Or, In which two primary concepts of modernity are introduced, batted around, and compared, without much of a resolution to speak of.

In the year 2000, Stephen Hawking wrote that the "next century will be the century of complexity." Of course, he wasn't referring to political quagmires or environmental degeneration, although he might as well have been, because all that shit is getting brambly. "Complexity" is a theoretical term, referring to systems whose behavioral phenomena cannot be easily explained by any conventional analysis of their constituent parts. Buckminster Fuller called it "synergetics:" the output of a system not foreseen by the sum of its parts. In practical application, there's not much worth mentioning, except for the continually unprovable String Theory; in the sciences in general, the term "complexity" is a common metaphor, referring to those systems -- physical, biological, economic, even social -- that operate in a region between order and complete chaos. Despite its ambiguity, it has come to be a buzzword in many disciplines, spanning most dimensions of the socio-scientific-cognitive sphere.

Certainly, many things in our world are inherently complex: the delicate balance of the ecosystem, for example, or the subjectivity that shrouds history, not to mention what happens inside of your brain whenever you look at an object. The prevailing cultural ontology represented in the media, too, is of a world culture defined by its increasing complexity: as though instant communication and the floodgates of information thrust open by the Internet were the harbingers of a new, uber-complex world. Assuredly, the structure of our social lives is experiencing an overhaul; buddy lists, speed dial, and Myspace comments are the new benchmarks of a successful social life, while popularity is often measured by the size of one's email inbox.

However, it does seem a little facile to immediately peg the "Web 2.0" -- you know, that second-generation of web-based services that let users connect on a more peer-to-peer basis -- as a figurehead of a new sociality of complexity. We are easily fooled by social networking websites like Myspace and Friendster, which joyfully show us our place within a whole structure of seemingly intricate relationships; they lead us to believe that we are part and parcel of an intimately interconnected social fabric. In concrete terms, what we're really intimate with are our computers themselves.

Part of me thinks that the reason we decorate and coddle our computers is that we're priming them to represent us out there in the digital sphere, the same way parents dress and educate their children. They're really the ones we're interacting with, blindly anthropomorphizing. I think more people than we realize think their computer is watching them somehow; we're all guilty of speaking forthrightly to our machines. I myself used to tenderly pet and soft-talk my modem so that it would go faster.

Furthermore, although the web is increasingly a social experience, every person views it in a singular way. Browsers, operating systems, connectivity: all these things influence how we use the web, on phenomenological level. What with the fervent, and highly personalized, organization of one's own "Bookmarks" and "RSS Feeds," the community of user-based web sociality is dependent a profoundly personal relationship with the portal to it all: the computer itself.

In theirexcellent piece in the New Scientist, Liz Else and Sherry Turkle -- science columnist and MIT professor, respectively -- point out that although "we insist that our world is increasingly complex...we have created a communications culture that has decreased the time available for us to sit and think." What Else and Turkle bravely point out is that, despite our "breathless techno-enthusiasm," our newly web-based, socially-networked society often cuts short the full breadth of our feelings. Instant communication brings with it less time to think about the subject at hand; when a response is demanded by an instant message, it must be handed out immediately, in the form of a quick text-byte. We no longer have the time to have emotions; rather, we must negotiate our relationships through emoticons. On-always communications devices enable us to embrace the complexity of social connectivity, while simultaneously abridging the depth of our relationships. At least, that is the risk.

Turkle and Else point out that, yes, we are in the thick of a communications culture, but this isn't "a culture that contributes to self-reflection...self-reflection depends on having an emotion, experiencing it, taking one's time to think it through and understand it, but only sometimes electing to share it."

Perhaps what is happening is that we are struggling to find a sense of self which can fit into the emerging model of the "social network;" certainly that anthropomorphic codependency many of us experience with our laptops is evidence that we're becoming plugged into social existence through technology. The Internet -- the Web 2.0, whatever -- is entangling us in a new framework of complexity, one that will become quickly irrelevant if we prove to be incapable of importing the full nuance and depth of our ideas, feelings, and relationships into it.

Relevant Asides:

1) If you are a Universe reader (or "Universist") and live in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Tijuana, the greater New York Area, or (potentially) Toronto or Burlington, VT, you may be interested in attending a pretty inaugural multimedia/ Power Point tour in which I am in the throes. Subjects discussed above given life through song, light, video, the whole gamut. More information here and here. It would nice to get meta-textual with you.

2) I am in the market for a new publisher. Contact universe@urbanhonking.com for more information.