The new technology we have to communicate is amazing and wonderful. Yet I suspect many people would still at some moments resonate to these words of the actor Daniel Craig:
The quotidian turn in proceedings prompts a query as to whether Craig is on Facebook. “No, I am bloody not,” he says vehemently. “And I’m not on Twitter either. They’ve proved pretty useful in Egypt and they might yet prove useful in Iran, but here? ‘Woke up this morning, had an egg’? What relevance is that to anyone?” He’s building up a head of steam now. “Social networking? Just call each other up and go to the pub and have a drink. There’s some talk of a new class-system paradigm – that, in future, the world will be divided between those who ‘get’ social networking and those who don’t. I’m really not bothered. But I hope the generations to come learn to be a little bit cynical and learn how to mess it up a bit.”
Perhaps Craig’s antipathy to social networking is fostered by his need to “shut out enormous amounts of crap” that get posted, texted and Tweeted about him…”oh man, the hating on the internet. Maureen Dowd wrote a good piece about this in The New York Times; no one’s going to question the prudence of it, because of the comment-is-free lobby ensuring that the internet is only tokenly policed, but, if you actually read some of this stuff, it’s like there’s a bunch of sociopaths out there who want to go out and rip you to pieces. It feels like that’s the norm, that the internet has licensed this vitriol. I think there needs to be a big debate about it, some kind of research done into how it affects our actual relations with others.” He pauses, and sighs. “I mean, if people are dealing with their lives by hating, that’s a problem, isn’t it?”
Lets see - takeaways include:
- some people on the Internet are mean
- fame can be a drag
I like Mr. Craig as an actor, but would we be paying the slightest bit of attention to this if he wasn’t famous? Clay Shirky, he’s not.
> Social networking? Just call each other up and go to the pub and
> have a drink. There’s some talk of a new class-system paradigm – that,
> in future, the world will be divided between those who ‘get’ social
> networking and those who don’t. I’m really not bothered. But I hope
> the generations to come learn to be a little bit cynical and learn
> how to mess it up a bit.”
That’s actually a pretty interesting question to me, and I would like to see it pulled out of the personal context and debated. To people who spend 90% of their free time (and 80% of their work time it seems) Twittering, Facebooking, etc. it must seem to be a fundamental activity and that those who “don’t get it are doomed”. But what is the percentage of the total population that does that, and what if anything does it actually affect? Are people who don’t spend a large percentage of their days with their faces stuck in 3×4 LCD screens missing something, and if so what? When the current crop of 20-year-olds gets to the point where they have to do real work, will they be able to do so?
I don’t have any answers to these questions myself, but I am curious.
Cranky
Movie stars spend a huge amount of time and effort in trying to control the public’s perception of them. They have full-time staffers and agents to massage and manipulate the celebrity media and they spend most of their time “appearing” at things and “giving interviews” like the one you’ve linked to. It’s not surprising that they’re unhappy about publicity that they don’t know how to control.
I think there needs to be a big debate about it…
Forget that…
The big debate would quickly descend into the very depths of what it is debating.
No what is needed is for people to police their own threads. Kleiman has posted the house rules here multiple times. I like to think I abide the rules for the most part. Enforced rules enforce civility. While the inverse leads to yahoos yahooing. (Remember when Yahoo! was king of the young internet? It was the perfect aptronym: Wanna cyber? What’s your stats?)
Here is an example of what I mean:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/damian-carrington-blog/2011/jul/28/ipcc-climate-change-science-pachauri
Everyone knows a climate change thread will bring out Koch’s army en masse. They will totally dominate and destroy any attempted conversation of point/counter point. Climate Science is a honey pot for attracting zombies. So check out the first comment on the link above. That’s the way it is done. It is up to the owners of sites to clamp down on “free speech”. As more do, the policed sites will offer an alternative and civil people will come.
I think we are seeing that transition right now…
I’m not sure what the majority of comments so far in this thread have to do with (AIUI) Craig’s point: Facebook is banal cr*p, who cares to read this drivel? I do the bookface for my work, not because I loooove to see weekly updates on 9 babies, all of whom are going through the EXACT SAME developmental stages as ~11 billion babies before them.
I confess to not understanding the allure of either Facebook or Twitter…is the root of “twitter” tweet or twit?
But I am going to hijack this little thread and ask the proprietor of the site to explain the hows and whys that the debt ceiling solution (sic) is all good.
koreyel: Just to be clear, I wasn’t thinking of RBC at all when I passed this along. I think we are 80-90% of the time a civilized forum and that is a credit to everyone who posts, comments and reads here. What I thought more about were the cases of gay or otherwise “different” teenagers being harassed to the point of depression and suicide through social networking and tweets, the self-involved inanity which Facebook promotes as Dan Staley so correctly points out in his comment above, and the number of people who hate on the Internet as an avocation. Try this interesting experiment: When you see a hateful, abusive remark on a blog, google on the commenter’s name and you will often find hundreds of such remarks on many blogs…some people are nearly full time dispensing abuse on the Internet — why? What is wrong with them that that attacking strangers is rewarding, and what is it about the medium (wonderful as it generally is) that facilitates their pathology?
I know you weren’t thinking of RBC Keith. I was just pointing out one of the main reasons I became a poster here. The rules force one to be more civil. That’s a good thing. Especially for those of us with naturally acid pens. My post was a claim that the Wild West internet (Yahoo! in the 90s) is in ebb. All because individuals are erecting rules of conduct (like barbwire of yore). Civilization is being carved out one blog at a time.
As for what there is about this medium that facilitates that sort of pathology…
That’s a deep question. And like all deep questions I expect it has more than one answer. My initial leaning is that the old school ground retort: “Sticks and stones will break my bones, but names will never hurt me”, is a monster lie. Language can be violent and cause major trauma. But we evolved in a situation where our taunting was always face-to-face. Physical clues as to the damage we were causing allowed the brain’s empathy algorithms to fire up and apply brakes. On the internet all the physical signals of caused pain are removed, and so the taunter feels no bounds, or satisfaction that he has hit home and can cease. I am reminded of the hormone (gherlin) released by the stomach that tells the brain it is sated. Like that, the epic haters never feel full…
Another idea: What percent of the human race are sociopaths? And suppose they all had internet access…
Keith poses the musical question:
some people are nearly full time dispensing abuse on the Internet — why? What is wrong with them that that attacking strangers is rewarding …?
The answer has been known since the antiquity of Usenet (a time when haters were less often anonymous or pseudonymous, but no less common) :
It’s a desperate need for attention, a need to be noticed.
Some people would rather be despised than be unknown.