Are we learning faster, or just not there yet?

Thinky June 9, 2010 3 Comments @laurenfisher

Image courtesy of Thomas Hawk

There was a comment left on a post I wrote a while ago, that I just haven’t been able to shake.Where I discussed the effects that the internet was having on our behaviour, one commenter noted how we are in the ’2 year old phase’ when it comes to our online communication. We are essentially still discovering our voices, only we’re doing it in a rather loud way. I can’t help but find this fascinating. Social media is an evolving form of communication and I think it’s easy to forget just how early on in the process we are.

100,000 years

The bit that gets to me, that really gets me excited, is to put it into context to give us some perspective. Though there is debate around the exact dates, the spoken human language first emerged around 100,000 years ago, with some placing it back as far as the early stages, 1.8 million years ago. And from these very early, primitive forms of communication we have had 100,000 years to develop a whole subset of completely separate languages; one entirely indistinguishable from the next. We’ve learned rhetoric, speeches, lies and truths. We learned how to make people laugh through words. We even found a way to translate the words we were speaking, onto symbols on a piece of paper. We’ve had 100,000 years to do all this. And in less than 50 years, we’ve gone from the first internet-enabled computers, to adding your local coffee shop onto a mobile device and synching with your Twitter account to let everyone know you’re the mayor of it.

Don’t underestimate how scary this is

As a generation we’ve learned to accept the new things as standard. We won’t have had it 5 minutes, until we’re annoyed that it’s broken. But I think it’s time to take a minute, and think about the enormity of this thing called social media, this online communication that we’re currently exploring.

And we need to ask ourselves – are we just learning faster, or are we actually not there yet?

What I mean by that is, in comparison to the evolution of human language, is it the case that we’ve just got incredibly smart, incredibly quickly, or are we actually, as my commenter suggested, in the 2 year ol phase? Maybe we’re not as smart as we think we are. We all like to think of ourselves as accomplished online (well, you’re reading a blog post after all), but what if we’re actually not at all? What if we’re actually the screaming baby that’s crying because they don’t know how to explain what’s wrong with them? What if we’re not actually communicating at all? It answers a lot of questions. The fact that we’re not able to determine something like sarcasm through online communication, which we can now understand so easily through the subtleties of facial expressions or tone of voice, might be something that in 5 years time, people can’t comprehend. There could be a way of talking to someone on the other side of the world, through a screen, that we can’t even imagine yet. It’s a pretty scary thought.

Image courtesty of alex_lee2001

As intelligent as we are now, we are actually nowhere near the true capabilities of online communication, of what the internet really means to us. We’re all having a great time figuring it out, pushing the boundaries and trying new things. We have the internet and the multitude of services and technologies at our fingertips. We pick something up, we like it, we give it to someone else for them to try (but we like it back – we’re early adopters, after all), we’re upset when it doesn’t do what we want it to, and then we’re onto the next thing that’s sure to please us. It’s the same motions the toddler goes through every day with their own toys.

We’re learning, but not that quickly. We don’t even know where ‘there’ is yet.

Comments

http://www.bullshitobserver.com Todd

For those of us whose jobs it is to know the Internet and social media specifically, I find it a very odd situation to be in where the experts hardly know what their doing relative to the raw potential of the online world. In fact, it’s relatively easy to fall behind the industry that’s far behind its potential.
http://facebook Master Blaster

we are not there yet ! as noted by the 2 year old….we are just screaming in the dark!
we have no learned to listen to the tone of the words being sent, by the understanding of the person sending the message! ” after sending a messtage that started with i was flamed by the one getting the e-mail !” the reason was simple, it was percieved that the laff was made with mal intent toward her intellict ! When in fact it reflected the person she w had been talking about !
With out learning tonal or facial qualities of typing from an individual …well we have a long way to go with technology in my book!
http://www.qwghlm.co.uk/ Chris Applegate

Interesting post, but I’m not sure you need be so pessimistic. The assumption that underpins the toddler theory is that there is a ‘normal’ rate of growth and adoption and that either we’re going too quickly and heading for a crash, or that we’re growing at normal pace but not aware of it.

I’m currenly midway through Steven Johnson’s “The Invention of Air”, which covers the life of the 18th Century scientist Joseph Priestley. In little less than a decade, Priestley not only advanced electricity, but disocvered oxygen, thereby founding two whole scientific fields – he also became a leading political firebrand, founded Unitarianism, and invented soda water. But the book argues that Priestley was neither a miracle man (though certainly he was very talented) nor there by fluke, but a very smart and creative man in the right place at the right place – growing up as the middle class took shape and spreading literacy, funded and patronised by men who had profited from the burgeoning Industrial Revolution in England, given political and social standing by the coffee-house Whigs, and given a platform for his views via the cheap printing press.

Anyway – back to social media. The enormous growth in social media is, like the explosion in both science and radical poltiics in the 18th Century, similarly a combination of the right things. Our growing interconnectedness and the rise of social media is not a result of computer and communication technologies accelerating our lives beyond our control, but a whole host of social factors falling into place – globalisation, high levels of universal education, a rejection of traditional institutions (social & political), the rise of the individual, widespread migration (both within and in between countries), the advent of more and more free time, a postmodern mashup and pastiche culture, advertising & media fatigue, the liberalisation of social norms – all of these interconnected reasons and more have made us more amenable develop looser connections, become amateur publishers, reconsider our sense of privacy, find new ways to communicate and share our lives.

This may look like it’s come about overnight, but in reality it’s more like the pieces have come together over decades. It’s not inevitable – nothing that is the byproduct of so many coinciding complexities can be described as inevitable – but it isn’t unnatural either. We may have moved very quickly in the past few years compared to the millennia before it, but the seeds have been there for a very long time, and so I don’t think it’s as much a cultural shock as people make it out to be (The Facebook user’s average age is now 37, I recall).

So I’m not pessimistic about the limits on our abilities – we’ve always had difficulty communicating sarcasm in text, long before the Internet came along, and we have devised ways of conveying it via context. Some forms of communication may come along in future, but they probably exist now in some form (e.g. videophones), and our decision to not use them now is more of a cultural choice rather than we’re incapable of using them (on videophones, see David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest goes on at length on why they’ll be rejected by people of our generation).

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Are we learning faster, or just not there yet?

100,000 years

Don’t underestimate how scary this is

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