Isolation and connection in a wired world

A few hours after I bought my first computer in 1994, I wanted to throw it off my balcony.

I came around eventually and learned to love the damn thing. In fact, I became a bit of a tech geek, if a lightweight one. But I was still held back by the instinct I had on that night in 1994 – that this technology was opening the floodgates on my privacy, and would paradoxically make me feel more isolated while increasing my contact with the world.

The first I'd heard of the internet in earnest was one morning in the last week of December, 1993. Woken by my radio-alarm, the host of CBC Radio's Early Edition was doing some segment on the year's most overused words and phrases. Number one on that list struck me as odd: "information superhighway". If this eight-syllable mouthful had been so overused, why had I never heard it? After all, I worked at the CBC, and the chatter of the AM network was yammering at my desk all day.

At work, even in the pre-internet days, IBM units were a staple on every desk. Word processing on DOS-based green-on-black screens is a faint memory, but we did have what we called e-mail. At the time, it was an internal system that CBC offices used for sending scheduling requests to other locations, connected by the broadcaster's satellite network. 

In those days I swore I'd never let a computer into my home. They epitomized the office. The hideous bulk of a monitor, keyboard, printer and CPU was, to me, just an impractical, impersonal and very expensive typewriter. I wanted these things in my apartment just as much as I desired filing cabinets and fluorescent lighting in my living room.

There was a moment when computers really started changing not just the landscape of the office, but people's perceptions and behaviour. That moment was Windows 3.1. Before Windows, the desktop computer was merely a tool. An imposing one, sure. One that began to define an era. But it didn't change how we thought about work itself or the people we did business with. 

Then one day, the little nerds from IT were sent through the building to install Windows on every computer. They had good reason; they could foresee the future, but they did a lousy job explaining it to us. All Windows did for me was take away some straightforward DOS commands and simple programs and turn them into something unnecessarily complicated. Although I came to love Windows over time, in those first few days it was disorienting and alien.

Here's what was different: Windows changed our mental and visual landscape. I would walk into an office to discuss a matter (or waste time) with a colleague and find myself overly distracted by the hypnotic laser show of the screensaver. It was creepy and unnecessarily ubiquitous. In every office, every control room, every corner, I found myself surrounded by flying windows, starfields and colourful geometric lines wrapping themselves into Escher-like eternity. It was agitating. Why couldn't the screens just go blank?

Then there were the games. Everyone was playing solitaire at work. Pre-Windows, if anyone had brought in a deck of cards and started playing games at their desks, it would have been considered antisocial at best, a firing offence at worst. The way Windows made slacking off acceptable (and officially sanctioned; management did nothing to wipe the games off the hard drives) was disturbing. Eventually I had my own vice: Minesweeper. It started as an occasional break and became an addiction. I asked our IT guy to remove the games from my computer for the sake of my productivity. He checked with my boss, Judy, who came to me and said that I shouldn't be mucking about with the integrity of the corporate hardware. So the games stayed. No one was the least bit bothered that I admitted to playing video games instead of working. Oddly, I was considered peculiar for trying to do something about it.

Then there was this "information superhighway" thing that was fast becoming the talk of the town. The media, thankfully, soon dropped the polysyllabic superlative and just started calling it the internet.

The first time I saw the gears of the internet cranking in action was at a little apartment-warming party in a friend-of-a-friend's West End pad. At some point in the evening, a giggling little group formed around the Marc's Compaq. Oh god, I thought to myself, he's got one of those useless computers. Showoff. He probably just uses it to make shopping lists and impress friends by printing out letters on his dot-matrix. I was my usual cynical self ... until I saw what they were doing.

The gang were logged into the Rainbow BBS, a local bulletin-board service that local gay men would dial into to chat. Although this was the Windows 3.1 era, the dial-up BBS was still a DOS-based white-on-blue screen. This was also before scanners were commonplace, and years before the first digital camera. It was a novelty to actually have a digitized photo on a hard drive at that time; impressive were those who did have a photo of themselves to share (if they could figure out how to send them via DOS commands). So this early chatroom was not even a window, but basic text typed on a screen, sent to another user by typing in a command:

Everyone was hovering over Marc as he sat perched at his Compaq. Those behind him shouted commands while captivated by the monochrome list of nicknames:

"Send TwinkBuddy a message!" ... "Find out where he is!" … "Tell him to come over!" …. "Ask what he looks like." 

I had no use for a computer in my home – until it became a tool for meeting guys. My new custom-built 486 with 420 megabyte hard-drive and 8 megs of RAM was on my desk in short order.

Within minutes of hooking it all up, I'd phoned the Rainbow BBS and bought credits, which would tick down at a penny per minute. I dialled in, listened to the beeps and moans of my internal modem for the first time, and there I was. Although a BBS was not the internet per se, the Rainbow BBS offered a limited internet portal on its menu with primitive access to newsgroups and such. No web browser at this stage, but I did have my first email address.

I had numerous chats going that night, and I have a clear memory of the little blips my sound card emanated every time a new line of chat appeared. I have no recollection of what we all typed to each other. Probably just general small talk as we were all likely enraptured by this newfound ability to connect with other strangers from our home desktops.

When I finally mustered the resolve to break my hours-long engagement with the blue screen and go to bed, a sense of dread overcame me. What just happened in my apartment was alien and bizarre. One moment I had several people in my home – not physically, but virtually, itself a new phenomenon. Then I flick a switch and they're gone. My "guests" were never physically present, but their clatter of activity rattled through my head as I laid in bed. I didn't particularly invite them in, nor did they trespass, but I felt both a sense of violation and a sense that I did something horribly antisocial by turning them off. Who were they, these phantoms? I looked at the silhouette of my new contraption, how utilitarian and ugly the tube monitor and keyboard looked on my desk, how the computer sat there as the perfect metaphor for the way it hogged too much space in my apartment as it would in my life, eventually erasing a host of tactile experiences.

I wanted to smash the whole thing. I wanted it and all the ghosts it came with out of my home.

Despite these feelings, I embraced the technology. I taught myself HTML script and hoarded as much pirated software as I could find – MS Office, Photoshop, Adobe Professional, Cool Edit, HTML Pro (to this day, I have not paid for a single program). Suddenly I was taking on freelance work from home, building some of CBC Vancouver's first websites for a few of the radio programs I was affiliated with. A decade later, I would be a magazine editor and publisher, an occupation I never would have risen to without the technical proficiency that has served me well over the last 20 years.

But the haunting feeling from that first night with the internet has never left. While I have enthusiastically embraced many aspects of social technology, I feel more isolated and disadvantaged by a new world that bestows lopsided advantages to extroverts. Socially, people who put themselves out there on Facebook are more likely to be included in events. Those who promote and brag about themselves on Linkedin are better positioned for good jobs.

And dating has become harder. Those first lines of text I saw being typed into the internet -- in that gay hookup chat room -- seemed like a gift. No more trawling through drunks and party boys in seedy gay clubs. No more would I have to pray for a fluke encounter with someone respectable at a book store or coffee shop. But, counter-intuitively, the orgiastic menu of guys on Grindr, Manhunt, Gaydar, Fridae and Gay.com, among others, has only made the gay community more picky. Yes, a decent-looking and relatively intelligent guy has just clicked you a wink, but why settle for him when there are just so many goddamn more hot guys to pick from? Back when it was harder for gay men to meet each other, they were more thankful to connect with someone sharp, smart and loyal. Now there is the false promise of the Perfect 10 waiting in the next pop-up window.

I suspect the same mentality goes for the job market. Where a good job may have once garnered 10 or 20 applications from keeners who made a point of walking to a particular company and looking at the job board, nowadays HR departments are inundated with hundreds of resumes for any given position. The days of the old-fashioned follow-up call are gone. Call an HR rep nowadays and you'll hear, "How did you get this number?"

To get noticed in the wired world, whether for jobs or romance, you better know how to market yourself. There was once a day when introverts were either on equal or better footing as the extroverts, as modesty used to be equated with discretion and cooperativeness. Today, in a world where online marketing is key in a multitude of professions, being brash is no longer seen as arrogance but as confidence and knowingness. As for me, I have reluctantly given in to Linkedin, a site with no privacy controls worth mentioning. An introvert by nature, I don't care to open up a significant portion of my life history to anyone who Googles my name. I'm not one of those who care to be found by the girl who sat beside me in 9th-grade Math. As a desperate job-hunter, though, it seems a necessity. But even so, my profile probably does me a disservice. A prospective employer will be able to jump to a host of conclusions when they discover that I have far fewer connections than most, and my resume is instantly comparable to a multitude of others that make me look like an underachiever by contrast. 

This new paradigm makes it easier for narcissists to thrive, both socially and in the job market, and this new norm (set mostly by Facebook) makes a certain level of narcissistic behaviour – a level that would have been repellent pre-internet – feel normal to those who aren't self-centred by nature.

I'm not completely down on Facebook. The biggest change I've noticed in my own life is the number of people I'm able to maintain friendships with. Of course, not all 130 people on my Facebook are "near and dear", but in the pre-internet days we'd rarely have meaningful exchanges with acquaintances. Today, my acquaintances and I know more about each other than normally possible, and on occasion I'm surprised by the fleeting connections we make. One time in Singapore I made an online gripe about how often I had to move because of landlords selling their flats right after I moved in. Someone I met briefly at a party a few months earlier alerted me (via Facebook) to a vacancy at his friend's apartment, and from there close friendships formed with my new landlords. Other times, people I have not seen in years have made insightful comments about things I post, or I've become aware of interesting points of view from their own status updates. In all, there are more people in my life who I'm glad to know. Pre-internet, these types of acquaintances would vanish permanently from our lives, having made no impact.

So I'm not completely alienated by technology. The bad comes with the good. But where technology has improved our lives, it's also lowered our standards. There was a time in the 1980s and 1990s when digital technology was seen as leading us toward perfection. Compact discs gave us "perfect" sound quality to replace the fragile sounds of the vinyl LP, DVDs allowed us to construct our own home theatres, and we waited with great anticipation for high-def TV to give us that perfect cinema experience in our living rooms.

Today, despite all our great innovations, everyone seems content to be entertained by feebly-encoded MP3s, crappy phone cameras without proper light meters, low-res movie downloads, and watching sitcoms on YouTube while hunched over a desk. Phone conversations frequently consist of, "Can you hear me now? Let me call you back. Sorry, dropped call." The half-second time lag in mobile phone calls results in repeated talking over one another and confusion as to who speaks next. And then there's Skype, which renders most conversations useless. "You're all distorted, I can't hear you. Now the picture's frozen. Are you there? Let me call you back." Such heights of inferiority would have been objectionable 20 years ago, but somehow Microsoft, Apple and Google have made it all quite palatable. 

We've also become accustomed to a certain amount of invasiveness. When I signed up on Linkedin, it "suggested" I make contact with a list of people that included individuals I hadn't been in touch with for several years -- people I had actually forgotten about. How did Linkedin know that I knew these people? Did it access my email without my consent? If so, why didn't it "suggest" people who I'd had more recent contact with? On Facebook, I find I have occasional access to strangers' photos, even though they're marked as "friends only"; makes me wonder who's looking at my private albums. But I've learned to roll with it and just shrug, because I'm too exhausted to get upset over every weird and creepy breach that I face on the net. The alternative is to unplug and go off the grid completely.

This is why, about four years after assimilating the rest of society, the smartphone is something I have not bought into. For all of the benefits served up by iPhones and Androids, I get a sinking feeling that they're re-wiring our brains even further to make shorter attention spans and lower standards even more satisfactory. Even without a smartphone, I've already felt how technology has changed the way my own mind functions. There have been times when reading a book or magazine, I come across a word I don't know and there's a brief moment of perplexity while my brain tries to Google the Oxford dictionary. I've also found myself on my way to job interviews without having written down the exact address or directions, subconsciously feeling like I can Google-Map it along the way. I could just give in and get one of the damn things, but every time I pick up an iPhone it feels like a homing device for the Borg. 

But being a smartphone refusnik only adds to my sense of isolation, confirming a pattern that started with that first night in 1994 when I used the internet for the first time – a cycle of heightened connection with the world followed by a greater sense of remoteness. I can contact friends all around the world by email, Facebook, Linkedin, MSN, Skype, G-chat and a phone with both text and talk capabilities, and yet I feel behind the times because everyone's moved on to Whatsapp and Viber. Tourists stop me in the street and ask for a photo; they hand me an iPhone with no buttons, and I don't know what to do with the thing. There was a time when we made fun of old people who couldn't program the clocks on their VCRs. Now I look at what everyone's doing on their iPhones and I just see a big flashing 12:00.

There is absolutely no doubt that the tech innovations of the last decade have permanently changed the way the way we function, communicate and connect. What I lament about the new paradigm is that it's starting to cement what should be passing fads into the permanent groundwork of our culture. There is no earthly reason why I need to let the world know that I'm at Starbucks, and then post an Instagram photo of my latte on Facebook to prove it. But not joining the rest of the world in doing it – not even having the ability to do it – makes me feel like the luddite I thought I'd never be.