Constantly Connected: Are We Puppets under Media’s Spell?
At first, it was easy. If something was needed online, someone went to the computer, turned it on, waited for the Internet to load, did whatever task was needed online, then logged off. Like turning a light switch on and off, there was a definite break between the online and offline. This was back when Internet was synonymous to the AOL dialup noise. It was where we logged in and logged out, signified by the little sound of a door opening or slamming shut on our AIM messenger. Fast-forward to modern day media and that distinction is no longer as easy as a door opened or closed. As of 2013, 63% of adult cell phone owners used their phones to go online (PEW). The Internet has caught up and is now as on the go as we are, increasingly as mobile as our phones. When speaking about media consumption, it is not something that can be defined to one place, especially in a city as in-motion as Chicago. As a 21-year-old student living in Chicago, I can attest to how mobile the life of my peers and myself is. Taking a step back, I quickly was able to notice just how big a role something handheld played in my life, blending the online world with the offline one. So I put it to the test. I thought quitting mobile media would change my life, but it really just strengthened the evidence that my “connections” follow me wherever I go, and that there are physical, mental, and social consequences we face being with and without said connections.
I was sure cutting my mobile social media intake would steer my life into order, bring “normalcy,” whatever that was, or at least make me more productive. I had high hopes, to be sure. My main hope for this test was to compartmentalize my media use in a way that would make it more efficient. Mirroring our in-class discussions of the relationship between utopic thoughts and new media, I believed that only being able to use media during certain times would allow me to use social media for the purposes I needed it for. For example, my Facebook would keep me up to date with friends’ birthdays, something I was very concerned about missing if I was completely disconnected from social media. In my grand mobile-media-free diet plan, I would check it at night when I was home and write a birthday message, having had my whole day when I was on the go free for me to do other things, such as read on the train. This did not happen. Like most diet plans, I quickly realized my life was not on an ordered schedule to do things like this. I never knew when I was going to be home. In my field notes I express anxiety because I almost didn’t open my laptop one night because I got home so late. I would have missed a long-distance friend’s birthday. In other words, my utopic vision for social media as a useful tool quickly diminished if I did not have it available to me in a mobile manner. Without the push notifications I was left my own, or rather, other, devices that did not always work as efficiently.
I might have felt lost without my social media in terms of efficiency, but my media diet was also able to help me notice the first major consequence of mobile media: a change in my physical presence. Being “present” somewhere can have many meanings. Normally, presence refers to being in a certain place at a certain time. Not too far into my media consumption monitoring, I was able to understand Rushkoff’s rule of Place in terms of social media. Just as the line of being online and offline was blurred, so was the line of where I was in a specific moment. I was not making up this sensed of ambiguity. Rushkoff argues in Program or Be Programmed, “the bias of networks were absolutely intended to favor decentralized activity” (43). Physically I was sitting on the train, but I was using media to put myself in many different places: reading international news tweets, responding to a friend about a class we had in an hour, or just posting a photo of the food I just ate in a restaurant down the street. Nicholas Carr furthers this thought in his article Is Google Making Us Stupid? by remarking that the “Internet, an immeasurably powerful computing system, is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies.” As internet and media begin to replace more things, such as newspapers, clocks, calculators, or cameras, it becomes necessary in more places. I experienced firsthand during my media diet when I went out to eat with my boyfriend. We sat at the table and immediately I put my phone face up next to my fork, as if it were another utensil. It got me to start thinking, how much was the phone just like a utensil? Even while on a media diet, I still had it at the ready, simply out of habit.
I noticed how Rushkoff’s tale of Gina, the girl who was both at the party and simultaneously searching for the next best thing online was a reality. I too noticed how my phone was able to remove me from my physical space. In my field notes I was in awe of how engrossed I was in facebook feed while a friend was trying to speak with me. It took so much mental effort on my part to switch from one “location” to the other.” Even on facebook, which a day earlier I had called “boring” and mused why I was even still on the site in my notes. Which brought me to another question: which one of these spaces did I hold to higher importance? My online or In-Real-Life location? While my knee-jerk reaction would always be to say “IRL” is most important every time, the evidence showed how subconsciously it was the opposite. My only explanation is that the physical buzzing and obnoxious notifications keep pulling us in. “The red notification is so enticing,” I wrote in my field notes, “apps like facebook and twitter, that constantly show notifications were harder for me not to check.” Only until we have someone doing the physical equivalent, slapping our wrist or waving a hand in our face, do we pay attention.
As mentioned before, realizing there was no strict divide between this online life and IRL demonstrated how we tow the line, with one foot in each realm most of the time. I felt like I was teetering between the two, waiting for one to pull me in a bit further than the other. Danah Boyd discusses in her lecture, Incantations for Muggles, how “there are no walls. The walls have come crumbling down.” I was physically in multiple places and mentally there as well. I named it “media snacking” during my monitoring. In my notes I checked my phone 23 times in a 40 minute train ride. They weren’t long intervals of use, but I went in and out of one medium and my real life. Carr notices the negative effects this seems to have on us. “What the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information…in a swiftly moving stream of particles…” In my media diet I noticed this as well. Constantly being online, or on-alert for the next notification, status update, etc. has our brains subconsciously checking constantly. When this breaks down, we are suddenly sedentary and it is uncomfortable. I noticed I reacted in one of two ways: I was either annoyed or feeling lazy.
Primarily these feelings occurred in what I referred to in my notes as “the tunnel,” a period of time on the Red Line train in which it goes underground and all 3G connection is cut on mobile devices. “People stared, like I was. I took note of how interesting we are when communication is suddenly cut. So many people are like zombies who don’t know what to do without a phone to check,” I wrote in my field notes. However this was a similar expression to that which I had while doing my Camtasia video while on media. I noticed this in my notes as well, stating, “being honest, I’m not sure disconnecting from media makes me any less of a zombie, just a different type of one.” If they weren’t spacing out with me, they experienced the other emotion I felt during my diet, “some even got desperate and kept trying to call back the person whose call they had dropped.” They were annoyed. Being removed from the constant connection was extremely uncomfortable.
My time monitoring my media intake has also demonstrated another type of consequence: social consequences. Boyd is correct in her assumption that people my age use media “primarily for coordination.” The biggest loss I felt was not being able to check facebook for possible events coming up or to see if I was missing something on campus. It was not simply this social disconnect that I felt howere. What I noticed it in “the tunnel” as well was “staring at people on the CTA at this point was starting to feel weird…We all avoid eye contact, while most pray for their service to return.” Referring back to my first consequence of presence, socially, we can see how in public settings we rely on our media to provide an invisible barrier. Without it, the excuse to not participate socially is not there. During my media-free time on the train, I felt like I had to retrain myself in how to be okay sitting in a full train of people without my phone as this excuse to not be in my environment. I had to ask myself if I was staring at people for too long or looking too open to unwanted conversations. The tunnel did not just disconnect me from the Internet, it also showed the disconnect I felt to the people around me.
As I sit writing this final portion of my media diet project, I have only checked my phone three times, a record in comparison to previously. What do these findings mean? Are we doomed to suffer the weight of being constantly connected? I guess my answer would be yes, but with a caveat: we are only as connected as we allow ourselves to be. Like Boyd suggests, I’m in my 20s. I want to be connected. Not a slave to technology, but “in the flow” of information, whatever it may be. The most important lesson I learned from all of this was what Rushkoff suggests throughout his book, to understand the system in which you are operating in. Now that I know how my connections influence me physically, socially, and mentally, I do feel more empowered and able to make it to my benefit rather than my distraction. A true master of media is connected, but surely isn’t a puppet.