Zuckerman quotes this article by Douglas Adam's on the return of interactivity in culture through the internet, "one about technology being "natural" if you were introduced at a certain age, and the other about how technology allows us to return to being villagers..."
I haven't gone through the article completely yet, but does this set off warning bells-the idea of internet being natural to people born into it and that's it's making us like villages. Are we in the process of witnessing the fermentation of a new ideology, where it is assumed that the internet and its various manifestations are becoming 'naturalized', I guess it's fairly innocent now but could it get to a point somewhere in the future where certain coercive arms of the internet become enforced as natural. And the idea of it turning us into villagers, is there an element of nationalist myth making, where we're all returning to a pre-lapsarian, innocent earlier era through this liberating new /ideotechnology?
[http://www.douglasadams.com/dna/19990901-00-a.html]
I think there is no doubt that children growing up with the internet will find it natural, as we did with television - however we never were under the belief that TV was part of the so called natural world. We were always aware of TVs mediated nature. Nevertheless its gaze was internalised and affected the way we perceived the world and ourselves.
ReplyDeleteI am opposed to the pre-lapsarian argument raised, although i do see internet having many improvements on TV for the reasons argued in this article. However, what this reasoning misses, for me, is the huge difference between internet style interaction and real world interaction. What happens in this process is we move from collective experience to isolated experience, and then dialectally to interactive isolation. Isolation goes from being external to interactivity to within it - it is obviously not equatable.
THe big problem with this move to interactive isolation is that it purports to be a direct substitute for direct interaction. THis wasnt true with TV which only purported to represent real social life rather than replace it.
But how problematic is this distinction in practice? Even when we watched TV we still talked about our impressions of the shows together and even watched it at the same time or together. On youtube, we would seemingly just post a comment, not even read the other comments or know the people who wrote them. But really we send the link to our friends or post it on our blogs and share it and ultimately talk about it so maybe it is not so problematic?
So I do profoundly disagree witht the sentiment that "pervasive wireless communication, ... will bring us back to behaviour patterns that were natural to us and destroy behaviour patterns that were brought about by the limitations of technology."
So what of myth making and coercion? Perhaps the current telephone scandals are instructivem of the limits to either position?
Perhaps another way to theorise the internet is as the absolute cause of relational aesthetics; with the internet, political engagement is the only form of culture that has the conditions of possibility for existing proper.
ReplyDeleteHow? The internet creates a "global culture", which is to say no culture at all. Rather than taking the "art is dead" thesis (arguably the modern material turn) we have to move to its immaterial cultural production equivalent "aesthetics is dead".
By way of example, take the move from say, a fashion magazine, to international "street fashion" blogs. Here we have the move towards a type of "hyperfashion" in which no trend or idea can mean anything because all locality and particularity is abolished. The modern idea that your look or lifestyle can be expressive and rooted in identity is crushed by the weight of numbers, speed and immediate replicability. We only have infinite variation, between each other and ourselves.
So this being the case with all cultural production, we are confronted with a culture where aesthetic expression is not able to be expressive of anything particular and localised and tironically this prevents its access to having any concrete universal claims.
So really we are only left with the most zero level antoginism of material and hence true politics.
Against this background we can then see the ideal of the seasteading institute only leading to a similar effect on the political field. A situation of politics being for consumption, and the avoiding of any confrontation with Otherness.