The story of Western society’s relationship to the Internet so far is this: experience, and then ambience. For a couple of decades the internet was an experience a person had to seek out through physical parameters. You needed to be at a computer. That computer needed a connection. For most people these two parameters terminated in place: a specific place to use your computer, and a specific place for that computer to connect online—at phone modems first, and then broadband cables. In other words, for most of the last 20 years access to the internet has been filtered through technological and geographical barriers. If you didn’t have a computer, you didn’t have internet. If you had a computer but you didn’t have an available connection (or better yet, if someone else was chatting on the phone during the days of dial-up!), you didn’t have internet.
Those barriers were part of what made the internet an experience. You went online. Remember those commercials that used to run? “Hey kids, grab a parent before going online.” There it is: the verb going suggests a contained experience, one that could be anticipated, realized, missed, etc. You were either online or you weren’t. You were watching a movie, working, going to school, eating lunch…and then after that experience, maybe you would find time to go online. And then after you logged off you would do something else, until the next time you went online.
Thus the internet was an experience that was enjoyed, even depended on, yet also contained. But now the internet is no longer an experience. It is an ambience. The internet has few parameters to mediate it. It is instead the default mode on which most of us operate. The idea of “going” online is absurd. We are online. The internet is not so much something we go do as it is something we are. We are on Instagram. We are streaming music. We are reading the news. And we are doing it everywhere and anywhere, with no geographic parameters and only one physical mediation (a phone signal). Thus, the internet has invaded every conceivable social setting, every space and slice of time. The internet is ambient in the car, ambient in the airplane, ambient in waiting room, ambient in the office, etc. Ambience, not an experience.
This seems pretty significant to me. If technology forms and shapes us, then logically it follows that the more access technology has to us, the greater its formative effects. Technology that is mediated through place and time has formative effects that are more controllable or manipulatable: i.e., in the experience-age of the Internet, moving the family PC into the living room instead of someone’s bedroom undermines addiction and secrecy, but it also undermines the idea that I should have constant access. It undermines that nervous tick we are developing where if we read something good or see something funny we instinctively reach for our phones. The internet is perceived to be more important to our lives, not because it actually is but simply because it is more present.
Ambient-age Internet, however, does the opposite. It generates a low hum of anxiety and boredom as brains become dependent on the web’s neurological matrix of change and feedback. It recalibrate how we think, tangling thoughts into sub-literate knots. And it gives the impression of the greatness of minutia, as fringe ideas and people take advantage of our lowered epistemological barriers and turn themselves into memes. The experience-age of the Internet was not without problems, but while it lasted we at least remembered that this technology was finite and fickle. Walking away from the PC was a dose of reality. In the ambient-age, there is no walking away, and the doses of reality much harder to get—or want.
Letter & Liturgy 