In Chinese astrology it’s the Year of the Water Snake. In Western astrology, too, 2013 is a year flooded with water.

We will be navigating outpourings and leakages both literal and figurative. In upcoming Skywatches we will be looking at how to sail through the changes ahead in a spirit of love and healing: going with the flow, without shutting down.

When planets in water signs bump into planets in incompatible elements, we need to pay attention. In February, Jupiter in Gemini squares Mercury and Mars in Pisces, and then the Sun (Feb 8-10 and Feb 20-25). The flood (water) that we are meant to be learning about is mental (air). It’s about getting a perspective (Jupiter) to avoid drowning in a sea of data (Gemini).

As it travels through the zodiac, Jupiter asks us, in twelve different ways, how much is too much? In Gemini until June 25^th of this year, Jupiter is asking us to consider how well we are navigating the flood of information and social interchange that pours into and out of our lives every day.

TMI

It is a peculiarly modern problem, fielding this much data round-the-clock. Before we’ve finished our morning coffee we’re glutted with Wikipedia factoids, photos from random acquaintances, must-read news links and –Goddess have mercy — Oppan Gangnam Style.

Jupiter is about standing back from something to get a sense of its meaning. This is not easy to do with everyday patterns, which is why this month’s transits are forcing us to do it.

In a bare handful of years, humanity has utterly transformed its relationship with information. The quantity (Jupiter) of information (Gemini) pouring into the human brain has dwarfed, in scope and speed of access, thousands of years’ worth of mental and social habits. Observers of the human experience are nowhere near understanding the myriad implications of this radical epistemological shift.¹

But we don’t have to wait for the scientific research to assess what’s happened. We can start by asking, What activities are we no longer doing because we’re always at the screen?

Silicon vs. Paper

Geezers are often to be heard lamenting the demise of old-fashioned letter-writing. But, nostalgia aside, there has been very little analysis of the psychological and aesthetic differences between the way people used to communicate and the way we do now.

Speed is perhaps the most obvious factor: most of us would find the slowness of pre-Twitter communications intolerable. Rarity is another: part of the mystique of a hand-written, hand-delivered letter has always been its relative infrequency, as well as the time involved in waiting for its arrival, which conferred upon it a quality of specialness.

In The Missing Ink (Faber), epistolary scholar Philip Hensher makes a case for the old-fashioned letter. He asserts that handwriting continues to reveal individualism in an age when a text message reveals merely that the writer has opposable thumbs.

Social media is a strange admixture of the über-personal (does everyone in your database really need to know what you ate for breakfast?) and the coolly impersonal (the fact that I’m telling everyone this same factoid gives it a very different resonance than if I were telling you alone).

Penned in the writer’s hand — which made it literally (even legally) unique — and carrying in its physicality the vibration of its place of origin, a paper letter offered far more dimensions for the conveyance of vital meaning than do the truncated silicon stuttering that now links us with our loved ones.

Ambient Awareness

One aspect of portable devices that has stimulated much comment is the concomitant expectation that we must be always on-call. Unless you’re a land line user, the old apologia “I wasn’t near a phone” doesn’t hack it any more. Because we can constantly check messages, the assumption is that we must.

Less attention has been given to the issue of ambient social awareness². Now that it’s considered normal to carry on conversations in public with a listener who is audible to us alone, the traditional etiquette of public space has been transformed. Now the rule seems to be to prioritize our disembodied conversations over our embodied ones.

Unaware of the other people immediately around us, on the bus, at a café, in line at the store – in fact, deliberately trying to ignore them, so as to focus more completely on our exclusive little telephonic world — we stifle any potential for spontaneous face-to-face contact. Unless, that is, we bump into others as we walk distractedly down the street, absorbed in our phone call.

Friendship

Another shift Jupiter in Gemini asks us to consider is the one that has occurred in the concept of friendship. What is the nature of friendship now that friend has become a verb?

On social media, our online associations are assessed not qualitatively but quantitatively; their numbers posted flauntingly for the world to see. What will future sociologists make of the “communities” created by a gazillion-dollar data-mining operation like Face Book?

Though new apps are concocted daily, one senses that a saturation point has been reached. Our tiny little machines, having expanded from mere communication devices to entertainment centers and virtual office desks, have achieved near-complete indispensability. They have become our lifestyle, our best friend. Our reliance upon them has segued into something that aligns uncomfortably with the literature on addiction.

In 2008 a grad student at Chapel Hill wrote software that lets people shut off their access to the internet for several hours. He called it “Freedom”. As of last year it had 75,000 users.

Intimacy

Saturn in Scorpio is presenting some juicy opportunities for us to observe the effects of digital relating on intimacy. Each time over the course of this two-and-a-half-year-long transit that Saturn comes up against Venus or the Moon  — especially by conjunction, square or opposition — the demands of deep, emotional closeness will make themselves known, perhaps by default.³

One of these is coming up this month. On Feb 10^th and 11^th Venus (relationship) in Aquarius (technology) squares Saturn, illustrating the great paradox of social networking. Karl Marx said that in the capitalist age we began to treat one another as commodities. Are we now treating one another as mere packets of information? ⁴

We are connecting with each other more than ever before in human history, yet our machines allow us to remain at a cool, safe remove from corporeal and emotional sharing. This is a relief for many of us, much of the time. But Saturn in Scorpio will remind us that intimacy is a universal human need that no amount of tweets and texts can fill.

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Notes

1 But astrology gives us a sense of its immensity. The transit of 1992-4 combined two symbols of world-altering power. Uranus (technology) and Neptune (mass use) marked the historical moment when, in the wired world, digital communication made the jump from an adjunct compartment of daily life into a ubiquitous feature.

2 We’ve all witnessed or read about incidents like the one The New York Times reported recently, where a neurosurgeon who’d made a disastrous error turned out to have been making personal calls during the operation.

3 Saturn teaches us about something by making us feel that it, and therefore we, are lacking.

4 Asked in the review in the New Yorker of the film “The Social Network.”