The question is before us of how our model of interactions with technology will evolve based on our current trend of connection. Will there be a devaluing of current relationships, as our contact with technology increases? The context of new media is the reoccuring theme and battle for authenticity. As Sherry Turkle discusses in Alone Together, many people may have begun their online life in a spirit of compensation, that is, what is lacking in their current situation, and any dissatisfactions that may exist in the realm of reality are compensated for in the virtual world. The question looms before us however of what will it come to when the ability of technology will diminish our interest in reality, a time which many argue is definitely apparent.
As more people become connected, the degree of technological advancement becomes normal. To clarify, in different periods of civilizations progress, there becomes placements that subconsciously become part of sociey’s way of at first thinking about then with time, normalizing, and further advancement making what was, “now” not new in comparison. Thus what value is placed on, and what begins to be enveloped into our view of what existence and being part of society morphs over time. What makes this so riveting, is that it happens at such a rate, or more specifically we are so caught up in the goings on that we don’t even realize it. I can think of two people that are both gregarious, interesting and in their way, sociable that both have given me insight as to what our relationship with technology has been patterned into. The one friend has lost his phone and didn’t have enough money at the time to replace it, relying on his apartments’ house phone to contact people. Not only has he found that people don’t call his house phone often, but that he is not part of forwarded mass texts asking to hang out, but that he has dropped of the radar of many people that he now considers fairweather friends, when hanging out with people, they ask him where he’s been, and didn’t even know that his phone has been gone for months. His value has been placed on his reprocity and his connect-ability. My other friend who is an excellent artist, deleted his facebook account after finding out that pictures he take and posts are owned by facebook now. When I mention him in social circumstances people don’t connect who he is, and ask who I’m talking about and have pulled out their phone to search him so they put a face to the name and there is none. His value is not apparent now by this standard from a further extrapolation that people aren’t aware of him, his doings, thoughts and activities based on his presence on their newsfeed. The trend that we are rapidly following is that technology even more so now is part of our subtle unconscious thought pattern, and that we will not value, appreciate or bother spending effort on interactions that are not facilitated in the esteem of virtual enablement.
References:
Turkle, Sherry. Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. 2011. Basic Books: NY
Karel Čapek, R.U.R. Rossumovi univerzální roboti, the beginning of usages of artificial human-like beings in art and literature and were manufactured by biotechnology not mechanics. He made the usage of the term robot.
http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/c/capek/karel/rur/
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/13083/13083-h/13083-h.htm
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