deek deekster: innit

I no longer believe that all social media “tools” are broadly beneficial. Some are, and some aren’t. As well as hanging out online, often trialing and sometimes adopting and using internet and mobile technologies, I’ve been extensively attending podcasting conventions, social media cafés, and meetups for the last two years, along with many other more conventional kinds of social and professional gathering, based on different industries, professional interests, and education, and I guess that puts me in a good place to sum up.

The more expensive conventions are not any better in terms of either learning or making connections. The cheaper ones are not any better at being friendly or creative.

The Social Media Myth is that the ‘organic’, small-scale, newer and less well-known kinds of gatherings are somehow more worthwhile than the organised, larger, older and more conventional conventions. Many times, the gatherings are organised around web technologies such as wikis, the geek’s version of MySpace groups, and Twitter, the geek’s preferred instant messenger.

I’ve lost count of the times I’ve turned up at these meetings and been met with a hundred geeks armed with enough technology to ward off alien invaders – laptops, mobile phones, video recorders, and sundry special devices of all shapes and sizes. The meetings are all supposed to be about social networking but everyone is so busy scanning for available WiFi or attempting bluetooth connections, they fail to contact one another on a human level.

Rather than closing the gaps, the technology in these situations is serving as a prophylactic. Perfectly sane people experience disjointed communication, interactions which are cut into pieces by video blogging, live video streaming and all the rest of the paraphernalia usually experienced solo at their desktop. Underneath this frenzy of technical play, often remains a loneliness which characterises many of their lives and to which, post-gathering, they return, having been prevented from achieving the intimacy they so badly need by the technology they have replaced it with.

This situation is maintained by a kind of social group denial, which does not recognise the negative impact of technology, and refuses to see the shadow side of the behaviour. Personally, I find it depressing. I value and enjoy spontaneity and it disturbs me to see tools which are claimed to enhance creativity and connection actually produce the opposite effect. I’d like to see some gatherings where the technology was checked in at the door; I’d like these social media early adopters to put aside their crutches regain their social muscles while they still can.

Bunhill Row, London, an old Quaker burial ground, dating back to the sixteenth century is the resting place of great author and artist William Blake, and Daniel Defoe, creator of the seminal castaway, Robinson Crusoe.

I dropped in to pay some respects to these great architects, on my way back from celebrating Bangladeshi New Year.

 Bunhill Row- Hill of Bones [4:06m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (1169)

“Cimate change is not the point, and that’s one reason why it’s not the rallying cry it is made out to be. The climate changes anyway and everyone knows that. But, humankind’s greedy stupidity and short-sightedness *is* however causing the degradation of the biological environment both onland and in the oceans, with wholesale industrial pollution, record levels of deforestation, the exhaustion of natural resources which we and millions of other species require for life. Once the ecosphere is sufficiently depleted, mass starvation will become the issue. When the Greens align themselves around the issues of food and water, we might see some coordination.”

I wonder if they’ll publish it?