Saturday, January 31, 2009
Solitude
Here's a link to an article from the CHE. It reads like an angry op-ed piece about technology and our drive for constant connectivity. I have my own responses to this complaint as my research interests have made me somewhat of a lightning rod for older family members and former professors who are anti-tech. All the same, I'd be interested to hear what other people think about this issue and your thoughts on connectivity, Twitter, etc.
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I suppose I appreciate the historicization of this piece. But it seems rather unabashed in its nostalgia for Romantic notions of solitude and the self. And these notions are by no means unquestioned. One of the interesting consequences of the explosion of interest in media studies has been a rehistoricization and revision of traditional literary and cultural histories. There are now counter-histories of Romanticism that reinterpret and challenge the notions of solitude with nature that underlie more conventional literary histories like those described in this lament.
ReplyDeleteI found the question of what friendship means on facebook when you have a few hundred of them, to be interesting. I would be further interested to know more about what people's protocol for accepting friends on facebook look like. For example, my wife is incredibly non-discriminating. If she has a tangential connection with the individual, that is enough. For me, I limit my requests to people with whom I believe I have had a substantial personal relationship. That is, we have to have known each other, talked at least a few times and had a generally positive or good natured relationship in our non-connected relationship. What do you do, though, with people from your past - old school friends you haven't talked to (in my case) for 15 years? Are these really friendships? Or are these reconstitutions (like just add water) of old memories? How does facebook reframe what it means to be a friend? To what extent does this reframed social interaction alter the relationships we construct offline? Do we meet people and then while we trade greetings run a quiet algorithm in our mind that gauges whether we should seek this person out on facebook? Or not?
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