Hyper-Connectivity That Reinforces Community

I’ve been pushing back against E.D.’s localizing tendencies of late not so much because I disagree with him, but because I think that in doing so we probably get closer to an accurate answer about any of the variety of elements that we seek to better understand: value, liberty, place, meaning, life. In doing so, it is incumbent upon me not to be the League’s “party of no”, but rather to try to establish and articulate an alternative vision for how we are to live in the world. My soul is most content when in doing so I am able to harvest the stock of wisdom that E.D. provides in his analysis, separating the wheat from the chaff as I see it, and fill in portions of the picture that I see as missing with what might seem like contradictory images, but come into focus as ultimately complimentary with enough perspective.

So it is that I re-read E.D.’s post about home and a sense of place in the world in light of my recent admission to myself that I think very highly and appreciate greatly our hyper-connected world. You see I found myself filled with a surprising degree of excitement when I read about the latest round of renovations that Facebook had planned (h/t: Poulos), which have ultimately caused me to decide to let my twitter account go unused and switch my network solely over to Facebook. My excitement was not so much rooted in the fact that Facebook was changing things for the sake of changing things, as many have attributed to the decision, but rather that the changes seemed to represent an inching closer towards a kind of interconnectivity that portends what I take to be a potentially great benefit in resolving the seeming conflict between embedding and strengthening a sense of locality and acknowledging and working with our ever fleshing contexts of globalism.

I, like E.D., moved around a lot as a kid and have moved around a fair bit as a young adult. During my childhood I lived in three different towns, though all in same basic geography, and moved about further within those towns, changing the neighbourhoods to which I could claim to be a member. In young adulthood I moved out of that basic geography to a little island off the coast of my geographic homeland (it’s not as Robinson Crusoe as it sounds) and moved around a great deal within the city on that island that I called home for seven years. I then moved back to the “mainland” and moved within different and distinct segments of the city three times in as many years. And finally, I moved over an entire province roughly a year and a half ago to land in the city I now call home, which is largely removed from most of my creature comforts (friends, family, haunts, etc.).

That last move I made very consciously, deciding that I needed to try living somewhere else, to open myself to a different class of experiences by changing my locale. The logic of this decision was a residual wisdom from my having moved a bunch as a kid and informs the basic idea around why people take mobility to be such an important freedom: the ability to move around and live in different places exposes one to a greater breadth of experience and helps to round one out as a human being in important and useful ways. To be worldly is a good thing in many peoples’ eyes, cultivating a certain tolerance and broad understanding of the world in which one lives and the diversity of one’s fellow inhabitants. Indeed, I too lament how poorly traveled I am in the grand scheme of things, having opted for other elements of my life to take precedence.

But E.D. is quite correct when he notes that all this moving has its downsides and that something is lost when the rootedness of having a home and living in it for extended periods of time is forsaken to proverbially, “Go west, young man/woman”. And I too can feel the sedentary impulse as my life draws closer to marriage and children and home ownership, the benefits of a headquarters, as it were, with a community of substance with which to surround one’s self seems a key element in family raising.

Yet and still, there continues to be a big old world out there acting as the backdrop against which our lives unfold and it seems folly to simply ignore it as a real understanding of the world we seek to decode involves those contexts of glacial, geo-political/cultural movement. Our picture is ever widening in its scope and parameters, there is more information available than ever, and if we wish to really get a sense for what is happening I think we need to find a way of bridging this seeming chasm between worldliness and placefulness so as to realize the benefits of both to the best of our ability.

It is here that the modernizing and globalizing well-spring of hyper-connectivity comes into play and why I continue to urge the localists not to let their focus on placefulness completely overshadow the possibilities available from a globally networked context — how, in fact, placefulness and placelessness might be seen in a complimentary light. The hyper-connectivity of web 2.0 platforms allows us in many ways to traverse the globe and interact with a diversity of people previously unimagined. It is that dizzying potential that makes such hyper-connectivity so addictive, why so many people have been drawn so quickly to it. My interactions with such a broad spectrum of people over the past year since I started blogging could scracely have been imagined in my youth and are undeniably to my great benefit. Not only have I had the opportunity to form communities of meaning and purpose with individuals that I would never have met otherwise (most of whom I still have not met face-to-face, and perhaps never will), but I have also been able to grow replacement communities of sustained relationship with those I have left behind in physical proximity. These are not insignificant realizations and I think warrant substantial potential optimism in what might be achieved in terms of utilizing this global hyper-connectivity as a means of bringing the conflict of mobility v. locality to some kind of acceptable resolution.

The problem here, though, is that a meaningful exchange and cultivation of community via platforms like Facebook and Twitter seems to the experiential exception, not the rule. More often than not, the kind of back and forth in which one engages when one uses these sites is a trade of surfaces and vapidity. As such, many folks grappling with questions about the influence of technology on the way we live are inclined to write these platforms off as nothing but fads, destined to go the way of Tickle Me Elmo or the pet rock. The question, then, is how we go about harnessing the potential for these platforms to play not just a more significant role (many may argue that Facebook and Twitter have significantly impacted our world), but how to have them play a more valuable role in the way we interact and how we understand one another and the world around us.

Had I the answer to that question at the tip of my fingers you can rest assured that I would be preparing to attain a much more luxurious station in life, but I think in some regards asking the question is just as important, at least insofar as it brings us again to that space where we look for bridges between a more localized and a more globalized way of seeing the world. What I might offer by way of a proposal is to say that, as with most things, we are ill-advised to wait for the creators of the platforms themselves to bring this sort of change. Certainly I can read the latest iteration of Facebook as a step in the right direction, but truly that step is as much about competing with Twitter as it is about anything else. It is my own perspective looking at how the platform is changing anf envisioning different ways of using it that illuminates the possibilities. So too, the meaningful and valuable changes that have been introduced into the Facebook operating system have generally been user-generated: causes popped up because people wanted them.

The long and the short of it is to say that part of how we go about trying to nudge these platforms in more meaningful directions is by using them in just such a fashion and experimenting with what works best in that regard. That we can do so and add meat to the globalized context of our world without having to sacrifice our sense of home and community is just one of the ways that I think we can start looking at placefulness and placelessness as more interestingly intertwined than we might at first blush. There is a sense of place and time that only comes from truly living somewhere, from placing down roots and feeling that place as home in your bones. However, there is also a sense of being in the world writ large as it evolves, of being open to that wide lens of shifts and changes and understanding that what happens half way across the world does have an impact you and yours.

What I’m suggesting is that perhaps the two needn’t be in conflict if we refuse to see them as such.

Tagged as: Facebook, globalism, interaction, meaning, placefulness, placelessness, Twitter, value