Do you think the answers to

avflox — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 22:14:35 -0600

Do you think the answers to the survey would have been more in favor of sex had Vance made it clear that it could be with multiple partners? I'm not so sure, but you are right in saying that the web is about the unknown. More than that, it's about doing a lot in a little time.

With technology, you can do a million things at once. You can be reading this column, paying your bills, chatting with your best friend and text messaging naughty things to a lover. I think we've become so used to being able to multi-task that the idea of being one-on-one with someone, with no gadgets of any sort, feels completely foreign to us.

Excellent

DallasDave — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 21:41:27 -0600

You have really captured a piece of the real intersection of our lives and technology's invisible but constant influence that is manipulating us in unseen ways, until now.

I hope you come back to this theme often. I don't know how many of us can make changes in our lives, even armed with this information.

Like smoking, drinking, drugs, or Starbucks, we are all addicted, and don't think we can live without the web (even for two weeks).

PS, Ashlee Vance should repeat her survey, but this time change 'sex' to 'sex with 14 new partners'. After all, isn't that the allure of the web, always changing, always encountering the unknown?

Absolutely. And that's the

avflox — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 21:20:33 -0600

Absolutely. And that's the thing: we feel connected, but we're not really. I think back about the time my best friend Parker and I spent in Hawaii--largely offline except for a tweet here and there--and it's totally different from our interaction now even though we are always either on the phone or chatting on IM. It's strange. I used to think technology was the solution to how mobile we'd all become, but now, I'm beginning to wonder. Are we getting reconnected, or is it a false sense of connection, one based only by the sporadic mutual shared interest?

Here's to bringing back the old-fashioned coffee and lunch date. Maybe that should be my New Year's resolution.

Fantastic post

ninepoems — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 19:05:19 -0600

I think you've made some incredibly valid points. It's a bit scary to see how relationships and interaction is shifting before our very eyes. It's kind of like looking back at Victorian courtship. It seems so alien and stupid to us now. I wonder if romance without technology interference will one day be considered old fashioned too?

I've had two experiences in the past week that prove how much interaction with friends is also shifting. I've attended two parties where for a sizable amount of time we all sat as a group and played on our iPhones. One of the parties was on NYE, the other party was just this afternoon at my job.

On NYE, I checked out my Facebook application to see if anyone wrote on my wall. A friend was watching some funny YouTube clip she had heard about. Her husband was watching YouTube clips of fish swimming in an aquarium (aquariums are his hobby) while keeping up with conversation. Another friend who can do a good beatbox, pulled up a clip of this French guy who literally sounds like a set of drums. We were all together in the act so if felt social, but we were also isolated to our own desires. We were like a string of islands at that moment.

As smart devices become more prevalent in our society I suspect moments like these are becoming increasingly common.

Rochelle | Nine*Poems Blog | Twitter

Love 2.0: Online or Alienated?

avflox — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 18:42:26 -0600

"'No man is an island,' the poet John Donne said. But we're becoming islands," my mother told my friend Parker and me on a lazy afternoon lounging on Waikiki Beach.

"As we search for people in our respective niche, we cut off others," she went on. "The internet has made it so easy to find people like us that we no longer know how to deal with anyone who isn't like us."

In real life, you can't block someone who's right in front of you. You can't always select who you work with the way you select who you choose to interact with. You can't opt out of someone screaming at you from across the table. And you can't really sleep on insults being hurled at you the way you might sleep on a nasty e-mail.

"If you can't equip yourself to deal with those situations—aren't you slowly isolating yourself?" my mother asked.

Parker and I, die-hard lovers of the web, could say nothing.

Of course, with the sun setting in the background and a cool breeze blowing through the palm fronds, being an island didn't seem like such a bad thing.

Even so, I couldn't shake a conversation I'd had a couple of days before, with a college friend of mine who lives in Honolulu.

"I don't want to get to know my lovers," Sarah had told me, taking a long sip of her green tea. "Reality is the natural enemy of desire."

Was she right? Have we become so used to relationships online with other people's personas, so stripped of the mundane stuff of life, that we've become intolerant to such details?

"In the beginning, lovers always binge on profiles and blogs," Sarah told me. "But that doesn't mean anything. Our Facebook profile lists only what we want to show. If you're a die-hard fan of The Hills and don't want anyone to know, you can keep it to yourself and no one will know until they move in with you and catch you some night, binging on all the episodes you had to TiVo."

I laughed.

"It enables total fantasy," she said, scanning her laptop screen before turning it around. "Look: you're a fan of FailWhale, Dubai and something else I can't even pronounce. Does it say anything about how OCD you are about keeping your kitchen spotless, how much you hate social functions, how hard you grind your teeth in your sleep when you're stressed? Of course not—ooh, and Citizen Kane is one of your favorite movies? Bitch, please."

"I do like Citizen Kane!"

"Quote a single line from the movie," she dared me.

"Rosebud."

She rolled her eyes, smiling. "Anyway, like I said, it doesn't mean anything. Even if a love affair starts with a lover binging on our profiles and blogs, it doesn't last. No one reads anything after the initial stages unless something goes wrong. The thing is: no one really wants that much information. We say we do and we might think we do, but we don't."

Is she right? I think the only man in my life who reads my blog anymore is my father. And it's entirely possible that he does this partly to make sure I'm not writing about him.

Savvier web users set up Google Alerts for their names and call it a day.

My friend Parker has a horror story. Several weeks ago, he met a man online who completely captivated him. Smith is a talented opera singer living in Manhattan; he's handsome, older, and supposedly wiser.

Every morning, Parker would wake up to a series of delectable text messages. He and Smith became fans of the same things on Facebook and left each other suggestive notes on their walls. If ever Parker phoned him when Smith was busy and couldn't talk, Smith would answer the phone to let Parker know what was happening around him. He'd also send Parker photos and video footage of all the places he'd go on a given day, from the Met to Central Park.

So despite being in Honolulu at the moment, Parker could still enjoy all the things he loved about New York. It had all the makings of a dreamy love affair.

And then one morning, the inevitable happened. Smith bore his soul: not in the well-crafted wonder of over-share-y blogs, either. Smith exposed himself in the vague and moody glory of our physical existence. That is, the sort of whining that refuses to give a reason or cause, leaving the person with whom one is interacting to serve as little more than an emotional punching bag.

"Immediately after, he tried picking a fight about my impetus for writing and the definition of art," Parker told me over Americanos at the Waikiki Trade Center Starbucks. "That's it. He's fired."

Click: end call. Just like that, the affair had gone to hot to over, all in the course of one conversation.

All along I have been telling people who mainly interact on the physical plane about the wonders of the internet but now, reflecting on Sarah's and Parker's statements, I can't stop wondering whether the effect has been the opposite: instead of taking our online interactions and making them part of our lives, were we taking the parasocial relationship model into our analog exchanges?

In streamlining our online interactions, we’ve all started building perfect worlds for ourselves where resolving situations is as easy as a couple of clicks. Tired of this person's status updates? Unfollow. Bored with a blog's content? Unsubscribe. Irritated by someone's constant chattering? Block.

Has the usability of the web made us lazy? We might appear to be online all the time, but is a vital part of us offline? More importantly: if we began to make this part of us available, would it be welcome, or would our fellow users reject it outright as a terrorist of The Fantasy?

While Parker and I were out for coffee and a stroll, the power went out in Waikiki.

With many phone networks tied up as thousands of frantic tourists and residents tried to get informed about the situation, and few available radios, we were literally left in the dark as to what was going on.

When we finally got a call through, a friend on the neighboring island of Molokai informed Parker that it wasn't just Waikiki--she'd seen all of Oahu go dark. Apparently, an electrical storm had surged Oahu's generators, leaving the entire island without power.

She relayed the governor's advice: stay put and go to sleep.

Uneasily, we did. The next day, finding almost everything in Waikiki closed and the one open Starbucks refusing to serve milk due to concerns about how well it'd kept during the fourteen hours without refrigeration, I thought again about becoming an island.

Latte-less, starving and out of touch, it suddenly didn't seem like such a good idea after all.

BLOGGIE TREATS

Across the ocean, in bleak Seattle, Sugar blogs about how her "island" was discovered by her boyfriend's ex and how their relationship subsequently came crashing down: "A couple months ago, The Ex found my blog. How she found it is still a mystery. She read everything: my porn, my feelings about Aidan, life as a single mom... After running her bony ass to Kinkos, she immediately gave selected entries to Aidan's parents..."

When it isn't making or breaking relationships, the web is taking them over: in a recent piece for The New York Times, Ashlee Vance reports that 46 percent of women and 30 percent of men would opt to give up sex for two weeks rather than lose internet access for the same period, according to a study.

For good or ill, the web's with us for good. Jennifer of Playgrounds Are No Place for Children said it best when she wrote the following haiku:

The laptop’s open
all day. I check my email
and listen for *dings*

Sitting there, I tell

myself, only ten minutes

One hour passes

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Love 2.0: Online or Alienated?