by Dennis Dunleavy
It is oddly curious that we now live in an age where the distinction between our private and public selves is rapidly evaporating. For instance, when a teenager posted a picture of herself on a social networking Website the local newspaper decided to use the image to illustrate a story on teen drinking and sexuality. Never mind that the picture was used without the teen’s permission. Never mind that the picture and story have no direct connection to one another. Never mind that the teenager, a former high school valedictorian now faces ridicule and condemnation from the community and her peers.
Bill Shanahan, in his essay “Causalities of the Culture War,” claims that we are now inexplicably connected to the “interstices of binary code.” With this change, he argues, a shift in the temporal and spatial dynamics of every day life emerges. Those of us old enough to remember carbon paper may be resistant to understanding the complexities of this phenomenal turn. Social contracts that once bound culture together through face-to-face interactions are now being transformed by the many-to-many seemingly “anything goes” digital age. Today, we have entered the age of large-scale, asynchronous, and egocentric.
Item:
A 13-year old Missouri girl committed suicide after being dumped by her 16-year-old boyfriend on MySpace. The kicker to this tragic story is that the Online boyfriend turned out to be the mother of a former girlfriend who was mad at the teenager.
I am a technoholic. I am fascinated by the idea of how information technologies are changing the way people communicate. For some, the Internet is a liberating place where needs are met and experiences shared. For others, the Internet is a place of victimization and invasiveness – a place of rampant commercialization. On the Internet everyone can have a voice, but the implications of how people work, play, date, and communicate across time and space presents a strange cultural pathology. We are now holding our society together in space — where there is little difference between night and day, virtual and actual. The Internet is a place where the self can appear, reappear, and disappear at will.
Item:
A father discovered that the best way to communicate with his son fighting in Iraq was through the popular social networking site MySpace. Their last conversation occurred Online three days before a roadside bomb killed the soldier.
It’s Christmas Eve and more than 1 billion people have visited the Santa-tracking Website run by the U.S. Department of Defense. Tonight, someone is sending electronic greeting cards with dancing elves and a guy is dumping his longtime girlfriend with a text message. This is how the Internet inhabits us.
I am an ego-surfer, game player, and blogger. I surf the web, send emails, make podcasts, watch poorly made YouTube videos on my iPhone, send and receive text messages, get news delivered in aggregated form, take editing and grammar courses Online, write on a blog, read a dozen or so more, keep a website. I have Online profile on such social networking sites as Second Life, Flickr, StumbleUpon, Facebook, LinkedIn, and MySpace. Who I am?
Item:
A Chinese woman died of exhaustion in 2005 after playing the online multi-player game World Of Warcraft for three-days without resting. Later, friends held a virtual funeral for the woman.
The relationship I have with people Online surpasses those I have off-line. I live an asynchronous, but hardly an irrelevant life. If I rely on technology to communicate outside traditional paradigms it may be because I appreciate the feeling of control I get from living in a wired world. I can hardly distinguish between virtual and actual. In some ways these realities have merged. The spatial and temporal dynamics of my day-to-day life have profoundly changed, as they have changed for millions of other people. Does diving into the deep end of a pool of information on the Web – a pool of information that makes the oceans of the world seem like puddles – make us happier? Can there be such a thing as virtual happiness?
Item:
A woman dates a man she had met Online through Facebook. She was already turned-off by the dozens of women he had already linked to on his webpage, but finding pictures he took of their first date on his website the next day was more than she had bargained for.
Now, it turns out, that I am what technophiles call a microcelebrity. Someone’s started a Facebook group under my name and titled it the “No Bullshitting the Bullshitter” group. This is a different generation of students from those who used to live in fear of authority. The anonymity of the Internet is a safe place to challenge the status quo and commiserate with other like-minds. I was surprised when more than 50 people, mostly former students, had signed up. It’s not your grandmother’s quilting circle in cyberspace.
Andrew Keen, in his scathing polemic of the Internet age, “The Cult of the Amateur” describes the Internet as a bloated and “endless digital forest of mediocrity.” Keen unabashedly attacks the Internet for the wholesale destruction of the music, movie, and news industries. Keen worries that these engines of social capital are now threatened by the electronic free-for-all that is the Internet. He blames blogs, Wikipedia, Google, Yahoo, and YouTube for creating a generation of intellectual plagiarists. In a copy and paste culture, Keen’s probably not too far off the mark on this last score. Some young people fail to see the ethics of copycat behavior. If it’s free on the Internet, why not use it?
Item:
Last year, 26 students in Japan failed a final exam after they were caught using the email function on their cell phones to share answers during the test.
Attempting to understand all the changes we are currently experiencing in a seamless and malleable digital age is futile. Information is as supple and cheap as Jell-O. Communities of like-minded ideologies do spring up relentlessly on the Internet, but they are fleeting and transient. Any reciprocal exchange is only as good as it remains intact. Henry Jenkins, the MIT professor who has been called the next Marshal McLuhan for his work on convergence cultures, believes that “What we cannot know or do on our own, we may now be able to do collectively.” Despite the rampant and chaotic commercialization of the Internet, democratization is underway. If the impact of community building through the Internet has not yet entirely been achieved in the U.S., the Internet’s threat to tyranny and despotism in places like China, Myanmar, and the Middle East is fairly obvious. For Jenkins, “The new knowledge culture [on the Internet] has arisen as our ties to older forms of social community are breaking down, our rooting in physical geography is diminished, our bonds to the extended and even the nuclear family are disintegrating, and our allegiances to nation-states are being redefined.” Unfortunately, for many of us, sifting through a torrent of mediocrity on the Internet is not the most efficient use of our time. As I sit and surf the Web for interesting things to think and write about, I often wonder if I could be has satisfied and inspired by simply taking a walk in the woods. At the same time, the culture-junkie in me has a firm grasp over my attraction to observing change first-hand. The Internet is far from a dead end for me, because I choose to enter the fray of cyber-space not only as a consumer but also as a critic. Each time I go Online to check email, write on my blog, read articles I would otherwise miss, or watch a political campaign on YouTube, I feel I have the opportunity to reinvent myself in the world.
(but for Tod's point of view about the Internet, click here…)