I just came across this juicy tidbit from ABC News that seems like it should be hot of the presses from Techfaux.
But unlike the headlines from Techfaux, this story’s actually true. Apparently a man signed up for an account at Classmates.com after one of their infamous online ads told him his former classmates had been searching for him on the site.
Good for him.
I mean that, and I hope he sends Classmates straight to the spam hell they’ve earned a spot in.
And here’s why.
Every day you hear more and more about things like “social media” and “revolutions” and “technology tying people together” etc, etc, etc and on and on and on.
But the problem I’ve always had with this mindset is that it gives so much power to machines over people.
What I mean by that is that the internet has two ends: on one end there are millions of real human beings, and on the other end are real businesses.
In between the two ends of the spectrum are machines.
Stupid thoughtless emotionless humanless machines.
And for some reason it’s these dumb pieces of wire and plastic that people think have “revolutionized the way we communicate,” “bridged the long-standing gap between brand and consumer,” or whatever the buzz phrase of the week is.
The telegraph didn’t reinvent the human condition, the telephone didn’t cause us to become a world of antisocial basement-dwellers, and the internet hasn’t either. And obviously it never will.
I think this is exactly the problem I have with people putting so much stock on things like telecommuting and working “virtually.”
The problem with these people is their assumption that since we’ve migrated to a new machine to handle our communication, our connections are somehow more lifeless. As if working virtually puts me further out of touch with the real human beings on the other end of them.
When you finally come to realize that a computer is just a dumb machine placed between you and a real human being with real thoughts, feelings, goals, beliefs, and virtues and businesses with agendas, bottom lines, and goals of their own, it becomes increasingly difficult to either put too much stock in the dumb machines or to brush off the value of the real human beings you communicate with and connect to in your cloud reality.
So back to Classmates.
They didn’t break any kind of cardinal rule of the internet. They aren’t violating an unwritten machine ettiquette either.
What Classmates did, by telling a man that long-lost friends were seeking him out when they in fact were not was screw with the very real feelings, dreams, nostalgias, and hopes of a very real human being.
And I hope they receive the punishment they deserve. It’s not Usenet and IRC anymore, folks.
And even when it was, it wasn’t, really.
