A Little Too Connected? Media Meditation #2

A few days ago, I was writing a paper.

Well actually, if I'm being completely honest, I was writing a paper, texting one friend of mine, on AIM with another, checking facebook, and updating my brand-new twitter account. As I stared at my slowly developing homework, I wondered if I was living a life where now I was just too connected to the people around me.

If I needed someone's help, I now had about seven ways of reaching them:
facebook, twitter, AIM, facebook chat, email, texting, and if it came down to it, calling them on the telephone (but how stone-age is that?). With the vast size of the internet, there is now far too much stimulation given to the neocortex and limbic brain (brand new information at any second! Cool pictures at every turn!) and it really can get to be overwhelming. It's certainly not helping my homework habits or overall attention span.

A lot of media culture shifts come into play when it comes to these connections. The way we communicate with our friends, families, and now the world are forever changing to keep up with our need for connection.

The technological shift is a big one, of course. In elementary school, for example, my friends and I would write in a series of hideous diaries and notebooks to preserve our secrets. Around seventh grade, we all got livejournal accounts and were free to customize (and communicate through) our e-diaries. It was a strange way of going from things being totally internal to sharing with potentially the world at large.

The personal shift is another big one here. Information sharing has gone from "I'll call my mom and tell her about my weekend" to "I'll blog about my weekend so that everyone can know what I did!" Twitter is a big part of this. A while ago I saw a video that describes the purpose twitter in a really positive way, which I liked:



At first, all I did was mock the way people shared the minutia of their day via twitter, but that doesn't mean it isn't useful.

The seven basic principles of media also come into play here. We end up creating our own realities on the web; I talk differently online than I do in real life.

There's also the question of ownership. Do I own what I make on the web? I know I basically signed away my independent thought when I agreed to facebook's terms of service, but I still consider all of the pictures and wall posts to be mine. It's strange to think of someone else actually owning something I've been using for four years. At any time it could shut down.


Though that might not be a bad thing.

It's hard to keep up with all of these forms of communication. At a certain point on that paper-writing evening, I had a jarring thought: I wanted to do my homework. I shut down twitter, told my friends I'd talk to them later, used the program self control to block facebook (this will change your life), and got to work. In the media-centric world, it seems a little stone-age, but it felt fantastic.


(I didn't turn off my phone, though. I guess I'll forever be on the grid.)