By now it is ancient news that the digital age is changing the ways we behave and organize our lives. I confess, I’m old. I grew up in the 70′s and 80′s. Back when our parents waited for the weekend to drive a car full of disobedient monsters to the mall to do the shopping. Long hours of managing little criminals with one arm while picking up laundry detergent and Cheerios with the other. These days? A few clicks on the computer before bed and Fresh Direct brings the groceries by tomorrow. Done.
Back in the 80′s, what did a testosterone drunk high school boy do when he fell for a new girl he met at a party? Here’s how I handled it (badly): Spend half an hour practicing how cool and calm I could be before picking up the phone, only to get an answering machine onto which I left an awkward and rambling voice mail. What repetitious humiliation could have been avoided if only there was texting.
In college. Started a rock band. Practiced in a garage. Worked nights and weekends to save money for studio time. The record took a year to put together, and printing the albums required maxing out our credit cards. Today, the cost of all that is little more than the laptop our parents would have already bought us for school.
The first word that might come to mind in all this is EFFICIENCY. All this digital capacity makes us damn efficient. Shopping takes a fraction of the time. Dating launches humiliation free in under 140 characters. Records and films are made on budgets under a hundred dollars. It’s super efficient.
The Internet and digital technologies such as mobile have cut the distance between desire and action from often vast to almost nothing. Forgot to buy a birthday present for a friend’s party tonight, go online and have it delivered to their house today. Or go to Xtranormal and choose a cast of characters and type in some dialogue and you have your own animation depicting that time the two of you got into an awkward situation backpacking in Bulgaria.
And speaking of efficiency, let us not forget sex. Lots and lots of sex. Available 24/7 in any variety. From porn to Craig’s List hook-ups to video chatting to Match.com to the exhibitionist surprise that was Chatroulette. Sex has really gotten efficient on the Internet. There are many PhD theses to come discussing the disruption to traditional relationships due to the sex-efficient Internet
But this post is not about efficiency or sex. It’s about love.
Something interesting happened on the way to integrating the Internet into our lives. People started doing things for reasons that no one could understand.
Who would have thought that…
Millions of people will write and edit encyclopedia entries on obscure subjects and give their work away for free? Or that people are going to make films of their cat doing somersaults? Then rip the perfect piece of music to go along with it and mash that up with clips of Tom Brokaw doing the news? And then post it for free and watch as it gets millions of views from all over the world? And never expect a penny in recompense?
Maybe love is erupting.
Clay Shirky talks about how the Internet is enabling all sorts of new forms of SHARING. As he puts it in Here Comes Everybody, the sharing we do over the Internet is “different in degree” and “different in kind” than what came before. Or in other words, Facebook. And YouTube. And Wikipedia. And so on. And people are putting a lot of work into their sharing without expecting to get paid for it. How can this be?
Again I say, love.
Psychologist Edward Deci at the University of Rochester did an experiment where he put people in a room and told them to solve a puzzle involving putting different shaped blocks together into various forms. He would leave them alone in a room for eight minutes and see how long they worked on the puzzle while he was gone. Usually it was about four minutes. Then he tried the experiment again but offered them money for solving the puzzle and the subjects worked about six minutes. Then for the third round he told them that the money was off the table, but the task was still the same. Put the pieces of the puzzle together into yet another shape. On this final round the subjects did something curious, they worked far less than four minutes they did in the original experiment. It turns out that once they expected to get paid, they weren’t as interested in solving a puzzle for free.
The conclusion? As Shirky reports in Cognitive Surplus, Deci figured out that when we increase dependence on and expectation of extrinsic motivations (money) we actually suppress intrinsic motivations (here intrinsic motivations are defined in the liberal sense as love… love in all its various emotional and creative forms).
By reducing the cost to connection to others to nearly zero, and in the wild efficiencies thus enabled, the Internet has reduced the need for extrinsic rewards such as money, allowing people to express themselves and connect with each other based on intrinsic motivations. Such as love of creating and sharing a song. Love of blogging on all things having to do with clogs. Love of joining a presidential campaign and phone banking from home.
Shirky provides a gentle but important reminder in all this: “Internet social tools don’t create collective action, they merely remove obstacles to it.”
In other words, the Internet doesn’t do the work for us. The Internet doesn’t make us more creative or love-seeking (in all its forms). It is a tool for connecting and sharing, so that WE can do the work. We do the creating, not the Internet. And yes, while many people are making a lot of money on the Internet, there is an almost infinite amount of love being shared as well. Love in all forms. Overflowing into and out of the digisphere. Spilling itself into our lives in endless messes and majesty.
Love is erupting. Thank you Internet.
Is Love Erupting?
By now it is ancient news that the digital age is changing the ways we behave and organize our lives. I confess, I’m old. I grew up in the 70′s and 80′s. Back when our parents waited for the weekend to drive a car full of disobedient monsters to the mall to do the shopping. Long hours of managing little criminals with one arm while picking up laundry detergent and Cheerios with the other. These days? A few clicks on the computer before bed and Fresh Direct brings the groceries by tomorrow. Done.
Back in the 80′s, what did a testosterone drunk high school boy do when he fell for a new girl he met at a party? Here’s how I handled it (badly): Spend half an hour practicing how cool and calm I could be before picking up the phone, only to get an answering machine onto which I left an awkward and rambling voice mail. What repetitious humiliation could have been avoided if only there was texting.
In college. Started a rock band. Practiced in a garage. Worked nights and weekends to save money for studio time. The record took a year to put together, and printing the albums required maxing out our credit cards. Today, the cost of all that is little more than the laptop our parents would have already bought us for school.
The first word that might come to mind in all this is EFFICIENCY. All this digital capacity makes us damn efficient. Shopping takes a fraction of the time. Dating launches humiliation free in under 140 characters. Records and films are made on budgets under a hundred dollars. It’s super efficient.
The Internet and digital technologies such as mobile have cut the distance between desire and action from often vast to almost nothing. Forgot to buy a birthday present for a friend’s party tonight, go online and have it delivered to their house today. Or go to Xtranormal and choose a cast of characters and type in some dialogue and you have your own animation depicting that time the two of you got into an awkward situation backpacking in Bulgaria.
And speaking of efficiency, let us not forget sex. Lots and lots of sex. Available 24/7 in any variety. From porn to Craig’s List hook-ups to video chatting to Match.com to the exhibitionist surprise that was Chatroulette. Sex has really gotten efficient on the Internet. There are many PhD theses to come discussing the disruption to traditional relationships due to the sex-efficient Internet
But this post is not about efficiency or sex. It’s about love.
Something interesting happened on the way to integrating the Internet into our lives. People started doing things for reasons that no one could understand.
Who would have thought that…
Millions of people will write and edit encyclopedia entries on obscure subjects and give their work away for free? Or that people are going to make films of their cat doing somersaults? Then rip the perfect piece of music to go along with it and mash that up with clips of Tom Brokaw doing the news? And then post it for free and watch as it gets millions of views from all over the world? And never expect a penny in recompense?
Maybe love is erupting.
Clay Shirky talks about how the Internet is enabling all sorts of new forms of SHARING. As he puts it in Here Comes Everybody, the sharing we do over the Internet is “different in degree” and “different in kind” than what came before. Or in other words, Facebook. And YouTube. And Wikipedia. And so on. And people are putting a lot of work into their sharing without expecting to get paid for it. How can this be?
Again I say, love.
Psychologist Edward Deci at the University of Rochester did an experiment where he put people in a room and told them to solve a puzzle involving putting different shaped blocks together into various forms. He would leave them alone in a room for eight minutes and see how long they worked on the puzzle while he was gone. Usually it was about four minutes. Then he tried the experiment again but offered them money for solving the puzzle and the subjects worked about six minutes. Then for the third round he told them that the money was off the table, but the task was still the same. Put the pieces of the puzzle together into yet another shape. On this final round the subjects did something curious, they worked far less than four minutes they did in the original experiment. It turns out that once they expected to get paid, they weren’t as interested in solving a puzzle for free.
The conclusion? As Shirky reports in Cognitive Surplus, Deci figured out that when we increase dependence on and expectation of extrinsic motivations (money) we actually suppress intrinsic motivations (here intrinsic motivations are defined in the liberal sense as love… love in all its various emotional and creative forms).
By reducing the cost to connection to others to nearly zero, and in the wild efficiencies thus enabled, the Internet has reduced the need for extrinsic rewards such as money, allowing people to express themselves and connect with each other based on intrinsic motivations. Such as love of creating and sharing a song. Love of blogging on all things having to do with clogs. Love of joining a presidential campaign and phone banking from home.
Shirky provides a gentle but important reminder in all this: “Internet social tools don’t create collective action, they merely remove obstacles to it.”
In other words, the Internet doesn’t do the work for us. The Internet doesn’t make us more creative or love-seeking (in all its forms). It is a tool for connecting and sharing, so that WE can do the work. We do the creating, not the Internet. And yes, while many people are making a lot of money on the Internet, there is an almost infinite amount of love being shared as well. Love in all forms. Overflowing into and out of the digisphere. Spilling itself into our lives in endless messes and majesty.
Love is erupting. Thank you Internet.