AVATARS OF THE INFORMATION AGE

Alternate Title: Tools of the Tool

Lately, Ive been discussing with others the role of computers and, more specifically, social networking in their lives and those of their children. The perspectives expressed range from the indispensible to the antichrist. Although I didnt grow up with computers Ive been using them ever since I got my first Commodore 64, so my perspective lies somewhere in the middle. I tend to think less about the danger of computers, and more about the effect of social networking platforms on the nature of communication and on popular culture. Personally, I feel that the introduction of new technologies and the products they spawn is too often driven by the motives of profit and control. Thanks to large marketing conglomerates the adoption of new products by consumers is often fast, and pervasive. The role of a good marketing firm is, after all, to the help the consumer recognize their needs, and a firms success can be measured by how quickly a product becomes embedded in popular culture. Because humans are social animals weve always embraced new methods of communication with great enthusiasm. In light of this enthusiasm, I find it interesting to examine the latest version of social networking from the perspective of the user, as a sort of mirror on popular culture. In this mirror we may see, and reflect upon, what we are becoming as social animals or, in more recent vernacular, as avatars in this new social landscape. The word avatar derives from the Sanskrit avatra meaning descent, and refers to the deliberate descent of a deity to earth, or the descent of the Supreme Being. The term is most often associated with Vishnu, though it has also come to be associated with other deities such as Rama, Krishna, Jesus, and Muhammad. In 1954, Meher Baba, an Indian mystic and spiritual master, declared publicly that he was the avatar of the age. He went on to described the avatar as a gauge against which man can measure what he is and what he may become. He trues the standard of human values by interpreting them in terms of divinely human life. In English avatar is commonly translated as incarnation or manifestation. The first use of the term avatar in computing occurred in 1985 in the LucisFilm online role-playing game Habitat, which was the first attempt at a large-scale commercial virtual community. Individual users in the virtual community were represented by onscreen personas and interacted with the personas of others in order to barter for resources and engage in battles. This third-person perspective, or incarnation, of themselves was referred to as an avatar and it is through the eyes of the avatar that I see this reflection of popular culture. We are the avatars. We are the authors of our personal electronic incarnation in the age of digital communication. Our identities are mapped out in our social networking profiles. We are males, females, and the gender nouveau looking for a friendship, a date, and a relationship. We maintain a huge network of friends, groups, photos, links, and applications. We have political views, religious views, and favorite quotations. Our likes and interests include all aspects of popular culture and individual behavior, as well as all music, books, movies, and television shows available in digital. We have an insatiable appetite for visual and audible entertainment. When were tired of our electronic incarnation we simply change our image and profile, and when were tired of interacting with others we opt out of

the social network which leaves us free to author our new incarnation. Our family is our community and its one-part flesh and two-parts ether. We log into our favorite social networking application to collaborate with our family. We like to update our status and share whats on our minds because, of course, our friends are interested to know about the job were hating, or the holiday were loving, the meal were cooking or the movie weve just watched, whatever pleases us or pisses us off, what politician were following, what painkiller were taking, or what level weve attained in Mafia Wars. We impulsively share our thoughts through status updates, snippets, texts, tweets, and tumbles. We write on our friends walls and they write on ours. We poke and we get poked. We invite and we uninvite. We confirm and we ignore. We subscribe and we unsubscribe. We like and we dislike, we're the friends and the friended. We text when we can't face, we face when we can't IM, and we IM when we can't skype. Were either home or away, or simply unavailable. We wiki when we have questions, google when we need answers, and submit a ticket when we need help. We also log in out of simple curiosity, and the open nature of the social network legitimizes our deeper voyeuristic tendencies. We enjoy peering into the lives of others with total anonymity, maintaining the right to comment and criticize with impunity. After all, were all entertainers, collaborators, and co-conspirators on the global social platform. If we're not shy we star in our own YouTube video. If we get a lot of views we often host our own YouTube channel and grow our network of friends through channel subscriptions. We love videos, and especially videos of other people. We love watching people sing and dance, play tricks on each other, hurt each other and themselves, and drink too much or drive too fast. We enjoy seeing people building things and destroying things, getting fucked or fucking someone. Most of all, we like videos of people who do such outlandishly stupid things that most of us lack the creativity to imagine the act in the first place. Like jumping out of an airplane riding a snowboard, or pouring mass quantities of alcohol down their throats with a hose and funnel from a second story balcony. We also love stupid pet tricks and the evolution of dance. We value our personal time and want to make every moment of it vibrant and meaningful. Were interested in meeting other vibrant people like ourselves and maybe developing a personal or sexual relationship. But we work long hours and grab food when we can. Like our parents generation, theres still a lot of free love around but it takes a monthly subscription to a dating service to find it; auto billed of course. But thats OK because our Internet dating service saves us precious time, especially if we select premium services like an online dating assistant. We outsource the time consuming communication to our assistants who email back and forth with potential partners until a meetup is arranged. We do it all from our smart phones on the way from work to the gym, where we pump iron with our favourite tunes on a flash-based Nano. Were comfortable with the notion that its OK to skip the awkward bonding and encoding stage of the relationship. After all, our time is important and there never seems to be enough.

We have caller ID so that we know who's calling before they know whether we're even home. Because we screen our calls we've also become accustomed to conversing quite personably with digital answering machines that store our voicemail. Thats fine with us because leaving a voicemail saves time by freeing us from direct human-to-human conversation. We quickly get our message across without being questioned or forced to explain ourselves, or forced to listen to someone else's longwinded explanations, problems, or opinions. With the time this saves us we can communicate with even more people. "Hi this is Trish. I can't come to the phone right now so please leave a message at the beep, or you can call my cell, or email me at trishthedish.com, or text me, or face me. LOL We're surrounded by so much information that we depend on RSS aggregators to feed us condensed and simplified information from news web sites, blogs, and zines. Even in it's simplified form there is too much information to comprehend so it's fortunate that we can subscribe to feeds that deliver only the kind of news and information that interests us and spares of from news that is irrelevant to our lives. This helps us form opinions and make decisions that are directly relevant to us, without distraction. Sometimes we scroll from the headlines to the reader's comments, scan to the most liked or recommended comments, and side with the majority. Leveraging the intelligence of like-minded avatars to decide on important issues saves us a lot of time. After all, were the majority and the majority rules right, or at least they rule as long as they follow the right rules. From virtually any location we enjoy strategic social entertainment through hosted MMOGs, MMORs, MORTs and TRSs. These massively multiplayer online games deliver three dimensional experiential pleasure to our homes through PlayStations, PSPs, XBoxes, DSis and Wiis, and to our smart mobile devices when were roaming, because were restless and love to roam. Within a sharded universe, we enjoy adventurous living in a persistent world that evolves through the interaction of millions of fellow avatars. We are the people in the age of digital communication. We are hunters and gatherers, agriculturalists, knights of the realm, rulers, renegades, racecar drivers, freedom fighters, soldiers of fortune, witches, warlocks, and wizards, musicians, dancers, time travelers and terraformers, builders of cities, architects of civilizations and destroyers of worlds. By mid 2010, in the US alone, we spent 407 million hours per month in this world living life on our own terms. But this is nothing compared to our friends in Asia who spend and estimated 2.25 trillion hours per month at Happy Farm where they grow crops, trade agricultural goods, sell produce, and steal from their neighbors. We enjoy the privileges of membership for only 20 dollars a month debited directly from our bank accounts. Were sensitive and emotional people as you can see from the extensive use emoticons in our communications. When we need advice about our job, family, work, or health, or when were facing a moral or ethical dilemma, we turn to our personal E-therapy advisor who is only a click away. From the comfort or our home we can talk privately with licensed therapists and mental health counseling professionals qualified in: psychiatry, psychology, career development, life coaching, marriage counseling, family therapy, substance abuse counseling, family medicine, chiropractic medicine, and naturopathic medicine. We can heal ourselves with virtual services, which means we dont have to search for a doctor,

schedule an appointment, or discuss our personal problems with anyone face to face. Thanks to the technology of web 2.0 our social network enables us to share more information with friends than ever before, more than the invention of the printing press, moveable type, the telegraph, radio, telephone, and the television combined. We are a more social culture than any other organism in the history of the planet. You might think that being able to communicate so freely and effectively with our friends makes us happier than previous generations. But there never seems to be enough time to meet the ever-growing list of demands we must satisfy. Fortunately, the social network has also enriched us with knowledge of the wide reaching benefits of new antidepressants available on the market. We now know that in addition to depression we can use antidepressant drugs to treat anxiety disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorder, eating disorders, chronic pain, dysmenorrhea, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, substance abuse, snoring, and migraines. Empowered by this knowledge we increase our well being by going directly to a manufacturers website and download e-coupons for free introductory prescriptions. How wonderful it is that we can do the research ourselves and help doctors make more personalized and relevant healthcare diagnoses. Between 1996 and 2005 anti-depressant drug use in the United States went up 75 percent, from about 13 million to 27 million people. At the same time, there was a more than 10 percent decline in the use of psychotherapy among people using antidepressants, and a significant increase in the use of antipsychotic drugs to manage the side effects of antidepressant drugs. The increasing demands of socialization may have some unwanted consequences but were learning how to cope with them to maximize our happiness and effectiveness. We dont want to be part of the wage labor system that enslaved our parents. We give our labor and our account numbers to businesses and corporations in exchange for automatic deposits that add numbers to our bank balance. We no longer write checks each month. Instead, we check the box that enables the numbers to be automatically transferred each month from our bank account to the accounts of businesses and corporations that provide our essential services. When we do have to use money we prefer debit and credit cards, PayPal, web certificates, web coupons, bill me now and bill me later services. Wed rather not be ruled by money it so we dont dirty our hands with cash. Music is no longer a universal language like it was for our parents. Yet, we have an insatiable appetite for music. Thanks to MP3 players and digital music services, we can listen to whatever we want, whenever and wherever we want. Were the first generation to turn a world of irrelevant sound into a self-gratifying symphony or our own creation. Online education is finally making it possible for everyone to get an education regardless of their schedules and their socioeconomic level, even in a failing economy. Of course, in a failing economy its necessary reduce classes, increase class size, eliminate programs, reduce staff, replace full-time teachers with part-time teachers, eliminate tenured faculty, etcetera. Lets be realistic, none of these things will be necessary in ten years time. Corporate endowments will supplant out-of-date educational values and become the new value proposition for educational institutions. Colleges and universities will become server farms

and content production will be outsourced to technicians in cheaper markets. Finally, everyone will be able to take to the digital highway and be empowered to create their own educational experience, and isnt that what we really want? We move around a lot so our devices are roaming. Theyre synced in the cloud so we can access all our favorite music, videos, photos and important files. Wherever we roam we like to share the experience with our friends so weve become experts at digital photography, documenting our vibrant lives down to the millimeter. When we document an experience with our a smart phone our locations are instantly transmitted to satellites, our images are instantly uploaded to our photo albums and social network pages, our friends are instantly notified, we are globally-positioned, time-stamped, experience-spamming, marketing machines. Like so many others of their time, our parents tuned in, turned on, and dropped out. It was about politics, drugs, and social protest. This was a period in history that influenced their lives deeply and forever. Like our parents, we tuned in and turned on, and we uncritically embrace the idea that some day soon we can drop out. With Web 1.0 we tuned on, with Web 2.0 we turned on, and with Web 3.0 well eventually drop out. As our physical and virtual worlds converge there will be no need to leave the house. There will be zero distance between the product and the consumer. Will we continue to grow as a culture in which more and more people are engaged in social interaction, yet fewer and fewer people look into each others eyes, or hold each others hand? A culture of individuals who engage in social advertising to perpetuate their unique brand with greater levels of efficiency, advertising to an expanding virtual community? A culture in which individuals may die of consumption but do so in a fanfare of digital advertising that touches all consumers of their brand? Having looked into the mirror and questioned our reflection, we might start to wonder whether its wise to have allowed so many of our defining features to become ported over to a digitalized forms. Perhaps, as Neil Postman pointed out, we are becoming a tool of our tool. By accepting that technological advancement is synonymous with human advancement weve become willing to change our image to accommodate new technologies. This has led to their uncritical acceptance with no discussion, in advance, of the inherent pros and cons, of the effect on individuals, and the greater effect on human and non-human societies. If we are to avoid becoming tools of the tool we must address where each new technology fits into what we want to become, and this must be informed by a shared notion of human morality. Otherwise, morality runs the risk of becoming the side-effect of a legal system based on president-setting legal cases argued by a cadre of lawyers hired to deal with a cascade of unanticipated consequences. Russeau said that science can tell us how things work but it cant tell us how to live, and the greatest mistake that we can make is to assume that technological change is the same thing as human progress.