Digital hygiene

How to survive under the onslaught of the Internet?

• It is generally accepted that we are dependent on the Internet, but doctors and psychiatrists do not consider this a diagnosis.
• The Internet is a form of evolution of human and machine relationships, a type of transhumanism. A person with a smartphone is an expansion of a person.
• A huge number of cultural practices are tied to the Internet, which are self -realization of the individual, and regardless. The Internet is an ecosystem, a kind of air of civilization.
• A big problem is the so -called "information bubbles in which the Internet offers people only a comfortable information for them. This leads to the atomization of society, network wars.
• In general, the Internet is a powerful means of socialization and individualization of a person, an instrument of identifying our differences.

Sergey Medvedev: In 2002, Zemfira released the album "14 weeks of silence", in which there is a song "Girl living on the Web." Then the very formulation of the question seemed to be news. Since then, we all have become such girls or boys living on the network. Indeed, network dependence and our immersion in a continuous digital flow 24 hours a day, 7 days a week became almost total. Details in the plot of our correspondent Svetlana Osipova .

Svetlana Osipova: By the beginning of 2018, more than 87 million people over 16 years old used the Internet in Russia. Studies have shown that adolescents spend about nine hours a day on social networks. News, friends, work, music, games, study - everything is now on the Internet. E -sports is actively developing on the network. In 2016, in Russia it was recognized as an official sport. Today is a person in touch 24/7. And for someone, the Internet becomes an endless opportunity to obtain information and optimize work, and for some-a drug, a monthly need, and sometimes even a source of stress. The answer to the question of how to find the middle, harmoniously use a new resource and receive more than to give, experts have not yet found.

Sergey Medvedev: Our guest is Oksana Moroz , associate professor of the Moscow Higher School of Social and Economic Sciences , and Catherine Arya , teacher of the Russian Academy of National Economy and Council of State .

Internet addiction ... We are not talking about oxygen dependence, and the Internet is a variety of oxygen, at least it is an external thing towards us. You can depend on drugs, on alcohol, as on an external essence in relation to a person, and the Internet has already ceased to be such?

Oksana Frost: both doctors and psychiatrists who worked on a new classifier, abandoned the idea of considering Internet addiction to a relevant and adequate diagnosis. Firstly, there are no repeated research results that prove that a person really has some kind of psychological or physiological dependence in the medical sense of the word. Secondly, the development of the same e-sports proves that the Internet, its practices and tools are so included in our professional everyday life that, in fact, you need to really learn new digital literacy or media literacy, and not always try to explain the behavior of some users through medication. This is, in fact, stigmatization - to declare them sick, offer them to treat.

Sergey Medvedev: There are Internet clinics where they are treated with Internet addiction.

Oksana Frost: With the help of marketing, you can sell anything.

Ekaterina Arya: There are still astrologers and so on. We often forget that the Internet, gadgets, phones, computers are just a technology, piece of iron that a person gives certain values, myths, and in the end we get addiction to the Internet, fortunetellers online - "I will guess according to your profile." It seems to me that you need to a little demistify in itself the image of what a disease related to online, and all other meanings that are tied to it.

There are Internet clinics where they are treated for Internet addiction

Sergey Medvedev: I myself, although I know that I will not receive new messages, all the time I automatically check Facebook or some other messenger: what if something new came.

Oksana Frost: This suggests that you have some functional fatigue from inaction. We are used to the fact that we are doing something all the time. If we do not overload the channels with which we get information, we begin to frantically look for something in the device that all the time provides us with this information. I would like to be in good shape all the time, to be busy all the time.

Ekaterina Arya: It seems to me that the word "dependence" should not be used in relation to the technique of this kind simply because a huge number of cultural practices are tied on it, which can hardly be called dependence. All our functional behavior is formed on the basis of these micropols, habits, and so on. Dependence is still something psychiatric, it has a negative coloring that is not enough with the reality with which we interact. We really check mail, write letters, but this is, firstly, functionally, and on the other hand, what will we do in general in the 21st century in a global, super-connected world, where are a bunch of services?

Oksana Moroz: Susan Umbrella wrote about how the image of a fashion disease was constructed-there was tuberculosis, there was cancer, then AIDS, now Internet addiction.

Sergey Medvedev: You said that the Internet is iron. But the Internet is, first of all, people. We are now moving from the Internet of machines to the Internet of things, to the Internet of animals, in the end, to the Internet of people. The Internet consists of people. Is the Internet a continuation of a person?

Ekaterina Arya: Yes, but initially it is a wire, as well as a person - it is initially a stomach, brains, blood.

Oksana Frost: The question is that we are trying to understand by conceptualizing the word or Internet technology. If we are trying to consider this in some kind of futurological way or in a certain vein of transgumanism, then, of course, a person is very largely soldered not only with people, with other users, but also with the machine. And this spike will happen further, here it is not even necessary to implant parts of the car, it is enough that for someone a smartphone is a continuation of the hand.

On the other hand, the Internet is a continuation of some other social and anthropological practices, which used to be implemented before. This is some kind of evolution or revolution of the development of the relationship of technology and man. If we forget that not only a person acts in a adhesion of an Internet man, but also the Internet, cars, codes, algorithms, then this will be radical anthropocentrism. Then, of course, the biggest problem will be that we are all dependent on the Internet, and not that we use it wrong or that we have functional illiteracy in use. Or the problem is not that people are connected to the global Internet, but how they are connected to it. In a conversation about addiction, there is always this Center. The worst thing happens with a person, but sometimes you should think that something terrible is happening with the car.

Ekaterina Arya: We do not see what the car is doing.

Sergey Medvedev: And a person with the Internet, a person with a smartphone is a new anthropology?

Ekaterina Arya: Why should we always look for something new? Why can't we see the continuation of all this? We are talking about dependence that people wander to the network, but at the same time we often forget that cultural practices are wandering into the network, gaining there, find updated incarnations. For example, the same machine learning, which learns to reproduce some masterpieces of painting and so on, is not new in fact-the same thing happens in a different space. It seems to me that this is rather some kind of expansion.

Oksana Frost

Oksana Frost: If you answer the question of what is happening with a person, then here again it all depends on what we are looking at. A person, from the point of view of some cognitive mechanisms that are inherent in him, may change somewhat. It is necessary to take not just people who at one time very hard and not very correctly called digital natives (conditionally born in the late 80s), but also different other generations, and see what is happening to them. You can say at a banal household level that people somehow begin to work in a different way, but this is also not new, McLuin wrote about this in relation to book culture. We can say that people have practices of friendship or some affective interaction. But here rather, we are not talking about change, but about development. Someone, for example, still loves to meet with his friends offline, and someone completely suffered friendship online. Are these subspecies of man different? Of course not. It’s just that this is the question of what the Internet makes public and open multiplicity of life styles.

Sergey Medvedev: That is, this is just a new digital form of sociality, and the sociality itself is the same?

Ekaterina Arya: You can even go a little further and say: why did we get that sociality remains sociality, provided that, for example, Facebook algorithms give us only a certain sample of the people on which we are signed? That is, we are a priori a little less social in the pure sense of the word, but are more connected with cars.

Sergey Medvedev: Here you can put a certain fork: the Internet is sociality, or is it the Internet? Indeed, the car feds us those bytes, the information that is pleasant to us and we need, causes us a sense of comfort, and in fact a person closes in his autistic bladder. All these information bubbles are antisocial things. The machine feeds a person with pink porridge, which is pleasant to him. A person does not come out of this doll, does not communicate, does not go to the wide world, does not substitute the face with the oncoming wind, does not study new people and concepts.

Oksana Moroz: I do not want to justify the creators of Facebook, but it seems that in 2013-14 they did a large study, which was devoted just to studying the phenomenon of digital bubbles. They said a simple and obvious thing: people almost always want to see socially close, acceptable, familiar outlines around themselves - so they are comfortable. Of course, there are those who want to substitute their face to the wind, but in general people want to be calm. Of course, there is a filter bubble, but a person in many ways drives himself there. Therefore, when we see that in our profile, in our tape there are only certain people with certain intentions and thoughts, this is an occasion to think about how much we are tolerant of the surrounding world, how much we allow us to penetrate our shell that are not very pleasant for us. From this point of view, social networks do not offer anything revolutionary except the tool.

Sergey Medvedev: Yes, a person was always signed to the newspaper that answered his political ideology, talked in a club with those people who are more close and pleasant to him. Indeed, the technology builds selectivity into a square, to a cube.

The Internet is such a mystical terrible thing that we will have to deal with in the coming years

Ekaterina Arya: Technology has a stable feature - this is something that a person uses as a mechanism, tools. In the presence of a huge number of algorithms, advertising, and so on, the entire huge scale of artificial intelligence and platforms, while at the same time, people completely happily agree to their own unsuccessfulness in this world. That is, they gravitate to ensure that the algorithms make decisions for them, so that they are really surrounded by pink porridge. Moreover, they do not have a sufficient level of literacy in order to understand that you can do something and get out of this porridge, and this is done for two minutes: the redone is quickly. The Internet is such a mystical terrible thing that we will have to deal with in the coming hundred years. A very convenient goal.

Oksana Moroz: When Trump was chosen, they made such a thing on Twitter: to the people whom the car associated with democratic views specially replaced the tape with the republican one. It had a shock effect. According to the results, many people were sure: it is very good that they live in bubbles. But the very result of this experiment showed that in fact there will always be this demarcation if people will be so distanced from what they do not like.

Sergey Medvedev: The question is, is there any benefit from the information that the Internet brings to us? Do we learn anything new about the world with the help of the Internet, or is it an absolutely consumer function?

Ekaterina Arya: I am angry for very functional and high -quality behavior on the network. The Internet, with all the knowledge base that he keeps in himself, does not end on Facebook, on the last news about who went where and who was photographed with whom. An example of this is the excellent exciting YouTube University phenomenon, where a huge number of creators gather, that is, those who create this or that content, completely free for those who watch this, teaching phenomenal things, starting from cinematography and ending with completely incredible languages. If we are not ready to use the Internet as a tool for creating any content, then this does not change the fact that this is a very constructive space.

Sergey Medvedev: Oksana, you have a lecture in which you are talking about the "Internet of everything." What is meant?

Oksana Frost: The Internet is a marketing concept that allows a particular company to sell various kinds of gadgets, to a lesser extent, in general, the idea of total inclusion as a norm. We can sell the idea of a technological network, to which, among other things, living objects are connected, for example, animals, as some desired and desired condition, and not as something that we should run away from, invent digital detoxification or digital shabad. Let us imagine that you are an adequate conscious user of the Internet, and you perfectly understand that you are very much tied to the use of appropriate technologies and services. You know what this ethical and other costs have. You probably know how to control it. Therefore, instead of feeling the effect of an impostor, when everyone is doing better than me, or instead of feeling that I am communicating with someone, but this is not the communication that I want, so I am lonely ... in order not to run like a protein, in this wheel, invent your technologies for refusing the Internet at some period of time: for example, do not answer phone calls or messages at the weekend, do not try to complete work tasks, overloading yourself.

This whole concept works great when we are talking about some incomprehensible user who is so robotic and rational that he always knows what he needs from people can always measure when he works and when he does not. But this does not happen to anyone, even with a person who has a cool time manager. Everyone, one way or another, experiences such sensations, but not all of them reflect them so much, and in addition, not for everyone this is part of some identification pieces. This is, first of all, such a wonderful marketing move, with the help of which you can bring a person to the idea: everything has become related to each other, everything is technologically mediated-get used to it, humble yourself and do something with it, and we will help.

Sergey Medvedev: This is very reminiscent of environmental concepts - everything is connected with everything. That is, in fact, we can now describe the Internet as a new environmental environment, respectively, there should be some laws and ethics of human existence on the Internet.

Ekaterina Arya: This is a whole ecosystem. The smallest action in it has its consequences. When we talk about a person and about the Internet, as a tool or mechanism, we forget that a person does not always realize what influence these technologies have a living. Actually, cases with some overload, with the need for digital detox are largely connected with the inability to distribute their own resource. There is some incomprehensible image of a person in a digital environment that manages everything, does everything right, does not infuriate anyone, all the deadlines are observed, all the norms of communication work as it should. But this is unattainable - this is nonsense.

Ekaterina Arya

Speaking about dependence or overload, we forget that everything always depends on the person and on the decisions he has taken. The decision that you would be overloaded was made by you when you did not turn off the computer at ten in the evening or explained to your friends that you were a little tired, you have a headache. This, on the one hand, is a conversation about the personal boundaries that a person builds in a professional and even simply in a social sense. On the other hand, we are always online - we want to do more and better, because we are all over the review. Therefore, you will definitely read messages, even at two in the morning of Friday.

Sergey Medvedev: Do I need to immediately answer a message? Wherever you, even driving, came a message - you need to answer right away.

Oksana Frost: for example, I do not need.

Sergey Medvedev: People complain: even if you woke up in the middle of the night and you received a message, you write the answer.

Оксана Мороз: Потому что иначе это выглядит как некоторое неуважение к собеседнику. Это старый коммуникативный этикет. Но поскольку мессенджер – это пространство отложенной коммуникации, то нужен какой-то специальный цифровой этикет, с помощью которого можно как-то рационализировать эти отношения. Есть корпоративный этикет в рамках каких-то компаний: сколько дней или часов отводится на то, чтобы ответить на письмо делового характера, когда имеет смысл писать сообщение, когда запрещено писать письма. Во Франции в свое время один из профсоюзов добился того, чтобы начальство штрафовали за рабочие письма после окончания рабочего времени или в выходные.

Мессенджеры, если они не корпоративные, это все-таки не рабочее пространство, поэтому здесь невозможно установить корпоративные правила, здесь правила устанавливает сам человек. И если мне пишут сообщение в два часа ночи, а я на него не отвечаю, то могу объяснить человеку, почему я не ответила, или объяснить, почему он не прав, что он мне написал, или оставить это без внимания.

Екатерина Арье: Интернет – это же еще потрясающая штука, которая позволяет человеку наконец снова стать субъектным, выбрать собственные каналы получения информации, создать что-то, выстроить собственные границы. В интернете можно сказать, что я не беру телефон тогда-то, я не отвечаю в мессенджерах по работе.

Сергей Медведев: Мне приходило в голову, что субъектность появляется в тот момент, когда тебя нет в интернете. Я – человек, довольно много пишущий в Фейсбуке, и есть некая группа подписчиков, которые привыкли, что от меня ежедневно в определенном количестве исходят некие сообщения. Когда я пропадаю, я начинаю получать сообщения: не случилось ли чего, а почему вы не пишете? И тогда я неожиданно начинаю понимать, что я существую.

Екатерина Арье: Вы, получается, как Первый канал: без новостей в 9 часов невозможно лечь спать.

Оксана Мороз: В этом и смысл интернета: каждый может стать медиа. Интернет – это такая огромная и абсолютно демократичная площадка. Сколько ни устанавливай правил, в том числе и внутри Фейсбука, все равно найдутся способы их обойти. И только от человека зависит, насколько демократичность будет оставаться адекватной и релевантной.

Сергей Медведев: Давайте поговорим о различных стратегиях собственного пути в цифровом потоке. Оксана, в той же вашей лекции вы говорите и о цифровом детоксе, и о смешении. Из того технооптимизма, которым вы меня заряжали, я понимаю, что цифровой детокс особо и не нужен. Но тогда все же надо признать, что интернет токсичен, нам нужна детоксикация.

Каждый может стать медиа. Интернет – это такая огромная и абсолютно демократичная площадка

Оксана Мороз: Или что ты ничего не можешь сделать, кроме как просто выдернуть вилку из розетки. Соответственно, десубъективация: я не могу сделать ничего, просто изолируйте меня, пожалуйста, из всего этого пространства, может быть, тогда я начну получать настоящие эмоции, потому что все остальное – это фарш, колбаса из Фейсбука. Проблема этих стратегий заключается в том, что они пытаются быть генеральными. Есть разделение работы и частной жизни, есть их смешение, есть детоксикация, какие-то близкие вещи, и все они позиционируются как работающие для любого человека из любого социокультурного контекста, с любым профессиональным опытом, стажем и статусом. This does not happen.

Есть стратегии, которых, в том числе, придерживались компании – цифровые гиганты, позволявшие им задействовать относительно молодой персонал, вовлекать в постоянную коммуникацию, делать пространство лояльным, удобным, толерантным к их привычкам. Отсюда высокая степень экологичности, много видов дополнительной занятости по типу релаксации, и при этом ты не выходишь из офиса. Но это тоже не работает.

Сергей Медведев: Я был в европейском офисе Фейсбука в Лондоне, и в Яндексе то же самое – какие-то комнаты, где вы можете поспать, комнаты для переговоров, настольные игры, всюду расставлены фрукты, машины, которые бесплатно дают тебе чай и кофе. Ходят молодые счастливые программисты…

Оксана Мороз: Выглядит классно. Но насколько они счастливые? Где исследования, которые доказывают, что они стали лучше спать, у них уменьшился уровень депрессивных состояний? Идея была как раз в том, чтобы снизить эти абсолютно очевидные показатели. То есть это не была идея – давайте сделаем людей счастливыми по платоновскому типу, нет, это была идея – давайте сделаем людей более работоспособными и эффективными.

Екатерина Арье: Плюс ко всему, фрукты и игровые комнаты – это прекрасные стимулы по принципу собаки Павлова: все замечательно работает, и люди счастливы. Но при этом есть еще другая штука, которая доказывает, что это не работает. В принципе, мы говорим о тенденции генерализации как таковой. Генерализация – это обобщение базовых параметров, то, что мы можем представить, коротко, в общих чертах описать. Сейчас человечество обладает беспрецедентными возможностями по хранению и распределению данных. Искусственный интеллект, машинное обучение открывают нам новые возможности по выработке стратегии анализа и обзора того, что мы изучаем. Мы можем хранить эти данные и обращать внимание на исключения из условных общепризнанных правил. Вот это как раз оказывается важным, когда мы обращаем внимание не на то, что есть общие генерализующие тенденции, и мы в норме должны им следовать, а на то, что у каждого есть своя не норма, своя стигма, каждый по той или иной причине ненормален, и это тоже нормально. Это опять возвращает нас к субъективности человека в цифровой среде.

Сергей Медведев: Интернет – это средство подчеркивания различий?

Оксана Мороз: И воспитание привычки к тому, что все различаются.

Сергей Медведев: Интернет ли это дает? Мне кажется, это изначально дает общество. В интернете ты общаешься не с людьми, а с цифровыми аватарами, где все счастливые.

Оксана Мороз: Но достаточно уколоть человека или ему вляпаться в какой-то инфоповод, который ему не нравится, как вскроются невероятные глубины. И как раз в этот момент ты осознаешь, сколь глобальны бездны людей, с которыми ты общаешься. А это позволяет тебе узнать о незнакомцах или о полузнакомых людях гораздо больше, чем ты мог бы узнать раньше.

Сергей Медведев: В этом отношении интернет – продолжение нашей социальности, но с точки зрения обычной уличной социальности он не является десоциализирующим медиумом. Он учит нас тому, что люди разные, тому, что есть определенный этикет, нормы.

Оксана Мороз: Кроме того, интернет требует от конкретного субъекта колоссальной ответственности.

Сергей Медведев: Баланс работы и жизни, баланс интернета и жизни или их смешение?

Оксана Мороз: Я очень серьезно оберегаю свои границы и стараюсь не смешивать интернет и реальную жизнь не только потому, что я считаю интернет токсичным, просто я – асоциальный тип человека, который лучше пойдет куда-нибудь.

Сергей Медведев: Я думаю, очень хорошо, что мы имеем право выбора. Действительно, перед всеми нами стоит онтологический вопрос – что такое я? Я – это человек, отключенный от интернета, или я, наоборот – это тот, кто существует в соцсети, с моими слабостями, с моими стратегиями презентации, с моими всплесками, когда меня провоцируют какие-то тролли. Мы, слава богу, имеем возможность выбора.