At one extreme the development of the internet by finance capital and promises of eartly riches beyond imagining makes for a sort of haunted house of pop-ups, blinking advertisements and penis pill variants. Here we have the internet at its most vapid; devoid of any of the people that make it happen. Commerce would make the internet a grotesque strip mall of the mind, in which advertisments for products that no one needs are shunted directly into the brain stem whence they activate an autonomic credit card swiping response from the user. It is this internet that makes me shun it, on occasion; to not lament its unavailability and instead engage a park somewhere. Somewhere where they have books written by people that loved or hated life on the ground. People for whom trees were magnificent creatures.

On the other extreme we have various software and social networking sites that allow for interpersonal relationships to spawn from nothing more than brief connections in feeling. We meet someone, who lives two hundred or two thousand miles away and experience that person without certain “normal” human interaction (viz. body language and in many cases certain voice traits). It has to be noted that the popularity of certain internet phenomena (myspace, facebook, MMORPGs et al.) is created and maintained by certain demographics of people who were more or less born with an innate sense of how this intrawebnets thing works, how to make it do what they want. Though some few people are making staggering amounts of money on these types of social applications, they are only popular because they are social. There is, I think, a tacit understanding among people who frequently use any of these sorts of applications that the other people using them are of the same ilk. Our similarities difused over distances and merging with others like Neal Stephenson’s rolling metaphor: Quicksilver.

At some point in the not-to-distant past, it were normal for people to engage their sociality in face-to-face. Less normal, perhaps, as much as it were the singular option. The telephone, of course, could breach distance at approximately light speed, but it were both expensive and frustratingly stationary. There is also an inherent limitaion in phone use that only allows for the user to effectively “network” with people they already know (friends, family etc.). This particular quality made land lines of the past draw borders around peoples’ lives in terms of the technology they were using: “This is my circle of aquaintance, lest it be breached.” To add new nexuses to one’s network, then, required a regular bodily dip into pools of indivduals of various social meins and strata. Asking for the phone number of a potential mate was once a big first step, now its so casual as to not even illicit a blink. There are certainly less sweaty male palms out there these days.

Our sociality itself, at least in the younger generation, is changing at a rapid rate. There may be something postmodern that can be said about this whole endeavor (social networking), but we don’t even live in a postmodern world anymore. The postmodern might opine of the self-awareness of the machine itself; how it is a product of latent human traits and either reinforces or augments those traits. Among other things, the postmoderns are out there right now talking about what it is that we are creating right now. Will there be emergent AI on the internet (a la Terminator 3)? The new left postmoderns might talk of revolutions that could be sparked and whose flames could be fed by this network of machines. Some are thinking in terms of the database of human knowledge, accessible from all points at all times. I’ve even ruminated about this in an earlier post in this blog: the oversoul writ in binary code, every human being online twenty four hours a day.

Directionally speaking, then, those postmoderns that still exist are all engaged in the human-to-internet processes. To many, the internet is a continuing work in creation. People made it. It does things. People use it. Strangely, even anthropologists are in on this gig. Some seem to think that the real phenomenon that the internet represents is a collective act of creation in which certain social mechanisms are necesessarily present by default, even if they are altered in some way. This is especially the case with something like wikipedia, whose effort to actually build the oversoul is something of a given. Wikipedia doesn’t exist without recurrent collective action of posting and editing. But even further, people who study non-space (the internet) draw their boundaries at the GUI. The sociality of the event (e.g. wikipedia) stops when the light coming out of the monitor hits the eye.

Due to certain experiences in my life, I fully believe that the more important area of study is how the internet changes people, rather than how people change the interent. The obverse directional is as worthy of note as the creational. Not ten years ago, it might have seemed odd, or potentially fatal, to meet and converse with someone on the the internet and then at some point spend good money to go meet face to face the person with whom you had been in correspondence. This was a time of less chat and more email, but even after the chat phenom broke various boundaries, there has still lain an undercurrent of apprehension herein. Common admonitions are as follows: “He could be a serial killer!” “That hot 18-year-old cheerleader-cum-pornstar you’ve been talking to is probably a 300lb postal worker named Joe! With a peg leg!” Though I’m sure there are serial killers and pre-op transvestites out there who prey on the gullible, the above warnings almost sound to the reader (or maybe just me really) like urban myths; bed time stories to scare little Jenny away from adult chat rooms. [As an aside, I’m not going to go into the whole “To Catch a Predator” phenom that at some points seems laudable and at others terrifingly gestapo]

At the very least, the aforementioned caveats sound somewhat dated. The advent of VoiP has made it is as possible as it can be to know the sex of the person you’re talking to. Coupled with social networking sites, it’s more or less possible to discern the person in question in physical form. Some people, I suppose, could go to astronomical extremes to disguise their identities in order to fool the unsuspecting, but it’s rather easy to pick out bad people. It also occurs to me that the people that say such things are the people that don’t know a lot about the internet and its operations. Those with only a cursory knowledge of this tool could easily be pessimistic about its various uses.

I think what I’m trying to say is that people are adapting their actual lives to the availabilty of sundry internet capabilties. It’s not that they just pick up a new gadget (zomg iPhone) with new interface options and connectivity. Its that the very core of the human (at least American) understanding of social reality is being altered, in real time, by this (rather stagnant) intraweb thing. It is now more or less exceptable to meet people on the internet and travel to meet them for the first time in meat space. There are even sites that facilitate this type of thing; There’s a couch-surfing registry for people who have extra bed space for low-budget travelers (with ratings: “I give this couch 3 1/2 out of 4 stars. Very comfortable, but smelled vaguely of cat urine”). But really, even match.com and other singles sites offer the ability to search for people within a 1000 mile radius or more. What do they expect? People aren’t going to travel to meet?

In a strange twist of irony, this sort of behavior sort of defaults humans to a Christian-acceptable sort of dating. Since people can be so far removed from one another, how could they possibly copulate? It’s almost puritanical actually. Think about how the internet acts as a buffer and annonymity dispenser. If you don’t want to talk to the person anymore, you just don’t. Its not like they live in the same town as you and can suss your address out of the phone book. In these terms both parties are completely equal. Has anyone done a study of emergent gender and racial equality in real space because of the inherent equality experienced on the internet? What the hell am I getting into?!

This is now so long that I have to quit or I’ll go blind. I might have more to say on this later.

-vec