Net Shock Redux
I just spent about 30 hours in a student house/record company HQ. Many gigs were being arranged via mobile phone and email. Around that, people we’re composing and rehearsing music in the house almost constantly.
There was a huge TV in the living room, which was on when I arrived, but noone was really paying attention to it. There was also a PC next to it, which had no drivers for onboard sound until I poked around with CPU-Z and found a model number. As soon as the sound was running the whole house changed.
Even before that, the TV went off and a PS2 was quickly plugged in. Broadcast TV didn’t get a look in afterward. Around a whole lot of socialising, console gaming, and flash gaming, we spent more time entertaining each other with cool stuff we’d found on YouTube than watching anything coming through the cable box. On the shared PC, people also spent far more time with FaceBook and MySpace. Through phone and packet networks, a social scene of loose arrangements and impromptu invites perpetually unrolled and regenerated itself.
People in the house were typically 5 – 7 years younger than me. I talked with a few of them about media, and much like Clay Shirky quoted below, found it difficult to convince them there was anything extraordinary about any of this. They went through their teens with it. The media landscape of the 80’s and early 90’s I grew up in, which inspired an apathy only the net was able to cure me of, is already foreign to them.
It’s an astounding and fearsome change, but one with so much innate utility and amourphousness that the culture shock it inflicts on participants is minimal.