I am only one of many…that is, I am part of the growing number of people who are connected to the internet via several devices. This has been a growing source of amazement for me, in that I have access to things I never knew existed, in places where I would never have thought about it anyways… I am part of what seems to be an unnamed subculture.
There are plenty of blogs and sites covering many of the prosaic aspects of online life, and gadget technology; almost no sites cover the underlying motivations of those people who are already amongst the ‘chosen’. There are sites which attempt to school newbies on how to download Firefox, but no sites to cover the reasons why people do this, why they feel motivated to immerse their lives in this manner. There are no sites to bring the newly converted along.
Considering that there are so many techno blogs, gadgets sites, and adjuncts to online culture, I see nothing presenting an overview of this newly emerging subculture (other than coverage of gadgets and apps).
Are there any hallmarks to being in this culture? What are they? So far I see a lot of sites, and even the commenters dealing with shards of this new culture from the standpoint of trying to develop more meaning and value into the new gadgets that they have… It seems a bit backwards, and I suppose this is merely a presumption of mine. I see little beyond this form of gear acquisition syndrome. But there is still a residue of something here…
There are some advantages to having modern tools (including any new gadgets, and apps), which can help you accomplish things more efficiently, to schedule everything with more certainty, and to generally tighten up your life. I use a number of these tools myself.
These techno-gadget sites don’t implicitly give you much information as to who these members are…But we can try here and now…
First I suppose we could try to define what it is to be a member of this subculture… I could be grandiose and say that this could be a form of primitive symbiosis between man and machine. But this would lump us with anyone with a driver’s license. Maybe a reasonable definition of what all of these people do would be to consider the idea of personal efficiency…computers can make some real changes in your life…if you get some gadgets.
This would represent the upside, that you can accomplish more, or to get everything done in less time, or that you can do things in new ways, and interact with people and things in really new ways… This is an attraction for many.
You can deduce some of the downsides which come from delving too deeply into this personal technology. For instance, too much of this can distance you from the rest of ‘real life’; you can spend too much time and energy defining tasks and accomplishing them to the degree that you can get a bit ‘tunnel sighted’. You can get too deeply immersed into this culture, where you become an online social butterfly, taking on every new app, program, and gadget, in a misguided attempt to ‘keep up’.
There should be some sort of a happy medium here, but that would only be defined as a sense where you believe that these tools are a new plus for you…
While this may be self evident, it doesn’t help in my attempt to try to define what all of this really is. There are some upsides and some downsides; it is possible to describe how some use of these sorts of technology can be of benefit in one’s life…
You can see these people in every coffee shop, those who sport the latest gadgets, the eReaders, iPads, iPhone 4’s, Mac Air’s and MacBook Pros. You can see this in the growing number of edu blogs covering almost solely the use of new technology. Most of these people (if only from gathering what they have written in these blogs) seem to think that they are a step ahead of the hoi polloi. What is it that they think they have?
Is all of this as trivial as keeping up with the Jones’s? Is there anything beyond this perception? Is this perception only something that these people need to believe in to justify themselves? Is this only a way to wallow in consumerism that much more?
Most of this ‘movement’ seems to be consistent with the use of Apple products (and the Kindle…), is there more to this?
Is there a way to distinguish these people from others, by virtue of the outcomes that the use of these tools would provide? Is it noticeable?
In the modern world (i.e. most of the western world), is this a cause or an effect of the consequences of online and computer use creating voids between people?
I am still no closer to any sort of understanding…of who these people are, what ties them together (in any tangible reason, other than the fact that they all have ‘gear’), what defines them, and if there are any real and verifiable advantages to this first level of cybernetic ‘collusion’.
I imagine that if I were to spend enough time online I might find some written pieces…produced by a philosophy grad student, replete with all kinds of post modern concepts and buzz words….all in the attempt to create some sort of justification or definition for this growing phenomenon…It will likely be so much of a hot house flower of verbiage as to have little real impact…Beyond this, I expect that this growing trend will continue to exist outside of most people’s perception (even amongst those who are the adepts…).
As a few remaining points to consider, I have:
· How would you distinguish this from merely keeping up with technology?
· Is this just a form of gear acquisition syndrome?
· How does this relate to the vast increase in the pace of western life?
· Is there enough here to be able to coin a name for this group and thus ‘define’ it?
o It strikes me that this may be a gold mine waiting for someone to accomplish this…first!
· Even if this group of people get labeled, is this of enough importance to be a real influence in modern life, or will this life style merely become as trite for some other ‘labels’ which are falling out of style, such as: metrosexual, neocon, and valley girl…
· On the other side of this issue, I don’t see many of these people as being necessarily amongst those I would call technocrats…maybe a better term would be “Elite Gadget Users” (EGU’s).
This term (EGU’s) doesn’t feel like it is that pleasant to pronounce…Maybe it is too close to the overused term EGO (amusingly enough it is pretty close in meaning too!). In that this may be my first entry into the world of creating abbreviations…
No matter what, this sounds better than to describe someone as having G.A.S. (e.g. Gear Acquisition Syndrome…).
