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I came across a haunting trailer today for a documentary by (of?) Josh Harris and Ondi Timoner called We Live in Public.  According to Jason Calacanis, who wrote an excellent email-turned-blog-post about the documentary’s subject matter, “It’s a cautionary tale about the dehumanizing effects of technology, a somber topic that we all need to consider in the age of Facebook, blogging, linkbaiting, and, sadly, the MySpace and JustinTV suicides.”

On a day when my feeds were brimming over with remarkable content (great unrelated post on white privilege here), the following video really jarred me.  Actually, it sent chills up my spine.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_XSTwfdFwIY

After viewing this, I was pointed to Jason Calacanis’ blog post, where he takes considerable amount of time detailing his thoughts and feelings about our use of technology and where our culture might be headed.  His post also jostled me to the point of forcing me into an afternoon of deep self-reflection on my own media habits.

Underlying the lack of empathy he observes on the web, he cites what he calls Internet Asperger’s Syndrome

In this syndrome, the afflicted stops seeing the humanity in other people. They view individuals as objects, not individuals. The focus on repetitive behaviors–checking email, blogging, twittering and retiring andys–combines with an inability to feel empathy and connect with people.

On the development of IAS and some more symptoms:

In IAS, screen names and avatars shift from representing people to representing characters in a video game. Our 2600’s and 64’s have trained us to pound these characters into submission in order to level up. We look at bloggers, people on Twitter andpodcasters not as individuals, but as challenges–in some cases, “bosses”–that we must crush to make it to the next phase.

The dual nature of Asperger’s, from my understanding, is that it makes the individual focused on very specific behaviors–obsessively so in many cases–while decreasing their capacity for basic empathy and communication. It’s almost as if you trade off intensity in one area for common decency and communications in another area–not that the person has a choice.

Well, trading off people’s feelings for page views and Twitter followers sounds familiar to me.

Now, this isn’t an endorsement of Internet Asperger’s Syndrome as a diagnosis  That’s not really the point.  What’s more important is the behavior the term describes.  Lack of empathy and social reciprocity.  Inability to form lasting friendships.  Impaired nonverbal communication.  I think Jason’s outpouring, and Josh Harris’ documentaries (the other of which is called Quiet, where a group of artists lived in an underground terranium for 30 days under constant surveillance – a segment of this documentary is shown at the beginning of the video above), get at describing the consequences of what I and others perceive to be a quest for identity in an age of context collapse and overchoice—all simmered in a culture that places the burden of identity construction on the shoulders of its members.  The result?  A crisis of significance, a crisis of self.

One caveat I should note, however, is I haven’t seen either documentary in their entirety, so maybe I’m jumping the gun.

Thoughts?

via We Live in Public (and the end of empathy) « The Jason Calacanis Weblog.

Tagged: anthropology, context collapse, culture, empathy, identity, media, privacy, public, self, sociology, technology