Have you read
The Circle by Dave Eggers? I just finished and am still reeling a bit.The basic storyline is that Mae Holland gets a job at The Circle, this broad-reaching company based in California. If I didn’t know better, I would say she was working for Google, though Eggers states early in the novel that the fictional Circle purchased companies like Facebook and Google. So, as a reader, we have to assume that The Circle is bigger than those two combined.
Mae joins the company at a point when she is grateful for almost anything. Her last job was miserable and unsatisfying. So when her new bosses reprimand her for not participating in optional weekend activities, for not updating online groups with her daily (hourly? by-the-minute?) thoughts, she accepts blame. When her company installs an ever-expanding number screens at her workstation, with the expectation that she monitor each all while conducting surveys via her headset, she happily complies. She even agrees that sharing online with co-workers should be prioritized over family emergencies.
I find the world Eggers builds beyond creepy. And mainly because I think we already live in that world.
I am no techniphobe. I work in technology. I’ve been blogging for more than 10 years, sport accounts on Facebook, Flickr, Twitter and Tumblr, though my use varies widely. I sell things on Etsy, Amazon and eBay and make more purchases than I care to admit online. Through BzzAgent I share my feelings about various consumer goods. I used to use Instagram and briefly had a Google+ account, but was too overwhelmed by all of the feeds I was maintaining and routinely checking. With all of those accounts, I am continually aware of how much I share.
Online advertising makes it clear that no matter how careful I am, what I do is tracked. A recent hunt for specific snow boots resulted in ads for me on Facebook, Amazon and online searches all showing the same boots I had just been admiring online. Creepy! Through work and industry articles, I know that advertisers will say users appreciate ads that target them specifically. Maybe some users, but there are others of us who see targeted ads as an invasion of privacy. Or just an acknowledgement that there is no privacy online.
The idea of no online privacy, or no privacy at all, is a recurring theme through The Circle. So is the idea of sharing, or, I would posit, over-sharing. I see the value in reviewing products, much like I am reviewing this book. It helps other people make more informed purchases. It’s why I review purchases and sellers on Amazon. Why I bother to review things for BzzAgent (though free products are a big motivation there). It’s why I periodically join Angie’s List. I like keeping up with friends and organizations on social media. I do think things can cross a line, though.
If a person posts more than 10 updates a day on Facebook, I’ve likely unsubscribed to their feed. It starts to feel like spam. If I person tweets there every move, I stop following. If Instagram photos serve only to detail mundane details… well, who cares? I definitely don’t.
I also see all of this online sharing as being detrimental to our social skills, relationships and perception of self. I have plenty of friends whose kids I have seen / met maybe once and yet I feel okay with that because I’m totally up to date on their lives. Why call a sick friend to wish them well when I can post something on their Facebook wall at my own convenience and be done with the interaction in 10 seconds? Catching up in person is often awkward because there are so many “known” details from online posts. Not often acknowledged is that we only post online what we want others to know. So an in-person meeting that uses only online posts as the grounding for a conversation misses much of the nitty gritty details, the negative, the ugly facts we all have in our lives – the facts that you share with real friends but maybe not online ones.
Not too long ago I watched a (high school-aged) acquaintance freak out when they sent a text, saw it had been read but didn’t get an immediate reply. There was an expectation of immediacy. That same expectation was placed on Mae at The Circle. It’s weird to me. I mean, I like immediate gratification. Who doesn’t? But it wasn’t that long ago that when we called someone, we were just as likely to get an answering machine as them. Or that there was no such thing as voice-mail or an answering machine and you just had to keep trying until you caught the person at home.
There’s some spontaneity that is lost with technology as well. My mom mentioned to me that with cell phones, she knows that when she calls me she will always get me. In the time of landlines, when she would have called me, she might have spoken with me but she might also have talked with Wonder Boy. Now the two of them rarely speak. They still have a good relationship so this isn’t hurting things, but is it helping?
There are a lot of really awesome uses for technology detailed throughout The Circle. Eggers does a good job of presenting people with an alternate, but familiar, view of technology so that maybe people stop and pause and think about what they do online.
