From a distance

We are more connected today than we have ever been as a society. That level of interconnection comes with many benefits and many drawbacks. There's a lot to be said about the always-on state of the internet and the extent to which we make ourselves available to others but I feel those conversations have been somewhat exhausted in recent years.

The Covid-19 pandemic had many transformative impacts on society as a whole but I think the necessity of working from home and blurring of personal and professional boundaries brought significant attention to the need to division and distinction between the two.

Since I decided to leave Twitter last year, I have more or less been absent from social media other than dropping in on a discord server set up by a few friends of mine for those who wanted a more community focused experience. The only other website vaguely resembling a social network that I have engaged with on a regular basis is Duolingo, a website primarily focused on language learning. I hesitate to outright refer to Duolingo as a social network for the simple reason that it's not very social, at least not in the traditional sense. You can't message other members of the site, and discussion boards centred around learning topics for the most part appear to be closed now.

You can interact to a limited extent with other members of the site, mostly by following one another, and offering encouragement with high-fives and messages of congratulations when they achieve certain goals. Adding these features into Duolingo at this point would be potentially problematic as it could completely change the dynamic of the community that exists. Whilst it is disappointing not to be able to directly connect with one another, it does eliminate the potential for abuse, trolling, and other forms of aggravation that has become synonymous in online communities.

That's not to say Duolingo has managed to completely escape these pitfalls of social media, if you delve into some of the discussion boards for language lessons you can quickly see why most if not all of them have been closed. Transphobia and homophobia are particularly abundant in any language lessons that happen to pair pronouns of the same gender - even gendered nouns in languages like Spanish seem to trigger transphobes which is quite amusing but also raises the curious question of whether the English language's ignorance of grammatical gender has played a part in cultivating transphobia. Interestingly, English does actually have gendered nouns, "programmer" for example is a female noun, "actor" is male, and "child" is neutral, there's just no reason at all why you would ever need to actually know this as it has no impact at all on grammar and syntax in modern English.

Despite not being able to openly interact with other members on Duolingo I have developed an interest in their success. The ability to encourage one another however limited is something I use quite a bit on the site, and with each new leaderboard I scan through the other members I have been ranked alongside and add anyone that piques my interest.

Being kept at an arm's length from other members has raised an interesting question that harkens back to that concept of access and availability. Social media in the last two decades has cultivated the idea that people we meet online and develop a connection with should have a path to connect further, but should that actually be an expectation? Again I don't want to relate this specifically to the use of the Internet in general but it's hard here not to reflect on the fact that before we had widespread access to the Internet in almost every home, our time and attention were at a premium that it was a privilege to request not a right to demand.

In a previous post I questioned what a world without social media would look like, perhaps that question is better rephrased in asking what would our world look like if we limit how close others can get to us not by choice but as a limitation of the services we use? This isn't a totally alien concept, in the early days of social media for instance sites like Bebo used the concept of networks much more stringently, with users only able to add people within their networks as friends. This was later abandoned, much in the same vein as Facebook which abandoned the idea of academic networks favouring the everyone-in-one-place approach.

Is it better to get to know someone even if that relationship is a one-sided parasocial relationship, and find out whether you'd actually like them as a person, or is it better to hold onto the idea of someone kept at a distance and never know if you would actually like them? I think if Social Media has taught us anything in recent years it has been that sometimes ignorance is bliss; the question of separating art and artist has become quite prominent as we learn more about the creators of artistic works that we once loved and the crushing disappointment that goes with realising they're actually horrible people. Knowing more about the creators of these works of art does not enhance our enjoyment of them, even when they don't turn out to be horrible people, but knowing the latter can destroy our experience.

"Ignorance is bliss" and "never meet your heroes" are adages among others that profess the wisdom in keeping your distance. I want to accept them both as the best course of action still of all I can't help but wonder, curiosity gets the better of me. In place of these adages I find myself falling back on the concept of Yin and Yang, the symbiotic twins of the Taiji representing light and darkness and the presence of each within one another, ultimately asserting that no-one is good or bad to the core there always exists both natures, just in varying proportions.