Opening up my curmudgeonly bag for a moment (does not seem like this image would imply that, would it?).
A surprising number of years ago, during the late 1990s, a silicon-valley tech and educational tech innovator and developer, whom I know, was pushing me to try out something that, in retrospect, was an early version of a computer-based social medium. I would, she assured me, love to create a small circle of friends to post notes and pictures and chat one another up, telling some immediate story going on in my life at that moment. Try it… you’ll like it.
At the time, it struck me as an utter waste of time. And given my singular disinterest, to this day, in the comings and goings of funny cats or what anyone is eating for dinner – or what our current President decides to fart at 3AM that gets interpreted by the press and headlined in time for counting clicks at 8AM – I still do. I’m in the diminishing demographic that contemplates before running my mouth or posting my — well, not posting a bunch of stuff that I would just as soon keep to myself.
I am swimming against the tide. Any urban or slightly-urban setting you go to on this planet is overwhelmed by humans with their noses glued to their mobile devices. My driving has gotten more defensive than ever, because the roads are filled with these people. The self-driving cars cannot come fast enough to suit me.
The comprehensive platform called “WeChat” has functionally taken over China in the last couple of years. I absolutely think they have gotten this right (I can admire the achievement of a goal without advocating for it) for the same reason the smart phone was the revolution it was, namely, it is truly integrating all the current things people think they want… and it is giving them things they did not know they wanted, but it turns out they did… and it has made it easy to do.
Beyond the social media stuff (groups of friends, chats, picture posts, micro-blogs), people can exchange huge amounts of information through QR codes by passing their phones over another person’s screen, and WeChat has integrated commerce – paying for lots of stuff out in the world, nailing discounts of all kinds that show up all ready to use, grabbing taxis, and so on. I am assured (and by the looks of it I have no reason to doubt it) that WeChat represents a user-friendly one-stop-shop for all this stuff that, in the interesting words of a colleague in Hefei, looks like it was designed by Apple.
What I have seen on this trip that I did not see 3 months ago – faculty members who are as on-board with WeChat as 10-year-olds were with Pokémon Go not that long ago. Here are two of my colleagues (one from the US, one from China) during two (of many) “hold on a second” time-outs.
Interestingly enough, there is a belief that “WeChat makes things so efficient,” but what I observed was simple and frequent distraction from whatever it was we were supposed to be doing at the time. WeChat was not more efficient for the task at hand, was it? At every meal I was at, and during every meeting I attended, all of which had agendas, the people were hopping up and down and running out of the room to attend to whatever beep, blurp, or ping was ringing in at that moment.
The title for this post is borrowed from a song title by one the 1960s protest singers, Phil Ochs, which appeared as a track on his 1967 album Pleasures of the Harbor.
Ochs’s composition is incredibly ironic. Played to the joyful honky-tonk upbeat tempo of a piano, a banjo, and tinny percussion, with a few added cowbells thrown in for fun, Ochs tells the story of the murder of Kitty Genovese, who was stabbed to death just outside of her Queens home in 1964, while, according to reports, the neighbors ignored her pleas for assistance.
Forgive the comparison, but I find a comparable irony in the effects of social media – people spend more time navel-gazing on the me-centered micro-verse and increasingly miss the big picture.
Outside a small circle of friends
by Phil Ochs
Pleasures of the Harbor (1967)
Wikipedia: After years of prolific writing in the 1960s, Ochs’s mental stability declined in the 1970s. He eventually succumbed to a number of problems including bipolar disorder and alcoholism, and committed suicide in 1976.
I was introduced to Ochs in 1978 by a friend who would end up succumbing to AIDS about 15 years later.
Look outside the window, there’s a woman being grabbed
They’ve dragged her to the bushes and now she’s being stabbed
Maybe we should call the cops and try to stop the pain
But Monopoly is so much fun, I’d hate to blow the game
…
And I’m sure it wouldn’t interest anybody
Outside of a small circle of friends.