“What I exclaimed, you don’t have an email address or a cell phone! No Internet? How do you live?” I asked my old college friend.
Exasperated, I stopped trying to understand how he can survive offline. Here I am immersed in the intricacies and ironies of new media, which I’m not so sure about in the first place, and now this old friend lives comfortably, happily, and seemingly unfettered without computers and smart phones. Let me emphasize “happy.”
One of my cutting edge colleagues recently predicted that social networking and the number of an individual’s followers will now become part of his personal pricing structure. In this scenario, the guy with greater social media statistics, i.e. 1000 Facebook friends and a million twitter followers—is clearly more important than the poor guy with only 30 Facebook friends and no twitter followers. So, when the more connected guy goes to make a reservation on an airline—the airline will value him more as a customer—give him special consideration, better pricing, special offers—because he has more digital clout. He’s like a high roller in Vegas, courted, pampered, and damn near worshipped.
Google, I’m told, is wrestling with how to rank the piles of social networking data accumulating in its search results. New criteria may include how many Facebook connections I have accumulated and how many followers on twitter in addition to my links and normal prestige.
So, where does my college friend fit in this scheme? Without a digital trail, how will they be able to rank his importance? Or judge how cool he is?
Ironically, I’ve met up with my non-digital, college friend in the downstairs cafeteria at the Museum of Fine Arts; a cafeteria quite similar to Lang Hall where we took meals 35 years ago. In this cafeteria, the better dressed baby boomers seemed to have already grabbed the window seats overlooking the garden. My old hippy friend and I sit in the open seats in the middle of the dining hall. Like every human endeavor and organization—a hierarchy quickly develops. The cool kids sit by the windows. The geeks have carved out their territory in the far corner. The wealthy were eating upstairs at the formal restaurant—with waiters, attentive bus help, and vintage wines. My friend will not eat there, not even take coffee.
In this scenario, the rich kids don’t get a chance to look down at my friend’s old jeans, paint-spotted jacket and turn their noses up at him, because he naturally avoids them. But in the digital world, they already have. My hippy friend can avoid the Toney restaurant upstairs, but Google juice, Facebook, and Twitter have already turned their digital noses up at him. We are sitting virtually at the non-cool, unimportant table based on software analysis and ever changing algorithms.
Two other college friends join us. They are cool. They can sit anywhere, upstairs or downstairs, no matter. This couple has a kind of diplomatic immunity; it doesn’t matter to them whether it’s Maine or Manhattan, motel 6 or the Four Seasons. They look good, fit in anywhere, and would be welcomed upstairs. She’s just back from a friend’s birthday party in Istanbul and he looks like a model stepping out of the pages of an outdoor hiking catalog. But amazingly, they too, have turned off their gadgets for now. Perhaps in deference to our old friend. She talks about her trip to Istanbul and we slide into conversations about John Lennon’s death and updates on other old college friends.
A calmness starts to overtake me. My old friend is actually looking at me when he talks. We are listening to our other friend’s stories about Istanbul and watching one another’s expressions. No texts, emails, or calls interrupt our discussions. No looking down at the blackberry checking emails and tweets as we talk and laugh about old times. No clicking as we share French fries. We are actually having what I recall to be a conversation, like our days in Lang Hall. Not a series of short sentences like a telegraph. Perhaps more amazingly, I can now remember our lunch conversation—as opposed to remembering the emails I would have normally been glancing at during lunch. For the first time in months, I didn’t hear someone say: “Oh, what was that, I was sending a text and missed what you said?”
Henry David Thoreau dropped out to live an unfettered life on Walden Pond just 20 miles from where we were having lunch. Back in our college days we would visit Walden. My friend my not have consciously pre-planned his dropping out of the rat race as did Thoreau—but I do think my friend has “built a cabin” in the woods—a cabin that seems nicer to live in. He’s struck his own act of civil disobedience, or should I say, digital disobedience.
Watching all the work that went into maintaining the railroad systems of the 1840’s, Thoreau asked the question: Does man ride on the railroad, or does the railroad ride on man? Well, I have to ask, is this blackberry on my hip riding on me? Do I really need the iPhone to do Internet searches while I am also typing on the blackberry? Do I need to expand these Facebook friends to bolster my digital profile or should I just listen to my friend across the table?
Here’s my recommendation for a weekend if you can do it. Unplug that box, cut the WiFi, turn of the PDA. Call an old friend from your hard line. Mail a card. Leave the smart phones in the glove box and have a lunch together. Then walk around some beautiful pictures and sculptures in a museum or take a sunny walk around Walden Pond or one like it. I had almost forgotten how much fun we non-virtual friends used to have together. I think they used to call it socializing.
Suddenly I get an idea for writing a blog about my old friend…. So I ask him: “Can I use you as an example in my next blog about social networking and new media?” “Sure,” he laughs, “mail it to me.”
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