Recently, I was reading Fast Company’s article about Jeff Bezos of Amazon and he made an observation that we are in a critical period similar, he thinks, to the period of the end of the dinosaurs. As he put it, “what’s very dangerous is not to evolve.” This article was in reference to his effort to create the electronic book, Amazon’s version is called The Kindle, but he very clearly could be talking about the world around us in general.
Currently, there is clearly a massive change occuring in the area of social interaction and cultural constructs. What is evolving is not fully clear, but with the onslaught of facebook, twitter and a host of new “instant communication” tools, whatever the “new rules” were from the start of this decade are clearly being re-written, or abandoned.
Nowhere is this more clear for myself than in the classroom. At my school, Valencia Community College, we have been on the electronic bandwagon along with all other higher-ed schools nationally. While we haven’t decided to force students to purchase an iPhone, we have moved fully in many ways to an electronic world. Yet, even as we fight within the College to learn how to use the now-old communication tool of email, our students are clearly moving on. While we still have some professors, and students, who “don’t get it” relative to email, and throughout the college one will hear the lament that “so and so” had not returned an email that was now over a week old, most students are not even checking their email at all. They are now moving, or many of them are, into what some sociologists are calling “lifecasting.”
This new style of instant communication really broke big a couple of years ago when Facebook exploded past Myspace. Myspace was (is?) in many respects just an easy way of building your own webpage. Facebook is something completely different. Just this year, Facebook moved past Myspace in unique users and have set their sights on Google in an attempt to re-write the rules for what the future of the Internet will look like. Wired Magazine (in the same month as the FC article) had their own article about Mark Zuckerberg, the “notoriously cocky” CEO of Facebook. The article explained how Facebook believes that it can create a user experience for, well everything on the Internet that is more personal, more friendly and, uh, less Google.
This then raises the sense of frustration, concern and even perhaps panic and fear that I experience in all of this. As I said above relative to VCC, for many, as a society, we are just now really “getting” email and yet the game is changing. Rapidly. Too rapidly. The threat of the dinosaur becomes more real with each day, yet we are talking about people, human beings with real feelings and desires, become extinct, or if not technically dead, then left behind in terms of consumer purchasing or even just simple communication with others.
I am a part of a living, breathing community of real people who all live in Orlando. We have worked very hard to build a thriving connected experience over the past 10 years and we have used the Internet to gird our efforts. From our earliest days we have used a simple email group mail system to stay connected. We’ve tried message boards and fully robust websites, but those have never really worked too well. We still have our website, but we shifted to a more static site, sort of an electronic business card.
Over these 10 years, we have struggled to help one another understand the experience of email. Email is like getting a phone call, so you need to check your messages every day. We’ve learned about spam, having a “throw away” account for web “sign ups.” We’ve talked about staying current and slowly, but surely, trained everyone in our community about the value of staying connected with each other. Of course, we have the pleasure of a real “face to face” experience that aids our efforts, but the “email list” is important. Yet, in the past 2 years, though, we have seen the impact of the instant, the “lifecasting” stuff that has emerged.
The problem of course is not precisely with facebook, Myspace or Twitter or IM or SMS or the iPhone. Independently of one another, these are innocuous tools to try to use to stay connected. The problem is that they all exist and all demand your attention. The problem is there is too much.
In the old days, say, of the “Betamax vs VHS Wars,” you had one thing and the market ultimately decided and we all moved on. Now, things are happening so fast, no one can keep up. To really stay current in my life, it takes about 2-4 hours a day (or so it seems): I have a Myspace account that I rarely check on; a facebook account that has too much demand and has become off-putting; three personal emails that must be maintained every day; one phone, but not a “smart phone; just got text messaging (SMS) though I loathe to use it; two work emails that must be checked faithfully; one work web service for classes (WebCT) that then provides an email to check for each class that I set up there (typically 2-3 each semester). What else? Well, I still have a home phone. I occasionally get a real letter, though typically only from my Mom. And I have this blog here (probably my 4th real effort at this communication tool).
Do you see the issue here? Note, I have not added Twitter, which is one of the “big mysterious coming asteroids of our dying dinosaur” analogy. In our group, we are seeing some serious cracks in the community, as there is just too much to keep up with. One of my friends in that group said, “I think facebook has replaced the email list.” Another disagreed with him, yet regardless of who is right, that very thought raises another aspect of the problem here—unless everyone adopts that single mode of our “now” world communication, you end up with a Balkanization of the community. Can we just let people get left behind?
As far as my students go, in the summer of 2009 I tried a new service that would send a group text to the entire group (of those who joined the service). Since students seem to have “moved past” email (noted by their reluctance to really stay current in our College-proprietary email system), I thought trying to reach them via text might help. In a funny twist, before the class even started, the company changed their service. Six weeks later, they changed it again—I can’t even tell you if it really worked or not. But, let’s say it did—what about the students who (like me) detest SMS or can’t afford to pay for it. What do we say to the college student who can’t afford the iPhone or who does not want to join the ATT network or doesn’t want to pay their fees (yes, I know those students might could purchase the iPod—that misses the concern)? What about some who simply are uncomfortable with the technology?
Worse, what do you say to someone like me who is NOT uncomfortable with the technology but simply can’t keep up? These are serious concerns that I fear have no answer. Ultimately, the answers will just show up, perhaps driven by “the market” or by “the government” and neither of those things give me great comfort. I don’t want to live in an age where we all have our government issued phones, where we all have to vote from these things, where we have to make all our purchases using them or where we have to get all of our lectures from class there.
Sadly, I don’t think anyone really cares that I don’t want that future. And, if anyone does care, I don’t think that that anyone could really “fix it” for me. Maybe I am just the dinosaur that Bezos talked about who won’t or can’t evolve. I just worry that I won’t die fast enough to avoid the trauma of living in an isolated situation where I no longer know what is going on around me because I don’t have the 5 hours a day to check into all the varied communication tools that are thrust upon me.