andrewducker | The general connectedness of all things

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.

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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.

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).

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.

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.

The general connectedness of all things

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