Ant-e-Social

When I first spent an extended period of time in Central America during the late eighties I got to know a retired engineer from Dundee in Antigua who used to get the bus to the capital every few days just to pick up the British newspapers at the Embassy.

After my return there was a period between 1989 and 1994 during which we didn't go back to Guatemala and our only way of keeping in touch with events over there was by subscribing to the current affairs magazine Crónica which tended to reach the UK about a fortnight late each time.

In the Autumn of 1991 a friend of mine from the same apartment block in London came over and installed MS Mail for DOS on our PC so we could keep in touch via email. On New Year's Eve of that same year I had my first exposure to Compuserve and I can clearly remember the visceral sense of excitement at the possibilities that opened up that night.

By 1994 I was making my living as a sort of email consultant and it amuses me now to think how in those days we had to organise emergency meetings to figure out how to encourage the employees of the firm where I now work to use their email more!

On a personal level email was already our preferred way for keeping in regular touch with people we'd rather not see all that regularly on a face-to-face basis, but it would be a couple more years before we could begin exchanging asynchronous communications with friends and family in Guatemala (and one or two virtual-only chums too, a 90s social must-have.) Meanwhile, the news problem was had been comprehensively resolved by the Web.

This morning I posted a piece on my company blog about a session I attended last night in the offices of MSN in London. Windows Live Director Phil Holden had flown in to tell a select audience of denim and corduroy-clad geeks about upcoming updates to the platform and to formally initiate a process of ongoing engagement with key social media influencers.

I can however confide here that it worries me a bit that these days new features hardly ever give me the same sort of gastric flutters as that alcohol-fuelled Compuserve initiation.

Instead, for the past couple of years V and I have actually been trying to develop a more stealthy online presence, in part because when it comes to the goings on in Guate, being "always-on" is quite often undesirable. (It reached a stage where we had more blocked buddies on our Messenger clients than un-blocked ones: people over there would keep trying to get us involved in the most trivial of incidents with no appreciation of how the vast geographical distance between us would prove a source of great frustration.)

Perhaps synchronised complexity just no longer appeals in quite the same way. I've also drifted away from the line of work where these tools are endemic in the majority of colleagues' personal and professional lives (like iPods!).

I can't help feeling that the current crop of online portals create as many needs and anxieties as they once appeared to satisty. And that more often than not the best buddies you can find are actually the ones that are outside − or at least on the margins of − the system.

Of course technology has enriched my life over the past decade, but there's no doubt that it has also impoverished it on other, often unexpected levels , and as I get older and wiser I've had to start making a few compensatory adjustments.

V increasingly talks of simplifying things, cutting away all the stuff we don't really need, usually holding up to me the chilling example of my mother, whose latterday lifestyle has become almost exclusively stuff-focussed.

Individualisation, especially as facilitated by technology, can be like a stimulant. The more you have the more you need because eventually each new shot delivers a smaller and smaller hit. And the more you actively pursue your goals and self-image through the commodity culture, the higher the risk of long-term passivity.