I was never a luddite. When I was eleven, my parents acquired a 14.4 modem; I quickly created a Hotmail address in order exchange email with my friends about our Magic: The Gathering strategies. From then in middle school and onward through college I, like others my age, managed to develop internet-based “habits.” My freshman roommate and I would instant message each other rather than turn around from our respective computers. I experimented with, and abandoned, LiveJournal and Blogger. After college I worked for a legal consultancy that advised the makers and distributors of online advertising on data privacy and opt-out requirements. Literally years of my life have been spent in front of—increasingly thinning—screens.

This came to a crashing halt two-and-a-half years ago when I joined the Peace Corps and ended up in Turkmenistan. As far as the development of telecommunications networks is concerned, Turkmenistan ranks near the bottom of the heap, about where it does (perhaps this is not unrelated) in terms of human rights and press freedoms. The country’s current president, Gurbanguly Berdimukhamedov, at first refused to believe Jay Katzen, Peace Corps’ Eurasia Regional Director, who, meeting with the then Health and Education Minister, told him that there was better cell phone service in Sub-Saharan Africa. Berdimukhamedov later admitted the truth of this statement and since becoming president in February 2008 has taken some steps to ease access to cell phones and the internet.

There were few improvements during the time I spent in Turkmenistan, although I have heard, since my departure in August, that coverage is improving. In the town in which I taught English, however, there was no internet, and cell phones generally failed to get a signal, even though people began to buy them in 2008, claiming that if they stood on a roof on the edge of town between the hours of seven and nine pm they could receive text messages. I hadn’t brought a laptop with me, and while the school at which I taught did have a computer, I found little reason to use it. Occasionally—when I could afford it, and had a day off from school, and when the roads weren’t closed—I would travel the seventy-five kilometers to the regional capital, where, at the local offices of a NGO, there was semi-functional and free internet access.

Admittedly, I did still occasionally type things and send emails. I even taught basic HTML to a group of students who are unlikely to ever put it to use, as much to refresh my own memory as to provide them with an applicable skill. What generally ended, however, were references to the internet, cell phones, computers, downloads and online profiles in everyday conversation. The infinitum of arcane concepts that had once, to some degree, infected my interlocutions went unused. The verb ‘to google’ dropped out of my vocabulary. Another volunteer had brought a laptop, which, pre-loaded with WorldBook Encyclopedia, more or less became the regional resource for all knowledge. Rather than coining new verbiage for WorldBook searches, however, we instead developed a strange flapping of the hands to signal the strangeness of the act.

After two years in Turkmenistan, I spent the next six months in Tajikistan and Kazakhstan, where I was able to use the internet to some degree and where I purchased—and spoke on—a cell phone. Notwithstanding this increased access to telecommunications, my discussions on such topics remained limited. It’s not that one is unable to speak about sotovie svyazi, or odnoklassniki, or sms-ki in Russian, or Tajik, or Kazakh (there’s a lot of overlap in technology vocabularies). I simply found that my conversations rarely, either with expatriates or locals, encompassed these topics. I might have just emailed Moscow about a DHL shipment, but what I was really concerned about was how to move that shipment hundreds of kilometers on the nearly impassable road to Khorog.

T

iPods were already fairly ubiquitous when I left New York City. I didn’t own one at the time, only acquiring a Nano a year after arriving in Turkmenistan (admittedly a complicated procedure). Having returned to the city, and at times still earbud free, I can’t help but feel that something has changed in the urban conversations I hear. Today on the subway I overheard a conversation about Facebook status updates, and walking home from the station, someone was talking on their phone about an iPhone app. A friend complained recently at a party that she had been unable to find any information on Google about a high school student she was supposed to tutor for the SAT. This is actually a fairly constant background to conversation, and one that I now find confusing and hard to approach. I recall, sort of, being engaged in these discussions. I don’t recall their frequency being quite so high.

Perhaps something has changed in the past two years, something that I missed out on by being outside of what is generally considered the civilized world. It now seems that our virtual forms of communication—by which I mean our online profiles, blogs, text-messaging, consumption of information-based goods and so-forth—have begun to invade what were previously non-virtual communications, by which I mean conversation. We discuss text-readers (“iPod Touch capable? What formats of text can you input?”) at a bar, Facebook’s “wall” while commuting (“I saw that Jimmy—you remember Jimmy, he had that blog, but anyway, he wrote on Sarah’s wall that…”) and email just about everywhere. Blog commentary goes without saying.

To some degree this blurring of online and offline communication is inevitable. People have long talked about phone calls or written correspondence, often going as far as to shape their hands as if they were clutching a receiver or writing utensil. Conversations have always referenced previous conversations, and whether the process is currently one of typing, or texting, or posting information, what it all remains, at heart, is a conversation, and thus able to be referenced in future conversations.

Yet the conversations I now overhear, or that is, notice—as I likely overheard and failed to notice before—hold a character that seems in some way different from those referencing a phone call. Take reading. I assume that in the past, one might simply have said, you know, I was reading so-and-so’s book, and then continued on with whatever the point of their comment might have been. At this point, conversations about something that has been read might include “I was reading x on my iPhone via this text-reader app I downloaded” or “Oh—I read that on my Kindle” or “I read excerpts of that on y’s blog” or “I bought that book, but only started reading it.” The options have expanded to the point where the actual process—not the content of what is being referenced, but the process that leads to that content—becomes half of the conversation.

This process-talk is pervasive and permeates widely. At a restaurant I noticed how, waiting for a friend to arrive for dinner, an impatient man was able to determine, via Facebook, via a Blackberry, that the friend was ‘online’ and therefore at home—in Queens—rather far from the restaurant. A young woman, discussing her recent purchase of an external hard drive, noted how she had ‘looked some things up online’ but remained somewhat clueless about the differences between various models. The content here—that the friend wasn’t arriving, that this woman had purchased something—is obscured by the process of information access. In some way, that process-talk becomes the content of the conversation.

T

As Nastya, of the Ukrainian hip-hop duo Potap and Nastya, asks Potap in the song Ikra—wouldn’t you want to go back to the way things were before, simpler as they were? No, Potap replies, it just seems that before, everything was vkusneye, somehow more flavorful.

Perhaps nothing immense has changed, and that this was all happening before; I have difficulty parsing out what has changed externally, versus what has changed in me internally—I’m sure that demographics haven’t radically shifted in NYC, and yet I notice the Spanish being spoken around me far more today than I did before leaving the states. I personally do remain in a state of transition, yet in addition to the constant use of English, find this process-talk strange—and the sense that the methods of information access, in addition to the information itself, is now content worthy and acceptable to become the topic of a conversation difficult to fully engage with.

This may also be a transitional communicative period for many Americans, as people adapt to the myriad options available to them and the blurring of their online and offline communication channels. It could be that once, maybe five or ten years from now, everyone simply accepts this overlap and the ways in which the line between the two has been undermined, that such process-talk will fade from conversation. Or it may be that the processes will continue multiplying and process-talk will simply remain part of the modern vocabulary.

Before speaking with Jeff Bezos on a recent episode of The Daily Show, Jon Stewart remarked that, “If you like our interview with Bezos, you’ll also like our interview with the founder of Craigslist—just something that our computers dug up.” This was, presumably, a joke. It is, however, only funny in reference to the process behind the statement, the process of contextual advertising targeting that would underlie such a claim and this reference to Amazon’s own ad targeting. The audience didn’t seem to catch it. We’re still adapting to new flavors.

—Isaac Scarborough

Techné editor and contributor Isaac Scarborough was a US Peace Corps volunteer in Turkmenistan and has written variously about Central Asia, online marketing and political theory.