03. Guest editor83 (subbed).

qxd 2007/08/01 02:38 PM Page 10

guest editor

Who the
bleep do
we know?
Guest editor rik
maes is wondering
whether technological
mediation is making
live encounters way
out of fashion. Do we
throw out the baby
with the bathwater?

couple of years ago, the movie What the Bleep do being alone and elsewhere. Gathering physically is OK,

A we Know? made a (in my humble opinion: weak)

case that quantum physics will impact our future
in ways that are now almost unimaginable. In the
meantime, the overpowering advent of so-called
communication tools transformed our present in ways
unimaginable the same couple of years ago. Who the bleep
do we still know in an era where most of our encounters
are mediated by machines, if not with machines
themselves?
Imagine a typical conference in the year 2007. At
least half of the audience in the self-evidently Wi-Fi
enabled room is answering their e-mail, aimlessly
surfing the Web, downloading the very latest stats for
their own presentation or even just listening to their
favourite music on their laptop, mobile phone, PDA,
BlackBerry or whatever device that supports them in
but keeping contact with the distant, virtual world is
primordial. Poor speaker, despite the fact that she is
ornately making use of streaming videos taken from the
Web. Even her attendance is no longer crucial in the
conference room!
Imagine a typical meeting in the year 2007. Your
counterpart is entering the room holding his phone at the
ear, plainly neglecting your secretary and talking to a
person who is apparently more important than you are.
After some 5 to 10 minutes in which his only contact with
his physical environment was a little blink on entering
and a nod when the secretary brought his coffee, Mr
Always On starts the conversation complaining about the
omnipresent phone, but at the same time excusing himself
for the fact that he keeps the device on as he cannot miss
an overseas phone call.

10
convergence vol 8 no 3
03. Guest editor83 (subbed).qxd 2007/08/01 02:38 PM Page 11
Poor you... too polite to throw him out, but at the same
time too embarrassed to get in genuine touch with this
umpteenth passer-by, hidden behind his self-constructed
firewall.
Whether we like it or not, we live in a world of split
attention: multi-tasking and time-sharing are no longer
primarily computer terms, but apply to human beings in
their communication patterns as well. People and
electronic devices alike are competing for our attention,
but don’t we lose our competence to share attention? For
sure, we pay attention, but what is its price? It looks as if
a split second of partial and mediated attention is almost
available free of charge, but an hour of full attention has
become priceless. We measure our performance in terms
of the number of e-mails answered and phone calls made
and a holiday period without e-mail facilities means a
nightmare of hundreds of e-mails waiting when coming
back home.
I used to restrict my mobile phone number to my
family and my closest colleagues only, but I threatened to
become a totally eccentric person. My last friend without
a mobile phone got one from his children “for his own
good” as a birthday present. Being off-line is no longer an
option.
The once stealthy use of mobile phones in the
conference break has been overruled by the overt
intermixing of a face-to-face meeting, the checking of an
e-mail box, the answering of a phone call and the sending
of an SMS-message. “You’ll Never Walk Alone” any more:
physical encounters are just one of the many options to
meet people. The question is: to what detriment? Do we
really know the person we never met in real life, but with
whom we share even our most intimate feelings on
MySpace? Can we enter into a true dialogue via Windows
Live Messenger or by participation in a fleeting blog
discussion? Is the message in SMS-lingo “LSKOL 4
1
LOML” as real an expression of authentic love as the
handwritten love letter of our ancestors (or of ourselves)?
Thanks to all these gadgets, we have never been more
connected, but has this brought us closer to each other?
11
convergence
guest editor
“All real living is meeting” was Martin Buber’s credo for
our time, but does this hold true in an alienated world
where we talk a lot about communities of practice, but
don’t succeed in the real practice of communities?
Meeting, in Buber’s words, is with your whole self,
whereas modern technologies allow you to take as many
identities as you want to have versions of your own life.
But what does it mean to meet such a split identity and is
it different from “meeting” your BlackBerry?
I will never forget a “conversation” I had with the
telephone operator of a big company. It took me a couple
of minutes before I noticed that her monotonous “The line
is busy, please hold on” was repeated exactly every 30
seconds and, hence, that my reiterated “Thank you” was
totally absurd. Until I effectively stopped making myself
ridiculous, after which the “automatic answering
machine” rather anxiously asked me: “Are you still
there, sir?”
Being online has turned into a mere obligation and we
have gradually unlearned the ability to be on our own and
take responsibility for our own emotions. Emotions are
shared via emoticons, experiences via instant messages.
“For those who are lonely yet fearful of intimacy, online
life provides environments where one can be a loner, yet
not alone, have the illusion of companionship without the
demands of sustained, intimate friendship”2. A lasting
friendship is just a burden if you don’t know how to know
each other.
Isn’t it contradictory that we experience the world as
increasingly complex, but give ourselves less and less
time to cope with it? We feel down because we are
always on. We persistently forget to take our time to
meet ourselves.
Ultimately, we resemble Bruce Chatwin’s explorers,
trying to speed up their native porters, but incapable of
understanding the latter’s reasoning: “We are waiting for
our spirits to catch up with our bodies”3.
1. For the uninitiated: “Long, slow kiss on the lips for the love of my life”.
2. Sherry Turkle, “Can You Hear Me Now?”, Forbes Magazine, 5 July 2007.
3. Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines, 1987.
vol 8 no 3