Rachel Dretzin is the producer-director and co-correspondent of the 90-minute Frontline special, "Digital Nation," which airs Tuesday Feb. 2 on PBS. It's a multiplatform examination of life in the digital age: from multitasking to education to virtual worlds and the military. Dretzin's co-correspondent on the film is media theorist Douglas Rushkoff, who's been writing about the internet for nearly two decades.
In filming at the IBM offices in Westchester N.Y., we were astonished to find the huge, slick office park almost deserted. We learned it was a byproduct of the fact that so many IBM employees telecommute from home or hotels.
In fact, now, IBM is shifting a significant portion of their internal meetings into virtual worlds like Second Life, giving their employees another excuse not to come into the office.
A couple of those employees told us they find virtual worlds like Second Life to be much more human and intimate than video conferencing or phone calls. A group of avatars sitting around a virtual conference table can share a joke, grab a virtual cup of coffee or divulge a virtual secret. By occupying the same physical space online, they say they feel they're regaining some of the communal office culture that's been lost to them. That is to say, they're solving the isolation modern technology has helped to create with... more technology.
Weirdly, I started having an analogous experience making this documentary. Working largely through google docs, g-chat, and even occasionally Second Life to collaborate with my team, I started to feel like we were curiously bonded by the technologies we shared. There were days when we never saw each other physically, while we forged a communication online that felt surprisingly intimate.
Here I was sneaking under the dinner table to text my editor about a scene change. Or passing notes via g-chat with a couple of co-workers during a really dreadful conference call we all had to be on. Or there I was making real-time changes on each other's drafts of scripts in google docs. (Google docs, I am convinced, is going to change the lives of filmmakers like me, but that's for another blog.)
It feels almost illicit using new technology to share tools that were once private. There's something about the brevity and the immediacy of communicating with someone while you're doing something else, with no one but the two of you having access to what you're saying. It's probably why so many affairs start with text messages.
One of the burning questions about the digital age is whether these tools make us more or less intimate. Sure, they isolate us physically, but could they also be starting to bring us together?
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