Connector Field Notes #5
Home friends abroad
What are the chances? A friend told me recently that she and another friend realized they would both be traveling to the same city at the same time. Even though they see each other often at home, they're planning to meet up while they're overseas. They could have just said "maybe I'll see you there!" but instead, they're planning it.
It got me thinking about how to feel connected in a new place, even if you're just visiting. You can seek out people you know who live there, or local chapters of a community you're part of back home. And if you find out that a friend who doesn't live where you're going just so happens to be going there too, you can create a shared experience!
They're turning a coincidentally overlapping trip into an opportunity to make a new city feel more familiar, and to create a unique touchpoint in their friendship.
Is listening digital?
Headphones in, world blocked out, walking or at the gym- this is an individual experience. Music playing out loud in a restaurant or even at home with other people- this becomes a shared experience.
You can dance to music, with a partner or in groups. You can share memories of music rooted in time and place, a soundtrack shared across your generation. There are the songs of middle school dances, a song that makes you think of a particular friend group, a song that has a shared meaning with someone else. You can enjoy live music with friends and fellow fans.
Music can be an interesting in-between when it comes to the question of digitally mediated experiences, in a way that highlights how technology can both facilitate and hinder connection and shared experiences. Music falls in the in-between because it usually requires some kind of technology to listen to it, but it's focused on that auditory sense rather than glueing our eyes to a screen.
The physical world
We have a puzzle in progress in the middle of the floor. It feels like a very slow moving activity compared to our digital world of instant reward. It also fully occupies two senses that are usually wrapped up in technology: visual and tactile. If you're working on a puzzle, you're not scrolling on your phone.
It's grounding to reorient ourselves to the physical world, to balance our existence in the digital world with things we can engage with in 3D. Is the key to occupy at least two senses in the physical world? Is that how we stop ourselves from doing things like scrolling on the small screen while watching a bigger screen?
We used to put up away messages, and now we never leave the online world long enough to need one.