A Hot Nerd's #Randomblings: #SocialMedia and the Collective Culture
#TalkNerdyToMeLover's @MikeDelic
the internet allows for a lot of things. what is interesting to me is how it makes possible mindlessness on a level never seen in human history. or selflessness. not selflessness in terms of generosity but in a more literal way. we are actually creating a collective culture in which individual identities are dispersed and dissolved into a giant buzzing hive. this hive has a lot going for it. there is honey involved. but it is also threatening to our sacred notions individuality.
we come here to be someone else and here is really nowhere. all of our lives humans have desired metaphysical otherworlds and we've created them with our intellects and imaginations. call it culture. it is a way that we have of escaping the limits of our own physicality. death especially. though of course there are lesser physical difficulties that we may overcome by recreating ourselves on the internet, like being unattractive or confined to a cubicle. i have occasionally spoken to nerds over the years about the possibility that we may in the future be able to upload ourselves somewhere to live beyond physical death, or to be downloaded into sleek new clone bodied reconstructed from our own dna. i dont generally buy into such things as i am skeptical of any such literal notions of afterlife regardless of where they're coming from. one of the main flaws with these kind of ideas is that they are rooted in the idea that there is some essence to a human that can be extracted from the human body and preserved in a technological body. but i am inclined to believe that our personalities are so deeply rooted in our physical bodies that to remove them from said bodies would be to transform them completely into something radically different. much as we like to deny it -- perhaps because of thousands of years of religious and political ideas, or instinct, or chance, i dont know -- our psyches are rooted in our physical bodies. to change the body is to change the soul.
i'm not really saying that we wont try, or that something wont happen. rather i'm saying that the thing that we seek most to preserve in our shift from natural to technological (even if biotechnological as may happen sometime in the future) bodies will be the first thing to go. that thing is the integrated ego or sense of self. just as in the twentieth century we witnessed the death of certain cultural absolutes (the "death of god" as predicted by nietzche dostoevsky et al), there is a good chance that in the twenty first century we will experience the death of another cultural absolute, i.e. the myth of the self, which waxes and wanes through history. it was prominent with the ancient greeks and in western culture from the renaissance/reformation until now. roughly. i'm being pretty general here. during other times in other cultures it has not been so prominent. i'm inclined to believe that we are heading for other times like that.
self-consciousness has been on the rise for a while. and in internet culture it is wise to assume that more people are looking at you than you think. any big company whose site you participate in will likely try to make money off of your personal information. but there are so many other cool things about going on the internet that it seems worth it. it's like how a lot of people would like to be in show business even though it means dealing with backstabbing phonies and tremendous personal pressures etc. we are drawn to the light of a flame whose heat can easily destroy us. as time goes on it will seem more and more like there is nothing that does not see you. this creates a pressure in the psyche of individual people and in the collective consciousness of culture 2.0 as a whole. at some point it will reach a tipping point and a massive reaction will occur. the explosion of the self or integrated ego like a fusion bomb with the blast radius extending to the far reaches of virtual space, which seems to extend both inward and outward. if you put people under a lot of pressure they explode. the sense of always being watched creates a mounting psychological pressure.
i think most people understand this subconsciously and develop identifiable defense mechanisms in order to deal with it. these are not even purely defensive reactions either they have wonderful positive sides that demonstrate the beauty and playfulness of the human imagination. most involve versions of anonymity and persona play. the obvious negative version is the internet hater (i tend to prefer this term to troll because trolling is in my opinion not just going and badmouthing someone and a certain percentage of trolls have a quality resembling tricksters in folk tales that actually serves an important purpose within the culture) or habitual arguer who can alleviate the feeling some of us get sometimes of being watched and judged negatively (a common insecurity that most people feel at one time or another some more than others) by going and watching someone else and telling them that they suck while hiding behind a persona. a sock puppet account. as with a lot of things people do not inherently object to the system in place they just want to be on the winning end of it. this is one of the less attractive aspects of human nature. we have a generalized sense of revenge so that when someone hurts us in some way we end up taking it out on someone else. children who are sexually abused are more likely to grow up to sexually abuse children. leaders of nations retaliate against nations that have not even attacked them. it's a generalized version of scapegoating, which is rampant in our culture. we prefer making scapegoats to addressing true complexities. but i digress. that's really just one example.
some people create numerous different personae not for the purpose of hurting others without having to be accountable or hurt back but for the purpose of liberating themselves from themselves. i have a lot of friends on youtube with different channels under different names. all full of different images. there is a certain joy that comes in liberation from the limitations of self. one of the best things i ever did in my life was get out of my home town because i felt like i couldn't not be myself there and i wanted to not be myself.
nowadays the noplace to go when you want to get away from what you are in "real life" is the internet. but for many the personality change that occurs in going there is even more radical than if one were to be from, say, new jersey and move to new mexico, which is what i did the first time i moved away from where i grew up and felt like everyone knew too much about me. in the attempt to transfer the personality or psyche from the physical to the virtual radical transformations occur. as our physiologies dictate more of our personalities than we would like to admit so do our technologies. detached from physicality things become different. people do things that they would not normally do. i know that in a lot of the places i hang out there can be a lot of very aggressive language that people would not use in real life. one common theory for why this is is the punch-in-the-face theory, i.e. that people say on the internet what they would not say in real life because in real life they would be punched in the face. this theory is often advanced by people who seem to think that punches in the face are preferable to aggressive speech as a means of regulating what people say. not sure why this is. maybe because they know they will never actually be punching anyone. i always thought dialogue should have more influence than physical violence in the real world.
well, on the internet it does. we are free from that and many other more subtle social cues (things like eye contact and body language in some cases, tone of voice in text based interactions, etc) that create a less regulated social space. there is an increase of freedom of expression in general for both good and ill. one of the good things, i've found, is that by going around blabbing about all of my pet subjects i can meet people with similar interests and ideas in a way that i couldnt before. publicly accessible sites and people on the internet constitute something like a giant room with hundreds of millions of people in it that you can walk across in the blink of an eye. what this means to me is that it can be the greatest party or the greatest riot of all time…. or both. like an orgy of disembodied minds. this has obvious advantages in terms of socializing and spreading information. in terms of evolutionary usefulness we can transmit messages involving people in danger or sources of pleasure insanely quickly. the bad part is we can become a foam at the mouth mob just as quickly. so that at any time in this nowhere we can achieve mass ecstasies or agonies in a way heretofore unknown and largely unpredicted. and of course it's not actually nowhere it is happening in our collective psyche. the psychic energies we put in come back out at us too. we're constructing a giant group brain made of computers and smartphones that has it's own dynamic that as time goes on will become a much more real and observable form of what jung called the collective unconscious. we are still building our own myths and archetypes at an amazing speed. but that fact is not as important as it's inverse -- our own myths and archetypes are building us. like a lot of other revolutions it is equal parts beautiful and terrifying.
This has been a very random stream of consciousness from a very hot nerd.