It’s not just that we have more music, more text, more websites, and more TV for mixing our personal cultural blends. We also have new media for experiencing and expressing ourselves and for building the richness of our lives.
Marshall McLuhan asserted that “the medium is the message” and later economists Harold Innis and Leonard Dudley showed how communications media shape human lives. Over the last fifteen years the rapid advance of digital technology has accelerated this process beyond expectations. Many of us are still trying to catch up, so I intend this chapter to be a simple guide to how some of the new communications media—such as instant messaging, cell phone texting, and micro-blogging—matter for the emotional side of our lives. They matter for our personal cultural blends and they matter for how we relate to each other and how we bond with each other. Again, the intense ordering of information isn’t a sterile pursuit—it’s also about human connection. This reflects the “autistic insight” that the ordering of information can be a joyous activity.
McLuhan and his followers were fond of pointing out that television was a “cool” medium because the viewer had to fill in a lot of the content, while print was a “hot” medium because it didn’t involve a lot of reader participation. What’s happened is that print—in the broad sense of that term—has become a cool medium also in McLuhan’s sense of the term. Today, print isn’t just letters on a page; by clever use of electronic delivery media, you can create more context and make your messages more personal, emotionally richer, and more evocative in subtle ways. Counterintuitively, it is the very possibility of distance through the print medium that enables small variations in the message, designed to communicate small but important variations in emotional meaning.
Let’s start with instant messaging (IM), which has now moved beyond its original teenage users. IM, like cell phone texting, rose to popularity in the teen world in large part because teens were quicker to see why the new medium was important. But IM is spreading through the general population, including of course in the workplace, where it is displacing email more each day.
The very use of IM leads us into different kinds of communication. A dialog by IM is very different than one by email, even when it is the same two people “chatting.”
Here’s the thing: When the ordered bits are small, small changes in cost can have a big final effect on the power of the filter, namely which bits get ordered and which do not. Again, the logic here is economic. When the message is big and important and more or less indivisible, that same message will pass more or less unscathed through many different filters. For instance if you have to communicate about fifty words of fairly exact instructions as to how to take an antidote for a deadly poison, the content of the message will be roughly invariant whether you send a handwritten note, make a phone call, or post it on a web page. The key points of the message simply have to get through whatever filter you use and it is worth making the effort to communicate the required information. But when the self-assembly of small cultural bits is going on, usually no single one of those bits or even no particular group of those bits is so important to the overall stream. Each particular bit is small in value and so the nature of the filter—and thus the medium for communication—has a big influence on what gets through and what doesn’t.
In a world of cheap and readily available culture, the medium matters more than ever before. It matters for how we order information and it also matters for what gets ordered. Look at it this way: When it comes to messages, you are constructing a bundle of the message itself and the means of its delivery. The cheaper the content, the more the costs and the methods of delivery matter in shaping your decisions to communicate.
You might think it is counterintuitive that a small change in technology can matter so much. IM is only slightly easier to use than email. How hard was it to send an email in the first place? Very hard, it turns out, at least in relative terms. When you send information by IM the window for conversation is already open. You don’t need that extra click to open the new email window and you don’t need the extra half second for it to open. It turns out that very slight difference in extra speed and convenience makes a big difference for human communication.
Even among teenagers, an email usually has at least a sentence’s worth of more or less normal content. An email might invite a person to a party, recommend a movie, or maybe outline a whole business plan, albeit in brief. We even use email to make legally binding agreements.
In contrast, here’s a typical IM exchange between two people, or at least part of one:
Female: lol
Female: how amusing
Male: What? = P
Female: XD
Male: Amusing? *grin*
Female: yep
Male: Why? ˆˆ;
Female: :patpat:
Female: don’t think about it
Male:…I’m curious.
Female: are you now?
Male: Yep.
Female: ahahaha
Female: how cute
Male:…*glare*
Female: *ˆˆ*
Male: Ugh. = P
Female: ˆ_ˆ
Male: So annoying.
Female: who, me?
Male: Yep.
Female: hehe
Compared to a typical email, the IM bits are shorter, the language is a pidgin creole of sorts, symbols and emoticons are more common, and many more thoughts and feelings get typed into the conversation box. Of course the ability to easily stick every thought or feeling into the box means that you develop, monitor, and report more thoughts and feelings in the first place. One study of IM found that 22 percent of all transmissions are single words, or less than single words, such as when the letter “C” is used to substitute for the word “see.”
It’s not just about cute expressions or strengthening our friendships. IM makes the workplace more efficient. It’s easier to have a rapid-fire back-and-forth, or a worker can use IM to check whether another worker is available for a productive chat. IM means that not every query has to take the form of face-to-face contact or require an email. The judicious use of IM can decrease the number of workplace interruptions.
Some of the effects of new media are unintended and also unexpected. For instance the egalitarian nature of IM redresses a gender imbalance often found in ordinary conversation. There’s lots of evidence that during face-to-face talking, men interrupt women more often than women interrupt men and that women allow this to happen or perhaps sometimes even encourage it. When you’re both typing IMs, the notion of interrupting no longer makes any sense; in a way everything is an interruption. The power to interrupt is thus much more symmetric and the technology strips males of one of their intimidating conversational advantages. In face-to-face talk, maybe it feels like only a small cost for the woman to cut off or discourage the man’s interruption but very often she will not do it. A small difference in initial cost or attractiveness makes a big difference for the final outcome. If you’re the kind of guy who intimidates women excessively (intentionally or otherwise), IM is the medium for you to address that imbalance. Or if you’re a woman and your guy interrupts you, try to get him on IM for a dialogue.
IM is a good way to get to know somebody, usually better than email. An IM dialogue typically has many more questions than does an email. Furthermore it is rude to not respond immediately, unless you announce that you must break off the exchange. In an IM exchange, you learn very quickly whether and how well the other person can match your pace. It is information “dancing” in a way that the oh-so-slow email never can be. And who doesn’t love to dance? Truly good IM conversations are like overlapping polyphonies, with swells and peaks, breaks and moments of great intensity, and also humor. It’s one of the best ways of connecting with other people. It’s not a corruption of culture, rather it’s a cross between the emotional tie of the mambo and the intellectual connection of rapid-fire debate. It’s a new canvas on which to paint stories of friendship and sharing, not to mention romance and also sex.
Those stories and meanings of course are, most of all, painted on the interior dimension of the mind and thus they are not easily visible. So it is no surprise that many people are still suspicious of the new media. But most IM users don’t think twice about the importance of IM for their lives and that is because they have a strong understanding, possibly implicit, of the power and the subtlety of the medium for framing messages.
IM is in fact a pretty good metaphor for a lot of contemporary culture. Take a look at an empty IM conversation box and you will come away unimpressed. The design people don’t portray the boxes in lovely colors or give them interesting shapes. They are purely functional, at least on the major IM services. You might call them ugly. But they are a medium for fascinating connections and what is interesting in an IM exchange happens between individual human minds. The resulting excitement, connection, and beauty are hard for many outside observers to see.
Technologies of instant messaging also allow you to communicate with different people at once, possibly as many as twelve or more. You can keep as many conversation boxes open as you can keep track of and you can shift from one to another by a single move of the mouse, which is quicker than opening a new email window. Unlike clicking “send” for email, the IM box is open and ready to go. So part of the beauty of IM is not just the dance but the ability to dance with many people at the same time and on a roughly equal basis.
IM vs. email isn’t the only example of how small differences in communication formats can matter. Reading a document in HTML, a simpler file format, is different from reading in the richer format of PDF. HTML is more of a lowest-common-denominator medium and it is easier for searching, linking, and using Control-C to lift content. Circa early 2009, you can’t read PDFs on an iPhone. It’s also quicker to scroll through an HTML document, if only because you must first click in a PDF document before “page down” will work. That may seem like a tiny difference but when I see a PDF document my first instinct is to print it out or otherwise ignore it. When I see something in HTML format my first instinct is to read it. That usually leads to a big difference in final results. As the web develops, I see HTML gaining in influence over PDF. PDF is the main format for scientific research, but the reporting of that research is usually done in HTML, whether through blogs or mainstream media sites.
Just as IM differs from email, cell phone texting is very different from making a cell phone call. Having grown up with pay phones and AT&T calling cards, I used to think making a cell phone call was so simple. But once you think about it a bit, you realize it isn’t so simple at all. When you make a cell phone call, you open yourself up to being asked questions. You have to commit yourself on matters of tone and also on key information, such as telling your mother where you are and what you are doing and why you didn’t call earlier. A phone call is actually a pretty complicated emotional event and that is one reason why so many people remained “cell phone holdouts” for so long. A cell phone (at least if you carry it, leave it on, and answer it) means that other people can call you almost anytime they want to.
I have a growing number of friends who, even if they own and carry cell phones, avoid phone calls altogether. A phone call is a demand on you. A phone call is a chance to be rejected. And a phone call is a chance to flub your lines or overplay your hand.
With texting, the messenger or respondent is in more control. The messenger can choose when to answer the initial query and the responder can more easily limit the information sent back in response. The whole technology fits well into the idea of a life constructed from disparate cultural bits. And of course the very existence of texting (and email) makes a phone call all the more emotionally fraught. It used to be you could just call somebody up to chat; today a phone call often brings the presupposition that something is deeply wrong (or right) or perhaps you have an engagement or a death to report. Of course the greater the emotional pressure placed on phone calls, the more people will resort to substitutes for calls, including texting and also email. That makes the event of a phone call more important still. Phone call cowards will in return be even less likely to make the calls.
You might think that texting is ideally suited for the exchange of practical information, such as where and when to meet, and indeed it is. But texting also opens up emotional doors. It offers immediacy combined with a certain amount of distance. Just as people will write things in an email that they might not say out loud, so will they text feelings and revelations with greater comfort. Or if you just want to ask a question, you can be more direct without seeming rude. The medium requires directness and so it shifts the standards for polite discourse. No one expects you to beat around the proverbial bush and in this regard texted “conversations” are more like many of the conversations between autistic people. Just come right out and say what you mean.
Even though the idea of receiving or making a call is emotionally threatening to many people, carrying a cell phone is also a form of emotional comfort. Many people, especially teenagers, like the idea of carrying it all the time. It symbolizes a kind of protection, an electronic nest, and the possibility of always being in touch with friends and family, if need be. The option of texting strengthens that nest feeling while diminishing the potential threat of calls. So to make the cell phone more of a security blanket, texting should serve some emotional functions, and indeed it does. Donna and Fraser Reid have written of “‘Text circles’—the idea that Texters seem to form closely knit groups of ‘Textmates’ with whom they engage in regular, maybe even perpetual, contact.”
Texting is encouraging some forms of communication over others. It’s a very good way to communicate “I told you so” or to admit fault without setting off a long verbal argument.
Japanese teens and lovers use cell phone texting to communicate a steady stream of emotions between their “fleshmeets.” Before a date it is common to exchange numerous messages of longing during the afternoon, often peaking as the date time approaches. On the journey home, after the actual encounter, further messages are used as “fading embers of conversation” and this trail of feelings can continue for days until the next date rolls around. That’s harder to manage with your tone of voice. Texting has reached its height in Japan, and you can walk around Tokyo all day and see hundreds or thousands of texters but maybe only a few people actually making a cell phone call.
You also can send and read texts during your downtime or when you’re supposed to be doing something else. Or maybe you text when someone else is driving, as does my wife, and you interrupt your texting every now and then to maintain the conversation. A cell phone chat isn’t as flexible across the same variety of situations.
Micro-blogging services such as Twitter, Jaiku, and Pownce also shape discourse. Most of all, micro-blogging cultivates our sense of the importance of the small bit.
In case you don’t already know, micro-blogging allows you to post short observations only. In other words, sites limit the number of characters in a single unformatted blog post. In the case of Twitter, currently the best-known of these services, the maximum is 140 characters and the message is put in a small cloud up on blank empty space. If it’s small bits you want—for the reasons discussed in chapter 3—Twitter is one way to make sure that is what you get. Think of Twitter and related services as sending you very short updates about the people you care for or from the people who best supply you with new information.
A typical Twitter post, or “tweet” as it is called, might simply read:
Trying to do better
Some other favorite tweets I have read or read about are:
Brief nap gives me a second chance to wake up on the wrong side of the bed
Our Safeway is like The Island of Misfit Toys, but for groceries
Contemplating going to see Transformers by myself. Could anything be geekier?
when twitter first started, we twittered about things other than twitter, right? RIGHT? restore my faith in humanity!
And finally:
Do you have a Twitter strategy? Scoble says you need one and a Facebook strategy too. Scrambling to get one of each LOL!
I’m not sure you’re all so impressed but of course those tweets weren’t intended for you anyway. A tweet makes the most sense within a context, a friendship, and an ongoing conversation, if only on Twitter. By the way, if you meet with a tweet reader, it is called a tweetup. And in case you didn’t know, it’s easy to have your friends’ tweets delivered directly to your cell phone in the form of text messages.
The Twitter page is unpretentious, to say the least, and even a technophobe can learn how to do it in seconds. If you know more you can customize the background to look pretty, but perhaps plain is more to the point. Most users now post directly, without visiting the page at all.
Why would anyone ever want to Twitter, given that we already have email, blogs, cell phones, IM, and good old-fashioned speech, not to mention the handwritten postcard? Micro-blogging is unique. The pressure on the content is defused deliberately. It’s supposed to be content that you wouldn’t bother sharing with most people. Tweets are supposed to be extremely ordinary and everything about the medium pushes you in that direction. Twitter allows you to build intimacy with one group of people but not another, or in other words you can reach out and build intimacy with the people who are interested in you no matter what. Or sometimes a reader—a perfect stranger—may want to see what your shortest thoughts are really like; maybe it’s a kind of test of how interesting you really are. Traditional blogging, in contrast, uses longer posts. This form of blogging interests mostly those people who like writing for its stand-alone, paragraph-long merit. That’s all fine and good, but it’s not the most effective tool for developing a friendship, or for that matter an obsession.
Micro-blogging fills in the gaps. Too often I’ve had a periodic conversation with a friend or family member and been reduced to reciting the latest “news,” as if it were a series of bullet headlines. Micro-blogging recognizes that the ordinary fabric of daily life—the small bits of existence—is a big part of “what’s new.” Rather than being impersonal, it brings people together. If someone is reading your tweets and they ask “What’s new?” all of a sudden the conversation can take place in a thicker and richer context. The conversation can be emotional and evocative rather than sounding like CNN. It’s another example of how mastering some small bits can give you a richer, bigger perspective on the world.
There’s even a service called Twist (twist.flaptor.com/?tz=-5) that tracks trends on Twitter. Twitter posts about being drunk, not surprisingly, peak on Friday and Saturday nights, and twittering about hangovers peaks the following mornings. The days of the week that get the most mention are Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, thereby illustrating the centrality of the weekend in our interior lives.
But it’s not just about parties. If you’re micro-blogging all the time, you are forced to be more philosophical about what you are doing. Which little event from today is the one I want to list? And how should I describe it? What about the event was really important? Those may sound like stupid questions but micro-blogging is making many of us more contemplative and more thoughtful.
It would be easy for the Twitter site to allow more characters in a single tweet and thus more content, but that would, as they say, ruin everything. Twitter has branded itself as specializing in a very particular style of blogging, namely short status updates on what the writer is feeling or doing. It wouldn’t cost you much time to put your longer ideas in the form of successive tweets, but even the very slight annoyance of starting a new tweet usually stops that from happening. No one is out there trying to write an epic poem through successive tweeting and indeed the content on Twitter is almost exclusively of the short variety.
Twitter differs from email in another important way as well. An email is pushed into your face, whether you want to read it then or not. While you might say “I can always wait,” the reality is that most of us feel the pressure of an accumulating in-box. Twitter you visit when you want and stay there for as long as you wish to. It’s demand-driven and the pace is under your control. You don’t have to pretend you are listening. Nor does anyone assume that you must have read his or her tweet, so it is OK if you stay away altogether. “What, you didn’t get my email!?” is not an issue in this medium. J. P. Rangaswami has described Twitter as more like a side-to-side conversation, like you might have casually in a bar with a stranger, rather than a face-to-face conversation over the dinner table or an office desk.
As I discussed in chapter 1, how much people enjoy reality, and how people enjoy reality, depends on how they order it in their minds. By ordering material you create the surrounding frames. Standard behavioral economics views “framing effects” as distorting our decisions, but in many circumstances framing effects help make our lives real, vivid, and meaningful, just as Twittering can make our smallest choices more salient.
We choose to send or receive messages in particular ways, in part, to determine which kinds of framing effects will influence our thoughts and emotions. The greater the number of media we have to choose from, the more likely this process will suit our tastes. Human behavior still will be influenced by behavioral “distortions,” but there is a better way to think about how those distortions operate. To trace and understand your behavioral mistakes, do not focus on the cognitive distortions occasioned by any single, given instance of framing, especially as it might be measured in a laboratory setting. The framing you encounter in the real world usually represents your choice and you have some reason for it. In other words, most behavioral studies of framing effects eliminate competition—in this case competition between messages—one of the most fundamental features of a market economy. You probably made that irrational decision because it fits with the way you have chosen to frame your reality, and in turn your own economy, and thus you had some reasons for that framing, even if it wasn’t the very best decision of all those available.
The better way to understand human imperfections is to focus on what I call an überdistortion, namely that we, when selecting from a broad menu of options, don’t always make the right choice of framing effects. In other words, if you want to make better decisions, you should be more self-reflective about how you are choosing to frame the messages you send and receive. You should think more about who you listen to and who you read.
Let’s consider an example. Frederic Brochet, a psychologist at the University of Bordeaux, ran some experiments to test experienced wine tasters. He invited fifty-four wine experts to give their sensory impressions of a red wine and a white wine. He was told that the red wine tasted of “crushed red fruit,” among other traditional descriptive responses. He was told that the white wine tasted of lemon, peaches, and honey, all traditional white wine flavors. The experts then returned for another tasting, but this time the white wine was dyed red with (tasteless) food coloring. The same experts described the same white wine, only now it looked red. All of a sudden those experts found flavors in the white that usually they ascribed to reds. What used to taste like lemon, peaches, and honey now tasted like black currants. These experts had no reason to lie and in fact their answers subsequently caused them embarrassment. Their blather about the wines was sincere.
That’s a neat experiment, but it’s wrong to focus too much on the conclusion that people are excessively tricked by the pronouncements of authority. The experiment itself preordained that the wine tasters heard a positive message about the wine. In the real world, wine tasters choose the sources for their information and framing. Some of those sources (e.g., wine magazines) will “talk up” the quality of the wine experience while other sources (Budweiser, or the temperance league) will talk down the quality. To figure out the net bias, the question is which sources are overselected or underselected. Maybe the wine magazines receive more attention than the temperance league, but the effect of the magazines is not just a rude trick. The wine magazines offered a preferred means of framing aimed at helping us appreciate expensive wine, whether by learning, placebo, or, as is usually the case, some mix of both.
There are cases when we want to be tricked by our messengers, even though we don’t quite want to describe the process to ourselves in those terms. The more expensive wine really can taste better, simply because it is more expensive, and we want to keep that as one of our pleasures in life. It’s what helps to make “special occasions” feel so special, namely that we went to considerable trouble to do something. In part our expectations make the difference a real one through a kind of placebo effect. But if we have chosen that placebo effect, such a “trick” can bring real human benefits. Dan Ariely did a famous study where he showed that more expensive pain relief medication, even of similar quality, does a better job at alleviating pain. Or maybe I love my wife more because I had to court her with great passion. These are often opportunities rather than problems.
These results, by the way, aren’t all new and revolutionary but rather they reflect some age-old wisdom. Adam Smith, in his 1759 book on moral psychology, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, suggested that we enjoy and value an experience more if it took more self-command and more sacrifice to bring it about. The cost of getting something helps us frame it as something important. This is also a theme in the writings of the Roman Stoics, who were a major influence on Smith.
(These results make you wonder. Should we tell patients that the cost of their hospital treatment was really high? Can we reap more of the benefits of placebos without deceiving people? Is this one reason why top restaurants don’t hand out reservations so easily, namely so that the food tastes better when people go through trouble to get in? Is this why some women play “hard to get”?)
Studies of framing effects have been done on red wine and pain relief tablets but not on Facebook or iPods; for one thing those services are too new to have received comparable attention and also the outcomes from those services are harder to measure. But I wish to suggest that framing and expectations still shape the final results, in this case the human relationship. Facebook, by organizing your friends in a new and fun way, actually influences your friendships. Not just because those people are easier to contact, or for other practical reasons, but because they take on greater importance in your mind. When you “friend someone” (that is Facebook lingo for asking to connect to their page as a “friend”) you then expect the relationship to be a more intimate one than it had been and so this expectation is affirmed by both parties. You are more likely to think of that person as your friend, and indeed you are more likely to think of yourself as a friendly person. Both expectations will—on average if not in every case—become self-fulfilling prophecies. It’s like how you talk yourself into thinking that the more expensive wine has a more profound taste simply because it is supposed to.
I joined Facebook in part because I wanted to learn how it works. I didn’t have any “felt need” for the service, although I quickly found I enjoyed it and started using it for its own sake. Ever since I mentioned Facebook on my blog, hundreds of people have friended me unilaterally. I friended them all back, without exception. Every now and then I meet one of them. And you know what—when I meet one of them, they really do feel like my friends. Not good friends or close friends, so maybe the word “acquaintance” would be better (though they can’t call it “Acquaintancebook”). But I approach them with a warmer glow than otherwise, simply because they “friended me.” If an actual friend has friended me on Facebook, so much the better. Facebook has made me friendlier. Call that superficial if you want, but it is a better feeling than continued indifference or neglect. It is a framing effect that I have chosen to keep, and to my advantage.
It is less clear, however, that Facebook expands our friendliness in every regard. Facebook also makes friendship a little too easy and you will recall from above that a feeling of sacrifice sometimes makes us appreciate something more. Facebook gives us a lot of friends or acquaintances. Friendship becomes a bit less like that precious, hard-to-find diamond. But rest assured, Facebook is not destroying all ideals of tight and eternal friendship. If you have a truly close friend from, say, high school, Facebook makes it easier to stay in touch with that person’s life. That ease means you may in some ways value the general phenomenon of friendship less, but your best friendships will be stronger, closer, and based on more regular contact.
The inflating away of the friendship concept is not inevitable in a networked world. If you wish, you can have another social networking service, more exclusive in nature, reserved for those who are your true, lifelong friends. You can follow only your five dearest friends on Twitter or send text messages to only your immediate family. Facebook isn’t the only framing device out there and you can direct your attention elsewhere to offset any unwanted biases of Facebook. Framing effects are not just one-off influences but rather we choose them from a broad portfolio of options. We mix and match framing effects as we see fit, and so it is again a mistake to focus on the cognitive biases uncovered in stand-alone experiments under lab conditions. If there is any important bias in human affairs, it is again the überbias of choosing which framing effects to enjoy. When it comes to friendship, I’m not so worried that people will choose the framing effects that make all their close friends go away. Again, a networked world is very often an intimate world.
I once met a guy who had so many “friending” services (it seemed he had as many services as some people have friends) that he constructed an entire web page to organize them. He understood that each social network service performs a slightly different function in terms of how it brings people together and what kinds of ties it produces. The deliberately impersonal nature of LinkedIn, for instance, is part of its business and professional image; that same strategy could not work for Facebook. It’s again a case where competition really helps us produce exactly the right kind of human tie for each circumstance.
By this point the philosophical questions probably have occurred to you. How do these framing effects really work? Does Facebook actually make your friends more valuable? Or does it just make them seem more valuable? Is the time spent with them actually any better? Or do we just remember that time more fondly because we gaze on the photos afterward, on the Facebook site? Or maybe the time together isn’t any better, but perhaps you anticipate it in some fun way, such as by exchanging plans to meet over Facebook or IM. Which feelings are the reality and which are the illusion? Is Facebook just a “friends placebo” in lieu of the real thing?
I’m not sure these questions have final, absolute answers. When perceptions shape reality, and vice versa, there’s not always a simple way to separate the back-and-forth influences.
Communications media have the strongest impact on your emotions when they receive social validation, and that is exactly how the iPod, Facebook, and many other modern innovations work. Yes, you order your friends on Facebook, but this isn’t a purely private act. Your friends, by visiting your page, observe your ordering, they talk about it, they analyze it, they respond with their own changes in ordering, and they confirm the realness of your ordering in your mind. You lend your iPod to your friends, not just to be the proverbial nice guy, but to let people see what music means to your life. As the world sees you as a lover of Radiohead, so you become one all the more. Religions, Alcoholics Anonymous, and terrorist cells all understand the importance of social validation to firing up and firming up people’s commitments. Adam Smith knew that few men “can be satisfied with their own private consciousness” without social recognition of what they have done. This is yet another way in which Facebook boosts friendship rather than degrades it.
Amazon actually makes your books more interesting, and it makes the books you imagine you might read (but don’t) more fun too. YouTube makes your favorite TV show more memorable and more iconic. EBay turns collectibles into a greater source of pride. The behavior of your avatar in Second Life will shape your skills and attitudes in your first life. In other words, the techniques of ordering are spilling over into the very content and enjoyment of our culture and our lives. It reminds me of the Borges short story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” which is based on the idea of an obsessive ordering of the world through a fanciful encyclopedia. At some point the mythical objects of the encyclopedia world seep into reality and the principles of ordering start to govern and shape real-world events.
RSS readers are increasingly common. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. The reader “delivers” web articles and blog posts to you in a single, consolidated format; FeedDemon and Google Reader offer two well-known RSS services. In other words, if I am reading five (or fifty) blogs I don’t have to visit all of the sites. I can program my reader to deliver the post—without advertisements I might add—whenever something new is published on that site. That sounds pretty neat, right? Well, I’ll tell you this. Once you decide to add five, ten, or maybe two hundred people to your RSS feed, those become the important thinkers and writers for you. They achieve a salience as the people you have certified as sufficiently worthy to have delivered to your (figurative) doorstep. It’s different from visiting a blog every now and then. In a very discrete and distinct way, you have framed those people as “worth reading on a regular basis” and their careers and influence will benefit from that framing for a long time to come. You, as a reader, are likely to trust them more than you used to.
The web also makes it easier for us to focus on our points of similarity with others. For instance there is the well-known phenomenon of the “Googletwin” or the “Googlegänger,” patterned after the German word “Doppelgänger,” which refers to your ghostly double. A Googlegänger is a person who shares your exact name and appears in your Google searches. Of course whenever you Google yourself, you learn about the doings of that namesake person as well.
It turns out that many people have strange attractions to others with the same name. One writer, named Angela Shelton, tracked down and met forty other Angela Sheltons; she relates her experiences in a book titled, unsurprisingly, Finding Angela Shelton. The website HowManyofMe lets you find how many others have your name, Facebook coalitions are organized around common names, and there is a group trying to establish a world record by gathering together more than 1,224 people named Mohammed Hassan. There was a nine-year-old Tyler Cowen in a soccer league somewhere and every now and then I wonder how he is doing.
There’s evidence, from many fields of study, that people are strongly attracted to others who resemble them in terms of name or other characteristics, even accidental characteristics. Jeremy Bailenson, the director of the Virtual Human Interaction Lab at Stanford University, describes self-similarity, as it is called, as “one of the largest driving forces of behavior of social beings.” What’s interesting is how strongly new web technologies bring self-similarity into our lives. We can track down these commonalities, be it our names, the high school we went to, our hobbies, our neurologies, or our favorite vacation spots.
One of the most notable features of the web is how easily we can form groups and affiliations. We can join Facebook groups, we can meet these “peers” in virtual worlds, we can chat with them, and we can email them from a distance. It is much easier for us to find people with common interests than before and it is much easier to organize and order our relationships with those people. We “tag” or “bookmark” those people rather than lose track of them. We can meet them or maintain a structured relationship at a distance. By allying with “similars” in this way, we reframe and strengthen our preexisting identities and thus we become more like our true selves.
Even very unusual people can find peers through web search, chat groups, and virtual realities. These newly found similarities make it more fun to be yourself and the resulting affiliations are reinforced socially.
Cass Sunstein has argued that the web polarizes people politically for reasons like the above. We’ll see, but I think the final effect will be a more tolerant and cosmopolitan one. (Keep in mind we’ve had the web for a while now and our recently elected president Barack Obama succeeded by running on a non-ideological platform; while partisanship will certainly return I doubt if the web is the problem.) For most people our political connections are not the major source of our identity, even if in public arguments we sometimes pretend they are. Being a Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, etc. doesn’t mean any single thing for what we are actually like as human beings. One thing we do on the web is seek out others who are like us in non-political ways and then we cement those alliances and friendships. Over time, we will discover that many of these truly similar people do not in fact share our political views. Then we realize that politics isn’t as important as we used to think.
The nature of the web will favor some commonalities over others. Specifically it favors commonalities that can be spelled out in very exact, searchable language. For instance if you meet a group of people in person, it might be possible to construct a small coalition of members who are whimsical in a very particular yet hard-to-describe way. You know such people when you see them and you can all go off and take a short pedal boat ride together. But constructing the same coalition with a Google search would be much more difficult. Maybe I know what notion of “whimsical” I have in mind, but I can’t write it down exactly in a way that anyone else would understand. What I have in mind is “the kind of whimsical like that girl Alison Murray I used to know.” I typed that into Google and really didn’t get anything useful. But type in “blogs about model trains” or “Victorian collectibles” and you will be busy for the rest of the day.
The web thus encourages us to pursue our identities and alliances based around very specific and articulable interests. And do you know which group has a strong preference for specific and clearly articulable interests in the first place? That’s right, autistics. This is yet another way in which the web is altering our behavior and shaping our interests in what is broadly a more autistic direction. Relative to many non-autistics, autistics find it easy to use the web to track down what interests them. But no matter what your neurology, the web is encouraging your affiliations that are searchable and discouraging your affiliations that are not. The web is strengthening the aspects of your identity that are fact-based and easy to spell out in very direct language.
Finally, framing effects are more important than ever before. Some experiences, and some goods and services, are more subject to framing effects than others. If someone shoots you in the heart with a bullet, framing effects probably don’t much matter. You’re going to die, and if you survive the immediate impact it’s going to be unpleasant, no matter what your attitude. If you give a hungry man food, he is going to enjoy it no matter how it is framed; Cicero wrote, “Hunger is the best sauce.” The more visceral the experience, the less likely it is that framing effects will make a big difference for your pain or enjoyment.
This means that wealthy, secure societies offer greater scope for framing effects, and in particular they offer greater scope for beneficial framing effects. Competition gives you the chance to construct the whirlwind of influences that you most prefer. For that process to work smoothly, try to avoid the überbias of picking the wrong framing effects. Focus your wisdom on choosing the right media for your messages. If you don’t like how Facebook shapes your attitudes toward your friends, avoid it or supplement it with something different or something better. Write a blog post, a cell phone text, an email, or a Tweet. When all else fails, there’s still that good ol’ slow-delivered, handwritten postcard.