As another term starts, and you see so many students plugged in to social media, instead of assuming they could more usefully be reading a book or playing sports or meeting people face to face (and how do you know they don’t do these other things as well?), consider this: here is a generation that has mostly come to accept high-speed multimedia global communication as a given. Ten years from now, where will they have taken its possibilities? What will they have accomplished?
It says something that Facebook by now seems almost quaint, and the first-generation networking sites like LiveJournal seem positively Jurassic. Twitter, tumblr, Foursquare, the infamous Chatroulette: it’s difficult to keep up with all the possibilities for instant communication. In some ways the model for these is not really the old school-internet discussion board or email but text-messaging, whose chief appeal from the outset, apart from its instantaneousness, was its portability: hands up (my hand is up) if your first text was “I’m on the bus!”
But then portable communication itself has come a long way. There’s a bit in the trailer for the Wall Street sequel when Gordon Gekko, on release from prison, is given back his mobile phone, a boxy 1980s device resembling nothing so much as Maxwell Smart’s shoe phone. Eventually, we got something that pleasantly reminded geeks of the flip-up communicators on the original Star Trek.
Now, thanks to increasingly robust and widespread wireless connectivity, people using something roughly the size and shape of a playing card, and almost as thin, are managing email, taking pictures, watching streaming video, listening to music, and posting text and images to various social media venues while following the posts in real time of people at a variety of real venues all over the world. Expand the size of the playing card a little, and they can also read books and articles; they can carry a multimedia library around with them; they can carry around the Internet.
A few years ago in writing about social networking for UBC Reports, I pondered the simultaneous fear of privacy and increasingly compartmentalized obsession with trivia, or the development of genuine mass movements. The evolution has been swift and intriguing. Young people feel far less obliged to use these resources than many may assume, and are as apt to question their intrusions on privacy and relentless commercialism as to blithely ignore them. It’s also increasingly difficult to define generations of users; even the significant demographic of younger teens ranges from the Twilight crowd to devotees of the new breeds of graphic novels. Suffice it to say that even in the short span of years between the articles, incoming university students now have much more awareness and experience of social media.
The technology is now mostly simple enough that even people who felt email was beyond them are joining in, promoting everything from crafts to animal rights to mash-ups of movie trailers to injustices and disasters as they happen. Indeed, a sort of chaotic simultaneity is the best way I can describe the landscape of social media: satire, comedy, tragedy, a community of close friends and neighbours, and of complete strangers throughout the world. Sometimes you are really reminded while staring into the screen that you are living in history, in all its banality and momentousness.
Yet it’s worth remembering that the community still does not involve everyone, and it is always worth asking, when you learn that communications technology has been blocked or restricted anywhere, why this is, and what this says about the power of the shared word or image.
Gisele Baxter is an instructor in the Dept. of English. http://faculty.arts.ubc.ca/gmbaxter
