I understand that Socially AntiSocial is an oxymoron, but I think that if you bear with me you’ll understand. Let’s run through a typical day in the life of yours truly. Almost everyday, within 15 minutes of waking up, I check my email. Today I happened to have one from my Residence Director asking me to answer some questions before I meet with her on Wednesday. So right off that bat I’ve already had one interaction with another person. Not long after that I get a text message from my girlfriend wondering what I have planned for today and what my schedule is like for the week. A few minutes later and a friend of mine calls me wanting to play a few games of Team Deathmatch on Call of Duty over Xbox Live. Approximately 4 hours later and I’ve talked to and interacted with almost one hundred people from all over the world, not to mention my boss, my girlfriend, and the few friends I was playing with online. Unfortunately I had yet to leave my room and hadn’t actually seen another human being since the time I woke up. Not yet ready to cut my ties with the digital world I logged on to Facebook to find that another friend from back home had posted a video on my wall that he wanted to me to watch. After that I watched a daily Video Log that I subscribe to on YouTube and then proceeded to check my other email account.
Now eventually I did, of course, spend time with some of my friends without the help of any sort of technologically device. However, it’s easy to see how someone could go an entire day without seeing anyone else in person and still maintain a strong social network. Especially if they don’t live on a college campus like a lot of us do. I wonder if this will soon be the norm for most of us. We haven’t gotten into Second Life in class yet, but eventually we might all have “Seconds Lives” and we might put more stock in them than our real ones. What does that mean for our social lives? If I become well-known in Second Life should I then be content as a cyber celebrity? Anyone on Facebook knows that there are people with thousands of friends (probably more) on the web. They also probably spend a lot of time communicating with those friends through the internet. Would this mean that they are Social Butterfly, since they have a lot of connections and are socializing with many different people, or should they considered a Lone Wolf who spends the majority of their time online and has very little human interaction from day to day? I struggle with that question. I want to equate them with the latter, but depending on one’s definition of what socializing is, the view of such a person would change dramatically. There are obvious benefits of face to face interaction over digital communication, but one can imagine a world where there is no threat of spreading disease because people don’t actually meet in person.
Talking about defining people’s social lives based on their digital communication brings us to the larger obstacle of defining who a person is in general. My name is Bradley Carlton and I’m a 22-year-old, male with a shaved head and blue eyes. My alter ego is BadBradC, however, and on Xbox Live he’s a cut-throat soldier who’s known for two things: 1] Being a badass, and 2] Being badass, PERIOD. In all seriousness though some people only know me by a gamertag or a username or an avatar. On www.deviantart.com, I’m known by the name ‘B-radC’ and a 10 by 10 px image of my face. That doesn’t say much about the real me, but for many that’s all they get. Even Facebook can be deceiving. Yes, you can share much more about yourself, but the information can be of only the characteristics that you want to portray. Better yet, you can make up characteristics that don’t even define you and create a digital you that is nothing like the real you. In a way this is actually ideal. We all have qualities that we don’t like and now we have the ability to get rid of the ones that we don’t like. On the flip side of the coin, this also means that you never really know who it is your interacting with online. The graphic novel (and recent movie) Surrogates touches on this, as does the movie Gamer. In both society now has the ability to control robotic versions of themselves or actual human beings through advanced technology. Also in both, a man has control of a very realistic female and the rest of the world is none the wiser, believing the woman they see is controlled by a very similar woman reality. Now I would assume that none of my Facebook friends that portray themselves as male are actually female, or vice versa, but I do have a few that I’ve never actually met in person.
What this all boils down to is a different kind of socializing, different types of relationships and a different world where we will be confronted by new opportunities and unique hazards.
