> No, face to face means having a conversation
> of gestures -- a feedback loop of immediate
> reactions -- using our faces, hands and tones
> of voice. A lot of information, emotion and
> bonding is conveyed that way.
>
> You are free to argue that it doesn't matter.
> But I don't think you can say it's an false
> distinction. It is, in fact, FBOW, one of the
> founding distinctions of sociology and
> anthropology.
Michael,
I didn't mean to imply that face to face is indistinct from other interaction media. Or that the distinction does not matter. I think there's enough in my silly post earlier this morning to remove that impression. What I said, perhaps not clearly enough, is that face to face is also, necessarily, a mediated form of interaction. In this sense, it is just like Internet communication, or any other form of interaction for that matter. Inter-subjective contact is always and everywhere mediated by physical objects. That's why we call it media.
No wonder, since our evolving subjectivity is an emerging property of physical objects existing in the physical world (our bodies, our nervous systems, and by extension the artificial extensions we have been attaching to them progressively). In fact, our subjectivity has evolved precisely by and through our mutual, objectively mediated interactions, i.e. by and through these very artificial extensions beyond our own bodies. And at times we are even fuzzy about the discreteness between our bodies and these artificial extensions. Witness people with surgical implants, "artificial" limbs, or glasses, most everybody and their clothes, blind people and their guide dogs, professional bikers and their bikes, U.S. homeowners and their backyards, suburban dwellers and their cars, etc.
I paraphrased Marx's point that, as individual subjects, we can only relate to the rest of nature (and to the rest of society) as a natural force, as an object! So, what we are actually talking about here is different objective forms of the *same* inter-subjective contact.
Now, this doesn't imply that the difference between two media sets (e.g. face to face and Internet) doesn't matter. Of course it does. As I said, face to face has been the way we've done most of our interaction for most of human history. So, clearly, it's more deeply ingrained in our beings, individual and collective, in our social structures, etc. I'm not disputing some primacy to these more elementary media.
What I'm trying to emphasize here is that these media are not mutually exclusive, or at least not necessarily so, vis-a-vis the new media. They can be made complementary, reinforce each other. In fact, the elementary media operates as the subtratum of the new media. The new media chanels the basic media and compounds its power. Etc. Movies emphasize the visual, gestural aspect of our communication, most likely at the expense of other aspects (e.g. mass reach). Text is also visual, yet not as rich, but it emphasizes more abstract or symbolic communication. Etc.
Our switching from one medium to another is driven by our attempt to circumvent the barriers that each medium exhibits. Clearly, if the basic media forms sufficed to satisfy all our needs, if they entailed no barriers to our interactions, then why would we be developing and using the other media? What would we gain? Why bother?
Now, just to highlight how different media have different pluses and minuses, I'll say that, absent face and body gestures here, I'm now regretting that I started this morning's rushed post by responding to your paraphrases of Gladwell in terms of "virtual" versus "real," a dichotomy that I reject as false, because deep down, in a physical sense, every interaction is virtual, or -- if you wish -- real! What is usually called virtual is real enough. What is usually called real (face to face) is virtual in the sense that it is mediated by physical objects, just like the alternative media is.
My first line perhaps gave the impression that I was rejecting *your*
views. *I* thought I was not. I thought you had made clear in a
previous post that Gladwell's argument was not entirely persuasive to
you either. Now, look, Erick just reacted to my ex abrupto as if I
was confronting you, rather than Gladwell's argument, which you were
trying to summarize in a generous manner. I guess we need to meet
face to face soon and resolve this (or not) over coffee and pastries.
:)