When Is It Time To Unplug?
A few days ago Facebook unveiled it’s new location based sharing service, Places. Essentially, when a user is at any specific location, they can “check in” via Places, which then shares their location with their friends on Facebook. Location based sharing like this has existed for quite some time already in the form of Foursquare and within sites like Yelp, Gowalla, and Booyah. All of the aforementioned sites have partnered with Facebook and integrated Places into their sites so that checking in on any site will check you in on all of them. Chris Cox, VP of Facebook, described Places as a service that would help bring alive locations with technology during the unveiling of Places at a Facebook press event. He described how content shared on Facebook now could be identified by location. “Now … those stories are going to be pinned to a physical location” One of the biggest questions raised in the initial response to the new service is how large businesses can integrate their location into already existing pages on Facebook, which is a part of Facebook’s goal for what Places eventually will evolve into. Both Chris Cox and Mark Zuckerberg expressed interest in integrating Places more fluidly into Facebook after seeing what the general response is like.
After reading and hearing about Places, my initial thoughts are: Why does any of this matter? How valid are the incentives for users to actually use Places? And when is it time for us to unplug from technology and experience the world without the aid of a anything digital?
My first question is slightly rhetorical. As society has progressed in the past few decades, the ways in which people communicated have evolved exponentially. Mailing a letter was displaced by e-mail, which was challenged by instant messenger services and texting via cell phones. Eventually, the concept of social networking was introduced to the public and it caught on like wildfire. Myspace, Facebook, and countless other sights blew up and soon dominated the ways in which we interact and communicate in modern day life. Anything with the massive impact like social networking must matter if it had the power to change society as greatly as it has. However, my question is directed more towards the geo-location based tagging and sharing services. Personally, I never much saw the point in using a site like Foursquare. It seemed like a large effort on the part of a user for which they received little in return. While some may dispute how valid that is, being the “Mayor” of a location on Foursquare seems no different to me than flaunting accomplishments in any digitally based community, whether it’s a game, forum, etc. The only major difference is that Foursquare’s actual playing field is the real world, rather than a fictional one. So while the validity of such societal relevance is up for argument, I still believe that it can be concluded that there is a large effort on the part of the user. Whether it is a few swipes on an iPhone, some button clicks on a Blackberry, a quick visit to a web page from a computer, or clicking around a website for a while out of interest or most likely boredom, the amount of time that a user clocks for any particular service can add up greatly over time. With Places, the amount of time it takes to check in from any device probably won’t surpass more than 10-20 seconds. However, the time spent checking out location specific content and looking for friends who have been there previously or are there presently, both reasons which Facebook suggests is the purpose of places, will add up over time.
This raises my next question. Places, a service which is entirely derived from user participation, must somehow provide desirable incentives for continual use. Facebook has mainly described the value of Places as being able to connect with friends in public places via the site. Ideally, after you check in somewhere you would see friends also checked in at that location, which then would lead you to connect with them in real life. So in order to see if my friends happened to be at a restaurant, bar, or public place I might be at, assuming we weren’t already aware of each other’s presence, I would have to check in, look to see if anyone I knew was there, and then contact them most likely via a phone call or text to validate this information, and then finally meet up with them in person. That seems like a lot of work through a third party just to connect with people that most likely wouldn’t factor into my original plans, otherwise I most likely would have been aware of their presence and would have no reason to use Places to connect with them in the first place. There are many more situations where the true value of Places could be debated. For a service that is supposed is help me connect with friends, there are also a lot of “what if” questions that can be raised. What if only some of my Facebook friends use the service and I can’t rely on Places for an accurate depiction of who I know at any given location? What if someone who has checked into a location leaves and I try spend the time contacting them to meet only to discover they are no longer there? What if I’m tagged at a location by a friend and it has negative consequences such as revealing a lie about my whereabouts to others (Disabling this feature is a possibility with privacy settings and you are always prompted to approve tags by friends.)? These and many other questions that can be raised seem to almost completely negate most of the proposed benefits of using Places.
Lastly, I believe it is important to ask ourselves when it is the proper time to unplug from technology and experience life without digital or technological aid. This is a difficult question, because it can be hypocritical to even pose it considering how ubiquitous technology is and how infused it has become with modern life due to cell phones, laptops, mobile devices, and many other objects. I would like to clarify that I am posing it more as a means to reflect mainly upon the degree in which we are connected. Places, a service which tracks and reports your location, is something that requires constant involvement. To reap the benefits, a user must be constantly and consistently checking in, something that requires a large effort on their part over time. In the time that someone might spend checking in and looking for friends at that location, they will be glued to a screen of some device, distracted away from the very location they are at. I think this is comparable to something that photographers, myself included, have experienced. When taking pictures, it’s very possible to feel removed from the experience due to how focused you can be on capturing your specific vision or photographs of said experience. This can lead to feeling less aware and not being able to take full notice of what’s going on around you due to utter focus on your own actions. While using a social networking service in public is an entirely different experience, it is not to hard for me to think of how carried away people could get by using Places, which could distract them from the very physical experience that they are digitally tagging themselves in. That leads to the question: if you are not fully participating in an experience because you are distracted by documenting it via a digital third party, are you degrading the quality of what you’re supposed to be experiencing in the first place? With social networking increasingly fusing with more and more aspects of our lives, I believe it’s extremely important to pose questions like these. While each person might have a different answer, considering how we interact with technology and how it directly affects our experiences is the one of the only ways to let our relationship with the digital world evolve in a positive manner.
- M.T.
