In the Urban Computing class last night, Kevin Slavin showed us a website that I had not seen before. Stickam.com is like Myspace with a twist, its users broadcast themselves from their webcams live online. For about twenty minutes last night we watched an 18 year old boy from Orlando, Florida laying on his bed looking at his webcam, and presumably chatting on his computer with someone. He said nothing and did nothing. It was incredibly strange and, given its voyeuristic overtones, pretty boring. I searched through the site a little after class and the interesting thing is, this kind of behavior really does seem to be the norm. Most of the Stickam users are not actually doing or saying anything so, in actual fact, the web camera is not broadcasting their lives at all, but rather providing a kind of window into their bedrooms. Kevin made the every interesting point last night that this kind of virtual structure is actually mimicking that of the urban experience. In a city, he reasoned, we come into contact with strangers all of the time, and are constantly engaging in some sort of accidental and purposeful performance through our choices in clothing, behavior, where we choose to go etc. He also made the point that these kids are actually in some way searching for the kind of missing feeling that exists when one does not have this urban experience, and that in fact this is perhaps what we are all searching for when making our selves public in an online space, some form of connection and companionship with strangers.
I thought this point was incredibly interesting, but I have not yet figured out how much I buy the entire concept. It is certainly true that companionship with strangers is something unavoidable in a city environment such as New York. I was struck by how much I personally had incorporated this kind of feeling into my daily existence when I moved to LA, a city where feeling as though you are part of a crowd of strangers is almost impossible.. Every one drives, no one walks the streets and the accidental meeting between people who don't know each other is rare and confined to particular parts of the city at particular times. But New York is also anonymous and, as I have begun to realize more and more, the tendency for most people in this city is to keep a wall of personal space around oneself while engaging in physical contact with crowds. When we are on the subway, we look down or we read. When we walk the streets we are on our mobile phones or listening to our ipods. Its not that we are not engaging at all, but we have adapted to the public environment of crowds by developing different concepts of personal space. These spaces do get violated, people talk to us that we don't know, watch us, sometimes acknowledging that fact (how many women have been hollered at on the street). But it seems that in the physical world we have choices. If you don't want to talk to someone you walk away. If you don't want to be somewhere, you leave. How does this translate to the virtual world?
One's immediate response is to say that it is easier to turn off in a virtual world, you do just that, turn off, log off, not participate at all. We can delete emails, sign out of Myspace and in the case of Stickam turn off our web cameras. But as this article (which I will discuss in more detail in a later post) states, there is an archive. We cannot run away, hide or deny that which we say and do online and this IS different. It is searchable. In the physical world, our actions, while they can be seen in by strangers, are confined in space and time to where they, archived only by physical memory. What we are in effect creating, therefore, seems to be urban-like environments with memory forever, crowds of strangers with an unbelievable ability to scrutinize. This article suggests that this might not necessarily be a bad ting. If we make everything public then maybe we do in fact become desensitized to it. Half naked pictures of 16 year old girls do start to become irrelevant when there are 6000 of them instead of 10. But the question I have, as I raised in class, is what effect does this have on our ability to exist and interact in the physical world? How will a generation that grows up interacting online negotiate physical space? There IS somewhere here a correlation. This does not mean that we should become paranoid and log-off. But there is a fundamental change in relationships when they primarily exist in a virtual space or when they are partly informed by a virtual existence. Some kind of disassociation occurs.
One of the assignments for next week’s thesis class was to discuss our project with someone who is completely out of our field. I chose my friend Craig, partly because he was unfortunate enough to be having dinner with me last night. We talked about a lot of things concerning online experiences and mobile phones. But the one interesting thing he mentioned, and I knew already that he did this, was his participation in T-Mobile chat rooms. I have personally never been in one or seen what they are, but apparently they are simple text based spaces where T-mobile users across the country can speak to each other. I asked him when he most used this and he told me it was primarily at home (which was odd in and of itself because one usually thinks of the mobile phone as enabling something mobile) and that he normally goes on when he can't sleep as a time waster. I asked him why he wouldn't do something like this online, IM or whatever. His response was interesting. He told me that online he feels more public, less anonymous and since this form of communicating is more for fun and to pass the time he doesn't personally feel invested enough in the communication to want to make it public.
It was at this point that I became very interested. Suddenly, it seems, being online no longer feels anonymous, even for someone like Craig whose exposure to online forms of communication is restricted to Myspace and search engines. It is interesting that in this environment his mobile phone has become a means to exert some personal control over private space. I'm still thinking about what this actually means…..