In the early 1970s I was an analyst programmer in the Business Systems
department of IBM's A/FE (International
Business Machines' Americas / Far
East) division located on The Terrace in Wellington,
New Zealand.
Screens (in those days we called them VDUs - Visual
Display Units) had just appeared on the scene, of which
the IBM model 3270 was ubiquitous, edging out card punches and readers
as the de rigueur method of data entry. It had a
black
screen capable of displaying 24 rows and 72 columns of all green
characters. Inexplicably we called it a "green screen" terminal even
though it was clearly and obviously
black.
There in
godzone
(a pun on
"God's own"
country) was where I experienced communication via digital social media
for the first time.
The very earliest form of social media was terminal-to-terminal
messaging. The manual which I read voraciously, described a simple
CP (Control Program) command of the
VM/CMS (Virtual Machine /
Conversational Monitoring System) operating
environment. That command was "MESSAGE", a verb. I entered
CP MESSAGE PGT Where would you like to go for lunch?
Ready;
on the command line of my VDU, pressed [Enter], and on the other
side of the city-block-sized floor on which we worked, my friend's VDU
(he was logged on with the userid PGT) cleared, leaving one line of
green characters at the top of his screen, having traveled
magically
via the ether to get there, saying
Where would you like to go for lunch? /LGP
(LGP being the userid with which I was logged on). That was it. One
line of green characters at the top of a
black
screen. That was my first experience of digital social media: stunning,
unreal, otherworldly, the stuff of science fiction which hadn't been
seen in the real world until then. Strangely, I felt elated.
We're now in the mid-2020s, and it's no longer just one-liner
greenscreen lunch invitations which are communicated between people via
social media by CP messaging. Today 5.7 billion people ie 69% of
the world's
population use
the internet
daily, and 5.5 billion people ie 66% of the population
use social media daily. That means that of all
the internet's
5.7 billion daily users, a staggering 96% are social media users.
Communication via social media is no longer just a substitute for
writing
letters. Now it's the opportunity to show off, a place for full-blown
ego
to be on display in front of a fawning
worldwide
audience of billions of people, an anonymous platform from which to
launch the cruelest cyberbullying against young, naïve,
defenseless targets, and yet also a medium where musicians can have
total control of the distribution of their own music, completely
replacing record labels, and at the same time remaining powerless
against widespread, relentless bootlegging of their work. There's all
that, as well as there's an opportunity to manufacture and promote
one's own celebrity.
That one fleeting moment of elation in
New Zealand
has morphed into what's now essentially a global
addiction, the interaction with which is rendering
face-to-face
conversations in the best scenarios, to be avoided, and in the worst,
obsolete. Children raised with social media (indeed, children raised
on social media) are so inured to its impact and have
become so numbed by it that they're more adept in its deployment than
they are in simple
speaking
and
listening
in
ordinaryface-to-face
conversations, which are rapidly becoming an unfamiliar, unpracticed,
and therefore an avoided turf, the languishing under of which latter
day psychology has dubbed "social phobia" (aka "social anxiety
disorder") ie the
fear
of being in
face-to-face
conversations. Because they're practiced less and less,
face-to-face
conversations are becoming a lost art and therefore an unfamiliar if
not a difficult and awkward form of
Self-expression which for
some (witness entire families out for dinner only communicating with
each other via text over the meal) is to be avoided regardless of the
costs.
