Displacement and Complementarity in the Slipstream

Hong Kong.
The second speaker in this session at The Internet Turning 40 is Sharon Strover, who also highlights the amount of personal information which is being shared as a matter of course by many Internet users - at its extreme, by 'life streamers' who deliberately enmesh the virtual and the real and publicise as much of their everyday activities as is humanly and technologically possible.

She suggests that in our understanding of the Internet, techno-centric approaches continue to dominate, even in spite of the push to understand technologies as socially shaped - and she suggests a new metaphor, the slipstream, in which one object is travelling in the wake of another, expending relatively little energy (and indeed, in doing so reduces the aerodynamic drag on the leading object, allowing it, too, to move faster). The Internet slipstream underscores the possibility of a seamless communicative self, located simultaneously in multiple communication environments - it highlights the nimbleness of multiple communicative activities.

Sharon highlights displacement theory here: displacement is often focussed on time (time is finite, and one, new, use of technology therefore displaces another, older one), but can also be understood from a financial perspective (as available money for technology use is also finite); other scholars have suggested a social displacement (where use of online media displaces face-to-face interaction) or emotional displacement (where we become more attached to online connections and neglect our offline relationships).

However, that perspective is ultimately limited: new technologies and uses may instead complement or augment existing activities. Here, the observation is that 'the rich get richer' - well-connected individuals on offline life will also be well-connected online, while those who are already lonely offline may not make many new friends online, either. In a ubiquitous environment, a clear distinction between online and offline may no longer make any sense, anyway. Indeed, such complementarity is most pronounced for users who have both high mobile and desk-based usage, of course - those with low mobile and high PC usage, or vice versa, do most likely experience displacement.

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