1995 Flashback: The Internet? Bah!

[Lunican]

The Internet? Bah!

Feb 26, 1995 7:00 PM EST
Hype alert: Why cyberspace isn't, and will never be, nirvana

After two decades online, I'm perplexed. It's not that I haven't had a gas of a good time on the Internet. I've met great people and even caught a hacker or two. But today, I'm uneasy about this most trendy and oversold community. Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic.

Baloney. Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.

Consider today's online world. The Usenet, a worldwide bulletin board, allows anyone to post messages across the nation. Your word gets out, leapfrogging editors and publishers. Every voice can be heard cheaply and instantly. The result? Every voice is heard. The cacophany more closely resembles citizens band radio, complete with handles, harrasment, and anonymous threats. When most everyone shouts, few listen. How about electronic publishing? Try reading a book on disc. At best, it's an unpleasant chore: the myopic glow of a clunky computer replaces the friendly pages of a book. And you can't tote that laptop to the beach. Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we'll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure.

What the Internet hucksters won't tell you is tht the Internet is one big ocean of unedited data, without any pretense of completeness. Lacking editors, reviewers or critics, the Internet has become a wasteland of unfiltered data. You don't know what to ignore and what's worth reading. Logged onto the World Wide Web, I hunt for the date of the Battle of Trafalgar. Hundreds of files show up, and it takes 15 minutes to unravel themâ€"one's a biography written by an eighth grader, the second is a computer game that doesn't work and the third is an image of a London monument. None answers my question, and my search is periodically interrupted by messages like, "Too many connections, try again later."

Won't the Internet be useful in governing? Internet addicts clamor for government reports. But when Andy Spano ran for county executive in Westchester County, N.Y., he put every press release and position paper onto a bulletin board. In that affluent county, with plenty of computer companies, how many voters logged in? Fewer than 30. Not a good omen.

Point and click:
Then there are those pushing computers into schools. We're told that multimedia will make schoolwork easy and fun. Students will happily learn from animated characters while taught by expertly tailored software.Who needs teachers when you've got computer-aided education? Bah. These expensive toys are difficult to use in classrooms and require extensive teacher training. Sure, kids love videogamesâ€"but think of your own experience: can you recall even one educational filmstrip of decades past? I'll bet you remember the two or three great teachers who made a difference in your life.

Then there's cyberbusiness. We're promised instant catalog shoppingâ€"just point and click for great deals. We'll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obselete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internetâ€"which there isn'tâ€"the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople.

What's missing from this electronic wonderland? Human contact. Discount the fawning techno-burble about virtual communities. Computers and networks isolate us from one another. A network chat line is a limp substitute for meeting friends over coffee. No interactive multimedia display comes close to the excitement of a live concert. And who'd prefer cybersex to the real thing? While the Internet beckons brightly, seductively flashing an icon of knowledge-as-power, this nonplace lures us to surrender our time on earth. A poor substitute it is, this virtual reality where frustration is legion and whereâ€"in the holy names of Education and Progressâ€"important aspects of human interactions are relentlessly devalued.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/1995/02/26/the-internet-bah.html

[KenFSU]

What's missing from this electronic wonderland? Human contact. Discount the fawning techno-burble about virtual communities. Computers and networks isolate us from one another. A network chat line is a limp substitute for meeting friends over coffee. No interactive multimedia display comes close to the excitement of a live concert.

To expand on this point, I really enjoyed the below piece from the current issue of The New Yorker:

The Disconnect: Why are so many Americans living by themselves?
by Nathan Heller
April 16, 2012 .

Today, half of U.S. residents are single, and a third of all households have one occupant.

As reliably as autumn brings Orion to the night sky, spring each year sends a curious constellation to the multiplex: a minor cluster of romantic comedies and the couples who traipse through them, searching for love. These tend not to be people who have normal problems. She is poised, wildly successful in an ulcer-making job, lonely. He is sensitive, creative, equipped with a mysteriously vast apartment, unattached. For all these resources, nothing can allay their solitude. He tries to cook. She collects old LPs. He seeks love in the arms of chatty narcissists. She pulls all-nighters in her office. Eventually, her best friend, who may also be her divorced mother, tells her that something needs to change: she’s squandering her golden years; she’ll end up forlorn and alone. Across town, his stout buddy, who is married to someone named Debbee, rhapsodizes about the pleasures of cohabitation. None of this is helpful. As the movie’s first act nears its end point, we spy our heroine in the primal scene of rom-com solitude: curled up on her couch, wearing lounge pants, quaffing her third glass of wine, and excavating an enormous box of Dreyer’s. She is watching the same TV show that he is (whiskey half drained on his coffee table, Chinese takeout in his lap), and although this fact assures us of a destined romance, it is not so useful for the people on the screen. They are alone; their lives are grim. The show they’re watching seems, from the explosive flickering, to be about the invasion of Poland.

Few things are less welcome today than protracted solitudeâ€"a life style that, for many people, has the taint of loserdom and brings to mind such characters as Ted Kaczynski and Shrek. Does aloneness deserve a less untoward image? Aside from monastic seclusion, which is just another way of being together, it is hard to come up with a solitary life that doesn’t invite pity, or an enviable loner who’s not cheating the rules. (Even Henry David Thoreau, for all his bluster about solitude, ambled regularly into Concord for his mother’s cooking and the local bars.) Meanwhile, the culture’s data pool is filled with evidence of virtuous togetherness. “The Brady Bunch.” The March on Washington. The Yankees, in 2009. Alone, we’re told, is where you end up when these enterprises go south.

And yet the reputation of modern solitude is puzzling, because the traits enabling a solitary lifeâ€"financial stability, spiritual autonomy, the wherewithal to buy more dishwashing detergent when the box runs outâ€"are those our culture prizes. Plus, recent demographic shifts suggest that aloneness, far from fading out in our connected age, is on its way in. In 1950, four million people in this country lived alone. These days, there are almost eight times as many, thirty-one million. Americans are getting married later than ever (the average age of first marriage for men is twenty-eight), and bailing on domestic life with alacrity (half of modern unions are expected to end in divorce). Today, more than fifty per cent of U.S. residents are single, nearly a third of all households have just one resident, and five million adults younger than thirty-five live alone. This may or may not prove a useful thing to know on certain Saturday nights.

Eric Klinenberg, a sociologist at New York University, has spent the past several years studying aloneness, and in his new book, “Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone” (Penguin), he approaches his subject as someone baffled by these recent trends. Klinenberg’s initial encounter with the growing ranks of singletons, he explains, came while researching his first book, about the Chicago heat wave of 1995. During that crisis, hundreds of people living alone died, not just because of the heat but because their solitary lives left them without a support network. “Silently, and invisibly, they had developed what one city investigator who worked with them regularly called ‘a secret society of people who live and die alone,’ ” Klinenberg writes.

“Going Solo” is his attempt to see how this secret society fares outside the crucible of natural disaster. For seven years, Klinenberg and his research team interviewed more than three hundred people living alone, plus many of the caretakers, planners, and designers who help make that solitary life possible. Their sample included single people in everything from halfway hotels to elder-care facilities, and drew on fieldwork conducted primarily in seven cities: Austin, Texas; Chicago; Los Angeles; New York; San Francisco; Washington, D.C.; and Stockholm.

The results were surprising. Klinenberg’s data suggested that single living was not a social aberration but an inevitable outgrowth of mainstream liberal values. Women’s liberation, widespread urbanization, communications technology, and increased longevityâ€"these four trends lend our era its cultural contours, and each gives rise to solo living. Women facing less pressure to stick to child care and housework can pursue careers, marry and conceive when they please, and divorce if they’re unhappy. The “communications revolution” that began with the telephone and continues with Facebook helps dissolve the boundary between social life and isolation. Urban culture caters heavily to autonomous singles, both in its social diversity and in its amenities: gyms, coffee shops, food deliveries, laundromats, and the like ease solo subsistence. Age, thanks to the uneven advances of modern medicine, makes loners of people who have not previously lived by themselves. By 2000, sixty-two per cent of the widowed elderly were living by themselves, a figure that’s unlikely to fall anytime soon.

What turns this shift from demographic accounting to a social question is the pursuit-of-happiness factor: as a rule, do people live alone because they want to or because they have to? At one point, Klinenberg suggests that living alone provides “restorative solitude”; it may be “exactly what we need to reconnect.” But most of the people he introduces seem neither especially restored nor vigorously connected. They are insecure, proud of their freedoms but hungry for contact, anxious, frisky, smug, occasionally scaredâ€"in short, they experience a mixture of emotions that many people, even those who do not live alone, are apt to recognize.

Take, for example, Kimberly, a New Yorker who’s in the film business, and who underwent a sort of crisis when she found herself past thirty and living alone. She threw herself into her work, but at night she numbed herself with epic sessions of TV. “It took me a long time to figure out that it wasn’t gonna happen the way it happened in college,” she tells Klinenberg. “People didn’t just drop by.”

Things changed when she made the decision to buy an apartment, committing to a future alone. She renovated, began hosting parties, went freelance, tried Internet dating, and made contact with Single Mothers by Choice, a support organization for unattached women hoping to raise a child. Was this self-realization or resignation? Kimberly confesses, “I didn’t want to hang curtains by myself. I’d always thought I would do it with a partner and a lover.” Yet autonomy as an ideal brought her happiness, she says, partly because it freed her from the shame of falling short.

Some people remain single out of a disinclination to settle. Elsewhere, we meet Justin, a young man who came to New York out of college and moved in with friends after he found that living alone made it hard to meet people. The less Justin relied on his roommates for social entrée and domestic support, though, the more they seemed to get in the way, imposing on his space, his privacy (“When you bring a girl home, not only will the girl notice your roommates, but your roommates will notice her”), and his capacity to live as he pleased. He’s been alone since.

Most people who were brought up in the past half century have been taught to live this way, by their own rules, building the world they want. That beliefâ€"Klinenberg calls it “the cult of the individual”â€"may be the closest thing American culture has to a common ideal, and it’s the premise on which a lot of single people base their lives. If you’re ambitious and you’ve had to navigate a tough job market, alone can seem the best way to approach adulthood. Those who live by themselves are light on their feet (they’re able to move as the work demands) and flexible with their time (they have no meals to come home for). They tend to be financially resilient, too, since no one else is relying on their income. They are free to climb. To a particular kind of hyper-ambitious young person, entering into a domestic commitment too early carries a risk: what if you end up yoked to somebody who lacks the stamina to keep up? “For a rising generation of aspiring professionals, the twenties and early thirties is precisely not the time to get married and have a family,” Klinenberg observes.

Klinenberg’s research suggests that our usual perceptions about life alone get things backward. Far from being a mark of social abandonment, the solo life tends to be a path for moving ahead, for taking control of one’s circumstances. And, rather than consigning individuals to suffer in their solitude, aloneness may come at a cost to the community. The single life is inherently self-interested: it calls for vigilance on matters of self-preservation both large (financial autonomy) and small (dish detergent), and, in many cases, it frees the solitary from the sorts of daily interaction that help craft a sense of shared responsibility.

For one person, that may be a good deal. But, multiplied across a population, it becomes problematic. In a landmark study, “Bowling Alone” (2000), the Harvard political scientist Robert D. Putnam noted a puzzling three-decade decline in what he called “social capital”: the networks of support and reciprocity that bind people together and help things get done collectively. His work considered the waning of everything from P.T.A. enrollment to dinner parties and card games, but the core of his argument was declining civic participation. Between 1973 and 1994, the number of people who held a leadership role in any local organization fell by more than half. Newspaper readership among people under thirty-five dropped during a similar period, as did voting rates. Why? Putnam pointed to cultural shifts among the post-Second World War generation; the privatization of leisure (for example, TV); and, to a smaller extent, the growth of a commuting culture and the time constraints of two-career, or single-parent, family life. “Older strands of social connection were being abradedâ€"even destroyedâ€"by technological and economic and social change,” he wrote.

Putnam, in other words, saw public institutions as a casualty of the same forces of individuation driving modern aloneness. And, unlike Klinenberg, who’s optimistic about solo life largely because he’s optimistic about the socializing effects of technology, Putnam believed that digital communication offers too weak a connection to reverse the loss of community skills. Good socialization is a prerequisite for life online, not an effect of it, he pointed out; without a real-world counterpartâ€"the possibility of running into Web friends “at the grocery store”â€"Internet contact gets ranty, dishonest, and weird. What’s more, “real-world interactions often force us to deal with diversity, whereas the virtual world may be more homogeneous.” People lose the habit of reaching out to build bridges when they’re most needed. Technology may help us to feel less lonely, but it doesn’t really make us any less alone.

“Bowling Alone” appeared more than a decade agoâ€"an eternity in technology years. And yet the intervening time has, if anything, intensified Putnam’s concerns. A couple of recent books re-articulate them for the Facebook age. One of these, “Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other” (2011), by the M.I.T. psychologist Sherry Turkle, takes issue with the basic promises of digital connection. She thinks that togetherness, far from being strengthened by technology, has been crowded out by “the half-light of virtual community.”

Turkle is an unlikely candidate for this genre of techno-skepticism. Two of her previous books, “The Second Self” (1984) and “Life on the Screen” (1995), looked to a future of digital connection. Since then, though, her enthusiasm has foundered. Today, she’s unsettled by kids who text in lieu of making phone calls, by adults who answer e-mail during lectures, by Furbies, and by a recent book called “Love and Sex with Robots.” She thinks that technology is simultaneously drawing us away from social fulfillment and keeping us from finding solace in being alone. “To experience solitude you must be able to summon yourself by yourself,” she writes. “Many find that, trained by the Net, they cannot find solitude even at a lake or beach or on a hike.”

Turkle’s research assumes that connecting through technology is, essentially, a choice. But what’s the alternative? There’s a wistfulness in her plea for face time that runs through several studies of this kind. In “Together: The Rituals, Pleasures, and Politics of Cooperation” (Yale), Richard Sennett argues that coöperation is a skillâ€"one that, until recently, all adults were forced to learn. Now that we’re losing challenging, diverse forms of interaction in the workplace and at school, he worries, we’re growing up without this training. “A distinctive character type is emerging in modern society, the person who can’t manage demanding, complex forms of social engagement, and so withdraws,” he writes. It’s a compelling model, but a limited oneâ€"what if Sennett is simply looking for coöperation in the wrong places? “Together” is a book about messy, productive collaboration that makes no mention anywhere of Wikipedia.

Given our digital habits, the question isn’t whether we should use technology to ease our loneliness. It’s how. One day this past October, a New Yorker named Jeff Ragsdale, recently dumped and down on his luck, taped a flyer around Manhattan. It read, “If anyone wants to talk about anything, call me.” He included his cell-phone number. Within a day, he had received about a hundred calls and text messages. When people started posting pictures of the flyer on Reddit.com, the social-news Web site, that number jumped to seven hundred calls and a thousand text messages daily. The bestâ€"and worstâ€"of these have been collected in a new book, “Jeff, One Lonely Guy” (Amazon), edited by David Shields and Michael Logan. Jeff’s contacts are variously melancholy (“I’m the Minister of Depression”), engaged (“I don’t fall in love. I love jazz”), and perplexing (“I went through a traumatic breakup. Now I want to work in finance”). But there’s an undertow of pathos that often comes starkly to the surface, as here:

"Dad beat me, my sister, and my mom, and he finally got arrested. He went to prison and a mental institution. . . . I went through a bunch of foster homes. . . . He tried to contact me on Facebook, but I didn’t respond. . . . I tried to kill myself at 17 with an overdose of sleeping pills. The ambulance took me away."

Or here:

"After I did 9 years in the military, I worked as an X-ray tech at a trauma center. I lost my faith in humanity there. . . . I drank a 12-pack a night. I broke down finally when this homeless guy came in. He had lice in his dreadlocks so bad that he put ethyl alcohol all over his dreads and then lit a cigarette. Poof."

Turkle suggests that this kind of confession is a way of deflecting direct conflict: it can be easier to tell your woes and secrets to a stranger (or a lot of strangers) than to heal your wounds with people who are actually in your life. But black-box confession isn’t new to the computer age, and the main thing that distinguishes Jeff’s activities from the work of a priest or a counsellor is his lack of training. His callers know that. Many have aired their problems previously through professional channels and now want to connect with someone who’s like themâ€"someone who has nothing practical to offer but who may understand. It probably helps, a little. The truth is that lonely people at home typically contact friends, loiter in bookstores, work in cafés, take on roommates, open OKCupid profiles, or dance Tecktonik at a rave. They do what Klinenberg’s subject Kimberly did, and bring people into their lives. They text Jeff. They don’t sit by themselves for months staring at their coffee tables.

The real perils of life alone are more specific. Klinenberg had aimed to work past his knee-jerk idea about being aloneâ€"namely, that it’s an awful way to live in moments of disaster. But the cautionary gist of his study is basically: it’s an awful way to live in moments of disaster. Caught off guard, solo-goers can be left without recourse. This is a problem particularly for the elderly, who are often rendered single by the death of a spouse and whose risk of health or domestic disaster runs high.

Klinenberg offers many proposals for dealing with such eventualities, some reasonable (he suggests better funding programs to provide the elderly with caretakers), a few quixotic (he has real hopes for social robots). But even elective solo-going doesn’t alleviate the old-age problem. This decade will deliver the first cohort of senior citizens who reached adulthood after the liberalizations of the sixtiesâ€"the baby boomers are collecting Social Security. As a consequence, we’re starting to encounter a group of old folks for whom aloneness is a choice, an identity, an exercise of freedom. And the ethics of senior care will change as a result. If Mom has lived alone, successfully and proudly, for four decades, is it socially responsible to move her to a home when she stops remembering to pay her gas bill? Or is it an offense against the person she has spent adulthood laboring to be?

At one point, Klinenberg introduces us to Dee, a ninety-year-old widow who has lived alone for the past twenty-nine years in a Harlem apartment, and has no intention of leaving, ever. “This is my house,” she says, not unreasonably. “The idea of a nursing home andâ€"what is the other thing?â€"assisted living. I dread the thought of it.” Today, this fierce autonomy is striking from somebody of Dee’s age and generation; thirty years on, it may be the norm. The ease with which we can lead a single life is, as sociologists show, a social achievement in itself. And the people who suffer most from aloneness are those who require the most care to begin with. Otherwise, we would do well not to worry too much. The greatest grace of living single is the existence of other people who are doing the same. Widowers find friends at clubs or churches. Single mothers weave a network of support. Even rom-com characters find love, to the applause of strangers. They’re no longer alone, the story goes. But, then again, they never really were. ♦

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2012/04/16/120416crbo_books_heller#ixzz1rpm5VCN0

[BridgeTroll]

Interesting article Ken...  I may have to read the book Bowling alone...

“Bowling Alone” (2000), the Harvard political scientist Robert D. Putnam noted a puzzling three-decade decline in what he called “social capital”: the networks of support and reciprocity that bind people together and help things get done collectively. His work considered the waning of everything from P.T.A. enrollment to dinner parties and card games, but the core of his argument was declining civic participation. Between 1973 and 1994, the number of people who held a leadership role in any local organization fell by more than half. Newspaper readership among people under thirty-five dropped during a similar period, as did voting rates. Why? Putnam pointed to cultural shifts among the post-Second World War generation; the privatization of leisure (for example, TV); and, to a smaller extent, the growth of a commuting culture and the time constraints of two-career, or single-parent, family life. “Older strands of social connection were being abradedâ€"even destroyedâ€"by technological and economic and social change,” he wrote.

And...

Putnam, in other words, saw public institutions as a casualty of the same forces of individuation driving modern aloneness. And, unlike Klinenberg, who’s optimistic about solo life largely because he’s optimistic about the socializing effects of technology, Putnam believed that digital communication offers too weak a connection to reverse the loss of community skills. Good socialization is a prerequisite for life online, not an effect of it, he pointed out; without a real-world counterpartâ€"the possibility of running into Web friends “at the grocery store”â€"Internet contact gets ranty, dishonest, and weird. What’s more, “real-world interactions often force us to deal with diversity, whereas the virtual world may be more homogeneous.” People lose the habit of reaching out to build bridges when they’re most needed. Technology may help us to feel less lonely, but it doesn’t really make us any less alone.

I see some of this at work... people prefer to send countless emails or texts to discuss an issue when a face to face or phone call would quickly and effectively solve a problem.  Discussions or conversations among a group of people has become more difficult as the participants are distracted by multiple text conversations on their phone... and momentarily dropping out of the "in person" conversation.  The text or email seems to take precedence over voice or face to face...

[KenFSU]

Thanks.

And I would highly recommend Bowling Alone. It's not exactly a page turner, but it's a really incredible book nonetheless.

Sadly -- at the risk of sounding like a (30 year old) dinosaur -- I strongly believe that "community" has already largely been replaced by individualism and autonomy, thanks almost exclusively to technology.

I used to worry about how today's youth would be able to develop deep, meaningful relationships and communicate effectively when growing up in the current 160 character SMS/Twitter era, where what happened on Facebook often had more resonance than what happened face-to-face. Then the depressing notion occured to me that they would probably be just fine, as this new era is here to stay, and will eventually become the new social reality, if it hasn't already.

[KenFSU]

P.S. On another somewhat related note, also from the New Yorker, is this great piece on Instagram.

Instagram’s Instant Nostalgia
Posted by Ian Crouch

Instagram has already passed the Web verb test: to “Instagram” something is to take a picture with your smartphone, run it through one of the application’s photo filters (making it appear extra-vibrant, or overexposed), and then send it out to your friends and followers. On Instagram, a freshly plated weeknight dinner is transformed into a little work of food art, which in turn is rewarded by “likes” or comments of support: “Looks delicious!” “Wow, yum!” It’s as if your Brussels sprouts get stamped into a state of instant history.

Although the means and ease of transmitting images may be novel, photo-sharing networks didn’t create this urge. Susan Sontag describes the central role of the camera in everyday life in “On Photography”: “Through photographs, each family constructs a portrait-chronicle of itselfâ€"a portable kit of images that bears witness to its connectedness.” Substitute the word “family” with its contemporary replacementâ€"“friends”â€"and you get Instagram’s product statement. Sontag, writing in the nineteen-seventies, couldn’t have known just how portable that kit of images would become, but she was attuned even then to the ways in which we actively construct a “portrait-chronicle” of our lives. Essentially, we become our own documentarians and archivists in order to impose meaning on daily life, to show that we are honoring moments with the seriousness we are told they are supposed to possess, and to preserve that honor for posterity. We once did this in the semi-private realm of our families and social circles. Now we do so on a larger scale.

Much of Instagram’s appeal, however, comes from something more simple: it makes everything in our lives, including and especially ourselves, look better. We live in a world of bad lighting, and are forever stuck in mundane locations and posed in unflattering positions. Instagram gives us an ideal selfâ€"our edges sharpened by finely tuned manipulations of contrast and color. We look like the subjects of a magazine photo shootâ€"the nineteen-seventies rock-and-roll stars we always hoped we’d be. (One of Instagram’s filters is called “Nashville,” hinting at the Altman movie, or perhaps a smoke-filled outlaw-country recording studio.)

There is also an Instagram filter called “1977” that gives pictures a square white border reminiscent of a Polaroid photo, and fades out the colors to suggest the aging and yellowing that occurs over time. Much has been made of the connection between Instagram and the generalized hipster sensibility, which places a premium value on the old, the artisanal, and the idiosyncratic. But Instagram taps a fetishization of the past that is more universal. In “On Photography,” Sontag writes,

It is a nostalgic time right now, and photographs actively promote nostalgia. Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects photographed are, just by virtue of being photographed, touched with pathos. An ugly or grotesque subject may be moving because it has been dignified by the attention of the photographer. A beautiful subject can be the object of rueful feelings, because it has aged or decayed or no longer exists. All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.

Instagram’s “most popular” feed is filled with sunsets, over cities and beaches and points in between. It might be said, though, that all Instagrammed photos emphasize photography as an elegiac or twilight art, one that rushes and fakes the emotion of old photographs by cutting out the wait for history entirely, and giving something just a few seconds old the texture of time. We are creating a kind of instant nostalgia for moments that never quite were.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2012/04/instagrams-instant-nostalgia.html#ixzz1rq3glZdu

[KenFSU]

And also, a second great take on Instagram, this time from Grantland.

It's just so fascinating and unsettling to me to see how technology has created this romanticized false reality -- a reality that has increasingly superceded actually reality in importance to a hell of a lot of people.

Instagram and Digital Classism
By Carles on April 10, 2012 1:00 PM ET

'Grantland Illustration'Our 'lives' are allegedly a meaningful experience, and the Internet is supposed to be a place to document our lives in a tasteful way, contributing to a larger cultural discussion by simply sharing ourselves. The Web sites that you load every day are just as important as the clothes you wear, the technology you own, the television shows you watch, and the car you drive. Basically the same ‘material things’ that allow us to actively or inactively participate in modern classist behaviors are equally as embedded in our digital behavior.

Digital classism is the emergence of varying classes of people existing on the Internet who utilize habits of technological participation as a way to establish their status in digital society.
Your digital existence can be enhanced or bottlenecked by your computer, your browser, your 4G wireless device, or even the first website that you type when you want to ‘read the news.’ Members of the digital upper class perceive themselves as being the most connected, self-aware, and tasteful in their sharing mechanisms. The middle class is a group of sharing and caring social network users who lack the ability to question their online existences in the same way that a Middle American is somehow programmed to never question why they are supposed to start a family, get a decent job, and do their best to raise decent kids. The impoverished class are the technological laggards, seemingly confused and frustrated by the wavering disconnect between reality and their digital existence, often resulting in the darkest displays of ‘humanity’ on the Internet.

On Monday, the popular app Instagram was acquired by Facebook for $1 billion. It represented the acquisition of a perceived upper-class product by the mass-market social network Facebook.

The billion-dollar deal made the entire world attempt to rationalize what was actually acquired. A unique technology? The acqui-hire of a workforce? A ‘cool’ brand and user base that cannot be replicated because of its organic growth? The simple elimination of a competitor? While Silicon Valley is America’s symbolic home of innovation, it seems like Facebook’s $1 billion acquisition of Instagram was more about the investment in the digital photograph as something that can still be meaningful and personal, not just some image file that is lost in the grid of a social network’s user interface. Now that smartphone cameras have cannibalized the point-and-shoot markets, Instagram provides a service that allows users to feel as though their captured moments can be ‘elevated’ with the use of vintage filters and effects.

It’s easy to forget what a disruptive technology that digital photography has been, not just when it comes to quality, consumer usability, and the creation of affordable price points, but in the way our relationship with images changed when it became a little bit too easy for EVERYONE to take a picture. All of a sudden, your aunt was whipping out her digital camera at a chain restaurant, offering to send everyone in the family a high-resolution photo of the latest family meal. Some girl you went to high school with managed to take 100 pictures at a tacky club in the suburbs where you went to high school. Even that person you thought you respected took an accidentally depressing picture of their meal and tried to pretend they were a 'foodie.'

Every day, we get to see a bunch of mediocre images captured by mediocre cameras on our overpriced phones, uploaded via our overpriced data plans. But for the digital upper class, it is worth paying to be a participant of this instant cycle of sharing. Instagram has placed itself as a necessary tool in this process, an easy-to-use mobile app that Facebook bets will serve as the definitive photo-editing and -sharing tool of the current digital era.

Digital photography is the driving force behind the digital classism with which we live our online lives, because it instantly allows you to size up your class competitor’s lens on the world. The pictures that we take on our phones aren’t just a series of meaningless pixels uploaded to the cloud. They are supposed to be the precious moments of our 'lives.' Instagram created a space where all classes of digital users can feel comfortable capturing a moment, protected in an insulated environment with authentic effects (especially before a version of the app was released on Android days before the acquisition).

There has been a predictable backlash against Facebook’s purchase of ‘something that used to be cool’ which is indicative of our natural tendency to react to mergers and acquisitions as digital classists. We’re not searching for a perfect, uniform product or service for everyone. For some reason, digital consumers believe that their free will to visit websites, download apps, and curate the content networks upon which they share themselves is supposed to add up to a meaningful personal journey.

Facebook is not the preferred destination or permanent mailing address of the digital upper class.

Although it is the most popular social network, Facebook has come to be associated with ‘privacy concerns’ that are neglected by the middle and lower classes of digital society, but overvalued by upper-class members who complain about things on Twitter. While Facebook became one of the most valuable sites on the Internet by allowing mass-market audiences to participate in ‘life’ as we now know it, it is still under the threat of becoming an impersonal experience without constant innovation that is aimed at making users feel like they are building something meaningful as they upload their ‘lives’ to the social network. Being on Facebook just doesn’t make you feel like a VIP.

As we’ve witnessed with most social networks and online tools, it is important to cultivate the sense of a VIP community. Facebook did it by initially launching at Ivy League schools. Back in the day, Gmail was ‘invite only,’ and invites were sold for stupid amounts of money on eBay. Instagram cultivated its initial VIP brand on the iPhone, back when even the iPhone still felt like a VIP experience protected by data-plan, handset-price, and network-exclusivity barriers. Instagram did its best to over-preserve the idea of Instagram as a VIP experience. It wasn’t trying to scale by adding excessive social connectivity features and functionality that Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter did better. All it did was allow us to ‘sincerely’ or ‘post-ironically’ add photo filters to our camera-phone pictures. Even the idea of an ‘app’ itself is an insulated environment that is preserved from the excessive noise often associated with lifestreaming.

Facebook’s Instagram acquisition proves that the billion-dollar idea that defines humanity is that we are all desperate to immediately capture both the important and mundane moments of our lives, but not at the cost of letting the state of technology marginalize the narrative voice. Initially, digital photography eliminated the positive feelings of nostalgia associated with staring at a picture from the past. Instagram serves as a gateway toward making pictures feel meaningful and personal in a digital format.

At least until the digital lower class ruins it, marginalizing what we thought was once a method of innovative digital self-expression and communication, just like they did with Myspace.

[Non-RedNeck Westsider]

I see some of this at work... people prefer to send countless emails or texts to discuss an issue when a face to face or phone call would quickly and effectively solve a problem. 

I have a slightly different take on the prominent use of multiple e-mails - accountability and CYA, not necesarily the avoidance of human contact.  I routinely follow up person-person conversations with an email for the reasons listed above.

[BridgeTroll]

I see some of this at work... people prefer to send countless emails or texts to discuss an issue when a face to face or phone call would quickly and effectively solve a problem. 

I have a slightly different take on the prominent use of multiple e-mails - accountability and CYA, not necesarily the avoidance of human contact.  I routinely follow up person-person conversations with an email for the reasons listed above.

I guess I understand the CYA aspect and in many cases it is certaily needed... but there are quite a few who I deal with daily... who simply refuse to pick up the phone and discuss... so I short circuit them.  Upon reciet of the very first text or email.... I call them.  I ask questions... get replies... and make sure we are all on the same page.  Email and text simply does not do that without constant back and forth... misunderstandings are common and alot of... "Oh... I thought you meant...x,y,z.  Call me a dinosaur... I MUCH prefer a back and forth conversation.

[I-10east]

Just face it, the 'Informational Superhighway' will always dominate every civilized society, from now, into the unforeseeable future. 

[BridgeTroll]

Just face it, the 'Informational Superhighway' will always dominate every civilized society, from now, into the unforeseeable future. 

I agree... and I love the "interweb" as much as the next guy.  I really cannot imagine life without it at this point.  It is a wonderful tool and the future is unimaginable.

[Non-RedNeck Westsider]

Just face it, the 'Informational Superhighway' will always dominate every civilized society, from now, into the unforeseeable future. 

I agree... and I love the "interweb" as much as the next guy.  I really cannot imagine life without it at this point.  It is a wonderful tool and the future is unimaginable.

Very true.  And while we still can't teleport actual, living beings yet, 3D printers are getting down to a pricepoint that's not out of reach for most small business / tech-geeks.  So if you have an idea, you can model it and send a working, physical prototype out via email.  It's all pretty cool stuff.

[I-10east]

Email and text simply does not do that without constant back and forth... misunderstandings are common and alot of... "Oh... I thought you meant...x,y,z.  Call me a dinosaur... I MUCH prefer a back and forth conversation.

I totally agree. Most of my communications are on an on-line forum like this one, or in person. I don't even like to talk on the phone that much, and I'm virtually non-existent with emails/texts. It's kinda weird, I'm stuck half in the 80's, and half in the 21st century. LOL

[Lunican]

I think that this paragraph was actually the worst prediction of them all:

Then there's cyberbusiness. We're promised instant catalog shoppingâ€"just point and click for great deals. We'll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obselete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internetâ€"which there isn'tâ€"the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople.

Though his prediction about computers in the classroom was pretty accurate.

[BridgeTroll]

I think that this paragraph was actually the worst prediction of them all:

Then there's cyberbusiness. We're promised instant catalog shopping—just point and click for great deals. We'll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obselete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet—which there isn't—the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople.

Though his prediction about computers in the classroom was pretty accurate.

Do not be too hard on the predictor.  I am still waiting for my flying car and other wonders promised to me in my youth...  and on the other side... history is full of "the next big thing"... that never was...

[CharleyNovember]

"That darn horseless carriage will never replace good ole' bess and my wagon." Our entire society was changed forever by the automobile. It is now being changed by other technology. Society evolves for the better? For worse? We shall see.