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How society has changed as a result of technological improvements uture in communication, and how it will affect us in the future
Data gathered by Danah M. Boyd and Nicole B. Ellison and reported by kwiqq.com
1997 1998 1999 2000
Written by Justin McCarthy Art by Jon Aiello
Drawing by Jon Aiello
How innocent cent things were in the late te 80s. People had conversations—face face, the old onversations—face to fa fashioned way. ay. Now, snap back. Your cell phone is vibrating. Although itt has entirely changed th the way we go about our daily lives, the Internet hhasn’t been around for very long. Having slowly become more and more accessible to Americans by the late 1990s—and practically exploding in the new millennium—the Internet has especially changed the way we, as Americans, communicate. With more and more people logging on, social networking systems like MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter have flooded the Web, giving people all over the world access to each other. This phenomenon coincided with the advent of cell phone usage, endowing ordinary people with several means of keeping in touch with their friends and loved ones. Today, we rely on these systems and devices regularly. But as familiar as these things are to us, we are still very new to them. And many are oblivious to the effects new technologies are having on the way we communicate and interact as a society. Those who can remember the time before the Internet’s great impact on the world are able to see how this new revolution in technology is affecting us. Today, a 16-year-old can hardly remember a time before the Internet, if at all. American teenagers are already accustomed to using computers and seem to be using cell phones
Photo courtesy of Photobucket.com
Just imagine it. If you were to go back 20 years ago, no one would know what you meant if you said you’d text them, leave them a comment or even a voicemail. And imagine the looks you’d get if you asked your friends if they’d seen your latest Tweet. “Log on to what?” they might ask. “MySpace? Do you mean my bedroom?” Don’t bother reaching for your cell phone. It hasn’t become a regular commodity yet. People in this time period are still gloating about the fact that they can talk on the phone without a long cord trailing all over the house. They haven’t even realized how soon it will be until they can leave the house with their phones, and continue their conversations virtually wherev wherever certainly they want. And they certain can’t fatho fathom the idea of using their the phones to onto log on Internet. the Interne
at younger and younger ages. The communication they’ve grown up with is faster, instant, and involves less patience. To many of the parents of these children, this mentality is foreign. Hearing a child complain about a friend who “never texts me back” pales in comparison to an incident a parent might have experienced in the 70s or 80s of calling someone who didn’t pick up his phone and also didn’t have an answering machine. But these generational gaps have become even more stratified as technology improves in shorter periods of time. “These are not generations in the traditional sense; these are micro-generations,” said Judith Halasz, a sociology professor at SUNY New Paltz. “My generation versus someone seven years younger than me—or even someone five years younger than me-- there’s a clear difference in how we interact professionally and personally, because of the level of reliance on these technologies.” Some young people don’t see a problem with the rise
topics related to sociology. “Every aspect of our civilization is becoming distanced. It creates the appearance, not the substance, of participation in each other’s lives.” Not all young people are oblivious to the technological curtains that separate them from each other. Jamie Biglow, a double major in art history and history at SUNY New Paltz, said she knows that a conversation she has on AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) comes with a filter of a person’s immediate reactions. “When you talk to someone face to face, you can get more genuine reactions. You can tell if they’re lying, if they avoid eye contact, if their voice changes, if they’re making a joke,” Biglow said. “But when you talk to someone on AIM, it’s easier to lie.” While Biglow complained about the ingenuity of AIM conversations, she also felt strongly about the laziness that has sprouted in younger generations when it comes to grammar and punctuation.
of technological communication. Paul Ferndandes, a thirdyear business major at SUNY New Paltz said he never calls his boss. “I just text him,” Fernandes said. “It makes both of us more comfortable.” But the distance which Fernandes likes about his relationship with his boss is seen by many as a hindering factor in younger generations. While this might work for Fernandes, many professionals from older generations are often turned off by this distant approach. “Students often send me flowery e-mails when they need to get in touch with me,” said Dr. Irwin Sperber, a sociology professor at SUNY New Paltz. “But it would be much better if they came to me in person.” While acknowledging the show-it-all mentality that often accompanies sites like Facebook, he feels that networking sites generally cut individuals off from one another. “Today, there’s a pronounced trend of people being physically and socially isolated by technology,” said Sperber, who specializes in alienation among an array of other
“AIM is the bastard-child of words and speech,” she said angrily. “People don’t know how to speak anymore. It’s turning us into a generation of people who are completely stupid. I really think it’s depreciated the value of our language.” While we are still very young in the process of utilizing these new mediums of communication, a greater question is how these devices and systems will affect how we relate to one another in the future, as people become more and more acclimated to technology. Today, elderly people often joke about how out-of-touch they are with new technology. But what will happen when that same age group is no longer foreign to computers? They’ll be replaced by people who can type, text message, and leave comments on your MySpace page. “There’s this popularity contest element to all of these social media networking sites,” said Halasz. “I think it changes the way we evaluate each other. And over the long term, that’ll really affect how we assess other people and interact with them, even in face to face interactions.”
Data gathered by the Pew Internet Foundation and reported by techcrunch.com.
Photo by Justin McCarthy
Halasz also said she foresees a change in social etiquette, decorum, and the way that professionals view social networking systems. She noted how, years ago, having a MySpace would have been seen as something that could be detrimental to one’s career. These days, she said, professionals are almost expected to be part of this trend, and even have their own sites, such as LinkedIn. As we begin to learn more about how technology has affected our approaches to communication, one thing is clear: we are definitely changing as a result of our exposure to new technologies. But how much will this affect us? And will these changes be good or bad? “Right now, I can’t tell you which way it’s going to go,” said Sperber. “I wish I knew.” The one thing Dr. Sperber emphasized, however, is that regardless of the changes that will occur in communication, the younger generations are merely products of their environment, not the creators. “The process of being ‘plugged in’ electronically has become so deeply ingrained in us. Now, especially with young people,” he said. “Whatever problems result from this are not the fault of young people.”
Social networking systems each have different features and functions that users can use to communicate.