Networking

There's a small irony in my having worked for a time, just prior to the birth of the World Wide Web, on research tools that ran atop, and often were used to test the characteristics of, high-bandwidth, wide-area computer networks. Improving people's ability to communicate runs counter to my ever-increasing predilection for, if not quite complete solitude, then severely limited company. In fact, I think I would be more conventionally sociable were it not for the unrelenting pressure to connect, which runs afoul of a deeply contrarian streak in my nature. Always a bit of an outsider, it was the rise of the social networks, and the swift formalization of their place in our culture, that turned me into a passing stranger.

That's why this passage from a reflection on our fetish for connectivity caught my attention:

The prophets of networks thought that the greatest loser in the digital age would be the child without a modem. Instead, the greatest losers are those who are being forcibly plugged in, and losing authority and status as a result - state institutions, American embassies, old boy networks, publishers, families, political organisations, MPs and so on. It's not so much that these traditional forms of organisation are left behind by the rise of open access networks and fluid forms of association, it's that they are strategically undermined by them, sometimes to the point of unviability.

We were told that power would consist in having more and more connectivity (so the telecom industry hoped), making charisma and bandwidth the most important forms of productive capital. By this account, the city of Birmingham could have been a contender. Instead, power resides with Mark Zuckerberg and Julian Assange, individuals with few friends or capabilities, other than to break down whatever norms, rules and institutions used to enable society and communities to cohere (for better or worse).

Zuckerberg and Assange may or may not be as described, but Facebook and WikiLeaks are disruptive. Disruption is not necessarily bad, but if evolutionary biology teaches us anything, it is that some species don't survive changes to their environment. In the same way, not all people or institutions successfully adapt to social change.

At any rate, I don't have a presence on any of the social networks, and I doubt that will change. I find the effort to maintain a politely enthusiastic front in the face of meeting and greeting many people to be exhausting and unfulfilling. Give me a handful of congenial souls on whom I can focus my attention, and I am content.

On a related note, you might be puzzled as to why an introvert like myself would blog. Well, I have enough of an ego to think that my opinions might be of interest to others. I know how irksome unasked-for opinions are, too. A blog and a search engine are the perfect solution.

See? I don't think all connectivity is bad.