TMTOWTDI

• This post is part of a series I am writing for a class on New Media. Some technical explanations may seem unneeded or lengthy, but I am writing for the benefit of a very intelligent but less technical audience.

Here I address these issues curtly and incompletely. Others have written at length on the topics here, but I wish to add my thoughts to the mix.

Although we often say this, we often forget it: life is all about balance. For everyone who takes advantage of the possibilities of the net, there is a constant dialectic: balancing time spent communication via the web with “real world” communication and activities, and also balancing participation and consumption.

It is so easy to use the Web to communicate with five, ten, even twenty people all at once, more or less comfortably–the web allows one-to-many and many-to-many communication easily and clearly. Email, especially as it is used in business, allows a person to dispense with the niceties of human interaction in favor of expedient, efficient communication.

In contrast, real world communication is much slower to handle gobs of people either all talking at once to each other, say in a meeting, or all communicating with one key person such as a CEO. It is also slower because the social niceties, in particular small talk, are more necessary for what our society defines as proper social behavior.

The same holds for teens, the group often both lauded and denounced for its embrace of the internet. Teens are lauded for their adaption to new tools, for embracing the modern paradigm shift in communications. Yet, they are denounced for the very social problems listed above: real world, vocal, physical interaction is reduced in favor of fairly impersonal means of communication. Certainly there is no doubt of the impersonality of text-based tools such as email and instant and text messaging, where emoticons are necessary to deliver the intonation of what is said.

Further balance is needed in mediating media consumption and active participation. I, for example, consume almost entirely through the web, watching below 5 hours of TV a week. Although these two types of consumption may seem different, both are generally passive–I simply consume and do not synthesize the information actively through utilizing it. Reading and discussing a newspaper around the kitchen table with parents or blogging about current events or your knowledge are, however, more active, participatory activities. In them, you are required to internalize, analyze, and reformulate the information for critical discussion. Doing only one or the other is not necessarily good–fully active participation implies a lack of relaxation in consumption while fully passive consumption implies a lack of critical thinking in consumption. Balance is necessary here as well.

Our modern communications tools are not leaving us anytime soon–heck, I would be miserable without the speed and efficiency of information consumption we have today. We can embrace all of these technologies, activities, and “traditional” practices and proceed to balance them for the best outcome for us.

Authors note: Shelly G. had me write this.