Mediated

One thing that most struck me about Worldcon was how much personal interaction has become mediated, if not dominated, by social media.

I frequently found myself in a group of people who were looking at email, checking their twitter feed, browsing Facebook, and sharing cute cat pictures and amusing Youtube videos, all while trying to maintain face-to-face contact at the same time.

It seems that the conversational paradigm has shifted, and not for the better.

Do you know why I hang with my friends?  For the conversation.  I can do Facebook and email at home.  I don’t need to travel a thousand miles to a convention in order to catch up on the latest cute cat pictures.  But the constant checking of social media has become so habitual that it goes on more or less continually, a weird nervous tic, just as fifty years ago people lit up cigarettes in order to have something to do with their hands. And when the consumers get their fix, their cute cat picture, it becomes much more interesting and immediate than the person actually in the room with them.  They’ve been trained by their devices to focus their intention on the screen.  (It’s a good thing that an automobile windshield looks like a television screen, because otherwise they’d be running over people all the time.)

Good Lord, I can’t be that boring, can I?  To have person after person abandon conversation in order to re-tweet something?

I was on a panel about consensual reality at the convention, but at that point it hadn’t sunk in, and I didn’t mention the phenomenon of people carrying on two conversations at the same time, one in person, one online.  I wonder how many people in the audience were keeping an eye on their smartphones, just in case something arrived that was more entertaining than we were.

I see it in my own life.  I don’t see my friends as often as I used to, because they’re all reachable online.  I interact with the actual world less, because so much of it reaches me via electronic media. I don’t go out to movies much, because Netflix is right there, streaming 24/7.

Maybe I should learn to Skype, just to talk to my friends.