The Internet made three big promises to humanity when it went mainstream over a decade ago. Most people focus on two of these—it was to provide universal access to information and revolutionize the global economy. For me, the Internet was always about the third promise: personal connection.
In 1996, Amy took her new degree in social work to Door County for a week-long workshop with Judith Jordan. Jordan, one of the current torchbearers for relational-cultural theory (RCT), proved inspirational not only to Amy but also, vicariously, to me. The simple concept that we humans are hard-wired for connection with others is a foundational idea that has permeated my thinking.
A few years ago, Boston Globe reporter Christina Robb wrote a great history of RCT in the form of a book, This Changes Everything. Robb chronicles the overlapping professional careers of three extraordinary women—Carol Gilligan, Jean Baker Miller, and Judith Lewis Herman—as they gain insight from their pioneering experiences bending gender boundaries, thus planting the seeds for a revolutionary feminist perspective on clinical psychology, psychiatry, and education. The title of the book is from a quote by Miller when reflecting on the impact these insights have. Miller, the founder of RCT, died in summer 2006.
RCT examines women’s creation of self around their relationships. This contrasts other theories of human development focusing on individuation and autonomy. Strength is in the relationship, a dynamic beast that incorporates a cycle of disconnection and reconnection. The outcome of healthy relationships are energy, clarity, a sense of worth and—most importantly—a desire for more connection. With disconnection comes confusion, lethargy and isolation. The trick to good mental health is not to avoid the latter, but to work through it back into a state of connection with others.
Mark Pesce’s talk on Hyperconnectivity
These themes again resurfaced in my informatics work, which deals with the dynamics of community building. On June 24, Mark Pesce gave a talk on the social nature of humanity at the Personal Democracy Forum, Lincoln Center in New York. The name was familiar to me as the author of VRML, and early 3D markup language, but I found his current project—The Human Network: Sharing, Knowledge and Power in the 21st Century—to be much more compelling. His book is due out in mid-2009.
Pesce argues that the mixture of new mobile technology and our social nature is creating a fast-changing world we no longer can (or should?) control. The crux of his message is built on this key insight:
Children are experts in mimesis—learning by imitation. It’s been shown that young chimpanzees regularly outscore human toddlers on cognitive tasks, while the children far surpass the chimps in their ability to “ape” behavior. We are built to observe and reproduce the behaviors of our parents, our mentors and our peers.
Our peers now number three and a half billion.
In short, connection is an inevitably useful evolutionary force that shapes our global culture.
USC researcher Mizuko Ito studied teenagers in Japan and found that kids engage in a continuous conversation, or co-presence, with and average of five other friends. These conversations are mostly trivial in nature, but they begin the moment the teens wake up in the morning until they go to sleep at night. Led by Twitter, microblogging has shown that the interest in and value of short, phatic messages is cross-cultural. Those seemingly pointless answers to the core question, “What are you doing?” collectively form a dance of connection and disconnection upon which healthy people thrive.
Pesce puts this in the context of politics and democracy. Hyperconnectivity is producing hypermimesis, which itself leads to hyperempowerment. Because everyone has the potential to see what everyone else is doing, innovative notions spread quickly and spark action within the masses. Those who fight against these dynamics is tilting at windmills. As Pesce observes: “The mob, now mobilized, can do as it pleases. Obama can lead by example, encourage or scold as the occasion warrants, but he cannot control. Not with all the king’s horses, and all the king’s men.”
This is precisely why finding a way to connect Jean Baker Miller to Stanley Miller and Scott Miller is so important. The genetic predisposition toward connection coupled with a technology that soon will reach 3/4 of all people on the planet adds up to the inevitability of a hyperconnected world. The ship can’t go back into the bottle. Instead, we have to understand what might come from having a boat on the desk.
Usability Consultant Kimberly Krause Berg lamented last fall that the social web is more about disengaging from others than relating to them. (“We’ve had the Internet to use to change the world for over 10 years now. They still pave Paradise and put up parking lots.”) She reiterated some of those same ideas more recently, specifically taking issue with the notion that people over 40 don’t “get” social media. Kimberly makes an eloquent case for the need to see, hug, and sense our social contacts.
In doing so, however, Berg backs up to the old argument that computer-mediated relationships are inherently inferior. Strong and weak ties, online and offline … each connection we make affords its own opportunities and limitations. To appropriate her own example, Woodstock was special not merely because people had pot, mud, nudity and music over which to bond. It was special because a small mass of individuals did manage to connect, despite exponentially fewer opportunities to do so. Perhaps Woodstock exists in a different form these days, through microblogs or Second Life parties, and—thankfully—the magic isn’t as unique in a hyperconnected world.