How easy is it to directly contact someone with today's internet? Surprisingly hard.*
One of the most intriguing phenomena to me is how incredibly hard it is to contact someone privately with today's internet. Because users will be flogged with 'a thousand emails', valid or not, or with horrific spam mail, most users rarely place their personal email addresses online. It used to be that one could easily find someone's email address by simply writing in their name and an "@" sign; their email address often popped right up. Today, that is a nearly impossible feat, either because of user behavior or because of conditionalities of search engines. Users might write out their name in an uncommon fashion as in 'bob at page dot com' or simply place an image of their actual email text address [image: [email protected]].
We are all connected yet unreachable at the time. Privately that is.
Yes, I know. There is social media: Facebook, Google Plus, Twitter, and the likes. But they are so... problematic for many reasons. One key reason is their lack of privacy. If you want to get in touch with someone to initiate a private conversation, you have to do so in a very public manner (Twitter). There can be the case that many persons start social media pages, yet never follow up on them for whatever reason; they become eternal ghosts, present but unreachable (Facebook). But perhaps the main problem with contacting someone via a 'social media page' is that in order to do so, one will have to join the organization (Googel Plus). Social media pages act like walled gardens, and while inter-communication might be easily had between members in that community, they are 'closed off' to non-members. If you don't want to join the group for whatever reason (it strengthens the hegemony of said groups), you are out of luck with contacting that person.
We may observe that the internet creates a particular set of social dynamics that are truly unique in human history. For the first time in the history of the world, you are (in theory) 'exposed' to the entire world. This can be a good thing, and it can be a bad thing. Given human nature what it is, it is much more often than not a bad thing. So, while in theory, the notion of like-minded individuals sharing common interests being able to meet sounds like a good idea, in order for this to actually work, there need to be a series of social meshes in place that screen out potentially harmful individuals. Anybody who has ever run a webpage knows that the internet is far from being the land of illustrated individuals, which it once was during its very early beginnings.
Incidentally, it is curious to note that some academic institutions similarly provide 'chat accounts' to all of its members (students and faculty) yet do not offer universal directories of all participants, providing a serious hindrance to 'free' and 'cross-pollination' between its members. In China, this would be identified as a trait of the repressive regime. If the institution has inherent structural weaknesses, it will not be in its self-interest to provide such guides, creating the opportunity for the finding common cause of complaints from that very institution. This would, of course, be in the institution's best interest over the long run, but given its lack of control over the procedure, these tend to be undermined.
It can be pointed out that the paradoxes of unreachability in a connected world is not new, strictly speaking. Whereas old Ma' Bell traditional telecom had community monopolies, they also provided phonebooks identifying each and every caller to their telephone in the system. This allowed for the sort of organic points of contact I refer to, and was present since its very early days. The ITT in Puerto Rico from very very beginning had telephone books which today seem quaint for their rather small size, but which truly unified the island in a manner unfathomable nowdays. Ironically, with the emergence of cellular phones which were not tied to any particular location, the phonebook disappeared. While mobile telecommunications drastically increased the number of persons with a telephone, it became much harder to contact others because of the impossibility in identifying their actual phone numbers. It was perhaps in the 1980's when the the phenomenon of 'hidden in a cloud' began to emerge.
One contributing factor is obviously the problem of scope. As the number of persons connected to the internet drastically increases, the issue of 'too many points of contact' emerges. The Dunbar number points out that the total number of valid contacts a person can establish is 150 persons, with 1,500 being the total number of persons an individual can readily recognize without any assistance. Even if we presume the ideal absence of 'computer generated spam advertising', there will always the the case of too many persons trying to contact one individual with today's internet, and thereby flooding an individual's email address; not allowing that individual to appropriately answer each and every personal message that was sent to them.
This problem is particularly acute with regard to 'public figures', given that their social, political, or economic prominence drastically increases the overall range of awareness of their person. If President Barrack Obama were to give out his personal email and or phone to the world, he would quite literally be unable to govern if he were to seriously take the responsibility of answering each and every email and/or phone call. Imagine any public figure, and you will clearly understand the strange conundrum of being known yet unreachable--precisely those very figures whose key job is to be 'in touch with the people' given the public offices they hold. The dynamics are staggering and truly overwhelming.
The problem is scope is also time-dependant and contextual, arising during times of crisis and stress. During emergencies--Hurricane Katrina or any number of natural phenomena you can imagine--even if we presume that telecommunication grids are still functional (often they are not), these tend to be overwhelmed by a massive number of calls to emergency services. It is the same problem as that of a public figure, but at a broader social scale: the emergency phone basically becomes subject to what can be defined as a DOS attack ('denial of service' attack). We could suggest here that the same solutions which have been found to DOS attacks be also applied to 911 telephone numbers, via the use of DNS IP- VOIP handling.
DOS attacks in this sense might appear to be new, given that these tend to be composed of 'computer to computer' attacks. The subject in its technicalities is complicated, but in the essence they consist of 'botnets' focusing on a particular server. (Too many queries per second are made of the server, leading to a server shut-down.) The are really symptomatic of the inherent vulnerabilities of telecommunication systems, both its virtue and vice of interconnecting all individuals in a given geographic region. In their character, they even resemble the same problems that existed in India during the 1970s. India 'modernized' its telecommunications systems with ITT's Pentaconta central office units, which were able to handle large amounts of calls at low fees. However, the Pentaconta system was designed with 'Western communication patterns' in mind, specifically that one particular phone would only belong to a small residential unit consisting probably of 4-5 individuals. Yet, because of India's poverty, the few telephones that existed were constantly being swamped by hundreds of individuals in their neighborhood--leading to an 'analogue' DOS attack on telephone exchanges that readily knocked down city-wide phone systems.
The inability to directly and privately reach someone via email thereby is symptomatic of what is the 'best' and 'worst' of the internet: 'instant communication'. While we want to be free to explore the world, we do not want to suffer the true costs that such communication entails. Isolated islands as social media websites help to curb some of these effects, but they can never be entirely eliminated. And, as mentioned before, with said 'security' comes at a loss of true and genuine new links between 'like-minded individuals'.
It is certainly bad to throw out the baby with the bathwater, as the Texas saying goes.