Digital presence

I don’t consider myself an early adopter, nor even much of a tech geek. I enjoy new software, new devices, and so on, but I don’t want to know (much) about their innards, and I find that the ins and outs of how something works usually bores me senseless… However, at the same time, I love the frenetic pace of change and being part of the digital age. I love that content is user-driven and interactive, more all the time, and I want to stay on the front edge of the developing trends in the digital world–because that’s where you’re going to find the future, I’m convinced.

Granted, it can be difficult to keep up with the pace of change… I feel uninspired and dull more days than not, and I don’t have something clever or snappy to say for my Facebook status update, or I can’t get past writer’s block as I stare at that unforgiving blank screen in the “write post” portion of my blog… but I muddle through these issues (along with the days where I just don’t feel like doing anything online), because I know that I feel cheated when my friends or the blogs that I follow are slow with their updates.

I am convinced that digital presence is the future… that just as it would be inconceivable today to do an office job (perhaps any job) without email, in ten years some form of what we now know as “social networking” will be an unequivocal part of our lives, particularly our professional lives. (Though it also will facilitate other activities and group functions.)

Here’s an example of what I’m talking about. At present, when I get to a new city, I look for everything that I need online. Stores, restaurants, ballet classes, used bookstores, people I might know who might be living in the area, events… pretty much anything of interest. I find myself stymied again and again by this, since when you don’t live in a big hipster city, businesses are slower to go online. I don’t think that they realize they’re potentially missing out on my business because they don’t have a simple website saying, “Hey! We’re here! Here’s what we offer! Contact us here…” And while just one person’s business may not be a big deal, I represent a coming wave of digital residents, people who live and… practically breathe online.

I keep being made aware of the great divide between people who are a part of this digital community and the rest of the world, because I keep getting in conversations that go roughly like this:

Other Person (generally, but not always, older): I’m just so concerned because my son/friend/brother-in-law has taken up this social networking stuff and he’s posting all this information online.

Me: Well, you know… a digital presence is really the direction that the future is going, and besides, it’s not like all that information isn’t already out there.

Other Person: But isn’t he concerned about privacy, and that anyone can access anything about him?

Me: Well, it’s pretty much granted that anyone can already access any information about him.

Other Person: But what about his privacy?

Me: Really, all that info is out there already. Besides, have you considered the fact that this is the wave of the future? I think that soon we’re going to HAVE to have a digital presence in order to stay relevant.

Other Person: But what about privacy?

(At this point I generally give up, shrug, and wonder what is so sacred about this cow named “Privacy” that makes a person voluntarily give up being a citizen of the future… but figure it has something in common with the sentiment that old-timers used to voice when they said, “If God had meant us to fly, he would’ve given us wings.”)

Truly, I’m convinced that refusing to take part in online networking–where you necessarily have to post pictures, personal information (within reason), and people you know–will increasingly relegate people to the sidelines in the emerging (digital) world order. For instance, email now seems to me a completely behemoth form of communication… I’m as likely as not to lose track of people who aren’t around me daily because I get so much trivia through my inbox that their old emails get swallowed by it.

With social networking sites (I’ve been subsumed by Facebook) and blogging, you can syndicate your access to your friends. You can subscribe to their feeds and be passively informed of what’s going on in their lives. You can either do this with a collective feed of everyone’s status, or you can pick individuals of interest and find more about them. You can rediscover those friends that you lost touch with years ago, and even people that you used to be tight with (in high school youth group, perhaps), but forgot about the second that you went your separate ways. You can choose how much you want to know about all these people, and how much they’re allowed to see of what you have posted. And you can keep discovering more people as you see who your friends are friends with… and often rediscover people that way, too. I tell you, if email is the equivalent of having a telephone conversation with a friend, then a site like Facebook is equivalent to walking around a college campus and running into people that you know–mostly acquaintances, sometimes better friends–and having short “hey man, what’s up?” conversations that are completely appropriate to the time and place.

As I tried to explain in one of the infuriating conversations detailed above, I am more likely to keep up with people who’ve taken the step and moved to the social network than I am to remember people that I haven’t emailed in months/years. You need the network setup in order to keep tabs on people, much as you would via gossip and short conversations in a community of the past. Seriously, digital communities are the answer to the wail that we used to hear all the time about how “modern technology has destroyed all sense of community among people”.

Ah well. I’m pretty much preaching to the choir, here. I’ve just been wanting to say this because it’s been irritating me that people are waving around the sacred cow-siblings Privacy and Security as an excuse to cower in an internet blackout and make it impossible for me to find them with a simple Google search!

If you’re realistic, you know that your digital presence is just another side of your public presence, and that eventually the digital presence will be a necessary part of public presence. I believe that politicians have finally discovered this… it won’t be long until the general population wakes up to it, too…