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The best way to avoid being seen as a commodity is to offer a relationship. And that takes conversation.
“You keep clients because of the trust you build over years of face-to-face meetings, not because you write them emails.”
Life on our new digital landscape challenges us as citizens.
There, we can choose to see only the people with whom we agree. And to share only the ideas we think our followers want to hear.
in that world we have called friction-free, we are used to the feeling of getting things done—generations
This history of easy dispatch is only one way that digital life shapes a new public self. It conditions us to see the world as a collection of crises calling for immediate action. In this context, it is easy to skip necessary conversations.
our life online creates a digital double
But when our screens suggest our desires back to us, they often seem like broken mirrors.
“You go on a website, you send in your money—that satisfies your requirement for being in the conversation. You show solidarity with a movement by going online, and then, that’s it.”
With the physical sign you might have had to confront a person in your neighborhood
sharing warm feelings gave people the illusion that they were doing politics.
Expressions of interest in the physical world—for example, giving a few dollars to a cause when there is a neighborhood charity drive—can also lead to a dissipation of interest when the person who asked for money is no longer at your door.
the connections you form with people you don’t know have significant limitations. They are good for getting people talking but not effective in getting them to do much else.
Weak ties are friends of friends or casual acquaintances. Strong ties are people you know and trust. They are people with whom you are likely to have a long history of face-to-face conversation.
Facebook connections, the kinds of conversations we have online, and in general what we mean by Internet “friending” all draw on the power of weak ties.
But what do we forget when we talk through machines? We are tempted to forget the importance of face-to-face conversation, organization, and discipline in political action. We are tempted to forget that political change is often two steps forward and one step back. And that it usually takes a lot of time.
If you are in a conversation with someone you don’t know well—and these are most of your web contacts—the basic rule is to ask little.
says Gladwell, if you want to take those risks, you need ties of deeper trust, deeper history. You will have moved beyond gestures and donations; you will need to reach consensus, set goals, think strategically, and have philosophical direction. Lives will depend on your deliberations. Perhaps your own life. You will need a lot of long conversations.
Politics still needs meetings that are meetings. It still needs conversations that require listening, conversations in which you are prepared to learn that a situation is more complex than you thought. You might want to change your mind. This is what our current political landscape discourages.
Catastrophe Culture
If you see life as a stream of emergencies, this frames your life narrative.
In a world where even middle schoolers say they can’t handle the number of messages they receive, telling a friend “It’s an emergency” bumps you to the top of the list.
“Every channel, every day, the news is dominated by catastrophe.”
the media supports a view of the world as a series of emergencies that we can take on, one by one.
all are represented as catastrophes.
You know you are thinking in terms of catastrophe if your attention is riveted on the short term.
When you have an emergency, problems are there to be dealt with on an ad hoc basis.
Faced with a situation that you experience as an emergency, you want to use social media to huddle with your friends.
“Most of the emergencies that are broadcast on the media, you can’t do anything about. There’s no action you know how to take that would improve the actual circumstances.”
When terrorism is presented as a calamity, and it is, it is presented as separate from the history that created it, so that it comes to be more like a natural disaster, a state of evil, rather than something that can be addressed by politics or through a reconsideration of its historical roots. When terror is treated as a natural disaster, all we can do about it is kill terrorists.
When you name something a catastrophe, there is nothing much to say. If you confront a situation that you see as shaped by human actions, there is plenty to say. You are in a position to demand accountability. You need to understand causes. You are considering action. You need to have a conversation.
On our new data landscape, conversations that we traditionally have thought of as private—talking on the phone, sending email and texts—are actually shared with corporations that claim ownership over our data because they have provided us with the tools to communicate.
Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook, has said, “Privacy is no longer a relevant social norm.” Well, privacy may not be convenient for the social network, but what is intimacy without privacy? What is democracy without privacy? Is there free thought without privacy?
From my grandparents’ perspective, as second-generation Americans in the Brooklyn working class, being able to think and communicate in private meant that you could disagree with your employer and make a private decision about whether you were going to join a union.
You needed privacy to change your mind about important matters.
We make our technologies and they make and shape us.
email is not protected.
when it comes to her cell phone, she gives up all privacy for convenience.
GPS on her phone is turned on. This means that her phone leaves a trail of bread crumbs detailing her location.
These days, the desire for privacy is considered suspicious and limits your ability to have it.
A generation grows up assuming nothing is private and offering faint resistance.
Only a few years ago, a sixteen-year-old tried to reassure me that it somehow didn’t matter that her email wasn’t private by saying, “Who would care about my little life?” It was not an empowering mantra. And she turned out to be wrong. A lot of people care about her “little life.”
These days, our online practices put us in a world where the real question is “What do you have to give today?”
The digital self is archived forever.
the calls, locations, and online searches of ordinary Americans are monitored.
What happens to conversation in these circumstances?
one of the great paradoxes of digital conversation: It feels private despite the fact that you are onstage.
The experience of digital communication is out of sync with its reality. Online, you are under a kind of surveillance.
If you know that your texts and email are not private, you watch out for what you write. You internalize the censor.
These days, the most important data to those who watch us are the data trails we leave as we go about the business of our daily lives.
