Drinking in the Social Splenda
Why current social technologies might be keeping us from truly connecting with one another
If you’ve ever had what has been dubbed as “Mexican Coke,” you’ll notice that it tastes a lot better than regular Coke. Why? No, it’s not simply because it’s in a glass bottle vs. a can. It’s because it’s regular Coke, minus the corn syrup, with real cane sugar instead. It’s not only naturally sweeter, it’s healthier for you. Why is it not the standard?
High fructose corn syrup is among the many artificial ingredients that make up much of the food that we consume daily. It’s everywhere, along with trans fat, refined grains, livestock hormones and other materials and chemicals that are so prevalent in just about everything because they can be easily mass-produced and cost very little.
From food to synthetic fabrics to building materials like particleboard and more, we’ve continually attempted to perfect methods to create artificiality in many mediums for low cost, wider distribution and ease of use. And while many of these have allowed us to “scale” industries, we quickly reach a point at which they do more harm than good.
I see much of our social technology today as no different. From Facebook, Twitter and Google+ to Path, Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr, Vine, Spotify and the multitude of other popular social services, we’ve effectively cheapened our relationships to the point that they can be mass-produced through simple mouse scrolls and keyboard clicks while we forget that it’s not actually the real thing. In reality, the technology itself doesn’t actually make us closer to each other; it’s just more convenient.
We’ve been led to believe that “connectedness” in today’s society is pretty strong, that we’re supposedly working towards some supreme goal of making the world smaller and information more available. But, while indeed the world is smaller and information is more available, that doesn’t mean we understand – or even want to understand – each other any better.
“Connectivity is poverty … The man of leisure savors solitude and intimacy with friends and is surrounded by original things that cannot be copied or corrupted and shot around the globe with a few mouse clicks.” – said once in an article from the New York Times Magazine.
One problem is our learned helplessness in the matter. It’s one thing to try to maintain an online/offline balance, but often times I feel we neglect real-life connections for the sake of what we’ve deemed as the best and easier alternative, the “high fructose corn syrup” of the social life. It’s not just our faults; we’ve been taught by the technology to expect everything to come to us with little to no effort on our part. Heck, the very concept behind a “news feed” is to show us only what we want to see, not requiring from us so much as a mouse click. In this age of extreme instant gratification and fast-paced information intake, anything that takes more time than we deem necessary is simply discredited as “not working well” or “too esoteric” and moving on to the next thing feels easier and more natural as a result; further exploration has been almost systematically discouraged.
The other problem is, of course, the tools themselves. Most, if not all, social systems are pretty much the same at their core: connect with the same friends, share something slightly new, get a feed of everything in real time. I know because that’s what I promoted when I wrote the stripped down version of the Social Design Guidelines for Facebook a couple years ago. But learning about what people like and any other relatively superficial details (and even perhaps finding a variety of these things in common) does not imply that your morals, values, philosophies or empathy for others — the elements that make you a person — are aligned. Yet these are the very core issues people must discuss in order to find deeper relationships taking hold: the real cane sugar in the Coke that makes all the difference.
Although artificial ingredients will do the job just fine most of the time, at the end of the day they’re just plain unhealthy. Like the natural and organic food we’ve slowly started to see a stronger push for, real connections, real interests and real relationships are rare and take time, dedication, honesty and trust to develop – the last two being harder to discern in the public, context-less space that is the Internet. Theoretically, given the economic model of supply and demand, we should all be clamoring for this genuineness as we do with diamonds, raspberries, cronuts and all these other fairly coveted delicacies, yet for every new social technology that comes along claiming to “connect you better” we haven’t really had any true breakthrough (yet).
Maybe some people don’t want to go out of their way for “real” and prefer having a bland, cloying interaction-substitute as a break in the day. While that’s fine and valid, for them, the fact remains that within us all is a biologically basic need for connection to others, providing safety, trust and love. It’s imperative we realize that these digital communication tools ultimately are not here just to serve our expressive needs as individuals, but rather to help us collectively work together towards a shared vision that creates a happy and well-functioning future society. When we build authentic connections, we not only see others for who they really are, we see ourselves. That’s the true value of social.
So in the meantime, while we grapple with this problem, what about those of us who want something deeper and more meaningful from our digital communication? Where do we go for genuinely-sweet, glass-bottled, good old-fashioned meaningful relationships?
Mexico?
More coming soon…
