accountable for in the past. As Baym mentions in her book, when people use asynchronous communication through technology (emails, voicemail...) they are held accountable if they do not respond because it is something permanent, unlike face-to-face communication. If someone leaves you a voicemail about a work emergency you will be held accountable when you do not return it. In the past, one could just make themselves ‘unreachable’ and therefore unaccountable.  The invention of portable communication technology has changed the way we relate to others because it makes us constantly available to relate. However, although we are able to take all of our hundred of ‘friends’ around in our pockets, along with all our music, games and videos, I am not sure we can blame internet for procrastination or lack of attention. As Baym mentions in the conclusion of the book, there are factors that can affect how much someone will gain from internet usage such as socio-economic status, geographical location, education, age and gender.

“As adapters or non-adapters, throughout history, we come to media with social agendas, social commitments, and deeply ingrained social practices that are largely replicated and enacted through new technologies.” (153)

Maybe it is true that the next generations will have a different kind of intelligence, but procrastination has always existed in many forms and if people are not interested in something, they will always find a way to distract themselves. Saying that people having a different kind of intelligence is a negative thing makes no sense. Of course humans today have a different kind of intelligence than the philosophers of ancient Greece and Rome, but that makes neither of us stupider than the other.  People have always been looking for a short cut or the easiest and fastest way to do something. Portable technology just makes certain tasks that much more efficient. It is this efficiency, profit and ability to promote ourselves (look how great I am) that may be stopping us from being able to step back from it all, if only momentarily to self-reflect and understand what are the boundaries and capabilities of new media and how they affect our relationships. Young people’s tendency to favour technology to reality is criticized because when used for social use, people are neglecting academia in favour for what they think is relevant to them today. It seems as though books, research, reading and academic pursuit will no longer be relevant in the future and that intelligence will be replaced by short attention spans and minds filled with images, advertisements and celebrity gossip only. I don’t think this is our fate. As Baym puts it “the people have the power.” 

You can find the entire text online in PDF form here: http://www.tvo.org/theagenda/resources/pdf/2010-04-26_BAYMexcerpt.pdf