Pokemon Go and Device-Mediated Relationships

Having spent the past several years hooked to social media and being a part of digital pop culture phenomena as they happened, it’s a new joy to witness trends on the ground. I usually get this with fashion but within the past few weeks it’s been Pokemon Go. I didn’t quite catch the bug, I played for about a day or two and found myself missing the main Pokemon games, and returned to those instead. But I do hear how others are affected by it, and it’s interesting getting accounts from people not in games or those who don’t usually play a lot of them.

Reactions tend to go two ways, the first being how players feel like Pokemon Go enables them to explore places they haven’t been, especially their own neighborhoods. The app places pokemon in parks and other public areas that seems to, by effect, help players engage with each other and those in their community. We’ve seen evidence of this with the various pictures and videos online of Pokemon Go gatherings or even the off story of philanthropic organizations using the context of the game to encourage people to do good. The Pokemon franchise itself is rather disarming and an almost universal symbol to those born in the 80s and 90s into video games, so it’s not a surprise that we can see such large-scale virality of this ‘bring Pokemon into real life’ sort of experience.

An other type of reaction is a natural outcome of the first, being that players rove neighborhoods feeling the effects of gentrification and most of these iPhone-wielding 90s kids remind locals of the threat to their livelihood. While it is true that Pokemon Go is getting people to explore and connect, the reasons for that are pretty thin, and potentially transient the moment people get bored of it and onto the next distraction. This is a common effect of gamification, where you might be able to get people to do things using games, but you probably aren’t going to make them care about those things, rather just the extrinsic rewards they gain by gaming the system.

There is this constant back and forth of what is ‘doing good’ for any particular kind of topic or action at hand. Many people are satisfied with any level of help or good, that is, if we can see things as helping in any sort of way, that should be enough to justify the action. On the other hand, much of what is being done as good is surface level and doesn’t get down to the actual problem, a constant chasing of the symptoms instead of curing the disease. If a more radical approach doesn’t come around, a problem will persist no matter how much Pokemon you slap on it. Are people joining together and being out and about because of Pokemon Go a good thing? Whether something is good or bad rarely extracts the value from what we are looking at, since we can see different answers depending on what we look at. Instead, looking at Pokemon Go as a product of our current condition rather than a moral story will help us understand how experiences like this change how we engage with our surroundings.

I’ve long been fascinated by how our experiences with relationships have changed with technology that facilitates connection and communication. From the dawn of ‘online friends’ to dating sites to social media to hookup apps, how people, especially young people with technology around most of their life, relate to one another has slowly changed. We’ve offshored more of our usual ways of linking to one another from offline to online, preferring the curation and swiping techniques to include people into our lives than the complete randomness of life. More people use social media and online dating than face-to-face methods of communicating. The change in economy and labor practices have a lot to do with this, with companies taking up more time of employees with the expectation that on-demand apps will do all the things they don’t have time for. How we interact with people online is typically different than in person, mostly documented by the amount of snark, hate, dick pics, and overall virality of entertainment that just doesn’t happen in purely offline relationships. These device-mediated relationships have users treating others like they are part of the technology itself rather than purely people. We can turn them off, block, left swipe, unfriend, ghost. The ease in which we can curate and the knowledge that there are so many people potentially available primes us to move through device-mediated relationships as if they were a part of an on-demand service, and attachment is thin since one can easily remove another from their experience.

Because of its pervasiveness and ease, people are relying more on devices to connect them with others rather to have their own intrinsic reasons to reach out to those around them. Again, there’s no value judgment here, but it helps show the messiness of what something like Pokemon Go and a lot of what I see in VR/AR reveal about contemporary problems like gentrification. Outside of the uncaring fashion of how real estate works, one of the major forces of gentrification is when people move to a new area and don’t engage with the community already present, only others who seem to be of their same class. So new pockets of people grow inside communities, attracting others like them but not integrating in what was already there. They don’t engage with their neighbors, or go to block parties, or do anything really but use the neighborhood as a sleeping place until a trendy cafe that alienates the locals shows up. Instead of seeing who’s physically around them, people use location-based apps that connects users of like-class and slowly converts an area from serving one group of people to another. Wanting to connect with others and using devices to do as such isn’t bad, it’s just an unintended side-effect is a distance from people not using the same services. Cultural biases slip into who we filter in these services and perpetuate inequalities bolstered by the in- and out-grouping of majorities and minorities.

This doesn’t even get into the design of said apps and services, the politics of those designs, and how cultural attitudes from before device-mediated relationships carry over to now. I haven’t said anything about the implicit concerns of surveillance and consumerism also at hand. It’s important to note that it’s totally possible to express resistance to troubling aspects of technology while using said devices, it’s just a matter of being aware that politics is being more readily and stealthily coded into our experiences as we move over to fully integrated experiences. The point isn’t to find out which games or experiences are ‘good’ to consume, rather acknowledging that everything is prompting us to consume and understanding how that consumption factors into culture processes. As games change with emerging technology, it’s important to question how games are being used to cultivate connection with others, and what that says about the kind of society we are.

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