Brave New World of Digital Intimacy
“When students woke up that September morning and saw News Feed, the first reaction, generally, was one of panic.”
Before Zuckerberg’s institution of the News Feed, Facebook users had a relative privacy. With a multitude of friends, it was almost impossible to keep up with them all. However, when the News Feed began broadcasting everyone’s profile/ status changes, individuals lost their false sense of security. It was never secure to begin with, but apparently members saw their profile changes as something that others would pay little attention to.
How has this affected students? They have to-the-minute information on nearly everyone around them.
“Facebook users didn’t think they wanted constant, up-to-the-minute updates on what other people are doing. Yet when they experienced this sort of omnipresent knowledge, they found it intriguing and addictive. ”
What did Zuckerberg do here? He thought for his members. What do teachers do? We think for our students and make changes for them that they may not like at first, but will likely appreciate in the long run. In order to affect change, someone has to think ahead of the movements. Upcoming teachers need to have this forethought to make changes in their classrooms and using new technologies, ideas, and texts.
“For many people — particularly anyone over the age of 30 — the idea of describing your blow-by-blow activities in such detail is absurd. Why would you subject your friends to your daily minutiae? And conversely, how much of their trivia can you absorb?”
I’ll be honest- I very strongly dislike people who update their statuses every five minutes. I really don’t need to know the changes in your plan for the day from one minute to the next. I truly could care less where you are or what you’re doing most of the time. When do I update my status? Usually when I’ve got something amusing or important to share. I see no point in telling the world that you just went to the bathroom and are on your way to the kitchen for a sandwich.
“This is the paradox of ambient awareness. Each little update — each individual bit of social information — is insignificant on its own, even supremely mundane. But taken together, over time, the little snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your friends’ and family members’ lives, like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting. ”
This part is interesting to me. While I abhor reading endless updates by the same people… I can form a greater understanding of that person from such updates. Learning about individuals and who they are is always intriguing, but I’m not always aware that I’m doing it at the time.
How does this awareness of others affect our interaction with them?
When you know how someone is feeling or problems they’ve been encountering, you can use that to your advantage. Has your friend been struggling with relationship problems? You can avoid or confront that issue as your personal relationship with them allows. Is your boss having a bad day? Perhaps you need to approach them with a smile, not ask questions and just get your work done. Imagine if students had an emotion gauge on their teachers. Some students would work around it while others would take advantage. This awareness has its ups—but it definitely has its downs.
You’re Leaving a Digital Trail
“The students’ data is but a bubble in a vast sea of digital information being recorded by an ever thicker web of sensors, from phones to GPS units to the tags in office ID badges, that capture our movements and interactions. Coupled with information already gathered from sources like Web surfing and credit cards, the data is the basis for an emerging field called collective intelligence.”
What does this sound like? Little Brother! Think of all of the tracking devices that were used in Little Brother and how Homeland Security used it against the citizens. When people who where you are and what you’re doing, how can they use that information against you?
“Collective intelligence could make it possible for insurance companies, for example, to use behavioral data to covertly identify people suffering from a particular disease and deny them insurance coverage. ”
What do you think of this? If companies can deny services and/or other opportunities, then how are we supposed to get anywhere? Yes, things such as prior conditions for insurance are very important, but think of how many people are going without insurance because of this. Think of how many medical bills are going unpaid because insurance companies won’t cover procedures and necessary rehabilitation stays. I work in the healthcare industry and I see it daily. Heck, I make collections calls. It’s a sad, sad world, and monitoring systems like this are not making it any easier.
“”a few weeks ago, Google deployed an early-warning service for spotting flu trends, based on search queries for flu-related symptoms.”
Now this, I can see being helpful. Using these resources for good can be a very powerful tool. If we can predict flu outbreaks, track bad weather conditions and traffic, then those items can help individuals lead a less-stressful life.
Perhaps the hardest distinction here is making use of these tools for good and happening to profit from them, or using them for negative purposes and profiting from them.
“’For most of human history, people have lived in small tribes where everything they did was known by everyone they knew,’ Dr. Malone said. ‘In some sense we’re becoming a global village. Privacy may turn out to have become an anomaly.’”
Is privacy more or less important now? Both. Some groups and individuals are striving to share their lives with everyone through blogging, continuous Twitter updates and mega-uploads of pictures. Others are finding ways to protect their home computers and activities from hacking, tracking and destruction. What about you?
I share more things with the internet than I otherwise would have, but I value my security settings. I’m very careful about what information is put out there and I control who can see the things I post online. While I am thankful for having tools at my disposal to share information, I don’t want the entire world knowing what I’m doing and when.
“The cell-phone novel, or keitai shosetsu, is the first literary genre to emerge from the cellular age.”
Have you heard these novels? I haven’t. This is an interesting concept, though, and something that works off of an old idea. Many authors give the simple advice to “write every day.” This is exactly what these cell phone novels are—but with more immediate gratification. In this sense, others are seeing your work right as it happens.
Is this a good thing? In some ways, yes. This gets writers putting work out there, no matter how good it is. You won’t know how good it can be until you write it, right? However, there is this voice nudging the back of my brain telling me that revising and rewriting are important. Perhaps this is a result of the student in me, but I like reading my work before it’s pushed out to others. If nothing else, it might be worth a try, if only to try a new writing technique.
“It’s a group effort. Your fans support you and encourage you in the process of creating work—they help build the work.”
Are our novels and other works becoming more socially created? Think about the amount of writer’s groups and places to post drafts of work online. What does this say about our work? Can we not author something on our own? Is it merely that we need the confirmation and appreciation of others to make it worthwhile?
“’Nobody was saying that he was a great writer, or that his grammar was good,’ Arai recalled. ‘And yet his young fans were all writing about how his book had affected their lives and moved them.’”
Do great works have to be grammatically correct? Should the writing itself be great? Or are we relying merely on the content? These are serious questions that we, as teachers, need to think about. I would hate to read something with horrible grammar. I’m not saying that my own is fantastic, but at least you can read and understand it. I cannot bear the idea of teaching works that are not correct… There is also a huge difference between a different writing style and complete disregard for writing rules.
What does this mean for students?
Anyone can write a novel. According to many readers from these sites, the books don’t have to be great in order to be “good.” What makes a good novel for these readers? It seems that the consensus is a relatable subject that is easy to understand. The problem? These books are going to be quick, easy reads for most students. What sorts of questions are these novels asking? Could any of these novels be compares to a piece of canonical literature? The way I look at it, is that most of these cell-phone novels are of an amateur breed. It is a fantastic way to get people writing, but it’s not going to challenge the literary greats.
