"Professor Jonathan Zittrain at Harvard Law School has been known to refer to the Internet as 'autistic.'"
"What Zittrain means is that on the Internet, you don't have a sense for what is going on around you. Even though there are many people on the web, it's been hard to visualize them as experiencing the same sites you do, since when you visit a website or query Google it feels like you're the only person looking for ladyboy manga porn at that one time. At least, I know I do, and it's a lonely feeling." -Chris "Petey" Peterson, stolen from
Something Awful.
A rather amusing quote stolen from Something Awful.
There's this idea I've been toying with, that correlates the popularity of social networking with the idea of eliminating the autistic experience of the internet. The internet is largely a one way mirror, where you literally type into some box and it shuffles around until someone else bumps into it. It's like a fast method of sending off random fliers through the mail and hoping someone will respond, or that someone is already aware that these fliers exist and will actively search them out. However, it's pretty difficult to really make connections through the internet unless you truly know the person in real life; seeing and meeting one another is the nature of relationships. Really, though, more important than this is a search for immediacy.
Sometime during last year (my second year of college) I took a writing course based within the idea of postmodernism and media studies. While I thought that some (read most) of the postmodernism stuff were just people trying to make tangential relationships between unrelated cultural projections/influences on each other, one idea was pretty fascinating. I can't remember who implied it, but suggested that new media forms are a search for immediacy. People want things fast, and combined with a need for people to create relationships over this seemingly impersonal internet, social networking will only become more mainstream.
Twitter is probably some sort of strange evolution, although I think that the comments/status system of Facebook comes pretty close. It's my suspicion that Facebook was changed in order to combat the seemingly immediate nature of Twitter. Twitter's immediacy, no matter how trivial Tweets can be, is really about substituting face time with some other internet based relationship time. It's really about substituting the immediate communication of close proximity discussion via voice with some other media form, whether that be Facebook, Twitter, or whatever else the internet will spawn.
