Major Medium Shift Makes Minor Modifications In Maintainging M'Friendship. Mmhmm.
In fourth grade, my classmates and I were barred from our classroom until the 'first bell' had sounded (don't ask what the logic behind this was, I have no idea). Patiently, we would sit in the hallway for about ten minutes, waiting for class to being. During that period, I would listen to the chatter of the girls around me - they poured over magazines, talked about whatever TV shows they had watched last night, and occasionally copied each other's homework. Never, I thought, would I bond with someone over a TV show! (Pretentious fourth grader? Moi?)
I am woe to be proven a hypocrite, however, for now I do bond with my friends over electronic media. This has proven to be a shift in medium more than a shift in content, with the internet providing the same material as magazines and television shows did for my forth grade peers. My friends talk about and share things that they have seen online, including pictures and music. In some instances, the method of sharing is the same as it was in fourth grade. I can print out an interesting article or burn a CD of music from the internet to share with a friend face-to-face.
It is extremely interesting that the internet, as a medium, facilitates the use of itself, and it is commonly assumed that my generation predominately uses the internet for remote information sharing. This is often true. If I find an interesting article about kittens online, I don't need a print copy to share it with a friend - I can instantly email or message her a copy of the URL. The situation with video is similar – formerly, if I found something interesting on television, I would have been unable to 'send' the show to my friend. I could have called her, and told her to turn the TV to a certain channel, but our success in sharing information would have been limited by her access to a TV and whether or not the TV had that channel. Using the internet, however, I can send her the video knowing that she will have instant access to it and it won't 'disappear' after the 'show' is over.
I asked some students in my dorm about their use of the internet, and their preferred use of the internet is counter to the perception that the internet creates distance. Most commonly, students responded with “Yeah, I share things that I see on the internet with my friends… I go to their computers and show them”. If given a choice between simply sharing a link (remotely) and being able to share the information while the friend was present, students would uniformly choose the latter. Despite all of the fear about the internet creating gaps between us, most students (if not consciously) prefer to use the internet to facilitate face-to-face communication rather than replace it.
Referencing my earlier years, then, the internet has not served to replace hallway chatter with silence and anti-social looks, but rather supplement it. I can imagine if I was back in that fourth grade hall again, I would hear my fellow students, instead of referencing the TV shows they had seen last night, chatting about the videos they had seen on YouTube and the articles on AOL news – and probably still copying each other’s homework.
Comments