How To Avoid Becoming a Turktistic

How to Avoid Becoming a Turktistic(1)

by Rick Jones

[People in a Cafe, talking. Not Turktistics.]

As legend has it, somewhere around 1988-1989, aspiring auteur and USC film student John Singleton approached rapper Ice Cube and said he had written a movie and wanted Cube as one of the leads. The movie was a semi-autobiographical account of his time growing up in South Central Los Angeles at the height of the gang wars. Cube laughed and said sure, call when it gets green lit. Two years later, Cube made his big screen debut as troubled gang banger “Doughboy”. The movie was a commercial and critical success making over 57 million dollars on a 6.5 million dollar budget earning Singleton a best director Academy Award nomination (first for an African-American director, also the youngest ever nominated), won the NAACP Image award, and was named by Chanel 4 television as one of the 50 movies you need to see befor you die.

[Ice Cube, the wrong Coors Light Spokesperson to **** with.]

Cashing in on this new “fad” Oliver Stone produced a movie based off the novel “South Central” written by LA school teacher Donald Baker, and directed by Stephen Milburn Anderson. The movie was a commercial failure grossing 56 million dollars less than “Boyz”. Not quite the gold mine. The film was lacking. Despite their research, a presumably decent novel, and a bunch of actors they surely figured were from “the hood”, it is incredibly difficult to accurately portray such a nuanced and particular place and perspective if you haven't lived there. Just because I can recite Wu-Tang Clan’s Enter the 36 Chambers(2) doesn’t mean I understand the Brooklyn projects. In short, Singleton’s movie had a soul, his. Stone & Anderson had a book they didn’t even write. “South Central” didn’t work, because no matter how much research they did, how many interviews they conducted, or how many “authentic” actors they cast from the Hollywood streets, they simply could not fundamentally understand a place they have never lived.

[Pictured, Boyz Not From the Hood]

This bring’s me to Sherry Turkle. “Alone Together” strikes me as a “South Central” type report of teh interwebz (3)(4). I want to be clear that I don’t doubt the validity of her research, take away from the time she spent, nor do I feel like she’s making false claims. I do think she’s missing the soul. The “we” she constantly refers to in the book seem to be drawn from a pool I am not from nor have ever really come across. In my Twenty plus years of surfing, the type of addicts (5) Turkle describes have been the exception rather than the rule.

She is 27 years my senior, and I will concede that she has spent a lot of time online. I do question whether or not she has lived her or just looked at it with though a researchers lens. I grew up with the internet. In fact, I grew up in the shift from letters to email. When I was 8 I had a pen pal, Mandi, I met through the “pen pals” section of (I think) Muppet Magazine.

[Her name is Mandi. Mebbe I shoulda kept in touch]

I have sent letters, emails, traded wrestling video tapes then dvds, spent thousands of dollars over the years exploring the technologies (6), have written for websites (7), had virtual sex with a virtual hooker (8), dated someone I met online (9), have posted on various message boards, and have logged countless hours in AIM, Yahoo, Skype, and other chat type places. So, with that as my resume, I offer you a suggestion on how not to become a Turkitistic.

Stop, You Probably Aren’t One!

Walking away from her book, I get the impression that the average internet user gets in constant fights on Facebook before logging on to Quake for a fifteen hour stint, then off to dinner where your soulless mother ignores you whilst playing Angry Birds while dad is getting married to his fourth Second Life wife, then it’s off to check your 500 emails before crying yourself to sleep (10).

[Dad, can I have the gravy... Mom... Don't make me get all Emo over your iPhone!]

In response, I conducted a fairly unscientific online poll. Through Facebook and two message boards I frequent, I asked people about their online habits. I received 24 responses. Fairly equal distribution of men and women, ages ranging from 22-37, with an outlier being my mom who’s age I won’t mention. Most people were students or people with “regular jobs”. Teachers, accountants, one unemployed, etc...

Given that the message boards were filled with internet obsessive wrestling fans, I expected to get at least one or two people who mentioned online gaming or Second Life. Turns out, not a single one played anything with regularity. Most people went to around 5-10 websites a day, spent a few hours shopping, reading goofy sites, answering emails, and then went about their day. The constant was Facebook. Most people acknowledged spending what they called “too much time” there. Some called it “wasting” time. Two people admitted it was was stressful. Although in both cases it wasn’t about being too connected, it was about keeping up with the technology. One male said, “I guess if it’s stressful at all, it’s because I don’t get Facebook. I feel like I’m missing something.” None felt as though it was a burden. In fact as one person responded, “Does the internet cause me stress? Quite the opposite.”

[

[Also a great song by A Tribe Called Quest]

In regards to friends, most felt that it brought them closer to those they knew and the casual friends weren’t that big of an issue. They acknowledge that it is a way of keeping in touch - or adding to- not a replacement for friendship. One girl wrote, “It really helps bring close people, closer..” Not surprisingly, rationale adults don’t use Facebook to call each other names or lie about who they are. They use it waste time when they want to avoid homework for a bit, tell their friends happy birthday, or if you're my mother, get to level 137 in the restaurant building game, then start over because there's nothing else to accomplish. And even in her case, she notes that it gives her a welcome distraction from her various illnesses, especially when she can't sleep.

Lastly, communication is key. In nearly every example in Turkle’s book, a simple face to face conversation would have improved the situation tenfold. It should come as no shock then that most people noted that they called and texted their closest friends the most. One old college friend observed that texting can maker her miss a the physical presence of an absent friend, but then noted that she then just usually called them and that made her happy.

I want to once again note that I am not trying to completely invalidate Turkle’s research. That’s ludicrous. I don't agree with the conclusions she came to, but she clearly did work. However, I do want to suggest that perhaps there is an alternate user than the ones Turkle monitored. The fact is of Second Life’s 21.3 million registered users only 54,000 play concurrently. Or, .0025% And these guys say that there’s this many 1,542,769,457 worldwide who go online. I was going to post a chart, but there was literally no graphic representation for the difference of how many people regularly play vs. what the rest of the net is doing. On a worldwide scale and in perspective no one is playing this game.

[When did a chart ever help anyway?]

I don’t claim to have all the answers, and I don’t doubt that some people take things too far. Television, PokeMon, drinking, and even the internet. When analyzing the choices we make on the web, it is important to keep it all in perspective. And old high school friend who’s gone through a number of tribulations over the years responded this way when asked about whether or not she felt isolation from people on Facebook, “FB both connects you and disconnects you. I've been isolated, FB definitely doesn't isolate.”

She may not be a Luddite, but Turkle certainly doesn’t appear to embrace technology. In the end, she reverts to old technology. Why? To share as feeling with her daughter she had as a child. How did this come about? By talking to her daughter. We have choices in life. What we really need to remember is that the choice is ultimately our own.

FOOTNOTES

(1) I define this as someone who is an internet addict, gets hundreds of emails a day, and goes to cafes but doesn’t talk. (See Turkle 155)

(2) And I can.

⁽³⁾ I’m disappointed she never used this phrase.

(4) Also, she never makes bad jokes, puns, or sarcastic comments. That’s like, 84.6% of the content on teh interwebz.

(5) She could have saved a lot of criticism addressing this more directly. Not everyone who drinks a beer is an alcoholic, not everyone who plays World of Warcraft has lost touch with reality.

(6) Well, mine and my moms.

(7) Wrestlingsucks.com. It doesn't exist anymore.

(8) Sorta

(9) She dumped me in Paris.

(10) Perhaps that's broad. But if Turkle can say, "We have moved from multi-tasking to multi-lifing" (160) then I can make my claim.