Subject: gender: face to face interaction
From: Please type your name here (mailbox-name@mail.utexas.edu)
Date: Fri Nov 05 1999 - 11:13:01 CST
Matt wrote:
> > Not that we're a really communal society
> > anymore anyway, but doesn't this remove a level of human contact from
> > even _more_ of our everyday lives? Isn't relationship and community an
> > important part of life, period? I'm all for power and ease for the
Nathan replied:
> I really don't get jacked up
> about the supposed payoff of that generic exchange between clerk and
> myself. For me, I'd rather /spend/ the time I /save/ not going through
> these motions with friends, lovers, anybody I really want to be with.
> That to me is the value. Are we really better off leaving our real
> friends behind to run errands in town?
I think we can use the internet as a social resource, and that it could by
necessity replace face to face interaction, if you were in some sort of
physical isolation. Or say if you were in prison or Amarillo and wanted to
cultivate a different circle of friends than you had physically available, but
it is scary to think about folks eschewing the face to face variety, holed up
in their rooms -- replacing real people with their electronic representations.
And face to face, even with those folks you don't groove to can be helpful in
keeping you grounded and open to diversity. I think about high level
politicians who have done their own shopping or walked through a mall or a
walmart in decades. I saw them close all the on ramps to loop 360 so the
President (B.C.) could get across town to a dinner in Westlake, and I
thought: Shit, the traffic jams that make me batty are completely alien to
his universe.
But my initial point (the I. is my B.) was that the internet might be taking
on gendered functions, enabling the former performers of such drearydreck to
move on to bigger projects.
Susan
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