Connective Visions

The end of February is giving rise to a kind of media, climatic, and geographical mass effect. The 16th day of the 2010 Vancouver Olympics came on the heels of another Northeast U.S. snowstorm (the third of the month, but in Philadelphia, happily, the least bothersome) and on the day of the seventh-largest earthquake in recorded history in Chile. At 8.8 on the Richter scale, the quake itself was felt as far away as Brazil (roughly 1,800 miles, or 2,900 km); the tsunami warning it engendered covered a quarter of the globe.

Thanks to technology, I’ve been following it all.

From watching the Hawaiian coast ...

Stop to think about it. Over the past two days, in real time, I’ve watched Santiago’s streets and Hawaii’s waters, followed cross-country skiing and speed skating in Canada by athletes from around the world, and shoveled eight inches of snow off my sidewalk.

In short, I’ve spread my attention farther than even a massive earthquake or tsunami can travel.

Through the recurrence of this childlike wonder I feel at technology’s reach has penetrated the question of a specifically human presence. This first arose for me in a Facebook “sound byte” discussion with a friend over handwriting, and it resurfaced when I followed up a link to MediaPost blog The Social Graf about (yes, again) the Norwegian Olympic curling team’s pants.

The irony of the question arising within online social media and commentary hasn’t escaped me.

In the Facebook discussion, several of us noted and admitted to the deterioration of our handwriting skills and our ability to decipher handwriting. The general feeling seemed to be that this is a bad development. My friend himself said we type “too much,” and he noted that handwriting is “analog.” Others recalled handwritten notes as artifacts of the past that held special memories, and one described handwriting as “beautiful and expressive.”

This is Technological Ambivalence 1: the ever-present awareness that increased use of, and dependence on, technology leads to the sacrifice of something else, something fundamentally human and essentially individual. As I said on Facebook, even a chimpanzee can type. (A brilliant article in the University of San Francisco’s literary publication Switchback addresses this.)

On a more personal note, the uniqueness and difference of my mother’s and my father’s – and my own – handwriting has always been an identifier in my family. My father’s “chicken scratchings” were the source of fond teasing; my mother’s perfect and clear script was a reflection of her memorialized beauty and competence.

The Social Graf (“Connecting through the Chaos”) piece by Erik Sass addresses Technological Ambivalence 2: do strange, “whimsical” cultural phenomena crowd out the human presence within social media? Sass assumes that an essential humanness is present in the profiles on Facebook, MySpace, and the like. His concern is with individuality and original expression being engulfed by groupings centered on culture icons and movements.

In other words, flooding these sites with strangely-patterned sports trousers (and, presumably, pickles, rock stars, and suppositions that the Mayans were simply bored when they marked 2012 as significant) threatens to concentrate people around perhaps-fleeting moments and to take the focus off the networking individuals and their own contributions.

If I am less swayed by Sass’s argument than by the handwriting discussion, it’s because I see the individual as already in an inevitable social tension in these media – through participation in role-playing games and apps like Mafia Wars and Farmville, through the ability to change one’s image through avatars and design programs, through fan groups surrounding bands and sports, and, of course, through the ability to misrepresent yourself. Social media mirror society in general. So, if you assume a human presence in the social media, it follows that the presence reflects most aspects of what is human – likes and dislikes, groupings based on similar interests and convictions, and captivation by cultural events, both silly and serious.

... to cheering on a swimming speed skater ...

Is it any more “dangerous” to social media for people over a few weeks to be fascinated by multicolored pants than by the Winter Olympics themselves – or, for that matter, by snowstorms?

It has been a human emphasis that has kept me online over the past two days. The effect of nature on humankind always has the capacity to inspire awe, whether in a blizzard, an earthquake, or a tsunami. I observe these events respecting the persistence of nature’s power and beauty in the modern world, and buoyed by signs of human compassion and effort in response.

And the persistence of humans in respectful competition with one another and with internal and physical challenges is similarly inspiring. Hence I have held my breath in immensely tight races, such as the 30K cross-country battle between Poland’s Justina Kowalczyk and Norway’s Marit Bjørgen. I have wondered at the resilience of Canada’s bronze-medal figure skater Joannie Rochette, skating after the sudden death of her mother. I have laughed with relief along with Germany’s speed skater Anni Friesinger-Postma as she “swam” her team across the finish line and into the finals for the women’s team pursuit.

In this, I am with Sass. We have a presence in cyberspace that is essentially human.

What it isn’t, is physically experiential.

... to shoveling - the experiential part. (All right, it's of the first snowstorm, but they all look much the same.)

A snowstorm shared through pictures and anecdotes on Facebook and in news media is not the same as opening the door to the silence and cold that accompany the falling flakes. It doesn’t convey the aching wrists from lifting shovel after shovel of wet snow, nor the warmth of the house after the bite of 40 mph winds.

Watching the waves building off Hawaii or seeing skates cut into the Vancouver ice is not the same as removing yourself from your home under a tsunami warning or feeling your muscles cramp and your lungs burn as you push down a scratched and wet track.

My friend is right to say that handwriting is analog. The cyber-experience of community is digital: an approximation, less accurate, more manipulable. In that sense, cyberspace is the realm of the imagination – a mental landscape calling for heightened discernment and clarity. It challenges our empathic powers. It offers wider and more frequent human communication … but not the full human experience of connection.

Maybe it’s not surprising that we have a “digital” reaction – a tendency to classify it as “bad” or “good,” zero or one.

The development of social media is, in fact, another challenge facing human persistence.

But I think we’ll make it.