Personal Connections in the Digital Age

In the first chapter of Personal Connections in the Digital Age Nancy Baym outlines what her book will be focusing on by breaking down seven key concepts. However, first she gets you thinking about how media and technology impact the connections we make with others. We’ve moved from only making face-to-face connections to being able to connect with almost anyone, anywhere, and at any time. This shift in the way we can communicate has impacted our world in what seems like endless ways. As Baym draws upon each of her seven talking points, it makes you think some of these shifts are potentially for the better, but with each also comes unintended negative consequences.

Her seven concepts include: interactivity, temporal structure, social cues, storage, replicability, reach, and mobility.

→She explains that our media and technologies have become interactive because they’ve created a way for not only them to talk to us, but for us to talk back. With this, we are able to connect with friends on Facebook, but we are also able to put out personal information which can be seen as “flirting with danger.”

→When she speaks of temporal structure, she explains the difference between synchronous to asynchronous communications. Email and voicemail would be examples of asynchronous because they are associated with time delays. Whereas synchronous communication is face-to-face, text messaging, and phone calls because there is no time delay. This brings up the point of what is expected of us just because we constantly have our mobile phone on us (or are expected to) we must respond immediately.

→When we are talking face-to-face, we can not only see facial expressions and mannerisms, but we are also existing in the space with the same physical surroundings. As we shift to digital, we lose a lot of these social cues. Due to this, we lose the ability to communicate effectively exactly what we mean in the way that we mean it, and we are also able to shape an identity that may only exist digitally.

→Digital communication also means that it can be stored and replicated. Baym mentions that human memory is poor when it comes to conversation, but I would argue that because we can store and replicate digitally, we’ve become even less careless about remembering. For example, we have become so reliant on technology that we can’t remember our friend’s phone numbers or birthdays.     

→With the ability to connect with almost anyone, comes the ability to connect with as many people at one time. Mass communication has given us reach. Communicating on a large scale can be beneficial when a young performer can become famous on YouTube, but it also means that private messages can be easily shared on the same large scale. (Ex. Black Mirror, Episode One)

→Instant communication has been made even more possible because it is now mobile. With this comes the “promise” that we will never lose contact no matter where we go. But it also means that we can be in a virtual world while physically existing in a real world.

For me, all of these concepts bring up the question: what does it mean to be real? If we are interacting instantly in a form that is not truly ourselves, in a way that can be stored and replicated, to the world to matter where we are – are we living online or are we living in the here and now? Or is virtual becoming the new real?