The People Hive vs. Us Others

Visiting a step-daughter in the hospital with her first baby, I'm watching the relatives and friends come and go in the room. Most of them are using their phones to text and twitter and send photos to each other. And, gradually, I begin to get a sense of a huge web of people connected electronically to each other, not communicating ideas but rather the personal trivia of our lives, back and forth, constantly affirming that they are here connected with us, all the time. All the time.

There is a group awareness developing more and more. It's almost as if the members of this huge web don't really exist as separate, independent people any more. Their very identities are tied up with what other people know about them, what experiences they share, their immediate perceptions of the world. I think of this group awareness as like that of a hive of bees, all independently operating but at the same time linked to one another and part of a group awareness that is not self-conscious. This "hive" awareness has somewhat tenuous boundaries of varying intensity, and is also linked to other hives of interlinked people.

The hives haven't been around long enough for us to know about their life-cycles, beginnings and ends (if they ever end). The hive members can't even consider not being linked up every moment, communicating with one another. Their communications are not really about what they're having for dinner or who is going out with who. They seem for the most part to be really simple affirmations of presence and existence. As such the content of their messages can be almost anything. People tweet to each other while in the bathroom, having sex, walking.. privacy doesn't matter when you are a hive member. Hive members tell each other and show each other EVERYTHING, and this unwillingness to have boundaries and privacy helps create the hive awareness and the blending of selves. I get the impression sometimes that hive members are all simply afraid to be alone and disconnected.

And some of us are individual bees, flying along and minding our own business, increasingly on the outside of the growing hives who know all about each other but who are hardly aware of the presence of us singletons. We don't belong. We don't share. We cherish our privacy and our boundaries, while the hives around us blend more and more with one another. Perhaps the hives will themselves develop an identity and boundaries of sorts, even a sort of limited self awareness. If one thinks of the members of the hive as nerve cells and the cell phones as axons and dendrites, it's clear that right now there is little difference between the structure of a solitary brain and the hive brain. The hive can even look out through the eyes of the cell phone and perceive things as well as hear them.

I hope the hive doesn't decide there is no room in the world for solitaries.