Tardy with my posting as always

My response to Baron’s final chapter:

I’m skeptical.

All these authors we’ve read point to increased “loneliness” and social isolation in the wake of our new technology, but I don’t quite buy it. It seems to me that throughout history, most generations view technological change/innovation as cause of society’s deterioration. There always seems to be a tendency to see the past as simpler and purer than the present. Television, the telephone, the telegraph, the printing press—these (and probably lots of other technologies that we’ve forgotten by now) were viewed at the time as “threats” to the established way of life and was met with resistance…. and some of that resistance seems to be related to control of communication and relationships.

I can’t help but think of the Tower of Babel “incident” in Genesis, which seems thematically appropriate. Imagine all of mankind congregated in a grand metropolis, where everybody speaks one language and communicates without barrier. They have grand aspirations: to build a tower to connect themselves to Heaven (opening new lines of communication and transport, if you will). Their plan backfires, and God makes them all speak different languages so that they are socially isolated and unable to communicate or conduct business with each other. A moral in the Bible story seems to be that too much communication and connectedness leads to disaster. Don’t try to play God; humans need to know their limits.

But the Tower of Babel tells me that our worries are not new: we crave connectedness and fear social isolation, and too much connectedness can cause isolation (um, with God’s intervention?… haha, never mind).

I think that our worries about social ramifications of cell phone and Internet usage are rather silly. Humans have been using language for thousands of years, and our use of language has constantly been evolving. A goal of language has always been to connect with people, and I don’t think that’s changed. The concerns of today are the same as they have been. So I don’t think that the nature of human communication or the nature of human relationships is “shifting.” If anything, I think the changes we see part of an “ebb and flow” that will adjust itself with the next wave of technology.

But, all right, I don’t think it’s completely pointless to study the social consequences of blogging and cell phone use. I think it’s incredibly interesting, both because it gives me a different perspective on today’s society, and because it is so much “bigger”—has much broader global reach—than previous new technologies. Never in human history have people on opposite sides of the globe had synchronous contact with each other, and now I can have video, audio, or merely text-based contact with friends in Singapore, England, Peru, etc. But, I argue that though the means of communication, the speed, and the geographic distance involved has changed, there is not much difference between human communication/social interaction in the 1500s and now. Back then they used sailing ships and rode horses, yeah? And back then most people only had close relationships with people they saw face-to-face on a regular basis. But the content of their messages were the same, and they definitely used abbreviations and sloppy spelling. Baron talks about how Shakespeare spelled his own name five ways. And remember how many words he just made up? I’m sure his detractors bewailed his mistreatment of the English language, even though we find in him a pillar of English literature and language.

Baron talks about how we are constantly “able to pull the strings on the ways we interact with other people” (220). Haven’t humans always used strategies to control interactions? What is the purpose of etiquette?

I am trying to say that the more things change the more they stay the same. I do see the points that Baron makes, and she makes them very well. But I think that “loneliness” and “isolation” are very subjective, very relative concepts. Didn’t people complain of loneliness often in the 19th-century European metropolises (think Germany, Paris, St. Petersburg… a lot of the literature has to do with people feeling an “outsider” in industrialized cities, it’s a trope of Romantic literature)?