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The Disconnect In The Age of Ambient Awareness

October 4th, 2008 by AV Flox in Gloom Cupboard, Twitter, citizen journo, column, faves, malwebolence, marriage, travel

Steven Porricelli has never thrown his wife’s laptop out the window, but he’s wanted to.

“Technology is a necessary evil,” he told LifeWire about his wife, Jane, who runs MomGenerations.com. “She’s always texting in one hand and Twittering (an online social network and messaging service) on the other. I’ve woken up before and she’ll be zonked out in bed with the laptop on her lap. It’s insane.”

My husband can relate—and he’s not the only one.

“She grabbed my iPhone out of my hand, threw it on the ground and actually stomped on it,” my friend Peter told me in a recent conversation about why he’d broken up with his latest object of affection. “It’s too bad because the phone was OK and I really liked her, but, you know, on principle. I mean, WTF? Who stomps on stuff past the age of four?”

When I asked him how long she’d been trying to get his attention, he grudgingly admitted he didn’t know.


CRACK IS WHACK

They don’t call them CrackBerries for nothing. In mid-2007, The Guardian reported on a survey conducted by AOL and Opinion Research of 4,025 Americans over 13 years of age, which found that six out of 10 people use their mobile email gadgets in bed and at least four reply to messages in the middle of the night.

In March, Brian Alexander, who writes the Sexploration column for MSNBC.com followed up on the trend: as of March, 25 million Americans use a smart phone like the BlackBerry or Treo and 68 percent of Americans say they feel anxiety when they’re disconnected from the web.

Alexander points to a study by Sleep Council, a UK-based bed industry group which found eight of 10 people are playing with their high-tech gadgets before bedtime and one in three sends or receives text messages or e-mails while in bed.

A more recent study from Sheraton Hotels found that about 87 percent of users take their gadgets into the bedroom, 84 percent check them just before going to bed and as soon as they wake up, and at least 85 percent say they look for messages in the middle of the night.


AMBIENT AWARENESS–AN AGGREGATE PHENOMENON

A piece by Clive Thompson in The New York Times Magazine summarized the growing popularity of online interaction as a reaction to modern social isolation.

“The mobile workforce requires people to travel more frequently for work, leaving friends and family behind,” Thompson writes. “Psychologists and sociologists spent years wondering how humanity would adjust to the anonymity of life in the city, the wrenching upheavals of mobile immigrant labor—a world of lonely people ripped from their social ties.”

This is how. Social scientists call our incessant online contact “ambient awareness.”

“It is, they say, very much like being physically near someone and picking up on his mood through the little things he does—body language, sighs, stray comments—out of the corner of your eye,” Thompson writes.

“It’s an aggregate phenomenon,” Marc Davis, a chief scientist at Yahoo and former professor of information science at the University of California at Berkeley, told [Thompson]. “No message is the single-most-important message. It’s sort of like when you’re sitting with someone and you look over and they smile at you. You’re sitting here reading the paper, and you’re doing your side-by-side thing, and you just sort of let people know you’re aware of them.”

But is it just helping us stay connected or is it completely changing the expectations we have of our interaction? I think therefore I am, right—but is a thought not really a thought unless it’s a tweet?

Is living the thrill of a relationship without an audience no longer enough? Who can forget Heartbreak Soup or Jakob and Julia? I am continuously haunted by a tweet by former Valleywag writer, Melissa Gira Grant: “Uneasy truth: this relationship makes more sense with an audience. It’s when we’re most honest?”

Is talking to a single person at a time no longer enough, do we need the continuous bombardment of data from all corners of the world? The Sheraton study mentioned in the section above found that more than a third of those surveyed said that if they were forced to make a choice between their partners and their PDA, they’d keep their gadget.


THE IRL DISCONNECT

“I can’t decide what’s harder, being in a relationship with someone who’s as obsessively online as you, or being in a relationship with someone who isn’t connected at all, or only minimally,” I say to my friend Atherton Bartelby during one of our daily exchanges.

“I’d say being in a relationship with someone who isn’t in connected at all or minimally,” he responds, “because they don’t understand the anxiety one experiences when they’re disconnected.”

He’s right about the anxiety. Solutions Research Group, which surveys user technology habits, published a report earlier this year called “Age of Disconnect Anxiety,” which found 68 percent of Americans say they feel disoriented, nervous and anxious when deprived of internet access.

“I dated someone who was online just as much as I was, if not more,” I tell Atherton. “Often, we’d be in the same room for hours, but we hardly talked. We had a rule against talking in the ‘computer lab,’ actually. If we had something to say, we’d IM. But it wasn’t chit chat, it had to be important.”

“Dude, that’s totally messed up,” Atherton responds. “I don’t think it was technology’s problem. I think it was you guys.”

He’s not wrong about that. But neither am I wrong that sometimes ambient awareness tools, which are made to facilitate communication and enable connection, can get in the way of communication in a relationship and cause a major disconnect.

For her piece for LifeWire, Diane Mapes talked to Joe Guppy, a Seattle couples counselor, who agreed.

“Communication problems seem to be the number one thing people ask about when they call,” Guppy told Mapes. “They come to the session and pay me $100 just so they can sit together and talk. And to me, the number one red flag is if each person is engaged in their own cyberworld or video world. I had one couple that would even get into arguments via text message.”


HARD DRIVE OVER SEX DRIVE

A friend of mine calls Twitter the anti-marriage, which is funny because he wants to marry a girl he hooked up with on the microblogging platform.

But still, I can’t help but agree. As our networks expand thanks to social technology and people cater more and more to our niches, we’re less likely to move in the same circles and discuss the same things with our significant others. Social networking may enable us to hook up far more easily, and ambient awareness may accelerate the development of our relationships, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t taking a toll on established relationships.

And it’s not just about taking real quality time together with zero interruptions—it’s affecting sex, too. In his Sexploration column, Brian Alexander declared how surprised he was by reports on technology and human interaction, which, “if taken together, could indicate that we are spending big money to kill off our sex lives.”

Alexander quotes Marta Meana, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, who studies desire and treats people suffering from low to no desire, including couples in “sexless” marriages.

“There are reasons to believe there is a link,” Meana says of sex drive and technology. “If we are feeling like we are multi-tasking a lot, and our attention is divided many ways, that is getting in the way of making quiet time to have sex and really focus on another human being … Unfortunately, we do not privilege sensuous activity and sexuality the way we should in our marriages.”


REPAIR LOCAL AREA CONNECTION?

My husband is so jealous of my laptop that if he could take it out back for a fistfight, he probably would. Luckily, he can’t, because I’m not sure he’d win, as he’s not exactly the fighting kind.

“You being on the internet makes me feel isolated the way you feel isolated when you’re not on the internet,” he said recently when I told him what I was writing about.

“That’s because I am your internet, darling.”

I waited for him to retort, “no, iJustine is my internet.” But he didn’t. He doesn’t know who Justine Ezarik is or that on her Twitter bio she says, “I am the internet.”

Joe Guppy, the couples counselor cited above, suggests a way to keep connected to your partner in the age of perma-connection to the world: involving your partner in your digital distractions. Other people suggest weekly technology sabbaticals.

Outside of YouPorn, I haven’t had much success getting my husband excited about my digital distractions. But we have established that lunch, dinner and bed time are one-on-one interaction times.

It’s going well. I mean, we fought less when we hardly interacted. But, you know, at least we’re talking.

This piece was written for Gloom Cupboard

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In-Person Relationships vs. Cyberspace Relationships

September 6th, 2008 by AV Flox in Gloom Cupboard, column

A guy recently stopped talking to me because he didn’t feel he could be friends with my “online persona.”

I’ve always thought that I’m never more myself than when I’m online, especially in unregulated forums like Twitter, the popular microblogging platform, where I spew whatever happens to be on my mind without the kind of filters that I have between myself and the so-called real world where, as a proper Stepford wife, I’d never dream of saying out loud half the things I think.

I knew a man once who lived a double life: in one, he was a proper father and husband, and in the other, he was a tyrannical sex fiend, concerned only with satisfying his deepest and darkest cravings.

He didn’t like the term “double-life,” arguing that it implied that one of the lives he led was false, a cover that allowed him to have the other life without being ostracized by his social circle. There was no cover—he wanted both. He reasoned that any person could easily have conflicting desires and that these, while contradictory, didn’t necessarily cancel each other out.

“I’m sure you are familiar with the particle/wave dual nature of matter,” he told me. “It’s the quantization of personality. See, viewed as a wave, a personality appears to be connected and complete, but when analyzed in separate particles, completely contradictory beliefs, behaviors, and energy levels can exist at separate states.”

I’m no extreme, but the concept makes sense to me: on the one hand, I’m a wife. I wear pearls. I make dinner. I attend fund-raising events. I have dinner parties. I hold babies. I talk about square footage and property values and the It color of paint to put on the walls of your great room.

On the other hand, I lead discussions about sex and technology. I sporadically grace publications with a barely concealed body. I wander darkened alleys, eager to crawl on hands and knees through the underbelly of a city. I interview perfect strangers about how they like sex and how often, whether they have ever had an affair, whether they have ever live-blogged their sexcapades—and I do it for no reason other than my insatiable curiosity about people and, of course, sex.

Like my friend, it’s not that I feel I have to hide this drive under the guise of something socially acceptable. I do want to be married and I enjoy being a wife and having dinner parties and home-styling. But I also love sex and everything that relates to it, from the quickie you just had in the copy room to the thoughts of people who make the pleasure instruments we enjoy today, and while I wouldn’t introduce any such topic at a benefit dinner, the internet provides me with the perfect forum to do it.

And so I do. But like my Stepford self, my blog has its filters. I would never blog about something as transient as how mad I am with someone or something as silly as my new favorite YouTube video. My blog posts suffer from so much analysis and research that if I didn’t talk about myself so much a lot of them could probably qualify as articles.

Now enter Twitter, a micro-blogging platform that only allows you to update 140 characters at a time: I don’t think anything on the internet has so exposed so many particles on my wave. “I’m cooking!” “OMG, I could strangle my husband!” “Read my latest article.” “I love Anthony Bourdain!” “Ugh, you guys, I’m so depressed.” “I’m blogging naked!” “I JUST HAD THE BEST SEX EVER!” “A client is mad at me for charging him for phone calls—where does he live that this isn’t standard?” “Ouch, I stubbed my toe!” “Score—I just bought the hottest thing at Frederick’s!” “It’s 8:00PM, I just woke up!”

A lot can be communicated in 140 characters and even more can be communicated in a stream that runs all day long. If you’re doing Twitter right, you’re giving people a window into your life—the good, the bad and the TMI. Add to that your playlists on Last.fm, the books on your Visual Bookshelf on FaceBook, the song you’ve set on your MySpace profile, your stream on Flickr, your location on BriteKite and you’re basically providing anyone who cares enough with a complete backstage pass into your world. Seriously, one more social media tool and you’d be Nonsociety.

So when this guy told me he couldn’t be friends with my “online persona,” I have to admit I felt a little rejected.


THEY’RE JUST ON THE INTERNET

I hate it when I’m talking to one of my non-webbie friends about someone and they ask, with condescension, “wait, is that one of your little friends online?” Like I’m six and talking about an imaginary friend.

Recently, an older friend of mine confided that she was having an affair on the internet. Well, she didn’t call it that. In her words, “it doesn’t count if it’s online.” I asked my mother, who’s in the same age range, about this and she agreed, “well, it’s not like you are really going to become involved. They’re just on the internet.”

It blows my mind that this erroneous idea about the limitation of internet relationships to transcend pixel somehow continues to survive in the face of ever-mounting evidence to the contrary.

We’re part of a mobile generation—not just in the sense of technology, though that certainly has facilitated matters. I grew up on a little island in the Pacific where it was common for people to come and go. As I got older, I began to come and go myself. Even now that I’m married and settled, my husband and I continue to buzz around the world. We can’t sit still and we’re not the only ones. Where time and geography previously stood in the way, now technology allows us not only to make connections, but foster and enrich them.

I think one of the biggest issues with cruelty on the internet today has to do with this misconception that the people with whom we interact online aren’t really people. The truth of the matter is that some of the deepest, most honest, most meaningful connections I have with people have developed on the internet—both with those I originally met online and those I initially knew offline.


IRL VS. CYBER

“Whether you like it or not, cyberspace has become the new frontier in social relationships. People are making friends, colleagues, lovers, and enemies on the internet,” wrote Dr. John Suler of the Department of Psychology at Rider University. “The critics say it can’t compare to real relationships—and if some people prefer communicating with others via wires and circuits, there must be something wrong with them. They must be addicted. They must fear the challenging intimacy of real relationships. Is this true? Is it true that ‘real’ relationships are intrinsically superior to relationships in cyberspace? Or might relationships in cyberspace in fact be better?”

His treatise, aptly titled The Psychology of Cyberspace, which is readily available online, deals with the question of in-person relationships (IPR) versus cyberspace relationships (CSR).

“Text relationships tend to result in what’s called the online disinhibition effect,” Suler said. “Because they can’t be seen or heard, people may open up and say things that they normally wouldn’t say in-person. Self-disclosure and intimacy may be accelerated.”

Suler admitted that technology has advanced to the point where computer-mediated interaction has transcended text and can and often does engage our senses of sight and sound.

“On the other hand,” Suler was quick to note, “IPR have the advantage of touch, smell, taste, the complex integration of all the five senses, and a more robust potential to ‘do things with’ other people.”

Suler concluded that the disinhibition effect along with the time-stretching and distance-shortening qualities of online interaction make it a wonderful supplement to in-person relationships but that as a substitute, online-only interaction falls flat on its noseless, tongueless face.

“In an ideal world, we could have it both ways,” he closed. “We could develop our relationships in-person and in cyberspace, thereby taking advantage of each realm.”

What a difference a decade makes. His paper on the psychology of the web was published in 1997. The once-solid divide between online life and physical reality has long since been toppled. Nowadays, we largely enjoy both. Though there are exceptions, I wouldn’t spend much energy interacting and getting to know people I wouldn’t want to meet offline and most people I know, whether they use social networks for business or pleasure, want to meet the people with whom they interact and make every effort to do so.

Take the immediacy of the internet, the continuous fragmentation of social networks, the unavoidable stream of overshares, compounded with the inevitable face-to-face and you have the most complete picture of a person’s “wave” that you could ever want.

Which, though convenient, can make for some serious complications in relationships.

Which is why I’m here, exploring how technology, in particular the internet, is continuously affecting how we interact, live and love. I’m no expert beyond my social media whore credentials, and I don’t know that I’ll provide you with any kind of moral lesson, but as an old editor once told me, “you’re crazy enough to maybe be somewhat entertaining.”

I guess I should throw in a note of gratitude to the guy who doesn’t want to be friends with my online persona. He’s the one who got me this gig. Thanks, d00d. I have a feeling you and I will make good fodder for one another for years to come.

At the very least e-stalking you is a great alternative to obsessively looking for new songs for my MySpace profile when I’m on deadline.

This article originally appeared on Gloom Cupboard Magazine.

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  • AV Flox writes about web culture; new media’s gradual overthrow of old media; trends in social media; and the complicated entanglements people get themselves into as we venture forth into this new world where, more and more, the analog is colliding with the digital.

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