> 1) What makes social media like Facebook different than previous
> media like radio is that they create virtual communities. People
> share daily routines for lots of hours every day. They share personal
> information. They talk to each other and learn from each other. They
> "neighbor" as it used to be called. The only difference between these
> communities and all previous communities in history is that they are
> missing the face to face component.
>
> 2) People can certainly make virtual friends this way that have large
> impacts on their emotional life and sense of self and even direction in
> life. Gladwell's question is whether these kind of communities can be
> the basis for collective political action. And his answer, for various
> reasons, is No -- that their collective political action will necessarily
> be virtual, just like the rest of their social relations.
>
> 3) Gladwell is in effect arguing that political movements that change
> anything have to be based on real communities -- unions, parties,
> anything where people meet face to face. When you say that the point
> is that such groups can use this new stuff to be more effective, you
> seem to be implicitly agreeing with him.
False dichotomy. The virtual is a subset of the real. Behind the monitor's screen, or on the other end of the phone line (or of the radio or TV set) there are always real human beings, and that is aside from the fact that machines and apparata are all the products of human labor. Why is making the air next to our mouths vibrate more real than making an electronic device (a "microphone") next to our mouths vibrate to catch those vibrations, translate them into digits, and push them through some other physical medium just to reconstruct them on the other end as, again, air vibrations? As the old guy wrote: We, as subjects, can only face the rest of nature as a natural force, as objects.
What we call "face to face" is simply using the air in the immediate vicinity of our bodies, and also the "ether" -- the contiguous electromagnetic spectrum -- to interact. Even the sensations of "direct" physical contact between human bodies is no less a mediated illusion of our senses and entire nervous systems than the sensation of having somebody's voice next to our ear when we use the phone or the sensation of seeing the imprint of a loved one in a photo. We are still free to fetishize these media as we please. Because "knowing" the physics of it (and I'm describe things roughly) is no denial of the pleasures of bodily contact, closeness, human warmth, etc., aside from the fact that our current technology of sexual reproduction (and mothering) continues to require (thank God!) use of these very primitive technologies.
The air and the surrounding "ether" have been the main media platform for human interaction over a million years or so. So, it is well tested. It's robust, which suggests that we'll keep using it for generations to come, especially when other -- less robust -- media let us down. It will remain at the basis of the entire superstructure of more "artificial" media. So far, we have successfully reproduced ourselves, carry our inter-subjective back and forth, and built a thick complex culture mostly that way. But we have to recognize by now that this tendency to expand the immediate circle of our interactions beyond the immediate confines of space and time came along with our humanity. It was language, oral communication and then the written word that allowed humans to exploit and trade off forms of serial and parallel interaction, to trade off space for time and vice versa.
So, back to Gladwell's pieces, the premise appears to be that somebody out there -- somebody influential, because if not influential, then why spend the precious real estate of the New Yorker refuting her/him -- is wrongly claiming that Internet technologies make it unnecessary for people to interact face to face. They are not complementary ways (or, as I say, one the subset of the other), ways to extend and reinforce your immediate personal contact but rather mutually exclusive or substitutes. I guess the target is the commercial peddlers of these technologies and those in the left who get duped by that caricature. I grant *that* is a valid point.
However, the undertone of the pieces is misleading. What the pieces push is the fear that the Internet is an added cause of our alienation from one another and, hence, from the results of our social interactions, which then become the premises of our subsequent social connections. It is, but only in the sense that movies or TV shows in the 1970s caused racism in our society and that new shows emphasizing "diversity" and "racial sensitivity" eliminate it. The technophobic argument fails to locate the true and ultimate sources of our alienation in ... you know where I think they are to be located. In that sense, it is a noxious political decoy.
I'm not saying that the way we choose to overlay the next coat of productive wealth onto our lives will not make it easier or harder for us to re-appropriate our social relations on a higher platform, when/if we set out to do so. In fact, I'm emphasizing the exact opposite. I'm saying that Facebook, Twitter, etc. are disputed territories, that perhaps the rulers own them for the most part, but that the experience in Egypt shows that these technologies can facilitate our connections and struggles against alienation. I think the emphasis is better placed this way.
If I write another piece as long as this one, my social interactions, those in the immediate vicinity of my body are going to start to crumble. So bye for now. :)