How Apple and Google (and others) killed the random interactions

After I wrote the post about the global city, I wanted to look a bit further into this idea, so I googled up, “What makes a city great” and read some of the articles that Google found for me. They were not all in agreement about what makes a great city, but there was one thing that seemed to stand out as the most commonly mentioned: A great city is a city that encourages random interactions between strangers.

And then it hit me, that this is not happening anymore.

I mean, not that if you go on the wide sidewalks of New York City, or wander on the bank of the Seine in Paris, or go to the beach in Tel Aviv, for example, you will not encounter many strangers, but when everyone have their faces stuck into their smartphone screens, you can't expect much interaction. Now I know that lamenting about that has already become a cliche, but I think that there is a point here that is still often missed.

Because you might argue that OK, so people may not be interacting with strangers in real life public spaces anymore, but they are interacting with other people online. This is what they are doing when their faces stuck into their smartphone screens, right?

Well not exactly, or in the context of this discussion, even not hardly so.

I've been online, if so to speak, since the late 1980’s. That's even before Israel was connected to the Internet. My first cyber experiences were on a network, called BITNET, that used to connect the mainframe computers of academic institutes around the world. BITNET was connected to the Arpanet's backbone thought, so we had access to the Usenet forums system and to the IRC (in case you don't know, that was the Internet Relay Chat). Everything was text-based back then, and there were no search engines or push recommendations. In these primitive conditions, random interactions were a great and important part of what was going on, and it showed in all kinds of ways, and I am not going to be more specific because I have a wife and children now.

Now, I am not saying that I wish the Internet would stay like it was back then. Of course all this amazing advancement, thanks to the creativity and hard work of many good people, created a revolution that did allot of good in this world. But perhaps, the thing that went wrong, and made so many people dismayed and angry about this revolution, is that it all became too planned and expected. Apple, Google and the other giants killed the random noise, the unexpected human encounters, not just in cyberspace, but because the lines became so blurry, in the real world too. The result of this world in which everything is obtained by pointing and clicking to get what algorithms choose for you, is a generation of people who are divided into tribes of like minded peers, and find it very difficult to interact with others, who have a different stance than their own.

Since the internet power players profit from every interaction they mediate for us, those interaction represent what is best for their quarterly profits. This is not necessary what is best for us. What is best for us is often sub-optimal and unexpected. Something certainly has to change in the way the Internet works for us. But even more than that, maybe we should simply go back to spending more time in the real world, for example, walking down the street and smiling at strangers.