The general connectedness of all things

[andrewducker]

I have MSN Messenger.

I have email.

I have newsgroups.

I have IRC.

I have SMS.

I have telephones.

If the worst comes to the worst, I can actually talk to someone in person.

I find myself hitting Send-Receive, to see if someone is sending me a message. I say hello to people I don't even want to talk to, so that someone else will pay me some attention. I am never, ever alone, because I was once alone for far, far too long, and it scares me. I don't want to go back to being alone again.

In The High Cost of Living, the main character (who's name I forget, my copy being in Kent) says something along the lines of (the specifics I forget, my copy being in Kent) of "I don't believe in Love. I just thinking peple get lonely and horny and tell themselves it's love."

I don't believe that, because I think love is stronger than even a potent combination of horniness and loneliness, but I do think that loneliness is an incredibly powerful spur. I miss people when I'm not around them. If I come in and there's nobody in, I tend to go out and find someone. With MSN, I feel like I'm always kinda in company - if I'm bored or lonely or whatever I can always start chatting to someone else who's almost certainly just as bored and lonely.

The only time I'm really out of communication is on the train, when I'm down to my mobile and SMS, and even they become dramatically erratic for bits of the track. I'm sure the coverage is going to improve though, and when I saw a review recently for the xda, which uses a packet based communication system to make sure that you're always connected and supports MSN messenger, I realised that we're rapidly approaching a future where you are always in contact, where you're only alone if you deliberately choose to be.

Geographical communities don't suit me terribly well, outside of cities there's not a large enough supply of the people I want to hang out with, and even in cities they tend to be spread out. Virtual ones are a lot easier, because I'm always with the people I want to be with (even if it's not very 'with'). I'm just wondering what the psychological effect is going to be on the kids who grow up always with their friends, who are never alone. What kind of communities will they build, what kind of relationships will they form. How much will they differentiate between the people they can touch and those they can only see and hear.

I really am looking forward to seeing where this all ends up.

Comments

[ex-aphonia179.livejournal.com]

There's the scary potential of your friends never letting you forget just how much of a geek you truly are, or of ex-girlfriends hunting you down for breaking their heart a million years ago, or for you to meet a nice local person and have them find out from some "well meaning" individual about how much you suck, and then you lose a potential friendship.

I think the laws of emotional statutes of limitations, grudges, politeness, and all that rot are going to be rewritten. They'll be rewritten again when all world travel is cheap and easy to obtain.

Then we have to get off this motherfucking planet, or else.

Luvya,
Leslie

oh, and...

[ex-aphonia179.livejournal.com]

...I hate the idea that aloneness will be a saleable commodity, like silence, and that you'll have to pay for the pleasure of not having people's products beamed directly into your skulls and dreams.

A.

Re: oh, and...

[andrewducker]

Well, you _can't_ currently pay to avoid the adverts that adorn pretty much everything, so the option would be nice.

And I don't think you'll ever have to pay for privacy, because you'll always be able to turn your mobile phone off.

[blackmanxy.livejournal.com]

Sexton Furnival.

I'd comment on the actual content of the post, but I'm too tired at the moment.

the hole

[(Anonymous)]

We have to differentiate between being lonely and being alone. It is the old cliché but you can feel 'lonely' in a crowded room, and you can be 'alone' on a mountain top and yet not feel lonely.

I too have had those dark, dark times when you are *alone* but I question now whether this was aloneness or loneliness. I have convinced myself into relationships, flings ,beds through a combination of horniness and loneliness, I have convinced myself to stay in abusive situations through horniness and loneliness telling myself that this is love.

I do take your point that love is more than this and much more potent but how many of us truly feel that and/or perhaps we grow to feel it having put ourselves in a position to feel it for someone but having been driven there through H&L.

In my discussions with people (including myself) I have looked at my desire to be in constant contact, via msn, sms, email, phones etc ( interesting point here that I took myself probably the furthest away I could away from those I love…more on that later)and alot of it is to stop the impending doom of loneliness. The fear that that godawful feeling will come back. What I have realised is that all the amount of contact in the world will not stop that feeling from coming back. It will get you on the quiet and whisper in your ear when your PC has crashed, the battery on your phone is dead and you know that because of time differences most people who could help will be sound asleep and not appreciate a winy "just phoning to see if you loved me? ' call.

We need, or should I say I need my hole to be filled, this is not perverted but I do believe that somewhere inside most of us we have a hole, a big gaping black one that we learn to fill that in various ways, art, work, family, sex, drugs, music, the list is endless, the hole can be filled in various ways and to various levels. It does not remain filled and it can overflow and it can drain out completely depending on what life throws at us. What is important ( and this is just my own learning) is to learn that when that hole gets empty what one can do to fill it and what one can do to fill it in a positive way. IE. going on the piss by myself and partying it up with good craic but meaningless acquaintances will fill me up momentarily but the resulting emptiness the next day is not worth the momentarily fill. Dragging some good looking stranger home for sex will fill me up ( scues the pun) momentarily but the next day…….I am talking about balance here, yes I guess I am. My point is not to live some prudish life where you can't party or have meaningless but good sex with strangers but that it is the feelings behind your choices to do this that are vital to look at.

I tend to check with myself now and ask myself my motivations for doing something, if they are to fill myself up from feeling lonely then maybe I should check out where and why that feeling came from first. The resulting feeling of loneliness will depend on the starting point.

And yes you are quite right the world of constant communication that we are moving to will raise very, very different children. We will have to take them to more mountain tops and more forests and let them walk by themselves to teach them it is ok to be alone.

whoops

[(Anonymous)]

BTW above self indulgent rambling from Clare

sexton

[wordofblake.livejournal.com]

His name is Sexton.

[octopoid-horror.livejournal.com]

I have MSN Messenger. I have email. I have newsgroups. I have IRC. I have SMS. I have telephones.

-These are still all choices for people... they're easily avoidable. I don't have a mobile phone for a variety of reasons, one of which is that I don't -want- to be easily contactable at all times.

Of course, you should probably be careful if being alone bothers you. MSN Messenger, email, newsgroups, irc and the house phone all involve a fairly thin bundle of cabling coming into the house. Anything happens to that, you're without a large chunk of your communication methods.

--Tangent!

There was a good short story in Interzone about six years ago about how a worldwide internet crash sparked a mass exodus into the wilderness and a degeneration of civilisation. It was almost all told from the point of view of a teenage l33t haX0r type who ended up dead of starvation, killed for his laptop batteries. There was then an epilogue where you were shown that in fact, it was only the largely young online obsessively-online community who saw this crash as a portent of doom, since it was simply a series of technical glitches. Civilisation didn't really collapse.. but a few unfit, unsuitable people tried to live in the wilderness because they panicked and mostly died.

The moral here is that this kind of online connectedness still isn't universal.. and generally appeals to certain types of people. If you browse online communities, you tend to see certain similarities between the people here.

Mobile phones are different and -are- changing things in some very noticeable ways but going back to computers, I think there's an important difference between people who are just online, and people who are important parts of a community online. Let's draw a line between these two groups... There.. And it's my humble opinion that people tend to see less value in the opinions in people on the other side of that line, whichever side you're on. And since this is on a livejournal, most of the people who read this will obviously be on the latter side.

Did I make a point there? Probably not. Ah well.. it's enough anyhow.

[andrewducker]

Contactability is obviously a double edged sword, but most of the methods I use can be set to repel boarders. My phone, for instance, can be set to send people straight to the answering machine, so that I can just check messages and decide if I want to be contacted. Obviously, I can also turn it off. Similarly, MSN will happily pretend to be offline, so that nobody knows that you're sitting waiting for your secret lover to log on.

And obviously, some people want seclusion, while others want contact. The future will offer more ways of doing both of those, and I think the social mores that will spring up to cover the new situations will help a lot too. It will become more common for people to crave privacy if they can potentially be in contact all the time, so people will be more understanding of this need (we only tend to be understanding of things we recognise in ourselves, after all).

noooooo

[octopoid-horror.livejournal.com]

It will become more common for people to crave privacy if they can potentially be in contact all the time, so people will be more understanding of this need

Actually I'd disagree. I'm not talking about people I know irl here, but making a vast generalisation based on people at work and so forth... but I think this isn't going to happen. Already, it's becoming a social stigma -not- to have a mobile phone. At work, people in the same team as me were -entirely- incapable of understanding how I could live without a mobile phone. Entirely. It was scary.

I can happily live without a mobile phone. I could live without internet access if you gave me a day or two's warning to get some phone numbers from people. Without -any- phone use? For a while, although it'd get annoying after a bit but I could still get by since I like writing/reading letters.

I guess I'm just retro. It's hard to make people understand that you don't -want- everyone to be able to contact each other instantly all the time.

Re: noooooo

[andrewducker]

Hmm. I agree - people will definitely not understand not having the ability to contact others will certainly be seen as odd. But wanting to avoid using them, will be more accepted. And certainly as convergence causes your mobile phone to also tell you where you are, tell you your diary entries, surf the web, check your email and report your thoughts to Big Brother, being without one will probably cause as many problems as not having a phone nowadays.

I could certainly live without mine, just as I could live without a microwave or, indeed, a freezer. But I find them all so useful that I wouldn't want to (at least five times now they've solved problems of the "Where are you? Oh, _that_ Waterstones!" kind).

but hey, you don't have to have your brain chipped if you don't want to.

Yet.