Comments (2)

By chris, September 12, 2011 7:55 am

I don’t have a lot to add to Dan Pontefract’s response to George Siemens’ thoughts on “Losing Interest in Social Media”. For the most part, I also think George is right, at least if we are discussing “social media” with a somewhat narrower definition than I usually use the term and if the only significant value being sought is that of the complex thought that comes from deep examination and reflection.

I don’t participate in that kind of social media (which differs significantly from publishing platforms like blogs and wikis) for those things. I look there for the informal glue that binds together (some) communities, for the connections to people that help create (or reinforce) friendships and peer-relationships, and for the sparks that lead me to new and (sometimes) deeper thinking.

Like so many others, I could assert the strength of social media by citing how I found George’s post, which I probably would have discovered anyway, and Dan’s response, which I probably wouldn’t have, but that’s not the issue because George isn’t arguing that social media doesn’t do these things. What George seems to be talking about is a kind of technological determinism, the strength of which I can’t determine (I am a believer in a weak form of de facto tech determinism): that these media are slippery and lead most often to certain behaviors that are characterized by simplicity and relatively shallow thought. They grease the skids toward a certain kind of activity the same way an axe doesn’t force one to chop wood, but it sure lends itself nicely to chopping stuff up and not so well for opening a car door… at least not in the way we probably want to.

And let’s not forget that much of George’s piece is a response to the social media punditocracy, which would have social media as, if not the transformer of loaves into fishes, at least a miraculous cure-all, in which case assessing social media as a pIace of complexity and nuance (of a particular kind) is a sensible reaction. And I thought he was overtly making a bit of sport at their expense…

Comments (1)

By chris, September 10, 2011 9:13 am

As usual, Alan Levine gets at the heart of important matters. Yet, also as usual, I have mixed thoughts and feelings… maybe because the idea that online and offline are one is both true and not true.

Alan writes:

It’s my personal contention that a suggestion of ourselves moving from “offline” to “online” is a false binary construct. We are who we are, period. Yet we selectively and appropriately reveal ourselves, sometimes variations, sometimes less then full representations, not only online, but in different social circles. My personality is different with the locals who hang out in Sidewinders bar in Pine, Arizona then at some academic conference in New York City, but just by shades of difference.

I’d like to be like you (and GNA, apparently) and be able to claim with a straight face that my identity is a single whole no matter the place or medium, different only by “shades,” but for me it’s not true. I am different, sometimes subtly, sometimes not, depending on the place and community where I happen to be. Work me is not the same as poet me, though they share great commonalities, the Chris one might meet at the coffee shop is different from the Chris one might meet speaking at a conference. Of course it depends on how we define difference… in some contexts these are distinctions without a difference for me, but I feel I am often distinctively different, and I’m (usually) OK with that.

Alan writes:

I find even the terminology strange “to go online” as if it were a place. Do we sit down on the couch, press the remote, and say we are “going TV”? Maybe that’s a poor analogy, but using the “go” makes it suggest we are having some sort of out of body experience.

I get the drift. And the shift from static to participatory means the web has made the shift from being like the telephone or like television, where only a limited few could play and be recognize, to something that is different and integrated. For me the contrast is where the differences in me that can vary by medium are natural and where they are artificial… and where it is hard to tell. The online world (now) makes it a place I go to just as surely as I go to the store and just as surely as people appear on television or on the radio. It is not yet ubiquitous for me… and I doubt it ever will be, even if the ratio has shifted and now I don’t have to say I’m going online, because I probably already am at any given moment, but instead have to note (if only to myself) that I am going offline.

This is contradictory in some ways because at the same time that the “circles” of Google+ feel very unnatural and even frustrating to me because I don’t want to be fracture myself, and because I often maintain that splitting my online presence in a very fundamental, subject-based way (between here and Passion Task), was the worst thing I’ve ever done, I still maintain some of the dichotomy between my on- and off-line self.

Not that the relationships in these or any other media or community are lesser, because they are not: they are exactly the same. Which is to say they are good and bad, strong and weak, and they come and go. But I differ… which is one of the reasons I admire people like you (and there aren’t very many of them) who do seem to be the same in these different contexts. And most of the time I think being like that would be better than not, but the times I feel it’s a good thing to be more “context-dependent” (not dishonest) are still significant!

Finally, Alan says, rather poetically:

I am ready to drive a stake into the notions of “online” vs”offline” states of being; such differences don’t exist for me anymore- I am one Alan, not some frankenstein sewed together personality, and I float fluidly on the bits and atom states of the world.

I have to say that I resemble and resent the comparison to Frankenstein. Isn’t it possible that these differences (in people for whom they still exist) don’t represent something monstrous but, if understood, another equally strong way of being?

I love the Sagan quote that GNA invokes, that “we are all made of star stuff.” But I also love Whitman’s thought, which is related:

I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
[...]
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

So, rather than a put a stake in the idea of many identities, I choose to embrace them as who and what I am, the me that is different built on the same that is star stuff, just as very different seasons are collectively a year, different books a library, and different poems and paintings are art…