The emotional well-being of virtual connectedness
I've been thinking about the quote in the previous post. Although this (and Andrew's and Matt's) sites aren't technically livejournals, they certainly fufill many of the "prescribed format." Personal expression in a public forum: check. Hit counters to keep track of the lurkers: check (well, not Matt's, but if he continues I'll bet he will want one). List of online friends: check.

Connecting with other people is deeply ingrained in us. There is a specific set of neural connectors that mediate and stimulate desire for connection. It gives us a sort of a high comparable to that of eating chocolate or falling in love. Much of the evolutionary study of the development of language suggests that the desire for social connections predated and may have enabled language itself. We use language primarily to faciliate our social interactions rather than as a tool for getting things done. This may be why primates spend most of their time grooming each other, or why we spend most of our speech for gossiping, rather than spending our time in pure "utilitarian" pursuits.

With the development of email, cellphones, IM and other devices that expand our opportunites to gossip, to form connections, it seems that we have made the most of them. These devices create virtual types of communities that are, in so many ways, less fulfilling than picking the parasites out of each others hair. But they have their purpose, their uses, and of course, their misuses. And they still act on us in these deeply ingrained ways. I think everyone reading this blog will understand my difficulties with communication, namely prompt response to emails, phone calls, what have you. Take at look at this quote about the etiquette of email, as a way of explanation:

. There's something about e-mail that demands a reply, demands a response. But when you're getting thousands of these things, it becomes an impossibility to respond to everything. So we've got to shift the etiquette, and maybe make e-mail more like publishing: that is, you send something out and you might get one percent response.

Maybe this is why blogging is so appealing (even if I don't myself blog all the time). It's a form of communication which doesn't demand a response. The reader is not "responsible" to the author. Matt found that he found it ever harder to keep writing emails one by one. The phone is perhaps the worst example of the responsibleness to the caller. As they say in "Phone Booth," a ringing phone demands you to pick it up. The phone rings and you must answer it. You say "hello" into the void, agreeing to a type of contract of reciprocity to the unknown other at the end of the line. The demand of a email or a phone call is on the receiver. By accepting the email or the phone call, we are pressed with the obligation to return it, to enter into the dynamic of the communication. And when the responsibility is not fulfilled, the phone not answered, the email left unreplied, we feel guilty for having failed to met its expectation.

There is still "responsibility" in reading or writing a blog, but it is a contract of an entirely different nature. It is closer to that contract between a book (well, the writer) and its reader. The first known written story, The Epic of Gilgamesh, is about the search for immortality. Gilgamesh goes on great adventures to find it, but finds success when his tale is written down and remembered. The responsibility of the reader is merely to read, to recognize. And that, for the writer, is enough to gain a measure of immortality, a sense that the writer has connected to, in an indelible way, to the greater human world. Is this why the "personal expression in a public forum" comes with a list of links and a hit counter? A reassurance that the expression has fulfilled its duty and was read.

Furthermore, blogging allows us to move away from the more initimate responsibilities of email or phone calls. In the class that I'm TA'ing this year, there used to be an email listserv, but now we're moving to a bulletin board discussion forum to accomplish the same purpose. People felt that sending an email to the group, was, in a way, offensive and intrusive. It forced their thoughts into other people's mailbox, demanding their attention whether they wanted it or not. Posting to a bulletin board or a blog, on the other hand, lacked many of those negative emotional connotations. I'm interested to see how it works. Will people simply not feel as obligated to respond or will there be a greater flow of discussion? We'll see. I think the story of blogging has yet to play out.