When something that is not originally digital is converted to digital form, that thing has been “digitized”—but what do you call it when something that is digital is converted to analogue or material form? There was a discussion to this effect in my Twitter feed a few months ago, but I don’t recall that we ever came to consensus about a) whether there is a term for this, and if not, b) what that term should be.

Whatever that term is or may be, it’s a term that I keep needing, so I’m hoping to identify it by reopening the discussion here. Without further ado, here are some of the recent digital/analogue crossovers that have inspired my question:

1) Words With Friends: The Board Game.

Seeing a TV commercial for the board game version of an online game (Words with Friends) that ripped off a board game (Scrabble) that was itself based on word puzzles that originated in newspapers (crossword puzzles) pretty much broke my head.

Crossword puzzles, of course, are no strangers to medium-hopping. The crossword puzzle first appeared in newspapers in 1913, then jumped from the newspaper medium to its incarnation as the board game Scrabble in 1948. Scrabble itself has jumped directly into a range of console and online electronic versions; it also became a game show on TV in 1984, and the game show in turn became its own board game in 1987. In other words, the cross-media circulation of crossword puzzle games is not new.

All that said, something still gets me about this board game version of Words With Friends. I think it’s part that—even though everyone knows Words With Friends is a rip-off of Scrabble—Words With Friends still originated (“originated”) as an online game, and online games moving offline is still new and strange compared to offline games moving online. There’s also the part about how the same manufacturer makes both Scrabble and Words With Friends (the board game), as if the two were really that different. Sure, Words With Friends (the board game) comes with a code to redeem for a Words With Friends (the online game) “Ultimate Play Pack”—whatever that is—but it still seems like a lot of smoke and mirrors to pretend that, in its journey to and from an online incarnation, Scrabble is so changed as to justify treating Scrabble and Words With Friends (the board game) as two separate games.

2) Delete: The Eraser.

This is a rubber eraser that says “delete” on it. It genuinely made me laugh out loud, so of course I had to buy one for myself and one to give to a friend (and if there had been more than two “delete” erasers in stock, more than one friend of mine would be receiving one).

Mind you, “delete” is not a new word—and its meaning is not unique to how one gets rid of something digital or electronic. “Delete” dates back to 1600, with an original meaning of “to daub, erase by smudging.” In that sense, “delete” (the eraser) may actually be more accurate than “delete” (the key in the upper-right corner of my laptop keyboard).

“Delete” has generally applied to obliterating text, and held this meaning hundreds of years before text could be digital. Nonetheless, at this point, the association of “delete” with “digital” is strong enough to make the implicit joke of a “delete” eraser possible.

3) MP3: The Vinyl Record.

Over at Instructables.com, Amanda Ghassaei has come up with a way to use 3D printers to make playable records from digital audio files. Why stop at making .mp3 files out of your record collection when you can make a record collection out of your .mp3 files?

Again, it is certainly not a new thing for music to cross between analogue and digital formats, or even for music to exist in both formats simultaneously (in fact, my favorite music distribution format is a vinyl record that comes with a digital download code). But these days, vinyl records and .mp3 (or FLAC, or whatever else) files are made from the same studio tracks; if one is derived from the other, it’s always a digital file that’s been captured from playing a record. The idea that one could make a tangible, playable record of music that has never existed as anything other than a digital file is new, and kind of awesome.

These printable records are not lossless, however—which means that, unlike crossword puzzle games, audio files will change significantly over the course of cycling between analogue and digital formats. I don’t own a 3D printer, but if I did, the first thing I’d do is take a digital audio file, print it as a record, digitize the music that came from playing that record, print that as a record, and repeat this process ad infinitum until the resulting sounds were so abstracted as to be unrecognizable as any version of the original file. Would the resulting sounds be “digital” or “analogue” music? I think the fact that there’s no easy answer to this question is half the reason I want to do it.

4) Current Mood: The Flipchart.

Spotted in a Cambridge, MA art store, this is a paper flipchart system for broadcasting one’s mood to anyone in physical proximity. I think I remember vaguely similar paper systems from the 1980s—modeled on “The Doctor is In/Out” charts, and possibly featuring the cartoon cat Garfield—but the fact that this one specifically says “Current Mood” makes it seem like a riff on online blogs/journals in particular. In my world, “Current Mood” will forever be a Livejournal reference (which, for me personally, dates to late 2000); is anyone aware of “current mood” being used before that?

Also, you have to love that the “emo” smiley face is crying an asterisk.

Whitney Erin Boesel really is far too amused by erasers that say “delete” on them. If you see similar such objects, tell her about them via Twitter: she’s @phenatypical.

Analog vs Digital image from http://www.behance.net/gallery/Analog-vs-Digital/2866745
Words With Friends image from http://www.hasbro.com/games/en_US/shop/details.cfm?R=2AF67016-5056-900B-10AB-B53826132C53:en_US
Delete eraser photo by Whitney Erin Boesel. Used with permission.
Printed record image from http://www.instructables.com/id/3D-Printed-Record/
Current Mood flipchart photo by Whitney Erin Boesel. Used with permission.

(This is the full version of a two-part essay that I posted in October of this year. Here are links to Part I and Part II)

“Well, you saw what I posted on Facebook, right?”

I don’t know about you, but when I get this question from a friend, my answer is usually “no.” No, I don’t see everything my friends post on Facebook—not even the 25 or so people I make a regular effort to keep up with on Facebook, and not even the subset of friends I count as family. I don’t see everything most of my friends tweet, either; in fact, “update Twitter lists” has been hovering in the middle of my to-do list for the better part of a year. And even after I update those lists, I probably still won’t be able to keep up with everything every friend says on Twitter, either.

I feel guilty when I get the “You saw what I posted, right?” question. I feel like a bad friend, like I’m slacking off in my care work, like I’m failing to value my important human relationships. Danah boyd (@zephoria) was talking about something similar in October of this year at “Boom and Bust“—about how social networking sites create pressure to put time and effort into tending weak ties, and how it can be impossible to keep up with them all. Personally, I also find it difficult to keep up with my strong ties. I’m a great “pick up where we left off” friend, as are most of the people closest to me (makes sense, right?). I’m decidedly sub-awesome, however, at being in constant contact with more than a few people at a time.

Anyway, I have a bad case of Social Media Saturation Guilt, and “You saw what I posted, right?” hits that guilt square on its head. Recently, however, I’ve been thinking about how the awkward collisions of online and offline conversation used to run in the opposite direction. Twelve years ago[i] I was on an email list that was basically a private, 70-someodd person pre-Facebook: members shared links, asked questions, had serious conversations, sent invitations to parties, and circulated photos taken at those parties after they happened. It wasn’t uncommon to talk about something someone had posted to “the list” in face-to-face conversation, whether in small groups or at larger events.

Then, over a period of a month or two, most of us on “the list” got on Livejournal, and most of us who had Livejournals started ‘reading’ most of the rest of us who had Livejournals. (Yeah, Livejournal. We’re back in late 2000, remember?)

The affordances of Livejournal being what they are, most of us posted different content to our Livejournals than we did to “the list.” The intersection of Livejournal content and in-person conversation, however, wasn’t as seamless as the intersection of list content and in-person conversation. A new phenomenon popped up that a good portion of “the list” found anywhere from off-putting to downright hurtful, and it looked something like this:

The Scene: a “list” party.

List Member A: Hey, it’s good to see you! What have you been up to recently?
List Member B: [Starts to tell story]—
List Member A: [Cuts off List Member B] Yeah, I know. I read your Livejournal.

These aborted conversations became common enough that they spawned a long, intense debate on “the list” about what should be the proper etiquette for intersections of Livejournal and life-in-the-moment. Some list members felt it was rude and insensitive for friends to cut each other off; other list members felt it was rude and entitled for friends to expect each other to sit through the same story twice. The eventual compromise was to declare a sort of ‘best practice,’ which was that List Member A should signal being caught up with List Member B’s Livejournal by chiming in with a detail from the story: “Oh yeah! But then you found your cat hiding in the wall, right?” List Member B, on the other hand, should truncate the story accordingly: “Yeah! I have no idea how she got in there!”

So how did the Awkward Party Comment shift from “I know, I read your Livejournal” to “You read what I posted on Facebook, right?” There’s a simple explanation, which is that each of us was probably consuming less friend-generated and friend-circulated digital content back then. This could be because those of us on “the list” were just maintaining fewer digital connections in 2000, but there’s also the mode of communication to consider: though some list members juggled multiple different list subscriptions, and Livejournal, and usenet or BBS groups, all of these revolved primarily around text-based communication, and original text takes time to create (something of which I’m particularly aware at the moment, as I write this). When the rate of friend-content production was slower, it was easier to consume most if not all of what our friends produced and circulated.

Yet I don’t think this shift in content production alone explains the shift in social expectation. I think there’s something else in play, which I’m going to call the devolution of friendship. As I explain over the course of this essay, I link the devolution of friendship to—but do not “blame” it on—the affordances of various social networking platforms, especially (but not exclusively) so-called “frictionless sharing” features.

What does “devolution” mean? I’m using the word here in the same way that people use it to talk about the devolution of health care. One example of devolution of health care is some outpatient surgeries: patients are allowed to go home after their operations, but they still require a good deal of post-operative care such as changing bandages, irrigating wounds, administering medications, etc. Whereas before these patients would stay in the hospital and nurses would perform the care-labor necessary for their recoveries, patients must now find their own caregivers (usually family members or friends; sometimes themselves) to perform free care-labor. In this context, devolution marks the shift of labor and responsibility away from the medical establishment and onto the patient; within the patient-medical establishment collaboration, the patient must now provide a greater portion of the necessary work. Similarly, in some ways, we now expect our friends to do a greater portion of the work of being friends with us.

[Obligatory “We” Check: by “we,” here I mean some social media users some of the time. I’m not saying that all social media users’ expectations have shifted in this way, or that any given social media user’s friendship expectations are uniform across different friends, times, or contexts, or that the devolution of friendship applies only to people who use social media. Got it? Ok good.]

Through social media, “sharing with friends” is rationalized to the point of relentless efficiency. The current apex of such rationalization is frictionless sharing: we no longer need to perform the labor of telling our individual friends about what we read online, or of copy-pasting links and emailing them to “the list,” or of clicking a button for one-step posting of links on our Facebook walls. With frictionless sharing, all we have to do is look, or listen; what we’ve read or watched or listened to is then “shared” or “scrobbled” to our Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, or whatever other online profiles. Whether we share content actively or passively, however, we feel as though we’ve done our half of the friendship-labor by ‘pushing’ the information to our walls, streams, and tumblelogs. It’s then up to our friends to perform their halves of the friendship-labor by ‘pulling’ the information we share from those platforms.

When we think about this form of “bulk sharing” from our perspectives as content-creators and circulators, there are ways in which it seems like a good thing. We’re busy people; we like the idea of making one announcement on Facebook and being done with it, rather than having to repeat the same story over and over again to different friends individually. We also like not always having to think about which friends might like which stories or songs; we like the idea of sharing with all of our friends at once, and then letting them sort out amongst themselves who is and isn’t interested. Though social media can create burdensome expectations to keep up with strong ties, weak ties, and everyone in between, social media platforms can also be very efficient. Using the same moment of friendship-labor to tend multiple friendships at once kills more birds with fewer stones.

There are also ways in which we like being on the “more labor” side of devolution. For instance, sometimes we like the devolution of health care: if we are privileged enough to have people who can perform the necessary care-labor for us, many of us would prefer to recover from surgery in the comfort of our own homes rather than in hospitals. Theorists point out that we provide free labor when we use self-checkout machines at grocery stores and pharmacies, but to some of us that ‘free labor’ is a small price to pay for getting in and out faster, for waiting in a shorter line, and for not dealing with (“dealing with”) another human being at a conventional checkout counter.

Similarly, sometimes we like the devolution of friendship. When we have to ‘pull’ friendship-content instead of receiving it in a ‘push’, we can pick and choose which content items to pull. We can ignore the baby pictures, or the pet pictures, or the sushi pictures—whatever it is our friends post that we only pretend to care about (if we even bother to pretend). Whether we interact through digital media, through the telephone, or through speech in face-to-face conversations, socializing with specific individual friends requires that we mask our disinterest in [babies/pets/sushi/other] by actively ‘smiling and nodding,’ in one form or another. The non-specific sharing of devolved friendship, however, lets us skip this step. We can leave it to everyone else to respond, or tell ourselves that our sushi baby pet friend isn’t really talking to us in particular. Within devolved friendship interactions, it takes less effort to be polite while secretly waiting for someone to please just stop talking.

So if we like devolved friendship from the perspective of both share-producers and share-consumers, what’s the problem? While I won’t go so far as to say they’re definitely ‘problems,’ there are two major things about devolved friendship that I think are worth noting. The first is the non-uniform rationalization of friendship-labor, and the second is the depersonalization of friendship-labor. I explore both below.

The Non-Uniform Rationalization of Friendship-Labor
Social media has rationalized “sharing with friends” to the point of relentless efficiency, but it has not rationalized “being shared with” to the same degree. Instead, the ease of sharing means that we are now bombarded with ‘shared’ information—something Facebook itself has acknowledged with its new “sponsored” status updates, and that some of us acknowledge when we turn off frictionless sharing because we’re concerned about “spamming” our friends. We produce “sharing” at a rate far greater than we can consume it, and we flood the marketplace for attention.

In short, “sharing” has become a lot easier and a lot more efficient, but “being shared with” has become much more time-consuming, demanding, and inefficient (especially if we don’t ignore most of our friends most of the time). Given this, expecting our friends to keep up with our social media content isn’t expecting them to meet us halfway; it’s asking them to take on the lion’s share of staying in touch with us. Our jobs (in this role) have gotten easier; our friends’ jobs have gotten harder.

Of course, some of our friends might not mind performing more friendship-labor. Their own friends:time ratios might be low, and therefore allow them to keep up with everything we produce and circulate. Other friends might decline to perform the extra friendship-labor we implicitly demand of them, but also not mind maintaining closeness across a more distanced engagement. Still other friends might be ok with the fact that, again and again, we still haven’t seen whatever super-awesome thing of unbelievable awesomeness they posted, even though they posted it on whatever platform a week ago. Regardless, the shift from a “push” model of friendship to a “pull” model is worth noting.

It’s important to note here that, though I talk about our roles as share-producers and as share-consumers, these roles are deeply interrelated. This is because social media is something we prosume, something we both produce and consume in a simultaneous bi-directional feedback loop not unlike the give-and-take of functional friendship. The shares we produce often contain the same content we consumed just moments earlier; even when we generate original content, chances are pretty good we’ll consume some of our friends’ shares while logged in to social media sites to produce our own shares. If any frictionless sharing functions are in play, our content consumption fuels a whole stream of newly-produced share content. Even if we’ve turned off frictionless sharing, and even if we don’t repost anything we consume, our content consumption still produces data through cookies and other online tracking devices, and this data in turn feeds back into the algorithms that shape and structure our social media experiences. Though how much deliberate effort we put into each role may vary, the reality of prosumption is that it’s essentially impossible to engage in either the production or the consumption of social media content without engaging in the other. (Make a mental note of this concept if you don’t already know it, because I’ll reference it again near the end.)

The Depersonalization of Friendship-Labor
The second thing worth noting is that devolved friendship is also depersonalized friendship. Sure, we still send specific messages to specific friends through social media services, through other electronic media like email and text messages, and through non-electronic media; the personalized, hard-to-track shares that take place through email and text message communication (etc) may get called “dark social,” but they’re still social and we’re still engaged in producing them. We also still post things on each other’s individual Facebook walls, and we still send @replies on Twitter. Sometimes we share with specific friends within our generalized broadcasts, perhaps by tagging them in a Facebook status update or by slipping an @mention into the middle of a tweet. These things are not examples of depersonalized friendship. Frictionless sharing and generalized broadcasting, however, do represent depersonalized friendship, because we’re not sharing with any one or more of our friends in particular. Instead we’re sharing generally, with an unknown subset of people who will self-select from whatever potential audience we’ve allowed.

I talked a bit about this difference between “social” and “personal” sharing in an expanded version of my August post about the social music streaming service Spotify. To summarize, I signed up for a free trial of Spotify in order to update my essay, and found that being on Spotify isn’t at all what I’d expected. Given that Spotify is supposed to be “social,” and that near a half dozen people had been pushing me for weeks to start using it, I sort of expected that…you know…being on Spotify would involve experiences that felt like socializing. I imagined Spotify would be like a geographically distributed, digitally-enabled version of the old H3W porch (that’s Historic 3 Wadsworth), where a certain group of my friends used to spend every Monday night listening to—and arguing about—music. Friends, conversations, shared songs, chaotic banter: personal, collective, reciprocal social interaction.

Being on Spotify, however, is not like being on the porch. When you show up on the porch, your friends talk to you. Though a good deal of conversation (and performance) is addressed to the generalized audience of the group, your friends speak to you individually as well[ii]. There will also be times when you, specifically, are called upon to address the group, even before Monday becomes Tuesday and the world’s most wonderfully esoteric word game begins. Even when you are not speaking your friends recognize that you are there, and you recognize that you are there. Everyone on the porch knows that everyone on the porch knows who’s on the porch. The group may be a generalized audience, but it is a specific and mutually recognized generalized audience.

When you show up on Spotify, however, your friends don’t automatically talk to you. They don’t automatically send you notes and songs either, the way I do with my friends via both email and snailmail. You can see when your friends are listening to something (if they scrobble, or have “Spotify Social” enabled), but you have no idea if any of them know you’re there and looking. Scrobbling might be “social,” but it’s not very personal by default.

Personal interaction doesn’t just happen on Spotify, and since I was hoping Spotify would be the New Porch, I initially found Spotify to be somewhat lonely-making. It’s the mutual awareness of presence that gives companionate silence its warmth, whether in person or across distance. The silence within Spotify’s many sounds, on the other hand, felt more like being on the outside looking in. This isn’t to say that Spotify can’t be social in a more personal way; once I started sending tracks to my friends, a few of them started sending tracks in return. But it took a lot more work to get to that point, which gets back to the devolution of friendship (as I explain below).

When I first started poking around on Spotify, I wasn’t at all sure what the behavioral and interactional norms were supposed to be. Clicking on my friends’ listening activity without talking to them felt a bit like rifling through somebody’s CD collection without permission after they’d stepped out to use the restroom—which I recognize some people don’t mind, but which to me feels like something of a transgression. One ‘Spotivangelist’ friend told me that I was being ridiculous, and that scrobbling (frictionless sharing of one’s listening activity) is “donating your taste to a generalized other.” I wasn’t sure I agreed exactly, but I took that one friend’s statement as tacit, blanket permission to start checking out what any of my friends were listening to (without clicking into “private” mode beforehand, and then feeling guilty about it later).

I’ve been thinking since, however, on what it means to view our friends as “generalized others.” I may now feel like less of like “creepy stalker” when I click on a song in someone’s Spotify feed, but I don’t exactly feel ‘shared with’ either. Far as I know, I’ve never been SpotiVaguebooked (or SubSpotified?); I have no reason to think anyone is speaking to me personally as they listen to music, or as they choose not to disable scrobbling (if they make that choice consciously at all). I may have been granted the opportunity to view something, but it doesn’t follow that what I’m viewing has anything to do with me unless I choose to make it about me. Devolved friendship means it’s not up to us to interact with our friends personally; instead it’s now up to our friends to make our generalized broadcasts personal.

Nathan Jurgenson (@nathanjurgenson) has suggested that my awkward feelings about interacting with individual friends as a ‘generalized other’ are a form of cyberasociality [pdf], but I’m not certain I agree with him. I think the key piece in my discomfort, in my inability to read frictionless sharing and generalized broadcasts as friendship-labor (or as “personal social interaction”) in and of themselves, is that these forms lack clear mutual acknowledgement. The problem is that they’re depersonalized, not that they’re digitally mediated. That said, for all the examples of interaction that is both digitally mediated & mutually acknowledged that I can list, I can’t come up with an analogous non-digital form of depersonalized friendship-labor. If depersonalized friendship-labor is in fact unique to digitally mediated interaction, I can’t dismiss ‘resistance to depersonalized friendship as cyberasociality’ as readily as I would like.

In any case, regardless of whether it brings more harms or benefits—and regardless of my (potentially cyberasocial) relationship to it—devolved friendship’s attendant depersonalization deserves attention. When we consider the lopsided rationalization of ‘sharing’ and ‘shared with,’ as well as the depersonalization of frictionless sharing and generalized broadcasting, what becomes clear is this: the social media deck is stacked in such a way as to make being ‘a self’ easier and more rewarding than being ‘a friend.’

Jenny Davis (@Jup83) recently highlighted the incentivization to share with her concept of FOBM, or “fear of being missed.” FOMO, “fear of missing out,” is the anxiety we feel when we can’t keep up with consuming all the share-content our friends produce. Because it is now up to us to turn our friends’ generalized broadcasts into personal interaction, we can never know how many opportunities for connection slip by and are lost when we get behind in sifting through our streams. But again, that sifting takes a lot of work: as Davis says of her experience watching the second Presidential debate without access to Facebook or Twitter, “I wanted to see what everyone was saying, but I also knew that the vast majority of [even the smartest members of my network] would not be saying much of substance.” Davis’s comment is not a snarky remark about her friends, but rather an acknowledgement of the fact that even if she’d had access to Twitter during the debate, she’d have been sorting through a lot of dumb “binders full of women” jokes to get to more substantive conversations about, say, sexism in the workplace.

Fear Of Being Missed, on the other hand, is the anxiety we feel when we can’t produce share-content ourselves. As Davis explains in the comments, FOBM “isn’t that others recognize and lament one’s absence, but rather, that one is skipped over or unseen.” If FOMO is the fear of being excluded and forgotten for failing to consume share-content, FOBM is the fear of being excluded and forgotten for failing to produce share-content. “Interaction begets interaction,” Davis explains. So assuming we want interaction with our friends, how do we go about getting it? On the one hand we can attempt to tackle FOMO, and knock ourselves out sorting through all of our friends’ share-content looking for individual instances of generalized friendship-labor that we can work to personalize. On the other hand, we can attempt to tackle FOBM–and skip the sorting, in favor of letting our friends respond to our own generalized friendship-labor. Obviously the vast majority of us take on both of these tasks, but the latter is a much more efficient way to harvest the attention and acknowledgment we crave.

It’s easy to share, to broadcast, to put our selves and our tastes and our identity performances out into the world for others to consume; what feedback and friendship we get in return comes in response to comparatively little effort and investment from us. It takes a lot more work, however, to do the consumption, to sift through everything all (or even just some) of our friends produce, to do the work of connecting to our friends’ generalized broadcasts so that we can convert their depersonalized shares into meaningful friendship-labor.

We may be prosumers of social media, but the reward structures of social media sites encourage us to place greater emphasis on our roles as share-producers—even though many of us probably spend more time consuming shared content than producing it. There’s a reason for this, of course; the content we produce (for free) is what fuels every last ‘Web 2.0’ machine, and its attendant self-centered sociality is the linchpin of the peculiarly Silicon Valley concept of “Social” (something Nathan Jurgenson and I discuss together in greater detail here). It’s not super-rewarding to be one of ten people who “like” your friend’s shared link, but it can feel rewarding to get 10 “likes” on something you’ve shared—even if you have hundreds or thousands of ‘friends.’ Sharing is easy; dealing with all that shared content is hard.

Obviously there’s a whole lot more to friendship than sharing links, songs, and moving pictures (even if they’re pictures of spinning disco chickens, or of an epic sports catastrophe). But I wonder sometimes if the shifts in expectation that accompany devolved friendship don’t migrate across platforms and contexts in ways we don’t always see or acknowledge. Social media affects how we see the world—and how we feel about being seen in the world—even when we’re not engaged directly with social media websites. It’s not a stretch, then, to imagine that the affordances of social media platforms might also affect how we see friendship and our obligations as friends most generally.

The following post was originally a seminar “reading response” paper that I had a little too much fun with. Reproduced here for your (possible) amusement:

Oh, technoutopianism. I came of age steeped in you; I was the fish, and you were the water that surrounded me and kept me wet. We were once such intimate familiars—and yet, you still managed to smack me right upside the head when I moved to the Bay Area.

It’s not that we weren’t great together, for a time. Who wouldn’t have wanted the rosy glow off your shiny silver future lighting the way out of her teenage years? Sometimes I feel sorry for ‘The Millennials’—those poor kids barrel-aged in the “post-9/11 era” and the (George W.) Bush administration, then bottled into a financial crisis and clear signs of climate change. I got the Clinton era, and I got you. You told me I was good enough, and smart enough, and that doggone it, lots of people like me were going to work hard and invent things and save the world. You were wrong, of course. But high school kids are still kids, and kids still need shelter in fairy tales.

It’s been a while though, technoutopianism. I’m not a teenager anymore. I’ve changed, but in so many ways you haven’t—and I see you more clearly now. Fred Turner’s right about you, and so are Barbrook and Cameron: you’re selfish. You never really wanted what was best for me, or for any of the rest of us; you wanted deregulation and radical individualism, wanted us out of your way so you could take the whole world—the Whole Earth—for your playground. Hawai’i is for lovers, and your shiny silver future was only for a network of the already privileged and powerful. You got a taste of “the Long Boom”; we got “likes” and LOLcats.

Sure, if I were to hang out on Ken Kesey’s bus long enough, maybe I’d think that LOLcats are the revolution. I get that networks and decentralization are all the rage. The Internet’s decentralized; the subject’s decentralized; the production of digital information is increasingly decentralized. Thanks to the present “mode of information,” “everyone with access to the Internet can become information and cultural producers simply by pursuing their own individual interests” [pdf]. But as much as I loathe bureaucracy when I run afoul of it—as I so often do while stumbling through a behemoth, 10-campus public university system—I also see where Kreiss, Finn, and Turner are coming from: just as bureaucracy has its advantages, so too does peer production have its disadvantages. You’ve been so slow to admit any of this.

In fact, I’ve realized: you never apologize. You’ve never once, in all this time, said you’re sorry.

I’m tired, technoutopianism. I’m tired of your sexy, shiny surface and your utter lack of substance. I’m tired of life in the network economy, tired of all my supposed “freedom.” I’m tired of the land of “pioneers and gold-diggers.” I believe in the cyborg, but I don’t believe ‘life’ and ‘technology’ are as interchangeable as Kevin Kelly might think they are. I’m with J.J. King: there’s something about connectionism that I can’t connect with, either. I’m tired of being “disrupted, subverted, and dispersed across social space.” I’m taking my vinyl records and my MIDI-toned mp3s and my decentralized self, and I’m going home.

Whitney Erin Boesel sometimes sings obscure old songs with “Where’s the future you promised me?” in the chorus lyrics. She’s also on Twitter (but does not usually sing there): @phenatypical.

Technoutopian future city image from http://technoutopia.com
Facebook not colonies from http://futurist-foresight.tumblr.com/post/34697199800/future-you-promised-me-mars-colonies-instead-i

I hear there are people out there (though I’ve never been acquainted with one, so far as I know) who really believe high school was the best period of their lives. It’s a privilege to say so, but this position remains unfathomable to me. This isn’t to say I haven’t developed a retroactive appreciation for certain aspects of my teenage life; in high school I had no overhead, all of my income was discretionary, necessities (and sometimes luxuries) were provided for me, and activities like singing, debating, working on theatrical productions, shooting photography, and writing/editing for the school newspaper (awww, analogue blogging!) were considered “productive” uses of my time, all of which add up to a pretty cushy existence. Material and structural privilege can’t necessarily buy happiness, however, and it’s an understatement when I say that I’m presently happy to have left the affective experience of my teenage years in the past.

Recently, my Internet neighborhood has been revisiting high school through the lens of ‘What if we’d had Facebook Back In The Day?’ On Monday, Nathan Jurgenson (@nathanjurgenson) wrote about why we shouldn’t be so quick to celebrate the Facebooklessness of our adolescence; yesterday, Rob Horning (@marginalutility) posted his well-considered response. Below I consider both pieces, and add my own thoughts about the hypothetical intersections of present day Facebook and the pre-Facebook past. All three of us examine identity and “digital dirt,” but where Jurgenson considers embarrassment and stigma, and Horning considers context and narrative control, I consider temporality and affective experience.

Jurgenson states that ‘I’m so glad we didn’t have Facebook back then’ (etc) is “a common refrain among people who grew up without social media sites,” and his argument against such statements is threefold. First, this sentiment takes for granted that the net impact of Facebook on young people’s lives is automatically negative. Second, it fails to take into account that a past-with-Facebook would have led to a different present; perhaps if we had grown up with Facebook, the consequences of past-Facebook that we fear now would be non-issues (either because our feelings or the world would be different).

Third, and most importantly, Jurgenson is concerned that celebrating Facebooklessness reproduces the myth that identity is consistent and perpetuates the stigma against identity change. He suggests that, if we could all learn to live with a little “digital dirt,” there’s a slim chance that the coming ubiquity of documented adolescence might make it “very difficult to support the fiction of an identity that is unchanging, intrinsic, natural, or inevitable.” If identity were more broadly reconceptualized as fluid rather than fixed, Jurgenson hopes, perhaps society would also become “more tolerant of the non-normal and accepting of change and difference.”

Horning, on the other hand, suggests that while Facebook does threaten to expose our identities as inconsistent or performative, what really frightens us about Facebook is that it decontextualizes our identity performances and “encourages the idea that identity isn’t embedded in context but is strictly a matter of data.” For Horning, identity change doesn’t automatically lead to stigma; as he rightly points out, identity change is both expected and glorified under its other name, “growing up.” The problem then isn’t the digital dirt; digital dirt, like other artifacts and traces left by past selves, is something our successive present selves can recontextualize in new narratives that reinforce, rather than undermine, our current identity projects. The problem is that Facebook not only makes our decontextualized digital dirt accessible, it also promotes the idea that context is superfluous. Facebook may invite you to “tell your story,” but the real message is that your story is irrelevant; each datum tells the truth of who you are, and no datum needs “context” to help it do so.

For Horning, Facebook therefore points in every direction except toward tolerance and acceptance of identity as fluid. It tries to actualize the myth of identity consistency by “[encouraging] us to become a stable, consistent target for marketers,” yet also “makes us vulnerable to having our identities ‘remixed’ by anyone who can access the identity information about us and verify we are connected to it somehow.” Horning fears that Facebook will lead not to a future in which we all inhabit one fluid identity that changes over time and across contexts, but in which we must each compete with and account for a proliferation of crystalized identities built “possibly by enemies, possibly by bots or algorithms” from the decontextualized digital data that Facebook makes available.

To knit both pieces together: Jurgenson and Horning agree (as do I) that identity consistency is a myth, and that it is impossible to achieve (no matter how hard one might try). Jurgenson suggests that celebrating past Facebooklessness perpetuates the myth of identity consistency, whereas if we give in to embarrassment and accept the “digital dirt” that leads us to celebrate past Facebooklessness, Facebook and its searchable timelines could help undermine the myth of identity consistency and thereby make digital dirt less of a liability in the first place. Horning, on the other hand, suggests that Facebook will both lead to a proliferation of crystalized identity-versions and intensify the degree to which digital dirt can discredit us. Both make a number of solid points (most of which aren’t actually in opposition to each other), but on the whole I side with Horning’s more pessimistic view. Though Jurgenson acknowledges that members of privileged groups would have to air their dirty digital laundry before digital dirt stopped harming “vulnerable populations,” it’s hard for me to imagine a world in which the privileged sitting with their embarrassment would have any impact on the *-isms that provide the real discrediting power that digital dirt has for Othered groups.

I want to suggest, however, that there’s more tied up in our imaginings of a hypothetical Facebooked past than just stigma and embarrassment, or context and narrative control (though these are certainly important things to interrogate). In particular, I want to focus on what Facebook Timeline does to our perceptions of time and to our experiences of the past. Jenny Davis (@Jup83) wrote last year about how Facebook Timeline extends the present into our pre-digital pasts, but by making artifacts from the past readily accessible, Facebook Timeline also brings both the digital and pre-digital pasts into the present.

In other words, while the documentary drive of social media may encourage us to see our present always as a future past, it also fixes our past always as a part of our present. I argue that while there is nothing new about identity change or potentially discrediting documentation of previous selves, the ease of accessing such documentation makes our past selves and our previous lives more presently salient not just to others, but to ourselves. To express relief at a Facebookless past, then, is also to express relief that some distance remains between that particular past and the present.

Is “telling your story” via Facebook Timeline any different from that old-school analogue method of chronicling one’s past, “journaling” or “keeping a diary”? Does it really drag the past that much more into the present? After all, Facebook Timeline is digital, and can be edited; I could reshape my Timeline narrative every week if I so chose, such that my past never showed anything beyond seamless, solid support for the self I claim to be now. In contrast, if I want to reshape the narratives in my paper journals, my choices are extremely limited—and mainly include scribbling out, tearing out, throwing out, or setting on fire. If we stop here, it might seem as though Facebook Timeline actually offers more control over the past’s relationship to the present than do older formats of self-documentation.

To stop there, however, is to forget that Facebook is both social and Social. I’m the only person who ever wrote in the ridiculous (and still expanding) collection of journals, diaries, notebooks, blank books, Moleskines, scratch paper, and paper scraps that I still cart around every time I move; suspicions about certain members of my immediate family aside, I’m probably the only person who’s ever read any of that stuff in its original format. Facebook Timeline, on the other hand, is collaborative; it’s not just me telling my story, it’s everyone who uploads a picture or tags me in a post or comments on my Wall.

Facebook says this is a feature, not a flaw—that its architecture lets our friends help us remember—but this collectivization of authorship is a double-edged sword at best. I can untag myself, or hide things from my Wall, but I can’t delete anything I didn’t post; I can remove a photo’s presence from my Timeline, but I have to depend on your privacy settings to keep anyone from following the trail of breadcrumbs that leads from me, to our “friendship,” to you, to that photo of me that you won’t take down, even though we’re “friends.”

Similarly, I can delete and untag and re-edit all I want, but anyone with access (remember, access to my profile is not entirely within my control) can download images, and can take screen shots, and can save these things, and can launch them back into circulation long after I’ve deleted them from my version of my Timeline story. My Timeline, then, can spawn not just one but a range of uneditable narratives (as Horning points out).

Sure, a malicious person could also circulate uneditable narratives from my print journals. But circulating such material would require figuring out where I live, breaking into my house, determining which part of a chaotic box forest is harboring journal-fruit (good luck with that), carrying all that stuff back out through the box forest before I come home, actually reading through the material to find something scandalous, and then painstakingly transcribing or scanning the chosen passages in order to digitize them. We “Facebook-stalk” people because we’re bored and because doing so is easy; accessing my print journals would take a level of effort that I’m sure no one will ever manifest.

My purpose in sketching out these differences is not to be all IRL Fetish about paper journals (I also have more than 3,000 pages of downloaded digital journal on my computer, and that’s just from one particular platform). The point is that it’s comparatively much, much easier for others to interact with the Facebook Timeline version of my past (and to interact with it in multiple different ways) than it is for others to interact with versions of my past that have been documented in older media. This ease of access means that my Facebook Timeline past becomes more immediate not just to you, but also to me. Even if I mostly ignore the far end of my Timeline—even if I treat it the way I treat all those notebooks and journals I keep but rarely open—my Timeline past re-announces itself to me every time you interact with it.

It’s been said that “nobody wants to see your status update from 2007,” but that isn’t always true. There’s the usual range of school admissions officers, prospective employers, obsessive stalkers, and the occasional malevolent dirt-seeker, but there’s also a practice I’ve taken to calling “timeline bombing”: I have one friend in particular who likes to scroll back and “like” items on the far ends of others’ timelines, just to see what those others’ reactions are when they get the notifications. Our Timeline pasts are dynamic, and lie even less dormant than do other versions of our past; they do not need us in order to stir and make themselves known.

We’ve argued all over Cyborgology—including in some of the posts I’ve already linked above—that social media affects both how we see the world and how we experience being in the world, even when we’re not using it and even if we never use it ourselves. It’s quite possible, then, that the temporal implosion intrinsic to social media generally, and to Facebook Timeline especially, might over time change our relationship to and experience of the past. I further argue that a Timelined past is particularly always a potential future present, and that traces of selves captured in Timeline format have a greater probability of resurfacing when we least expect them to do so.

Is this a bad thing? Jurgenson cites author Joan Didion, who advises us “to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.” Though I’m far more a fan of Didion than I am of Winston Churchill, one could also add, “those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” Certainly there are many reasons not to disavow or cut ourselves off from our own pasts and our own past selves. But there’s also something to be said for leaving the past in the past (as much as is possible), and for meeting a past self for a quiet drink at a prearranged time, rather than running into clusters of past selves on the train, on our way to work, at a party, on a first date, or before an important talk.

My own gateway Didion text was her stark memoir The Year Of Magical Thinking, in which Didion reflects on the first year of her life after her husband, John Gregory Dunne, died suddenly of a heart attack. The book is an exquisite and intimate portrait of grief, of all the ups and downs and—yes—magical thinking that comes with learning to live a different life after losing a partner of 40 years. One thing that’s lingered with me years after reading The Year Of Magical Thinking, and which is relevant here, is the way grief seems to dislodge Didion in time.

As if in a movie cut on the digital editing machine she longs for in the book’s first pages, Didion’s consciousness quick-cuts from 2004 (the book’s present-day) to 1964, to 2003, to 2004 again, to 1978, to 1968, to 2004, to 1985—and makes far more stops. The 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston becomes her daughter’s 2003 wedding in New York; a 2004 Boston hotel room becomes a 1955 Boston hotel room, becomes 1955 in Cambridge and Quebec and Sacramento, becomes California in 1966, becomes a blur of Hawai’i, Greece, Cyprus, Milan, Paris, Bogotá, and Buffalo, NY. “I couldn’t even go to Boston,” Didion concludes after this particular abduction down memory lane. Grief dissolves the mental boundaries between Didion’s past and her present; with the two so intertwined, even the most minute and quotidian details of life become flashpoints of pain and renewed loss. Only at the very, very end of the book—when she begins to let go and let Dunne become “the photograph on the table,” instead of trying to keep him still-living beside her—does Didion truly begin the difficult process of confronting the lonely future and creating a new life.

Facebook Timeline makes it much harder for our past lives and past selves to become “photographs on the table”—and this is why I, for one, am glad Facebook wasn’t around when I was in high school. Though I wouldn’t welcome it, I could handle the embarrassment; it must be news to no one that in many ways I was more shy, and far more awkward, and far, far worse at performing some semblance of being otherwise than I am now (which isn’t to imply that I didn’t make the attempt, but rather that the results probably alternated between “comedy” and “tragedy”). I’m even prepared to handle decontextualized recirculation; I’ve a library of stories to sketch a path from here to there, though obviously I’d rather not be forced into giving accounts. Self-presentation and self-documentation aren’t just about how we relate to others, however; they’re also about how we relate to ourselves.

What I’m not prepared for, and what I’m grateful for not having to navigate, is a world in which my teenage experiences are anywhere near as immediate as they were half my life ago. There was far more to that time than naïve reasoning and unflattering photographs and poetry scrawled on napkins; there was also an incredible amount of pain, much of which had little to do with self-presentation. Though there are plenty of cringe-worthy moments I still remember, what I feel most strongly toward my past selves is not embarrassment, but overwhelming empathy and compassion—and that’s why those selves need to stay in the past. I’ve kept the photographs, and some VHS tapes; I’ve kept the notebooks, and the rough drafts, and the letters, and the printed-out email messages. I’ve kept all these things, but I keep them in boxes and in drawers and on shelves. My past selves and I don’t just nod, we stop and get coffee—but then we part ways for another six to twelve months, at least.

Certainly unwanted resurgences of the past are not unique to social media. For instance, just before I moved to California to begin graduate school, I was visited in Boston by a high school friend I hadn’t seen since the summer after our graduation. I don’t think she’d been in my apartment a whole 15 minutes, however, before she managed to bring up not only the most humiliating thing that happened to me in junior high school (it was bad), but also one of the worst things that happened to me in high school (it was far worse). The insult to injury was that her stories were inaccurate; things I’d still believed were secrets had apparently been decontextualized, had been cast in new lights and knit into new narratives, and had been circulating who knows how far for who knows how long. To my infinite chagrin, I was still shaken by this encounter days after the fact; though I kept telling myself, “It was ten years ago; you have nothing to do with that world; it doesn’t matter,” the memories remained stirred and the injustice insisted on mattering. I cannot imagine having this experience on a more frequent basis, but that’s probably what would have happened if there had been Facebook when I was in high school.

For a large number of people, and for a wide range of reasons, destabilizing the boundary between past and present threatens a lot more than just “today’s impeccably curated identity project[s].” Past selves bring with them past trauma, and past pain, things our present selves may have very good reasons for leaving in another time. Perhaps we should not be so breathlessly uncritical in our celebration of past Facebooklessness, but neither should we so readily criticize those who express relief that Facebook cannot easily dredge up what they have worked hard to move past. Some of us might be ‘hiding’ silly musical tastes or earlier political ignorance, but others of us are wrangling skeletons a bit more formidable than a stack of Creed CDs. Sure, let’s all celebrate our earlier Bourdieusian missteps (ask me sometime about going to my very first high school dance the fall after I learned “the Macarena” at summer camp). But as for the rest of it: let’s let sleeping memories lie.

Whitney Erin Boesel *loves* old traces of others’ past selves. You can share yours with her via Twitter: she’s @phenatypical.

Photo of Joan Didion from http://www.biographile.com/first-impressions-how-to-open-a-personal-essay/8757/; text from The Year Of Magical Thinking
“Middle fingerish” image from http://renovationtherapy.wordpress.com/2008/05/25/the-trauma-of-the-20-year-high-school-reunion/
Mom made a meme image from http://memegenerator.net/instance/18319351
Kimodo dragons and angels image from http://notacrazycatlady.com/2011/04/10/awkward-years-are-the-best-years/
Eye contact first base image from http://www.quickmeme.com/Romantically-Awkward-High-School-Student/?upcoming
Awkward teenage years image from http://www.singletracks.com/blog/uncategorized/high-school-hormones-and-singletrack/attachment/awkward/
Rooftop photograph taken by Elizabeth Johnson in the 1990s; scanned sometime in the aughts.
Awkward highschool dance image from http://cheezburger.com/3115771904

I’ve been meaning to write for a while now about Ben Grosser’s (@bengrosser) project the Facebook Demetricator. If you haven’t seen it yet, the Demetricator is a browser extension that removes all the overt quantification from your experience of Facebook. With Facebook Demetricator installed and toggled ON, it doesn’t matter if 2, 20, or 20,000 people like your most recent status update (for example); when you view that status update, you see simply “people like this.” Visit someone’s profile, and you see that they have “Friends”—not “Friends 450” or “Friends 4,500.” “View all 6 comments” becomes “View all comments,” and “n hours ago” becomes either “recently” or “a while ago.

Grosser explains that,

As a regular user of Facebook I continually find myself being enticed by its endless use of numbers. How many likes did my photos get today? What’s my friend count? How much did people like my status? I focus on these quantifications, watching for the counts of responses rather than the responses themselves, or waiting for numbers of friend requests to appear rather than looking for meaningful connections. In other words, these numbers lead me to evaluate my participation within the system from a metricated viewpoint.

He further posits that “the site’s relentless focus on quantity leads us to continually measure the value of our social connections within metric terms, and this metricated viewpoint may have consequences on how we act within the system.” I’d take this one step further, and argue that if Facebook’s ‘quantification fetish’ influences how we act within the context of Facebook (and it probably does), then it also influences how we act outside the context of Facebook. (Recall that social media has an affect on our experiences of being in the world even when we’re not using it, and even if we ourselves don’t use it at all.)

The Facebook Demetricator additionally aims to highlight capitalism as a motivating force, both for Facebook users (in their constant quest for “more” of anything with a number on it) and for Facebook itself. In an interview, Grosser asks, “What purpose does this enumeration serve for a system (and a corporation) that depends on its user’s continued free labor to produce the information that fills its databases?” Facebook is, of course, tracking pretty much everything everyone does on the site (as well as what people do off the site), but only some of that tracking is revealed to users. Grosser posits that Facebook designers choose to show metrics that spur users to spend more time on the site (through that ‘craving for more’), and don’t bother to make visible metrics that might decrease user participation on the site. (Can you imagine what would happen if Facebook displayed how many minutes you’d spent that month on Facebook?)

As I commented to Ernesto Ramirez (@e_ramirez), who first told me about Facebook Demetricator, there’s obviously a lot going on with visibility in this project—though by my read, there may be more going on there than Grosser intended. On the one hand, by erasing the visible artifacts of Facebook’s quantification algorithms, the Demetricator can draw our attention to the ways those metrics motivate our behavior on the site (as well as our feelings about our interactions on the site); perhaps with continued use and additional reflection, Facebook Demetricator could also help to illuminate the ways those metrics (and other similar metrics) influence our behavior and feelings outside of Facebook. And I do particularly love the conversion of “#n people like this” to simply “people like this,” though even a month later, I’m not entirely sure I can articulate why.

There is, however, an inevitable bit of ‘reveal and conceal’ happening here. By concealing what Facebook chooses to reveal, Facebook Demetricator in turn reveals the concealed free labor capitalism that structures Facebook’s design and shapes how we use the site. But by drawing our attention to the obviously tracked and quantified elements of our experiences on Facebook, could Facebook Demetricator deflect our attention away from all the numbers, scores, and algorithms that structure our experiences of Facebook ‘behind the scenes’?

Grosser has acknowledged that Facebook employs many more metrics than are ever visible to Facebook users, and Facebook Demetricator does not claim to eliminate the quantifying algorithms themselves from users’ experiences on the site. Yet as Grosser states, “adding a metric to a line in Facebook implies that the data goes deeper, that there’s more to know than what you see.” This is precisely why I wonder if, by concealing the most visible signs that Facebook is tracking our every move, Facebook Demetricator doesn’t accidentally further conceal the fact that Facebook’s metrics and algorithms not only shape what we see and who sees us[i], but also track our every move. The free labor we perform when we use Facebook goes beyond providing visible content that lures our friends back to the site to do likewise; we also provide and generate a wealth of invisible content for Facebook’s databases and for Facebook’s third-party ad partners.

What I’d really love to see—though it would be virtually impossible to do without Facebook’s cooperation, and somehow I don’t think Facebook would be into it—is a sequel to Facebook Demetricator called the Facebook Reciprometricator. This fantasy browser extension would erase all the ordinarily visible metrics of Facebook (as does Facebook Demetricator), but would make visible a whole host of new metrics that are usually for Facebook’s eyes only. I want little red numbers for, say, “You’ve spent n hours on Facebook this month,” “You’ve been placed in n target demographic subgroups,” and “n third party apps have received access to your profile through your friends.” That Facebook wouldn’t welcome this in the least seems to underscore Grosser’s point: that perhaps Facebook metrics shape our feelings and behavior more than we realize.

Whitney Erin Boesel still vastly prefers Twitter to Facebook. You can follow her at @phenatypical

Demetricator GIF and comparison image from http://bengrosser.com/projects/facebook-demetricator/
Facebook stalker image from http://weknowmemes.com/2012/06/facebook-stalkers/

In the 1993 film Demolition Man, a not-so-sensitive ‘90s guy (a cop named John Spartan, played by Sylvester Stallone) is thawed out of cryoprison in the year 2032. Halfway through the film, Spartan’s new partner on the San Angeles police force (Lenina Huxley, played by Sandra Bullock) asks Spartan if he would like to have sex—to which he unsurprisingly responds, “Oh yeah.”

Sex, however, isn’t what it used to be. It turns out that by 2032, “fluid transfer” has been outlawed and, in one of the film’s most famous scenes, Huxley and Spartan “make love” by sitting 10 feet away from each other and transmitting brain waves via specialized helmets. If you’re into that  mind/body dualism thing (I’m not, but bear with me), the sex they have is decorporealized; it bypasses the cumbersome interface of human biology to create pleasurable brain waves in a more pure and efficient way. Spartan is first nonplussed, then aroused, then entirely freaked out, and removes his helmet at a very inopportune moment for Huxley. Their night ends badly.When it comes to law according to this mesothelioma lawsuit in illinois Mesothelioma attorneys can help you get the settlement you deserve. Have you been trying your hardest to lose a few pounds of fat from your body? With so many weight loss supplements springing up every day, you might have realized that you aren’t the only one with this problem. hopefully, our review of Ultra Omega Burn can help you. Ultra Omega Burn is made from Omega 7 fatty acid made from cold press technique. At Leigh Brain & Spine, our goal is to ensure you are at the highest level of safety and comfort while you are at our facility in Chapel Hill finding the proper solution to improve your life. To ensure your safety and comfort, we offer complimentary consultations to discover the root of your symptoms and the best non-medication methods of treatment. you can visit the site to know more about the top rated chiropractor in Chapel Hill. Whether you need a chiropractor for relief from physical pain, disc injuries, or neurofeedback for help with the symptoms of ADHD, head injury, and stress, you can trust Dr. Cosmas and Trish Leigh, each Board Certified with 20+ years of experience in their respective areas of expertise. Fall asleep faster and wake up refreshed with Medterra having CBD. Before moving to any conclusion of the buying Medterra from any store, we will recommend you to check the Medterra review of the best store.

This scene popped into my head earlier this week, as I sat in my living room with a pair of headphones on listening to strange sounds that were supposedly going to get me high by bypassing (the rest of) my biological interface to go straight for my brain waves. After a long flight and a long trip home from the airport, I’d finally made some food and sat down to eat when I found an email from a friend in my (chaotic, overfull) inbox. The message contained nothing but a URL: http://www.i-doser.com/

This is how I first heard about I-Doser, which claims to offer “binaural brain waves for every imaginable mood.” The premise is that, by playing two different audio streams at the same time (one in each ear), “I-Dosing” produces “a perceived tone inside the head, in order to alter brainwaves.” I-Doser explains I-Dosing as “THE USE OF AUDITORY TONES IN AN ATTEMPT TO ALTER CONSCIOUSNESS IN WAYS THAT CREATES A SIMULATED MOOD OR EXPERIENCE, SUCH AS TO MIMIC RECREATIONAL DRUGS” (caps lock on in original).

My first thought was, “This has to be a joke.”

Further clicking, however, revealed a complete website, one that’s actually trying to sell both digital and physical products—so perhaps it was a scam, rather than a joke? The site offers plenty of reasons to be skeptical: caps lock may be “cruise control for awesome,” but it’s not cruise control for, “wow, this seems like a legitimate website for a reputable business.” There are basic grammatical errors in the text (like adjective/adverb confusion in the FAQ), and the prose is frequently awkward. There’s an ad at the bottom of the main page inviting people to become “affiliates” with I-Doser (“NOW IS THE PERFECT TIME TO START SELLING I-DOSER BRAND PRODUCTS”) that just screams “sketchy.”

There’s also the images on the site. While most of the header images look like they were lifted from Apple ads—stylish 20-something hipsters wearing headphones and sporting facial expressions that range from contemplative to ecstatic or even orgasmic—there are also images in which women are sexualized and objectified so overtly that it becomes cheesy (see inset for an example). The media kit features only images of young women using I-Doser, all of whom are wearing heavy makeup and many of whom are dressed in lingerie. Are they selling headphones and digital files, or are they selling sex? (Actually, decorporealized sex is on offer via I-Doser as well–20 years ahead of Demolition Man‘s schedule! There’s a whole category of sex-related I-Doses, though presumably one does not need a partner or a pair of helmets to use them.)

The more I sat with the idea of “I-Dosing,” however, the more curious I became. I did my undergrad degree with a lot of seriously geeky people, and the more I thought about it, the more I could picture the exact clique of people who would have tried to build something like this. (In fact, I’d bet money that at least someone from that scene is connected to this project in some way, although the website names no names and states only, “The I-Doser group consists of several teams of underground music and tonal experts, programmers, testers, researchers and admins.”) Was it possible there was something to this stuff?

Then I found the link to download a free trial. The trial involves an app, so of course I was suspicious; in my mind, “free app” plus “sketchy-seeming website” equals “probably trying to data mine me in some way.” But I was also really, really curious, and if there’s one thing I have a hard time turning down, it’s an opportunity to indulge my curiosity. A few minutes later I’d downloaded the app, installed it, and was wondering which I should try first: “Alcohol,” “Content,” or “Sleeping Angel” (categorized as “recreational,” “sedative,” and “sedative,” respectively). I chose “Content” because it was the shortest, at 20 minutes long; I was also tired after a day of traveling and planning on going to bed early, so a simulated sedative seemed like a good idea (just in case it worked). It has been able to act as a nerve agent that helps to soothe how people feel. Instead of having to take prescribed painkillers, Kratom has been used as a natural pain killer replacement. Visit my company to know more details about the kratom.

What happened next was…odd.

Listening to the two different sound streams that make up an I-Dose is not the seamless experience of listening to music that’s been recorded in stereo. It sounds strange, and feels a little disorienting. After a few minutes, I felt a bit seasick—though I’m somewhat prone to motion sickness, so it was hard to know if this sensation was an intended effect coming from the I-Dose itself or an incidental effect from the I-Dose’s interaction with my inner ears. I dashed off a quick response email to this effect, but I also kept listening as I finished eating and read stuff on the Internet. If you didn’t realize that the benefits of direct access for physical therapy in the District of Columbia meant you could book a PT appointment without a referral, check out this info here.

This, mind you, is not how I-Doser recommends that one administer I-Doses. I-Doser says the I-Dose should be administered through their special headphones, “while lying down in a dim-lit room in solitude without any noisy distractions.” I, on the other hand, was wearing my nice but not “specially designed for I-Dosing” headphones, and was sitting mostly-upright in my bright lit living room thoroughly distracted by my food and the glowing screen of my laptop while sounds came from the heater and the ceiling fan. And yet…about halfway through, I did start to feel not just sleepy, but a bit hazy. I felt strange in a way I couldn’t quite put my finger on.

Was the I-Dose or even Kratom has actually having an effect on my brain? What is a “simulated drug experience” supposed to feel like? Should we take kratom for energy boost? Now I was thinking not about Sylvester Stallone, but about Howard Becker, if you are interesting find the best kratom vendors, will serve as a general overview of red vein kratom and will demonstrate its main uses and how to consume the supplement safely and as effectively as possible.

In his 1953 paper “Becoming a Marihuana User” [pdf], sociologist Howard Becker argues that some people use marijuana for pleasure not because they are individually predisposed to engage in such deviant behavior, but because they’ve had experiences which have conditioned them to view using marijuana for pleasure as both possible and desirable. In other words, it’s not that some people are predisposed to smoke weed, and when they encounter it, they smoke it and automatically become high; rather, people smoke weed because they decided to try it, learned to perceive the biological effects of smoking it, and then learned to interpret those sensations as something pleasant, as “being high.”Well, let’s be honest, as much as weed has been legalized, there is still some level of stigma towards people who indulge in it. What will people say about me when they see me walking into the weed store? Do I look like a bad influence if I walk into the weed store? Thanks to online weed dispensaries that you no longer have to worry about being judged by society anymore. This is so because when you buy weed online vancouver, the only people who are aware is you and the seller only.  As Becker writes,

It is not enough, that is, that the effects be present; they alone do not automatically provide the experience of being high. The user must be able to point them out to himself [sic] and consciously connect them with his having smoked marihuana before he can have this experience.

Becker finds that learning to vape cbd oil uk effectively, and then learning to perceive and interpret its effects of having done so, is something marijuana users most often do in social groups. More experienced users teach novices how to inhale correctly, and guide novices through identifying and framing their subsequent experiences. “Being high” is therefore in large part social, even when people smoke marijuana alone. One can smoke all the weed one wants, but learning to become high is a different process.

This is how I felt listening to the I-Dose alone in my living room. I hadn’t yet read any of the experience reports on the I-Doser website, and I was not in a group of people who were more experienced I-Dose users, so I had no one to teach me how to identify the effects of an I-Dose. Was I perceiving simulated sedation, or was I perceiving what one feels when one’s blood sugar begins to rise again, and Sleep Imperative begins to trump Eat Imperative, late at night after a long day of traveling? (What’s the difference between “sedation” and “simulated sedation,” anyway?[i]) Unlike Becker’s informants—who had “high” to parse the effects of smoking marijuana—I had no concept to parse the effects of simulated sedation. If there are cultures of use that surround I-Dosing, I’m not a part of them; as a result, I lacked the frameworks to perceive the effects of the I-Dose and to interpret those effects as being in a desirable, altered state.

Marijuana and CBD is legal and is said to have much more than just pleasure, many studes have shown that cannabis has medical benefits and products like pure cbd oil tincture can be used to cure chronic pain.

In truth, I didn’t go about my experiment very scientifically. Though I expected that nothing would happen, I chose an I-Dose that would be compatible with my current state (tired and wanting to go to bed) just in case it actually worked. If I was really going to test I-Dosing out, what I should have done is tried a sedative I-Dose when I wasn’t tired (not sure when I can find that moment in my calendar), or purchased one of their stimulant I-Doses and tried it when I was tired—though I’m unlikely to give I-Doser money, because the objectification of women in their promotional material really rubs me the wrong way. In any case, by combining a (supposed?) simulated sedative with my preexisting exhaustion, I created a situation in which I didn’t know what I was looking for while also trying to differentiate between two experiences that might feel very similar to each other.

In conclusion, I have no real idea whether I-Dosing works or not. I’ll probably try it again at some point, and if I do so, I’ll probably try “administering the dose” in something closer to the way the site suggests (though with the headphones I already own). If I feel any effects a second time around, however, this will have as much—if not moreso—to do with the fact that I’ve now read some I-Dose user reports, and have a sense of what being I-Dosed is supposed to be like. Even if I never try I-Dosing again, reading those reports has brought me closer to becoming an I-Dose user.

Whitney Erin Boesel may not be an I-Dose user, but she is a Twitter user. You can get a peek at her brain by following @phenatypical.

Woman wearing headphones image from http://www.i-doser.com/about.html
Woman holding cocktail glass full of pills image from I-Doser free trial:
“MultipleO” image from http://idosersoftware.com/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=6
Man wearing headphones image from http://www.i-doser.com/index.html
“Marijuana” image from http://idosersoftware.com/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=7&sort=20a&page=3
“Content” image from http://idosersoftware.com/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=2

Little known fact: I profoundly dislike going to events longer than four or five hours entirely by myself. Though I enjoy my own company, and have a visceral need for regular time alone, one thing I really do not enjoy (understatement) is awkwardly standing alone in a crowd of complete strangers who are having conversations. This doesn’t stop me from going to all sorts of things by myself, as I have an even stronger dislike of missing out on events that seem interesting, exciting, or useful to me. But as someone who falls somewhere between “awkward at” and “terrified of” approaching people she doesn’t yet know, there’s a certain level of OH GOD OH GOD OH GOD involved each time I have to contemplate keeping myself socially occupied for longer than an average night of rock shows.

How do I deal with this? Put simply: Twitter.

Ever since ROFLCon 2008—which is what got me on Twitter in the first place[i]—being on Twitter has helped to ameliorate some of my Solo Introvert’s Event Anxiety. I may not “know” people after exchanging a few comments with them on a hashtag, but those people aren’t exactly strangers either; approaching to ask, “Hey, are you <username>?” feels far less overwhelming and potentially intrusive than do other ways of initiating a first-ever in-person conversation with someone. What’s even better is that, since I look like my user icon, other people often recognize me and do the work of approaching to say “hello” instead (which I think is awesome); in fact, I can thank one such pair of interactions for the fact that I write for this blog. (Yay, Twitter!)

Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about the relationship between digitally-mediated sociality and in-person sociality, mainly because I spent last week solo-attending a five day event with only intermittent access to the Internet—and it turns out that few things make me contemplate digitally-mediated sociality the way being unwillingly cut off from it does. From Wednesday of last week to Tuesday of this week, I was in Reykjavík, Iceland for Iceland Airwaves 2012. I love this music festival, and was super-excited last spring when I made plans to attend it for the second time. There was a key difference between my experiences of Airwaves 2012 and Airwaves 2010, however, and that difference was this: by 2012, I’d learned the hard way that just because I can use my phone in Iceland doesn’t mean I should use my phone in Iceland. (Three words: “data roaming,” and “ouch.”) The plan was therefore to run wifi-only for #Airwaves12.

It was really hard.

There’s a lot of free wifi in Reykjavík, and a fair number of networks that are even unsecured. At the same time, many of the smaller festival venues didn’t have wifi, and the wifi in my apartment for the week was touch-and-go. Even when a venue had wifi, getting on it was sometimes difficult or impossible: Airwaves is an international festival, and I certainly wasn’t the only attendee fiendishly jumping on any hint of a signal, desperate for digital data. Even when I had wifi, I couldn’t communicate in all the ways I usually do; text messaging my friends who don’t use iPhones, for example, wasn’t an option. Suddenly I was almost painfully aware of how many functions my glowing rectangle serves for me (why do we still call it a phone?): I use my pocket computer and its portable Internet access not just to stay in touch with people but also to stay in touch with the world, to feel that I’m a part of the world at all. I use it to feel that I have a voice, and can speak, and can be heard, even if only by tracking algorithms and packet switchers that will never respond in any way I can understand. (And don’t even get me started about how much I apparently depend on scrolling through Twitter on my phone—read also: alarm clock—in order to wake up in the morning.)

The difficulty of getting online as an international visitor in Reykjavík shaped my experience of the festival on two levels, and not just because I kept oversleeping as I adjusted to life on Greenwich Mean Time. There’s the obvious personal/individual level, which is the fact that it was far more difficult for me at Airwaves to participate on the event hashtag, to document my experiences in the moment, and to use Twitter as a way to meet and interact with other event attendees. But there’s also the collective level effect, which is how the character of hashtag participation and other digital interaction itself may have been affected by the fact that a large portion of festival attendees had only limited mobile Internet access.

One member of a local Reykjavík band told me that, although his band had started an account, they didn’t use it very much—and that Twitter use in general isn’t very common in Iceland. If he was correct, this means that the people who had the easiest access to Twitter during the festival were also among the least likely to be on Twitter in the first place. There’s no way to know, of course, how many people would have been using Twitter at Airwaves if everyone had had reliable, non-roaming data coverage. It’s also important to acknowledge that my observations of hashtag participation are based only on tweets that were in English (roughly 60 to 70 percent of the tweets I saw), and that I was only following the official hashtag. Hashtag interaction in other languages may have been different, and my own experience might have been different if I was fluent in more than just English (particularly if I spoke Íslenska). Interaction may also have been different on some of the unofficial hashtags I saw pop up from time to time, such as #airwaves2012.

What first struck me about the #airwaves12 tag was twofold. First, although there were a fair number of posts being made to the hashtag, there weren’t a lot of conversations happening on it. Most posts were originating tweets rather than responses to other tweets, as if the majority of tweeting attendees were using the #airwaves12 hashtag only to draw more attention to their applicable tweets rather than also to interact with each other.

Second, cross-posts from Instagram made up a substantive portion (at times more than half) of the hashtag traffic. Some of the ways this differed from what I’m used to are undoubtedly due to the nature of the event itself: pretty light shows are more Instagrammable than are, say, most conference presentations, and pretty pictures more often prompt “likes” back on Instagram than verbal comments on Twitter. The very existence of Instagram, too, seems to promote photo sharing on Twitter in ways that less-Social photo hosting platforms (like Flickr, TwitPic, or Twitter’s own image hosting service) didn’t during Airwaves 2010. Not only did I see more photos posted this year, but almost every photo I saw posted to #airwaves12 (and every photo I posted to the hashtag myself: guilty) was an Instagram photo. Instagram does use hashtags, but the conversation each pulls up is written in pictures rather than words; if a Twitter hashtag can call up a public commons, an Instagram hashtag calls up an array of smaller rooms (images) with unlocked doors, which may or may not have verbal dialogue going on within them.

What it took me a night of thwarted hashtag participation and under-augmented show-going to realize, however, was that Instagram’s heavy presence on #airwaves12 may also have been due, in part, to the fact that many attendees (presumably) didn’t have constant mobile Internet access. Why? Because at least in my experience, the temporality of Instagram is more conducive to expressions of the recent past than is the temporality of Twitter. (Instagram’s faux vintage photos encourage us to see our present as always a future past, after all, whereas Twitter invites you to “find out what’s happening, right now, with the people and organizations you care about.”) Just like you wouldn’t live tweet a debate after it aired, you wouldn’t give detailed, multi-tweet descriptions of a show that happened hours ago; you can have a couple Instagram shots backed up for the next time you hit a wifi hotspot, but posting a night’s worth of backed up tweets in one fell swoop would feel strange and out of place. (Trust me: posting even half a night’s worth of tweets feels like Doing It Wrong.)

Yes, there’s the “insta” in Instagram, and people do frequently post pictures taken “in the now”; likewise, it wouldn’t be abnormal to tweet “<band name> was awesome last night!” But while whether one posts in the moment or after the fact has little impact on what one might post to Instagram, this distinction does impact what one might post to Twitter. “This set is awesome!” can easily convert to “That set was awesome!” on either Instagram or Twitter, but many of Twitter’s other uses are temporality-dependent and don’t work in after-tweeting. There’s no point in asking about queue length once the show in question is over, for example, and it doesn’t do much good to find out the next morning which shows a majority of people were planning to attend last night.

Critically, many of the ways that one might initiate tweeted conversations with strangers in the absence of public hashtag repartee are temporality-dependent. Sending an @reply to a stranger to ask about the show they just said they’re at makes sense (“how’s <band name>, are they any good?”), but sending an @reply to a stranger to ask the same question about the show they were at two days ago is a lot more personal. Why are you asking that person in particular, when you could scroll back and read everything that got posted on the hashtag afterward? Questions do not convert across time as easily as do plain documentary statements; removed from the immediacy of their original moments, questions require additional framing, some explanation of why they’re being asked and directed as they are. Without some sort of additional information—for example, “I really wanted to see  <band name>, but it was the same time as the <other band name> show. What did you think?”— temporally-dislocated questions to strangers can run the risk of seeming tangential, untoward, or even ‘creepy’.

Accordingly, what I saw on the #airwaves12 hashtag was a lot of statements (whether in pictures, words, or both), and very few questions. The few questions I did see go by rarely got on-hashtag answers; the handful of questions I asked got almost no responses at all. The one exception was the day I (thankfully!) discovered another hashtag: #rvktweetup, for Reykjavík Tweetup. After I tweeted that I wished I’d discovered #rvktweetup earlier, the organizer tweeted back to tell me I could still make that day’s gathering; some more back-and-forth communicated the logistics, and 20 minutes later I’d finally met some other festival attendees via Twitter. The tweetup was (of course) at a wifi-enabled location, and those of us who weren’t already following each other were able to do so before we parted ways. This was an important step: it’s what allowed a relatively brief encounter to become a collection of ongoing contacts and connections, rather than simply dissipate and return us all to the anonymous crowd.

This, to me, is part of the beauty of cybersociality: the cybersocial synergy of digital sociality and in-person sociality fueling and reinforcing each other, creating and often deepening connections as they do so. I’ve stayed in touch with some of the people I met at Airwaves in 2010, and I’m planning to stay in touch with a number of the people I met at Airwaves this year; eventually, some combination of personal schedules will work out such that I’ll go to Airwaves and actually know other attendees before the festival is half-over. I was also fortunate enough to meet up with friends of a Twitter friend after Airwaves ended: a gathering over pints was coordinated (via Twitter) after I was introduced (via Twitter), and since I started following the people I met that night, I’ll be staying in touch (via Twitter) with my new friends in Reykjavík, too.

Obviously, cybersocial synergy doesn’t just apply to music festivals; for instance, though it’s still 2012, I’m already gleefully looking forward to seeing many of the people that I met at #TtW12 next year at Theorizing the Web 2013. But cybersocial synergy also isn’t limited to events with hashtags; sometimes the ‘event’ is a wonderful ever-expanding meet-up at which you find yourself suddenly plugged into a preexisting network. Sometimes the ‘event’ is sitting down with a new contact over coffee, or a chance meeting at a bus stop in the city where you live.

For the first large chunk of Airwaves 2012, I tried, and failed, to meet people without using Twitter—and did a lot of that awkward standing by myself stuff between sets (while writing short statements I couldn’t tweet and cropping phone photos into square-shaped images I couldn’t post). Some people might claim that this is because digital sociality has destroyed my ability to interact with other people “in real life” (or something), but digital sociality and in-person sociality are not zero-sum; I’m frankly at my lifetime high point for Stranger Interaction Skills, and that’s certainly not in spite of my engagement with social media.

That said…I still really hope they expand wifi access at Airwaves 2013.

Whitney Erin Boesel is obviously on Twitter. You can follow her! She’s @phenatypical.

All photos by Whitney Erin Boesel. Used with permission.

How did the Awkward Party Comment shift from “I know, I read your Livejournal” to “You read what I posted on Facebook, right?” As I explained last week, this change is related to what I call the devolution of friendship. In devolved friendship, we expect our friends to take on a greater share of the friendship-labor involved in being friends with us. I link the devolution of friendship to the affordances of social media sites, and particularly to general broadcasting and frictionless sharing. While I don’t go so far as to say devolved friendship is necessarily a bad thing (or a good thing), at least two of its characteristics deserve a closer examination: the non-uniform rationalization of friendship-labor and the depersonalization of friendship-labor. I explore both below.

The Non-Uniform Rationalization of Friendship-Labor
Social media has rationalized “sharing with friends” to the point of relentless efficiency, but it has not rationalized “being shared with” to the same degree. Instead, the ease of sharing means that we are now bombarded with ‘shared’ information—something Facebook itself has acknowledged with its new “sponsored” status updates, and that some of us acknowledge when we turn off frictionless sharing because we’re concerned about “spamming” our friends. We produce “sharing” at a rate far greater than we can consume it, and we flood the marketplace for attention.

In short, “sharing” has become a lot easier and a lot more efficient, but “being shared with” has become much more time-consuming, demanding, and inefficient (especially if we don’t ignore most of our friends most of the time). Given this, expecting our friends to keep up with our social media content isn’t expecting them to meet us halfway; it’s asking them to take on the lion’s share of staying in touch with us. Our jobs (in this role) have gotten easier; our friends’ jobs have gotten harder.

Of course, some of our friends might not mind performing more friendship-labor. Their own friends:time ratios might be low, and therefore allow them to keep up with everything we produce and circulate. Other friends might decline to perform the extra friendship-labor we implicitly demand of them, but also not mind maintaining closeness across a more distanced engagement. Still other friends might be ok with the fact that, again and again, we still haven’t seen whatever super-awesome thing of unbelievable awesomeness they posted, even though they posted it on whatever platform a week ago. Regardless, the shift from a “push” model of friendship to a “pull” model is worth noting.

It’s important to note here that, though I talk about our roles as share-producers and as share-consumers, these roles are deeply interrelated. This is because social media is something we prosume, something we both produce and consume in a simultaneous bi-directional feedback loop not unlike the give-and-take of functional friendship. The shares we produce often contain the same content we consumed just moments earlier; even when we generate original content, chances are pretty good we’ll consume some of our friends’ shares while logged in to social media sites to produce our own shares. If any frictionless sharing functions are in play, our content consumption fuels a whole stream of newly-produced share content. Even if we’ve turned off frictionless sharing, and even if we don’t repost anything we consume, our content consumption still produces data through cookies and other online tracking devices, and this data in turn feeds back into the algorithms that shape and structure our social media experiences. Though how much deliberate effort we put into each role may vary, the reality of prosumption is that it’s essentially impossible to engage in either the production or the consumption of social media content without engaging in the other. (Make a mental note of this concept if you don’t already know it, because I’ll reference it again near the end.)

The Depersonalization of Friendship-Labor
The second thing worth noting is that devolved friendship is also depersonalized friendship. Sure, we still send specific messages to specific friends through social media services, through other electronic media like email and text messages, and through non-electronic media; the personalized, hard-to-track shares that take place through email and text message communication (etc) may get called “dark social,” but they’re still social and we’re still engaged in producing them. We also still post things on each other’s individual Facebook walls, and we still send @replies on Twitter. Sometimes we share with specific friends within our generalized broadcasts, perhaps by tagging them in a Facebook status update or by slipping an @mention into the middle of a tweet. These things are not examples of depersonalized friendship. Frictionless sharing and generalized broadcasting, however, do represent depersonalized friendship, because we’re not sharing with any one or more of our friends in particular. Instead we’re sharing generally, with an unknown subset of people who will self-select from whatever potential audience we’ve allowed.

I talked a bit about this difference between “social” and “personal” sharing last week in an expanded version of my August post about the social music streaming service Spotify. To summarize, I signed up for a free trial of Spotify in order to update my essay, and found that being on Spotify isn’t at all what I’d expected. Given that Spotify is supposed to be “social,” and that near a half dozen people had been pushing me for weeks to start using it, I sort of expected that…you know…being on Spotify would involve experiences that felt like socializing. I imagined Spotify would be like a geographically distributed, digitally-enabled version of the old H3W porch (that’s Historic 3 Wadsworth), where a certain group of my friends used to spend every Monday night listening to—and arguing about—music. Friends, conversations, shared songs, chaotic banter: personal, collective, reciprocal social interaction.

Being on Spotify, however, is not like being on the porch. When you show up on the porch, your friends talk to you. Though a good deal of conversation (and performance) is addressed to the generalized audience of the group, your friends speak to you individually as well[i]. There will also be times when you, specifically, are called upon to address the group, even before Monday becomes Tuesday and the world’s most wonderfully esoteric word game begins. Even when you are not speaking your friends recognize that you are there, and you recognize that you are there. Everyone on the porch knows that everyone on the porch knows who’s on the porch. The group may be a generalized audience, but it is a specific and mutually recognized generalized audience.

When you show up on Spotify, however, your friends don’t automatically talk to you. They don’t automatically send you notes and songs either, the way I do with my friends via both email and snailmail. You can see when your friends are listening to something (if they scrobble, or have “Spotify Social” enabled), but you have no idea if any of them know you’re there and looking. Scrobbling might be “social,” but it’s not very personal by default.

Personal interaction doesn’t just happen on Spotify, and since I was hoping Spotify would be the New Porch, I initially found Spotify to be somewhat lonely-making. It’s the mutual awareness of presence that gives companionate silence its warmth, whether in person or across distance. The silence within Spotify’s many sounds, on the other hand, felt more like being on the outside looking in. This isn’t to say that Spotify can’t be social in a more personal way; once I started sending tracks to my friends, a few of them started sending tracks in return. But it took a lot more work to get to that point, which gets back to the devolution of friendship (as I explain below).

When I first started poking around on Spotify, I wasn’t at all sure what the behavioral and interactional norms were supposed to be. Clicking on my friends’ listening activity without talking to them felt a bit like rifling through somebody’s CD collection without permission after they’d stepped out to use the restroom—which I recognize some people don’t mind, but which to me feels like something of a transgression. One ‘Spotivangelist’ friend told me that I was being ridiculous, and that scrobbling (frictionless sharing of one’s listening activity) is “donating your taste to a generalized other.” I wasn’t sure I agreed exactly, but I took that one friend’s statement as tacit, blanket permission to start checking out what any of my friends were listening to (without clicking into “private” mode beforehand, and then feeling guilty about it later).

I’ve been thinking since, however, on what it means to view our friends as “generalized others.” I may now feel like less of like “creepy stalker” when I click on a song in someone’s Spotify feed, but I don’t exactly feel ‘shared with’ either. Far as I know, I’ve never been SpotiVaguebooked (or SubSpotified?); I have no reason to think anyone is speaking to me personally as they listen to music, or as they choose not to disable scrobbling (if they make that choice consciously at all). I may have been granted the opportunity to view something, but it doesn’t follow that what I’m viewing has anything to do with me unless I choose to make it about me. Devolved friendship means it’s not up to us to interact with our friends personally; instead it’s now up to our friends to make our generalized broadcasts personal.

Nathan Jurgenson (@nathanjurgenson) has suggested that my awkward feelings about interacting with individual friends as a ‘generalized other’ are a form of cyberasociality [pdf], but I’m not certain I agree with him. I think the key piece in my discomfort, in my inability to read frictionless sharing and generalized broadcasts as friendship-labor (or as “personal social interaction”) in and of themselves, is that these forms lack clear mutual acknowledgement. The problem is that they’re depersonalized, not that they’re digitally mediated. That said, for all the examples of interaction that is both digitally mediated & mutually acknowledged that I can list, I can’t come up with an analogous non-digital form of depersonalized friendship-labor. If depersonalized friendship-labor is in fact unique to digitally mediated interaction, I can’t dismiss ‘resistance to depersonalized friendship as cyberasociality’ as readily as I would like.

In any case, regardless of whether it brings more harms or benefits—and regardless of my (potentially cyberasocial) relationship to it—devolved friendship’s attendant depersonalization deserves attention. When we consider the lopsided rationalization of ‘sharing’ and ‘shared with,’ as well as the depersonalization of frictionless sharing and generalized broadcasting, what becomes clear is this: the social media deck is stacked in such a way as to make being ‘a self’ easier and more rewarding than being ‘a friend.’

Jenny Davis (@Jup83) recently highlighted the incentivization to share with her concept of FOBM, or “fear of being missed.” FOMO, “fear of missing out,” is the anxiety we feel when we can’t keep up with consuming all the share-content our friends produce. Because it is now up to us to turn our friends’ generalized broadcasts into personal interaction, we can never know how many opportunities for connection slip by and are lost when we get behind in sifting through our streams. But again, that sifting takes a lot of work: as Davis says of her experience watching the second Presidential debate without access to Facebook or Twitter, “I wanted to see what everyone was saying, but I also knew that the vast majority of [even the smartest members of my network] would not be saying much of substance.” Davis’s comment is not a snarky remark about her friends, but rather an acknowledgement of the fact that even if she’d had access to Twitter during the debate, she’d have been sorting through a lot of dumb “binders full of women” jokes to get to more substantive conversations about, say, sexism in the workplace.

Fear Of Being Missed, on the other hand, is the anxiety we feel when we can’t produce share-content ourselves. As Davis explains in the comments, FOBM “isn’t that others recognize and lament one’s absence, but rather, that one is skipped over or unseen.” If FOMO is the fear of being excluded and forgotten for failing to consume share-content, FOBM is the fear of being excluded and forgotten for failing to produce share-content. “Interaction begets interaction,” Davis explains. So assuming we want interaction with our friends, how do we go about getting it? On the one hand we can attempt to tackle FOMO, and knock ourselves out sorting through all of our friends’ share-content looking for individual instances of generalized friendship-labor that we can work to personalize. On the other hand, we can attempt to tackle FOBM–and skip the sorting, in favor of letting our friends respond to our own generalized friendship-labor. Obviously the vast majority of us take on both of these tasks, but the latter is a much more efficient way to harvest the attention and acknowledgment we crave.

It’s easy to share, to broadcast, to put our selves and our tastes and our identity performances out into the world for others to consume; what feedback and friendship we get in return comes in response to comparatively little effort and investment from us. It takes a lot more work, however, to do the consumption, to sift through everything all (or even just some) of our friends produce, to do the work of connecting to our friends’ generalized broadcasts so that we can convert their depersonalized shares into meaningful friendship-labor.

We may be prosumers of social media, but the reward structures of social media sites encourage us to place greater emphasis on our roles as share-producers—even though many of us probably spend more time consuming shared content than producing it. There’s a reason for this, of course; the content we produce (for free) is what fuels every last ‘Web 2.0’ machine, and its attendant self-centered sociality is the linchpin of the peculiarly Silicon Valley concept of “Social” (something Nathan Jurgenson and I will discuss together in greater detail next week). It’s not super-rewarding to be one of ten people who “like” your friend’s shared link, but it can feel rewarding to get 10 “likes” on something you’ve shared—even if you have hundreds or thousands of ‘friends.’ Sharing is easy; dealing with all that shared content is hard.

Obviously there’s a whole lot more to friendship than sharing links, songs, and moving pictures (even if they’re pictures of spinning disco chickens, or of an epic sports catastrophe). But I wonder sometimes if the shifts in expectation that accompany devolved friendship don’t migrate across platforms and contexts in ways we don’t always see or acknowledge. Social media affects how we see the world—and how we feel about being seen in the world—even when we’re not engaged directly with social media websites. It’s not a stretch, then, to imagine that the affordances of social media platforms might also affect how we see friendship and our obligations as friends most generally.

“Well, you saw what I posted on Facebook, right?”

I don’t know about you, but when I get this question from a friend, my answer is usually “no.” No, I don’t see everything my friends post on Facebook—not even the 25 or so people I make a regular effort to keep up with on Facebook, and not even the subset of friends I count as family. I don’t see everything most of my friends tweet, either; in fact, “update Twitter lists” has been hovering in the middle of my to-do list for the better part of a year. And even after I update those lists, I probably still won’t be able to keep up with everything every friend says on Twitter, either.

I feel guilty when I get the “You saw what I posted, right?” question. I feel like a bad friend, like I’m slacking off in my care work, like I’m failing to value my important human relationships. Danah boyd (@zephoria) was talking about something similar two nights ago at “Boom and Bust“—about how social networking sites create pressure to put time and effort into tending weak ties, and how it can be impossible to keep up with them all. Personally, I also find it difficult to keep up with my strong ties. I’m a great “pick up where we left off” friend, as are most of the people closest to me (makes sense, right?). I’m decidedly sub-awesome, however, at being in constant contact with more than a few people at a time.

Anyway, I have a bad case of Social Media Saturation Guilt, and “You saw what I posted, right?” hits that guilt square on its head. Recently, however, I’ve been thinking about how the awkward collisions of online and offline conversation used to run in the opposite direction. Twelve years ago[i] I was on an email list that was basically a private, 70-someodd person pre-Facebook: members shared links, asked questions, had serious conversations, sent invitations to parties, and circulated photos taken at those parties after they happened. It wasn’t uncommon to talk about something someone had posted to “the list” in face-to-face conversation, whether in small groups or at larger events.

Then, over a period of a month or two, most of us on “the list” got on Livejournal, and most of us who had Livejournals started ‘reading’ most of the rest of us who had Livejournals. (Yeah, Livejournal. We’re back in late 2000, remember?)

The affordances of Livejournal being what they are, most of us posted different content to our Livejournals than we did to “the list.” The intersection of Livejournal content and in-person conversation, however, wasn’t as seamless as the intersection of list content and in-person conversation. A new phenomenon popped up that a good portion of “the list” found anywhere from off-putting to downright hurtful, and it looked something like this:

The Scene: a “list” party.

List Member A: Hey, it’s good to see you! What have you been up to recently?
List Member B: [Starts to tell story]—
List Member A: [Cuts off List Member B] Yeah, I know. I read your Livejournal.

These aborted conversations became common enough that they spawned a long, intense debate on “the list” about what should be the proper etiquette for intersections of Livejournal and life-in-the-moment. Some list members felt it was rude and insensitive for friends to cut each other off; other list members felt it was rude and entitled for friends to expect each other to sit through the same story twice. The eventual compromise was to declare a sort of ‘best practice,’ which was that List Member A should signal being caught up with List Member B’s Livejournal by chiming in with a detail from the story: “Oh yeah! But then you found your cat hiding in the wall, right?” List Member B, on the other hand, should truncate the story accordingly: “Yeah! I have no idea how she got in there!”

So how did the Awkward Party Comment shift from “I know, I read your Livejournal” to “You read what I posted on Facebook, right?” There’s a simple explanation, which is that each of us was probably consuming less friend-generated and friend-circulated digital content back then. This could be because those of us on “the list” were just maintaining fewer digital connections in 2000, but there’s also the mode of communication to consider: though some list members juggled multiple different list subscriptions, and Livejournal, and usenet or BBS groups, all of these revolved primarily around text-based communication, and original text takes time to create (something of which I’m particularly aware at the moment, as I write this). When the rate of friend-content production was slower, it was easier to consume most if not all of what our friends produced and circulated.

Yet I don’t think this shift in content production alone explains the shift in social expectation. I think there’s something else in play, which I’m going to call the devolution of friendship. As I explain over the course of this two-part essay, I link the devolution of friendship to—but do not “blame” it on—the affordances of various social networking platforms, especially (but not exclusively) so-called “frictionless sharing” features.

What does “devolution” mean? I’m using the word here in the same way that people use it to talk about the devolution of health care. One example of devolution of health care is some outpatient surgeries: patients are allowed to go home after their operations, but they still require a good deal of post-operative care such as changing bandages, irrigating wounds, administering medications, etc. Whereas before these patients would stay in the hospital and nurses would perform the care-labor necessary for their recoveries, patients must now find their own caregivers (usually family members or friends; sometimes themselves) to perform free care-labor. In this context, devolution marks the shift of labor and responsibility away from the medical establishment and onto the patient; within the patient-medical establishment collaboration, the patient must now provide a greater portion of the necessary work. Similarly, in some ways, we now expect our friends to do a greater portion of the work of being friends with us.

[Obligatory “We” Check: by “we,” here I mean some social media users some of the time. I’m not saying that all social media users’ expectations have shifted in this way, or that any given social media user’s friendship expectations are uniform across different friends, times, or contexts, or that the devolution of friendship applies only to people who use social media. Got it? Ok good.]

Through social media, “sharing with friends” is rationalized to the point of relentless efficiency. The current apex of such rationalization is frictionless sharing: we no longer need to perform the labor of telling our individual friends about what we read online, or of copy-pasting links and emailing them to “the list,” or of clicking a button for one-step posting of links on our Facebook walls. With frictionless sharing, all we have to do is look, or listen; what we’ve read or watched or listened to is then “shared” or “scrobbled” to our Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, or whatever other online profiles. Whether we share content actively or passively, however, we feel as though we’ve done our half of the friendship-labor by ‘pushing’ the information to our walls, streams, and tumblelogs. It’s then up to our friends to perform their halves of the friendship-labor by ‘pulling’ the information we share from those platforms.

When we think about this form of “bulk sharing” from our perspectives as content-creators and circulators, there are ways in which it seems like a good thing. We’re busy people; we like the idea of making one announcement on Facebook and being done with it, rather than having to repeat the same story over and over again to different friends individually. We also like not always having to think about which friends might like which stories or songs; we like the idea of sharing with all of our friends at once, and then letting them sort out who is and isn’t interested amongst themselves. Though social media can create burdensome expectations to keep up with strong ties, weak ties, and everyone in between, social media platforms can also be very efficient. Using the same moment of friendship-labor to tend multiple friendships at once kills more birds with fewer stones.

There are also ways in which we like being on the “more labor” side of devolution. For instance, sometimes we like the devolution of health care: if we are privileged enough to have people who can perform the necessary care-labor for us, many of us would prefer to recover from surgery in the comfort of our own homes rather than in hospitals. Theorists point out that we provide free labor when we use self-checkout machines at grocery stores and pharmacies, but to some of us that ‘free labor’ is a small price to pay for getting in and out faster, for waiting in a shorter line, and for not dealing with (“dealing with”) another human being at a conventional checkout counter.

Similarly, sometimes we like the devolution of friendship. When we have to ‘pull’ friendship-content instead of receiving it in a ‘push’, we can pick and choose which content items to pull. We can ignore the baby pictures, or the pet pictures, or the sushi pictures—whatever it is our friends post that we only pretend to care about (if we even bother to pretend). Whether we interact through digital media, through the telephone, or through speech in face-to-face conversations, socializing with specific individual friends requires that we mask our disinterest in [babies/pets/sushi/other] by actively ‘smiling and nodding,’ in one form or another. The non-specific sharing of devolved friendship, however, lets us skip this step. We can leave it to everyone else to respond, or tell ourselves that our sushi baby pet friend isn’t really talking to us in particular. Within devolved friendship interactions, it takes less effort to be polite while secretly waiting for someone to please just stop talking.

So if we like devolved friendship from the perspective of both share-producers and share-consumers, what’s the problem? While I won’t go so far as to say they’re definitely ‘problems,’ there are two major things about devolved friendship that I think are worth noting. The first is the non-uniform rationalization of friendship-labor, and the second is the depersonalization of friendship-labor. I’ll explore both of these in the coming week, in Part II of this essay.

Last week I wrote about a pattern I’ve been seeing, one for which I wanted to create a new term. I’m still working on the terminology issue, but the pattern is basically this:

1) A new technology highlights something about our society (or ourselves) that makes us uncomfortable.
2) We don’t like seeing this Uncomfortable Thing, and would prefer not to confront it.
3) We blame the new technology for causing the Uncomfortable Thing rather than simply making it more visible, because doing so allows us to pretend that the Uncomfortable Thing is unique to practices surrounding the new technology and is not in fact out in the rest of the world (where it absolutely is, just in a less visible way).

The examples I sketched out last week were Klout and Facebook’s new “sponsored” status updates (which Jenny Davis has since explored in greater depth); this week, I’m going to take a look at ‘helpful’ devices and smartphone apps.

In an essay for The New Inquiry last week, Jathan Sadowski (@jathansadowski) considered whether increasingly sophisticated smartphone apps could portend a future “Reign of the Techno-Nanny.” The essay itself is worth reading, but in oversimplified summary form the basic idea is a kind of “slippery slope” argument: we’ll start using smartphone apps for “conveniences” like grocery shopping and navigation, and then—as the technology becomes more sophisticated, and more app options become available—we’ll start to use apps for a wider range of less-trivial purposes, including decision-making. We’ll become habituated to following directions and taking orders from apps, to the point where we lose the ability to make moral decisions on our own.

I should say at the outset that I’m not a philosopher, and that Sadowski’s piece is likely part of a larger conversation with which I (as a non-philosopher) am not familiar. To date, my theoretical concerns haven’t included ‘moral character’ per se, and my personal strengths as a sociologist lie more in being particular about language and in asking annoying questions. That said, from my sociologist’s perspective, I can think of a number of reasons why a future in which we’ve outsourced moral or ethical decisions to apps may not be so likely.

More importantly, I think cultural anxieties about dependence on ‘helpful’ devices and apps have more to do with our anxieties around dependence and individual autonomy in general. Decision-making apps are concerning not because they represent a loss of cognitive independence, but because they expose how dependent and easily influenced we already are. We’re not autonomous individuals who make independent decisions every day, but who are now at risk of being lured into dependent complacency by an insidious tide of ‘helpful’ technologies. Especially in the U.S., we like to believe that we’re autonomous individuals—and that even if we consult with friends or family, we ultimately make our self-determined decisions in a social vacuum—but that’s not really how it works.

Below, I go through a few of the reasons I don’t think we’re headed to Techno-Nanny hell just yet, and try to show how what’s really making us anxious about these apps predates the apps themselves. We like to center our anxieties on the apps, however, in order to create the illusion that the cause for our concern is contained, and to place uncomfortable truths about influence and autonomy in the impending future rather than in the undeniable present.

As I said, I’m a sociologist, so the first thing I need to do is point out that not everyone has a smartphone; at least at present, owning a smartphone (or a similarly-featured tablet device) is a prerequisite for using mobile apps. Many people can’t afford smartphones (or the service plans necessary to use them), and others simply don’t want to own smartphones even though they could afford them. Even among smartphone users—and this may sound like heresy, but bear with me—not everyone defines “convenience” the same way, and not everyone values convenience above all else. What may seem like a “helpful” app to some people may hold absolutely no allure for others.

To illustrate, a former partner and I had a long-standing disagreement about whether the ‘default state’ of a smartphone is properly “on” or “off.” I feel strongly that the default state is “off,” and have had my phone consistently set to ‘vibrate’ for years; this particular partner felt equally strongly that the default state is “on,” and that I was a big old jerk for frequently leaving the phone in my bag and therefore not being immediately reachable.

In one of many arguments about this, the following scenario was posed to me: what if my partner were at the grocery store, and tried to call me to see if we needed milk, and I didn’t pick up—and then we were out of milk? What would I do in the morning when I was trying to make coffee? This line of reasoning didn’t get anywhere with me, because I thought the answer was obvious: clearly I’d drink my coffee black, and pick up more milk on my way home later in the day. For me, the convenience of never being out of milk (etc.) simply wasn’t worth the price of constant engagement with my phone. I’d rather be occasionally out of milk than perpetually aware of my glowing rectangle.

This anecdote highlights another important point however, and that is this: different people often use the same device in very different ways. Different brands of devices have different apps available; different people make different choices about which apps to install, and about how to configure their devices. Most importantly—and I think this piece is too often overlooked—how we use apps and devices differs according to with whom we use them. We don’t use technologies in a vacuum; we use them in the same social world in which we are inextricably enmeshed.

Designed objects (and apps) certainly do have affordances, or ways that they guide and ‘encourage’ us to use them, but we can also choose to use objects in ways their designers might not have anticipated. Shoes, for example, are shaped like feet, are usually soft(ish) on top, and come with harder under-parts; they suggest that we should use them to protect our feet when we’re walking around outside. Be that as it may, a shoe can also be used to open a bottle of wine. The shoe’s design may not encourage this use, but at least a few shoe-users have managed to pull it off.

Similarly, I can’t help but laugh a little when people worry about GPS devices turning their users into passive followers with no sense of direction, because my relationship with my own GPS device can only be described as dialectical. Perhaps some people follow passively (and drive into rivers, as Sadowski mentions), but I can’t be the only person who argues with her device, who tries to outsmart its algorithms to trick it into doing what she wants, and who’s accordingly learned to tune out the device’s digital sigh: “Recalculating.” Others might keep a GPS device on hand not to follow it passively, but to explore unknown areas actively and “get lost with confidence.” It’s possible that GPS devices are designed by people who imagine passive following to be the ultimate in convenience, but GPS devices get used in a range of other ways out in the world.

But what if ‘helpful’ apps and devices were more perfectly helpful? What if they never annoyed us, never interrupted us, somehow never asked anything of us, and certainly never told us to take Hwy 101 northbound when we knew 101 would be full of traffic well before we’d get home, even if it was uncongested now? (ahem.) What if these future apps were so seamless and perfect that more people did start using them, and using them in the ways designers had anticipated? What if decision-making apps catch on, and we really do start outsourcing our decision-making to apps? Could this be the end of our autonomy?

I say no, and here’s why: even if we start to “outsource” some of our decision making, we do that now with other people every time we ask for advice. Sometimes the people close to us give good advice, and sometimes they give bad advice; sometimes we take their advice, and sometimes we ignore it. Often we get a bunch of conflicting advice, and we cobble it together to make the best sense we can before moving forward. For the majority of people who use decision-making apps, the advice the apps provide will be just another voice in the same jumbled stew of opinions.

Now, does this mean we shouldn’t worry about the values that go into technology design, or about how the affordances of apps can influence our behavior? No, it doesn’t; we should absolutely pay attention to those things. But bias is everywhere. The people we ask for advice now also have biases, even when they endeavor to be objective for us. Apps may have that ‘glossy veneer of Science™’ to them, and may seem to hide their bias in shiny supposed objectivity, but advice-providers like columnists, therapists, and clergy often have similar glossy veneers of Expertise™.  Much of what we fear about decision-making apps is already part of our decision-making apparatuses.

There is another reason, however, that apps will never corner the market on advice provision. Even if we imagine a world in which everyone stops asking other people for advice and in which everyone makes decisions by consulting with apps in an impossible social vacuum, apps can only influence half of the equation. Even if an app determines the action we take, the feedback that follows will still come from other people. Apps can only co-produce our self-assessments of our actions; we’re still social creatures, we still live and act in societies, and in the end the consequences of our actions are still shaped far more by the judgments of the people around us. The truth is that we don’t have so much autonomy to lose.

Even if we manage to side-step thinking as we make a decision, the inevitable disagreements between our apps’ instructions and our friends’ assessments of our actions will force contemplation. In fact, this happens now: we speak or act rashly, without thinking properly, and the people around us call us out on our missteps. As a thought experiment, we can push this one step further by trying to imagine a world in which apps do run everything, in which no one speaks to critique someone else’s speech or behavior without asking an app want to say. The result is funny, and makes a great premise for a farcical theatre piece, but as anyone who’s even observed a heated argument knows, human opinions are often too passionate and too unruly to be so neatly channeled and contained.

It’s not just apps; we’re afraid of what we consider to be undue influence most generally. Considered in that light, the dystopian Techno-Nanny of the future is already among us in so many hybridized physical-digital forms: the controlling partner, the manipulative friend, the domineering parent; the charismatic cult leader, politician, or pundit. Anxieties about decision-making apps suffer from a two-pronged error in focus: the source of our discomfiture is neither out into the imagined future, nor buried in the contemplative inner workings of autonomous individuals. The source of our anxiety lies in the disjuncture between the autonomous selves of our fantasies and interconnected selves of our realities.

iPhone in bed image from http://hothardware.com/News/Survey-Reveals-iPhone-Addiction-Rampant-on-College-Campuses/
Smartphone slave image from http://operationunplugged.com/show/en/people/daniel/
Smartphone hell image from http://thetechjournal.com/tech-news/industry-news/smartphones-the-major-stress-trigger-according-to-british-psychological-society.xhtml
MilkSync app image from http://www.rememberthemilk.com/services/milksync/windowsmobile/
Slave to technology drawing by lone-dark-butterfly from http://lone-dark-butterfly.deviantart.com/art/Technology-Slave-136446233
Chained to smartphone image from http://www.economist.com/node/21549904