Thanks to the various people who popped me Google+ invite… I’ve really not known whether to jump in, and would appreciate any thoughts people have had who have made the switch or tested the water.

The obvious issue is this: have Google made it worth it? If you are going to switch, do you do so completely – and leave Facebook behind, or do so partially and have another bloody set of pages and messages to check?

I read Emma by Jane Austen recently, and there’s a lovely passage where one Mr Frank Churchill goes to pay a visit on Mr Knightley. Mr Knightley is out, which causes Mr Churchill to be furious as he’d walked there across the fields, and Mr Knightley hadn’t even left a message with his housekeeper as to where he was. Austen was writing in her own time, rather than retrospectively, but she brilliantly captures the experience of the vast majority of humanity over history: our inability to mediate our presence. Without telephones, with a very limited postal service and no immediately convenient form of transport, one simply had to take one’s chances with going to visit.

The problem with social networks is that all of that serendipity is taken away… and the end result is the opposite of serenity: a huge anxiety that we might be missing something or someone. So we keep on checking. Just in case.

If there was a way to integrate these various platforms into one ‘inbox’ (is there – will someone say) – or if there is a killer reason why it would be good to switch to Google+, then I’d love to hear it. Picking up a new technology requires time for inhabitation. The question always is whether it’s worth the time and effort to move house.

Really pleased to announce that we’ve sorted out three new dates for Apple events over the next couple of months.

The idea behind Apple is to get people thinking more reflectively about technology – whether that be digital culture or tool-use. Humans are tool-makers, and the technologies we use form us, just as we form them. As technology becomes more embedded in the functioning of our relationships, it’s hugely important that we think carefully about the effect it may be having on who we are.

The first Apple in this series will see Pete Rollins doing his only London date for some time speaking around the title ‘Despite Appearances, Some Things Are Real‘ and questioning whether our online personae are actually more ‘real’ than we are.

Details: 12th May, 7:30pm, free, at The Betsey Trotwood pub, 56 Farringdon Road Clerkenwell, London. Map here. Do spread the word.

The other two dates (same time and venue)

9th June – Manjit Kumar from Wired Magazine will be speaking on quantum mechanics, multiverses and the nature of reality.

7th July – Anthony Paul Smith from Nottingham University will be speaking on ‘Is the City a Machine for the Making of Gods?’

Spread the word, and look forward to seeing you there. Just exploring the possibility of Greenbelt coming on board and recording these too, so I’ll post if we have audio etc.

Very interesting conversation last night between Steven Johnson – author of brilliant books such as The Ghost Map, Emergence (for which I owe him a huge debt) and The Invention of Air – and Brian Eno – who defies description or categorization.

They covered a lot of ground over the evening, but perhaps the best line that I came away with was Eno quoting GA Cohen who said:

‘It’s not that socialism doesn’t work, it’s just that we haven’t developed the social tools to make it work yet.‘

Cohen died a couple of years ago, and I wonder what he would have made of the rise of Social Networks like Facebook, Twitter etc. Personally, I think he’d have been really interested in the potential that they have, and I wonder if he, as I did, would have mulled on that quote and wondered if actually socialism might become more realised with the improved social technologies that we increasingly have available.

I’ve been of the opinion that people all basically start out socialist, it’s just that most realise quite quickly just how impossible it is to put into practice, and turn more conservative in their middle years as they have children and look to increase their own wealth and security.

But perhaps a technologically-funded socialism might actually allow things to work a little more effectively. What’s clear is that if it ever is, it’s not going to be the perennially silly, ad-driven crap-stream that is the current state of Facebook. But here’s hoping.

My view is that while we do create tools, our tools do end up recreating us aswell. The internal combustion engine was a human invention, but its invention did have a profound effect on us too.

In his book Exclusion and Embrace theologian Miroslav Volf talks about creation in Genesis as a process of ‘separation and binding’: the water and the land are separated, humanity is bound in stewardship of the earth. Nic disagrees, but I think that this is a helpful metaphor for a good relationship to technology: we are bound to it – we cannot live without it – but we are also separate from it.

Now, using the ideas covered in the series of posts on ‘Bad Faith’, we might view this from another angle: our relationship to technology should have both facticity and transcendence, and it is when this duality collapses on either side that we see problems occuring. In a recent interview an Oxford Professor of Neurology expressed real concerns about the effect increased screen-time could have on our brains. Without practice at decoding the subtle and complex messages in face-to-face communication (nuance, tone, context, pheromones, gestures) our brains will perform worse in this area – and this could be a viscious cirle as embarrassment could lead to further withdrawal.

But, in my view, there is a parallel danger. By experiencing so many more relationships through media like Facebook or Twitter we risk collapsing the complexities of ‘the other’ into pure facticity: they become seen by us as no more than the sum of their status updates, and we also risk seeing ourselves in that way too. As Pete has pointed out, we are much more mysterious than that.

The danger works the other way too. Our status updates don’t mean nothing – they do communicate something of who we are, and to ignore them and claim separation from them is to collapse into pure transcendence – we are above all that.

Neither is true. We are separate from our social networks (virtual and ‘real’) but bound to them too. The art of living in technological ‘good faith’ is going to be negotiating the line between these two states, and avoiding the temptation to collapse either side.