The compartmentalization of lifestyles

The most popular websites, apps, blogs, concepts, and ideas on the internet today are digitized versions of some aspect of our lifestyles. A very accessible example is Facebook: it's a framework that enables our social life to be brought to life virtually. Within that virtual space, we exchange comments and create and consume information that is very real. This goes for everything from email and chatting to enhanced organizations like Couch Surfing, where you can meet people in a city you're backpacking through willing to let you sleep on their couch for a night. Essentially, we're increasingly moving our lives online, distributing tasks that require a group effort among hundreds of people. The broad and broadening reach of the internet has made us aspire for more, and we're reaching those goals by crowdsourcing assistance.

At the same time, this tendency has highlighted how we compartmentalize our lives. Principally, if the mechanisms purely of technology were subtracted from the operational mechanism, what must be left behind is the digital blueprint of a social activity. To wit: The functionality of Facebook is determined by its developers on how well and fulsomely it is used by people, on how intuitive the social network they build is as a social network itself. Twitter is hinged on easing the process of stumbling upon bits of information, an activity that earlier was simply serendipitous, and hence has sped up the process of becoming aware. Instagram has done what Twitter and Facebook have done but only pivoted itself on picture-sharing. Pinterest has set up pin-boards online to complement the learning process and has increased our access to creativity and inspiration (and then Pinstagram did what you think it did). Posterous (broadcasting opinions), LinkedIn (professional networking), TED (listening to experts), Couch Surfing, WTFSIMFD (deciding what to make for dinner), Google Maps (knowing where people are/where what is), Circle (proximity to friends and social networks), and 9GAG (humour) are other examples.

The incentive to move our lives online is to enhance different aspects about it that are otherwise limited by space, time or both. We get to involve more people, increase the volume and frequency of information influx, drive engagement and, most importantly, globalize our lifestyles, enabling us to reach out to like-minded people anywhere on the planet on a variety of fronts. Axiomatically, because we're doing things faster and therefore doing them more often, those compartments that we've outsourced to the virtual free up space for other activities - in other words, more compartments. Parallely, some activities are also exhausted quicker, mostly because we overdo them.

This could be anything - for me, they're video-hopping, gaming, and blogging (the frequency's dropped because of the invasion of microblogging). If I had been doing them at a slower pace, perhaps they'd have lasted longer as hobbies, but now, by speeding things up, I can actually live more. Purists at this point would argue that all this matter of virtualizing a way of life has robbed it of its natural essence, that by speeding things up, we're losing out on a lot of... whatever.

The virtual way of life is fast becoming highly recommended, soon probably would be mandatory, too. The way of the web has been to breakdown and categorize what we do so that we may better understand how to improve them. Without such compartmentalization - which inevitably reduces the incidence of mano-y-mano events - life would definitely be more continuous and people-centric than contiguous and experience-centric. It's my personal opinion that concepts on the web are now moving in a direction that yields us the best of both worlds.