Going digital

A friend sent me a link to this Wired article about the "digital life" and the trends towards living it. While the article is interesting in a general way, it would have been more interesting by far if they'd spent more time on the social aspects of the life Mary Hodder lives in the digital, rather than dredging up tired stats about how people currently use the net.

The article cites an Online Publisher's Association poll that states that people currently use the net more for content than for communication or searching. Am I the only one that sees the flaws and biases in that statement?

First of all, searching isn't an activity -- you don't approach your web browser saying, "oh I'm going to spend an hour or so using Google to search the Internet". Searching isn't an end, it's a means. If I didn't see stats, then, that say that people use the net more for content than for searching, I'd be worried.

Another part of that which bothers me is the focus on "communications". I'd like to see such lists drop searching and add a different term: "sociability". In the sociological sense, sociability is the act of being social, of interacting with others, of connecting and sharing with other people in those uniquely human ways.

How is that different from communications? In its purest sense, communication is about sharing information; thus the end goal of communication is content. When used to talk about the net, as it was in the article, Communications is a lump-sum term that has come to stand-in for sociability, interactivity, tool-use, etc. As a result, it has been devalued. I'd like to see communication return to its roots as a term that really describes one-to-one exchange of information. In effect, the kind of communication I envision is a sub-set of sociability.

On the net, the term communication tends to mean email. Yes we all know that now, 10+ years after the dawn of the web, email is still the "killer app". It is the reason most people get their first access to the net and it is the reason why many people keep it. So yes, communication as done through email between individuals is important. So keep the term, preserve it for that.

I'd like to see sociability added in, though, to track, chart and allow us to ponder the myriad ways we use the net for social purposes. While I recognize that I may still be a bit on the vanguard of this style of sociability, I honestly do not believe it will be long before the rest of you follow closely behind me and start joining (or even forming?) your own online social spaces. So why not start studying and measuring it?

Of course, as you know if you this space often enough, that's exactly what I'm trying to do.

So ... yeah....sociability. Important term, especially for the net and web. Had the Wired article paid sociability more attention, it would have been far more interesting and thought provoking.