What is this sacred benefit of so-called “live” communication over the “non-live” kind, that is, communication mediated by technology, that people worry about so much?
How much does talking through a webcam and a microphone differ from “live” communication? The lack of physical touch? But that’s only needed with people who are very close to you, and the soft-hearted talks about the harm of the internet aren’t usually about talking to loved ones, are they? Besides, touch will most likely become possible remotely somehow in the future. Smells? Same.
What else?
I’m not talking about the pluses here. Give me minuses! Show me the real, juicy downsides of talking over the internet!
The other day at 8p, a conference on internet marketing (thanks to Netpeak, by the way, for the excellent organization), one of the people asking questions of Anatoly Wasserman, the TV quiz erudite turned pundit, once again played the long-familiar record about protecting children from the internet.
It was nice that in the same hall, half an hour before the much-respected Anatoly, Yaroslav Trofimov, whom I respect no less, voiced a thought I found far more pleasant: that the internet will soon disappear.
Yes, yes! That’s not a tpyo: disappear, exactly. Trofimov’s thought was hard to catch, but from what I could grasp, I can piece together the following.
In the next few years the internet will disappear as a separate space, because its ubiquity will form a kind of infosphere, so to speak, that envelops all of us and every aspect of our lives that has anything to do with consuming information. Where will you draw the line around buying things, then, if you’ve just googled the price on Hotline, the price-comparison site? Where will you find purely “live” communication, if a beer with friends is inseparable from a Foursquare check-in, with a couple of tweets along the way and a like on a friend’s status?
What’s the way out? Off to the forest with Zarathustra?
Don’t panic.
Retrogrades can, of course, try to stay on the sidelines. Practitioners and lawyers (read Morozov) propose “reasonable” limits and rules. Optimists and technophiles happily look Medusa the Gorgon in the eye on their iPad screens.
Yes, of course, adopting new tech habits doesn’t happen without excesses.
Take the people who show off their iPads at round tables. They lay them out in front of themselves and then, God forbid they should reveal how useless the thing is (apart from lending them a geeky status), have to keep poking at the screen instead of actually taking part in the conversation.
It’s not as if those people aren’t needed there at all. They could bring something useful to it, or at worst take something useful away, but the damned gadget won’t let them!
Well, God be with them. As Solomon’s ring said, this too shall pass, once the wave of novelty recedes and nobody is impressed any more by a stylish tablet with a slick fascist interface.
And here I’d like to calm down and draw a conclusion that many will be glad to hear, but that will be very boring.
Technology changes our way of life. For many people, me included, it changes it radically, fortunately. But it can’t change us as much as we fear.