I don't want them

“The web didn’t introduce a new competitor into the old ecosystem… The web created a new ecosystem.” Clay Shirky – Here Comes Everybody

A little over a year ago I was sitting in O’Hare International Airport waiting to get on a plane to London. There were a lot of thoughts going through my head: “What do I do once I get there?” “What sort of people will I meet?” “What do I do if I hate it?” “What do I do if I love it and never want to come back?” “I wonder if British guys will be cute, or jus their accents?” But for some reason something much simpler stole my focus. Sitting across from me was a man, about my age, wearing orange finger shoes. I could not stop staring at them, and told my best friend who I was texting at the time about them. I expected her to laugh or make fun of the outrageous fashion statement, but instead she responded by saying she knew the guy.

At this point I looked around the airport terminal to see if she was hiding somewhere in the vicinity, but she was not, and I asked her how she could possibly know the stranger. She explained that on her recent trip to Israel she traveled with a guy who wore the same shoes. While catching up with him over a chat session on Facebook he mentioned he was going to London. She told me to go ask the guy his name and tell him she said hi, but at this point the novelty of the shoes had faded and I had a plane to board.

Clay Shirky uses a similar example involving strangers on a plane in chapter nine of “Here Comes Everybody,” explaining that random connections with apparent strangers aren’t necessarily random. The “small world” phenomena is really an illusion, because people are likely to surround themselves with similar members of a population, the odds of mutual connections within that isolated population increase. Thanks to technology the world is a much smaller place with much more information swirling around it. Shoe guy and I had several factors in common making our chance encounter not really chance at all. First was traveling, which would put us both in the airport, next we are both Jewish as determined from our participation in Birthright, which could also be tied to our departure from Chicago that has a high Jewish population, we are both college students active on social networking sites such as Facebook that increased the chance of the awareness of the connection.

Shirky uses two terms to describe this event, first is the idea of “groups” and the second is “tools.” Groups are essentially the way people organize. Currently my groups contain seniors at Lehigh University, journalists for The Brown and White, Chicagoans, foodies, travel enthusiasts, gym rats etc. “Tools” are the means of technology that connect these groups, the internet mostly and sites on the internet but also mobile phones and the fictions of those phones. Tools allow for faster and more efficient connection of groups, so not only am I better connected to my group of classmates at Lehigh but can connect to friends and home and even connect these groups to each other.

Well this is great right? Everyone likes friends, so now we all have more. Not so fast. After his airport interaction, Shirky talked about an application called “Dodgeball,” today’s equivalent would be the 2.0 version called “Foursquare.” Basically the applications allow people to post their location and the activity they are doing at that location and then notifies them of connections at the location and suggest activities or specials in the area. The application also notifies others of their whereabouts. According to Dennis Crowley, one of the creators of these applications, "What we wanted to do is turn life into a video game.”

OMG NO! Let’s leave the games for the school yard.

These applications, along with the title of Shirky’s book “Here Comes Everybody,” frankly scare me. What if I don’t want everybody? I’m happy with my tight circles and don’t need to know of every random acquaintance we have in common are more importantly don’t want those acquaintances to know where I am at any given moment. Maybe it’s just me, but personally I’ve always believed quality is more important than quantity when it comes to the people I incorporate into my everyday life.

This idea translates to the infiniteness of the internet. With so much content, so many connections, it is too easy to get overwhelmed, and the more we advance into the cyber age the more there is to filter. I would rather have five good friends than 50 so-so ones; similarly, I would rather have five websites that I trust than 50 that I need to be skeptical about and double check.

Let’s go back to my encounter at the airport. If I had the awareness of all of the possible connections in that one (very large) building my head might have exploded. There’s a reason I didn’t go over and introduce myself to shoe guy, because I saw no value in the connection. We would have exchanged pleasantries and thrown out the obligatory “what a small world,” but then probably would just have gone to our seats in different parts of the plane. It is like the majority of the content on the internet – sure it’s out there but I have no need to be aware of most of it.

The idea of infinite connections goes hand in hand with infinite information. While the development of technology allows us to be more informed it also allows us to be more stimulated, which may not be a good thing. Sure Shirky, here comes everybody, but what are you going to do with all of them when they get here?