From virtual reality to mirroring society

(First posted as a comment on a community blog discussion about Facebook, 13.6.10)

It's just three and a half years since I acquired a computer - before that it had been twenty years since I'd used one. I've found myself thinking of Facebook as a bit like a cafe or pub conversation - you are talking one-to-one or to a small group but with the tacit understanding that it is okay to be overheard. On Twitter it is more like short conversations with complete strangers in the bus queue, or any queue - gossip, which you are only too happy to broadcast to the world. With a community blog, it seems more like being allowed across someone’s door into a party where there is a host. Personal blogs are more 'broadcast yourself' - anything from a personal journal, to blatant self-promotion. Each application offers levels of privacy and intimacy.

However, what has become clear to me in the last couple of years is that it is probably a mistake (when trying to understand how the Web is evolving) to compare and categorize - rather one should think in terms of 'connectivity' (the ability to link one application to another) as the key to what's happening, and what you find yourself doing.

Facebook is important because of its size (400m +), personal blogs (approx. 200m), but Twitter (although about 150m) is ideal for gathering in, and pushing out (and filtering) information wherever you want it to go!

As the Internet becomes more important (as others insist on it as a means of communication) and it becomes less virtual (more an aspect of the 'real' world) then isolation in one preferred application, may come to mean ignorance, exclusion and vulnerability! Equally, when you find yourself distracted from work, surfing off to somewhere you never intended to be, ask who sent you there?!

(A few months later, I posted a link on the same community blog, 25.9.10)

Tim Skellett in yesterday's Guardian: 'Many people find a solace and acceptance online that they cannot find in person. ..As a bulletin board administrator, I know online friendships are no easy matter and neither is providing a safe place for them...’

(Then one of the site administrators commented, emphasising another quote from the article.)

‘..The protection of the private sphere of your online community will be the toughest part of your administration. It is precisely on this aspect that many fail, ending up closing down private sections of their bulletin boards, or even their entire forum when they cannot cope with the demands that the protection of confidentiality entails. Boards without such protection abound on the net, but are often marked by either aggressive cliques effectively in control, or by artificial and hard limits being placed on what may be discussed.'

(Three years on, although those new to the Web - particularly the young - may encounter similar problems, the idea of a ‘virtual reality’ has become even less sustainable. With the mobile devices we carry integrating so much data about us in real time, plus the sheer numbers of people connected by phone and Internet, the possibility of an anonymous, alternative or contrived online personality is rapidly disappearing. People are now made conspicuous by their lack of presence on social media. An avatar, in the computing sense, has become all about how authentic you can make it. Indeed, data capturing capabilities are now so sophisticated that they reveal sobering sociological truths that many had hoped had gone away – that within any age cohort and socio-economic group, the differences in educational attainment, health and wealth are as great as they were before the first computers were ever connected. By offering equal access to almost anyone, the Web reveals what appear to be the inherent inequalities of modern society. Just as computers and the Internet subvert traditional education and some forms of wealth creation, the data on the lives of millions show how much government’s interventions to aid social improvement have proved ineffective. NSA/GCHQ trawl for all those connected to wrongdoing, as neuroscience and network analysis use similar techniques to demonstrate that much of our behaviour is unconsciously viral and socially contagious, leaving anyone hoping to attribute cause, blame or responsibility going around and around in circles.)