A Shallow Web

As we become Internet beings, are we losing feeling?
by Claire L. Evans

In the year 2000, Stephen Hawking wrote that the “next century will be the century of complexity.” Of course, he wasn’t referring to political quagmires or environmental degradation—although he might as well have been—because all that shit is getting brambly. “Complexity,” as a theoretical term, refers to systems whose behavioral phenomena cannot be easily explained by any conventional analysis of their constituent parts. Buckminster Fuller called it “synergetics,” the output of a system not foreseen by the sum of its parts. In practical application, there’s not much worth mentioning, except for the continually improvable String Theory; in the sciences in general, the term complexity is a common metaphor, referring to those systems—physical, biological, economic, even social—that operate in a region between order and complete chaos. Despite its ambiguity, it has come to be a buzzword in many disciplines, spanning most dimensions of the socio-scientific-cognitive sphere.

Certainly many things in our world are inherently complex: The delicate balance of the ecosystem, for example, or the subjectivity that shrouds history, not to mention what happens inside of your brain whenever you look at an object—shit is whack. The prevailing cultural ontology represented in the media too, is of a world culture defined by its increasing complexity: as though instant communication and the floodgates of information thrust open by the Internet were the harbingers of a new, uber-complex world. Assuredly, the structure of our social lives is experiencing an overhaul; buddy lists, speed dial, and Myspace comments are the new benchmarks of a successful social life, while popularity is often measured by the size of one’s email inbox.

However, it does seem a little facile to immediately peg the “Web 2.0”—you know, that second generation of web-based services that let users connect on a more peer-to-peer basis, as a figurehead of a new sociality of complexity. We are easily fooled by social networking websites like Myspace and Friendster, which joyfully show us, six degrees of separation style, our place within a whole structure of seemingly intricate relationships. They lead us to believe that we are part and parcel of an intimately interconnected social fabric. But in concrete terms, what we’re really intimate with are our computers themselves.

In their excellent piece in The New Scientist, Liz Else and Sherry Turkle (science columnist and MIT professor, respectively) point out that although “we insist that our world is increasingly complex …we have created a communications culture that has decreased the time available for us to sit and think.” What Else (no pun intended) and Turkle point out is that, despite our “breathless techno-enthusiasm,” our newly web-based, socially networked society often cuts short the full breadth of our feelings. Instant communication brings with it less time to think about the subject at hand: When a response is demanded by an instant message, it must be handed out immediately, in the form of a quick text-byte. We no longer have the time to have emotions; rather, we must negotiate our relationships through emoticons. On-always communication devices enable us to embrace the complexity of social connectivity, while simultaneously abridging the depth of our relationships. At least, that is the risk.

Turkle and Else show that we are in the thick of a communications culture, but that this isn’t “a culture that contributes to self-reflection,” since “self-reflection depends on having an emotion, experiencing it, taking one’s time to think it through and understand it, but only sometimes electing to share it.” Perhaps what is happening is that we are struggling to find a sense of self that can fit into the emerging model of the “social network;” certainly the co-dependency many of us experience with our laptops is evidence that we’re subjects plugged into social existence through technology. The Internet—the Web 2.0 or whatever—is entangling us in a new framework of complexity, one that will become quickly irrelevant if we prove to be incapable of importing the full nuance and depth of our ideas, feelings and relationships into it.