by tt stern-enzi

Tiffany Shlain truly confounded my expectations, and dammit, I’m as grateful as can be. Connected, the new DVD release from the filmmaker and founder of the Webby Awards professes on its front cover to be “an autoblogography about love, death & technology,” while on its back teases us with a series of questions – Have you ever faked a restroom trip to check your email? Slept with your laptop? Or become so overwhelmed that you just unplugged from it all? – that, even to a relatively social media hermit crab like myself, speak to a growing sense of the virtual community run amok to nuclear extremes. There’s no longer just a couple of voices echoing in our mental chambers; we’ve allowed a cacophony of chatter inside, which has blown the roof and the doors off the structure. And the thing is, we’ve done this to ourselves, so what do we do now?

I think I expected Shlain to examine that question, which, in hindsight, would have been the easy option. Instead, what Connected does is make the whole global macro affair terrifyingly and intimately micro. At its core, the film is a personal document and testament to the ties that truly bind us and make us human.

That image says it all, as it traces the evolutionary line of Man, from our hairy apehood to our current stoop-backed fingers doing the walking & talking schlumb period. We are now driven less by our basic needs – the food and shelter instinct – than our desires to have others reach out and touch/stimulate our egos. We crave connectivity, but we’ve forgotten what real connectedness is. We want to be “liked, followed, and friended” by our peers and we’re willing to do the same, if we have to, but these button options fail to replace “live” experiences of creating community and connection through loving and being loved in return.

Although some who know me would dismiss me as a hater of social media, that was not what I wanted or desired from Shlain or her film. I willingly embrace the complexity, the love/hate relationship that we all have with the technology that makes life today what it is. There’s a bit of the Matrix philosophy embedded in my conception of it all and I believe that Shlain appreciates this as well. We need these machines and the systems they support to reach our fullest human potential, but everyday, we carelessly cede control to them and by doing so, we are handing over our humanity to artificial intelligence. One can only hope that the sentient machines we are giving birth to will take note and be willing to share/return lessons and examples of humanity back to us, if we stray too far off the path.

There is hope though that we may not speed too far past that signpost. Shlain shares her personal stories – the decline of her father, a noted surgeon and thinker, and the complications she and her husband experienced while attempting to have a second child – and through these narratives, we are pulled back from the edge. These are the connections that imbue the virtual construct that we believe is so vital and necessary. It is not the other way around.

Interdependence abounds and thankfully, Shlain’s film shows us that rather than merely addressing my more simplistic upfront assumption. I am thankfully more Connected, as I should be.