Connected doesn’t always mean digitally connected

Last Thursday I attended 4ip’s Recasting Power event in Birmingham. With presentations including Stoke’s grass-roots website Pits ‘n’ Pots and Nick Booth talking about Help Me Investigate and Big City Talk, a panel of politicians discussed with the audience what this all meant.

As is often the case it was partly inspiring and partly irritating and, as expected, the question of the Digital Divide came up. In short, if all this stuff is happening online, what about the people who can’t get online? This is an important issue and I wouldn’t want to suggest otherwise, but I think the discussion might be being framed a bit wrongly.

Social media tools (and let’s use that term for the sake of argument) are an effective way of connecting people but they are not the only way. Believe it or not, people were connected before the Internet. They were even connected before the telephone or the printing press. What these new tools allow is for people to connect in ways that are a bit different. Sometimes they’re faster (email vs the post), sometimes they’re more interactive, sometimes they bypass limits such as time and place, sometimes they allow a larger number of people to be involved in a thing, and sometimes they enable a smaller group of people to function better in a noisy environment.

The fundamental thing, that when people are connected to each other and are able to converse, share and build it leads to interesting things and contributes to our society (and I put no value judgments on that contribution), remains unchanged.

The other month I was on a panel at Caption, a self-published comics event in Oxford. Back in the 90s I organised stuff through the networks that had emerged around that scene, networks that were connected through the postal system. I thought about it and concluded that, actually, the only thing that had changed was the means of communication and the speed. The way that the community was connected, and more importantly the attitude and understanding of what that connectivity means, was still the same.

In the early 2000s when I was still involved in this scene it amused me no end that Mark Stafford, a cartoonist who was the very definition of digitally excluded (no computer access, no mobile phone, and no interest in having either) knew more about what was going on than anyone else out there. He was intrinsically connected to the right people in that scene. If you wanted to know what was happening you asked Mark. (He now has an old Nokia brick-phone and a friend does his website but I don’t think I’ve ever had an email from him.)

The thing about this offline connectedness is it’s pretty invisible, even to the people involved in it. I can look at my email and Twitter and so on and roughly map out my social network. It’s much harder for someone who’s network is based on walking around the streets and going to specific places regularly. Yes, they can identify shops or pubs or activities like walking the dog, but the nuances of their network, especially when you move past the friend-of-a-friend node, are hard to pin down. And I think because we’re comparing the two we assume the more visible activity is stronger and more important.

I don’t think either is stronger or more important. I think they’re both the same thing. For some people and some environments an offline network will be more effective. While for others an online network will bring rewards. Michael Grimes’ post Since using Twitter is a lovely example of someone for whom the offline network wasn’t working but the online one was and I see this again and again. For myself the reason I got involved in zines as a teen was partly because it allowed me to reach outside the limits of my offline network and find more likeminded people. I use social media to filter society, in a way, because, frankly, mainstream society doesn’t interest me.

Over the weekend I mooched around the Digbeth O’lympics which took place a various pubs in the area. This fantastic but quite low-key event was organised by people who are connected by those pubs was event had a different vibe. The Spotted Dog, for example, felt like a village fete with families and a BBQ while The Rainbow had a younger, more rebellious crowd. These were groups of people who were connected and had built up relationships around an offline environment. They are as constructive, inclusive and exclusive as any network online and, I think, can be understood in the same way.

We who spend significant amounts of our social lives online tend to forget that offline can be as if not more effective than online. While a decent web presence will often help these communities to function there isn’t always a need. The trick is identifying where the offline networks have degraded as society changes and where a need has emerged.