Saxophones & Honey in the Sun

Drastically changing an interface makes us uncomfortable because we are experiencing a simultaneous phenomenological change in both our environment and our digital selves. This hints at the possibility that, one of the few things that are truly different between online and offline social activity is that the environment and the self are entangled to the point that they are almost indistinguishable. Our profiles and desktop environments are extensions of ourselves, but the sum of these individual parts constitute a digital public space. This is another reason why the “end of privacy” debates are so ridiculous. Privacy is not disappearing, rather the relationship between the public and the private is being redefined along entirely new boundaries. It is also why studying social activity in digital worlds is so important- fundamental assumptions about the embodied nature of social activity must be called into question. To write off social media as unimportant or anything less than society-formation (for better or worse) belies a significant underestimation of what humans are capable of achieving. Namely, we are not just playing with digital toys, we are investigating new potentialities of what it means to be human.

—Our Emotional Attachment to Interfaces (via sociolab)