OK To Disconnect

For reasons that will be obvious to anyone who reads this blog, I'm not the sort of person likely to write an article bemoaning how kids today are tuning out of normal social interaction by listening to their iPods all day. But for those of you who are working on just such an article, I've got a tip -- one of you should borrow the phrase that iTunes uses to announce that it's finished loading up your iPod with music: "OK To Disconnect." What kind of message is that sending the youth of America?

E. M. Forster is no doubt rolling in his grave...

Comments

[Ian]

This sounds like a Radiohead album.

[jl]

I often want to disconnect from the internet and disconnect my phone. And there are some people I don't want to connect with - and sometimes these are my friends. The Apple pop-up is saying disconnect the wire, but the broader message resonates: retreat into your music, your mind, your little ephemeral consciousness. Meanwhile: war, environmental collapse, government surveillance.

I'm not up on my postmodern theory, but it seems like even the connected/disconnected dichotomy has lost all meaning.

We are so far gone in our society from anything that resembles the connectedness of the last two centuries, the connectedness of a real city. Like the world in Joyce's Ulysses. Or even in the Beat poets. The baseline has moved so far that we think going to a movie with a friend is a social occassion.

There is no going back. But I'm old enough to remember wandering around a college campus without a cell phone and with no e-mail to hurry and go check. Then I delighted in the color of the trees and leaves and formations of clouds, and chance encounters with acquaintances who weren't in a hurry to "get somewhere".

What can possibly follow except the disintegration of a society? And what do we see happening?

[Matt_c]

>>What can possibly follow except the disintegration of a society? And what do we see happening?

It's really easy to be pessimistic; one of the best things about Everything Bad is GOod for You is that it performs a Copernican Revolution regarding popular culture. Adorno can stick his head up his dialectic (well, no I like dialectics - he can stick it somewhere else) that goes beyond pure academic bluster.

I can imagine people bemoaning newspapers:
- People learning about the world alone? In their houses? No-one talking to each other anymore...

And yet newspapers are credited with the creation of national communities. (http://www.revision-notes.co.uk/revision/964.html) Whether you regard these communities as negative is another issue but to see technological advance with such a pessimistic teleology always strikes me as weird.

I'm not saying the progress is one way but that percieved negatives may have as yet unpercieved positives. And maybe even some banal side-effects right in the middle.

[jl]

I'm a weird guy - I admit it. I'm a software programmer, what do you expect?

I think the internet is great - social software is interesting - web 2.0, all that. I'm agnostic as to whether technological advances are a net positive or net negative. But the internet could end up helping society through this *weird* period we are going through. You have to admit that the world is bizarre on all levels these days, stranger than fiction. And a lot of it's strangeness has to do with mass communications - all the fictions we are fed by the newspapers and television. By the way, I don't have a television. Not because I am a luddite, but just because it is so agonizingly boring and useless. I think you learn less about the world through television becaue it distorts your view of the world. Cable may be different, I wouldn't know.

I think even Socrates didn't like the fact that Plato was writing stuff down because it would degrade his powers of memory. But clearly writing is one of the greatest advances in human history.

I just liked that period of my life when things were simpler. When things were slower. When getting to know people and exchange ideas was more direct. What can I say? I like human beings, faces, and bodies. Call me strange . . .

[Matt_c]

I didn't mean *you* were weird, though if you insist... :)

I know what you mean about simplicity, esp. in relation to relationships. I occasionally find monitoring all the ways in which I am communicated with exhausting. I check my email, read BBC News, blog stuff, watch TV, read books I've ordered from Amazon and which have been delivered by the postman... I think I've reached breaking point; last week my phone battery went and I didn't even notice.

My worry is not that mass communications feed me a fiction per se (in the sense that its not true when its delivered) but that it allows me to make my own fictions. Mainly television news delivers news in such a piecemeal and basic way and without context that all the viewer ends up knowing is that some people have died in Chechnya (or wherever) and probably nothing more or less but being able to jump to a variety of conclusions regarding 'blame' - Russians or Muslims? Bite size news is worse than no news.

But, no, it's not strange to look for simplicity. I think I'm just used to mainly communicating with my friends through technology at the moment, which probably explains my emphasis on the positives. I'll hopefully be moving a lot closer to them soon so I won't need to use the technology so much. Maybe I'll change my mind then.

[Kevin Farnham]

It is an incredibly different, new world for those of us who are old enough to have teens. I'm a software engineer too, but also a student of James Joyce, Dante, Coleridge, Spenser...

My wife discovered MySpace about six months ago. We had become used to stating what seemed obvious (to us) to our daughter: "You'll get your homework done much sooner if you do it without listening to Rhapsody while you IM with 6 different people..." but that message wasn't getting through. Then my wife joined MySpace, explored our daughters sites (yes, plural!), and those of her local friends, was suitably stunned, showed the horror to me...

Well, the end result is that we are now writing our first book, a guide for parents on MySpace safety.

The world has in a sense both imploded and exploded. It's possible for something to become huge with almost no non-participants noticing. How did MySpace have 50 Million members before it was even noticed by the mainstream media?

Time magazine had a cover article about wired kids this past week. Communication through technology will be the fundamental, primary type of communication in the future, because today's teens use it that way, and they are the future of this world. Our effort and plea in our book is for parents to "get with it" and understand the new reality.

But--I don't think Joyce and Shakespeare and Homer are lost. They will be refound, their heads will reappear in the new ocean. New technology is always a blitz at first, and the first users grab attention because so few people are there. Eventually, content becomes conditioned by its value. The value in Joyce, Plato, Goethe is enduring. Hence, we will see them standing tall in the new human communication realm before too long. I wouldn't worry about that...

More worrisome is: are our iPod toting MySpace posting teens going to leave their one-time "hip" parents in the dust just for today, or will the gap last forever?

[Ms. Jen]

I will be cranky for the other point of view and out my age here... 37. Today's use of iPods is no different from the fact that I spent my whole 4 years of high school wearing a Walkman between classes. I survived my own introversion, dislike of my peers, and my school, and am a fine, friendly connected adult.

I find TV to be much more disturbing than MySpace and millions more are sucked into it every day/night than are on MySpace. Frankly, I would rather be watching friends MySpace bulletins queue up, which some are banal, some function like an AIM custom availability (*bored at work*) and listen to the music of a band that I have never heard of and could be my kids... than ... watching any of the 20 minutes of commercials for every 40 minutes tv programming.

As for teens and MySpace, really how different is it from watchin MTV and the advertising there? Or from going to the Mall? Sex is being sold just the same.

My 34 year old friend Alex has a 15 year old cousin on MySpace and he regularly posts to her comments (Does your mom know you are telling people you are 19? Guys, this one is jailbait...etc) and reads her blog and teases her about her MySpace friends at family gatherings. Instead of switching her identity and losing her cousin online, she is proud that a member of her extended family is one of her MySpace friends.

[joy]

Internet has become a part of my life.

[kit]

I am very interested at the internet.Crazy.