I HAVE WRITTEN THAT I do not believe in virtual community, that the phrase itself is a misnomer, and I have been critical of the role of technology in our lives. Recently my attention was drawn to a rave entitled Pandora’s Vox: On Community in Cyberspace by Carmen 'humdog' Hermosillo posted on The Well, an early online "community" in which she talks about the commodification of the self via the Internet. If anything this phenomenon has become more ubiquitous since she wrote her essay in 1994. [1]
The self here is obviously self without any of the technical spin normally associated with a religious point of view. A single example will suffice to show how the internet commodifies and on-sells the self. This process is exemplified, and perhaps even finds it's apotheosis in Facebook and other online social networking sites. Facebook is a profit making enterprise. It exists to make the owners rich, which it has done beyond their wildest dreams, and it does this by pushing entertainment and selling advertising. The form of entertainment it uses is ersatz social relationships and commodified thoughts and emotions. Each user expresses them self by broadcasts their verbalised thoughts and emotions. This is then re-presented for our 'friends' along with a number of adverts. The friends are supposedly people we have a social relationship with, though often there is no offline relationship at all.
It is the adverts that pay for Facebook. "Free" blogs, like this one, are more or less the same business model. I broadcast my thoughts and opinions which you consume and it's paid for indirectly. I do have Google ads, and get paid about USD10 per year for them. Google don't mind that this is not a popular blog, as long as it's active and some people read it and see the ads. Google's business is all about aggregates of activity. There are tens of millions of blogs like mine, and 100,000s more each day, and some get massive readership. The popular ones subsidise the rest of us. If you want to write an uber blog then lists of top blogs suggest you write about celebrities, technology, politics (certainly do not write the arcane elements of early Buddhist philosophy and linguistics!)
If you don't like my opinions, you don't stop using the internet, you just go consume some other opinions that suit you better - that you find more entertaining. The Internet is an almost infinite source of entertainment. And what is entertainment? Entertainment is an activity we undertake purely in order to experience certain emotions. Emotions are the opiate of the world, which the Buddha clearly knew when he described people as intoxicated by sensory experience. We are often blind to the emotions naturally occurring in us, and only feel the kind of intense emotions evoked by more extreme stimuli. News media actively seek to stimulate our reptile brain, to induce fear, disgust and anger. Just occasionally they try to make us laugh or coo (what I call kitten stories). On the internet the range of emotional provocation is much broader. Whatever emotion you want to feel in yourself, you can turn to the internet to stimulate it. We live in environments that are highly artificial and hyper-stimulating. Modern life dulls our emotions, and so in order to feel alive we seek out artificial stimulation: we're like people who have to have chilli on every meal, and have lost any appreciation for subtle flavours.
Since these personal opinions and stories are now a product being on-sold by Facebook, Blogger, Google et al, then our inner lives have become a commodity with a commercial value. And do we ever stop to ask whether this is a good thing? Should we not be paid by social media for providing them with entertainment content for the businesses that have made them mega-rich? Facebook is basically a social parasite. It kids us that by repackaging a service we already have (email) into a broadcast medium, that we are more in touch with people. But there is no 'touch' involved in email.
In my critique of so-called "virtual community" - ersatz community would be more a more accurate name - I said that online relationships lack eyebrows, they lack the multiple dimensions of personal relationships. Psychologists have coined a term for these non-real relationships: they're called Parasocial Relationships. These can include TV and novel characters, as well as internet friends we've never met. The former are like imaginary friends. Why do we indulge in this kind of relationship? We are social primates. We thrive in small groups where we experience a sense of belonging by being involved in the lives of our community. One of the ways we express our membership of the group is grooming each other. Some people have theorised that language evolved as a form of grooming, and I imagine that language can certainly play this kind of role - especially our non-word sounds. I wonder if texting is another form of grooming.
In the absence of a community to be involved in, we find substitutes in, for example, soap operas. Even quite intelligent people can get caught up in the lives of fictional characters, or in media creations in the form of pop stars. Whether it's JR Ewing, Harry Potter, or Lady Gaga, we want to feel like they are part of our lives. We know all kinds of details about the lives of people who've never existed, because we have a faculty and a drive to be socially involved, and if we don't use it we suffer. Just like a horse or a dog kept in isolation will slowly go mad, we humans do not thrive alone. But more than this we don't thrive when we are surrounded by strangers most of the time. The individual is not the smallest viable unit of humanity. However our communities are no longer spatially contiguous, and we have begun to rely on technology to bridge the gap. For many people their "community" is a disparate group only loosely connected. Such a community may be no more than a series of overlapping sets of cellphone numbers. I suggest that this is why people will interrupt a face to face meeting to answer their phone. Community is a value we all share. But note how isolating relying on the one to one connection of the phone is in case of the interrupted personal conversation.
Our online persona becomes like a soap opera that is processed and sold as entertainment and enriches those who facilitate the process, with little or no real benefit to us despite the hype. All of our selves become commodities to be bought and sold. Nowadays our electronic identity can literally be stolen, and the selves of some celebrities are being hijacked by online impersonators. And we buy into this system, I suggest, at least in part because we are no longer embedded in a community. The whole enterprise is presented to us as a remarkable leap forward in human interactions that is facilitating closer relationships and easier communication, but it only seems attractive in a world where our neighbours are strangers and people are isolated. Accept no substitute.
The self here is obviously self without any of the technical spin normally associated with a religious point of view. A single example will suffice to show how the internet commodifies and on-sells the self. This process is exemplified, and perhaps even finds it's apotheosis in Facebook and other online social networking sites. Facebook is a profit making enterprise. It exists to make the owners rich, which it has done beyond their wildest dreams, and it does this by pushing entertainment and selling advertising. The form of entertainment it uses is ersatz social relationships and commodified thoughts and emotions. Each user expresses them self by broadcasts their verbalised thoughts and emotions. This is then re-presented for our 'friends' along with a number of adverts. The friends are supposedly people we have a social relationship with, though often there is no offline relationship at all.
It is the adverts that pay for Facebook. "Free" blogs, like this one, are more or less the same business model. I broadcast my thoughts and opinions which you consume and it's paid for indirectly. I do have Google ads, and get paid about USD10 per year for them. Google don't mind that this is not a popular blog, as long as it's active and some people read it and see the ads. Google's business is all about aggregates of activity. There are tens of millions of blogs like mine, and 100,000s more each day, and some get massive readership. The popular ones subsidise the rest of us. If you want to write an uber blog then lists of top blogs suggest you write about celebrities, technology, politics (certainly do not write the arcane elements of early Buddhist philosophy and linguistics!)
If you don't like my opinions, you don't stop using the internet, you just go consume some other opinions that suit you better - that you find more entertaining. The Internet is an almost infinite source of entertainment. And what is entertainment? Entertainment is an activity we undertake purely in order to experience certain emotions. Emotions are the opiate of the world, which the Buddha clearly knew when he described people as intoxicated by sensory experience. We are often blind to the emotions naturally occurring in us, and only feel the kind of intense emotions evoked by more extreme stimuli. News media actively seek to stimulate our reptile brain, to induce fear, disgust and anger. Just occasionally they try to make us laugh or coo (what I call kitten stories). On the internet the range of emotional provocation is much broader. Whatever emotion you want to feel in yourself, you can turn to the internet to stimulate it. We live in environments that are highly artificial and hyper-stimulating. Modern life dulls our emotions, and so in order to feel alive we seek out artificial stimulation: we're like people who have to have chilli on every meal, and have lost any appreciation for subtle flavours.
Since these personal opinions and stories are now a product being on-sold by Facebook, Blogger, Google et al, then our inner lives have become a commodity with a commercial value. And do we ever stop to ask whether this is a good thing? Should we not be paid by social media for providing them with entertainment content for the businesses that have made them mega-rich? Facebook is basically a social parasite. It kids us that by repackaging a service we already have (email) into a broadcast medium, that we are more in touch with people. But there is no 'touch' involved in email.
In my critique of so-called "virtual community" - ersatz community would be more a more accurate name - I said that online relationships lack eyebrows, they lack the multiple dimensions of personal relationships. Psychologists have coined a term for these non-real relationships: they're called Parasocial Relationships. These can include TV and novel characters, as well as internet friends we've never met. The former are like imaginary friends. Why do we indulge in this kind of relationship? We are social primates. We thrive in small groups where we experience a sense of belonging by being involved in the lives of our community. One of the ways we express our membership of the group is grooming each other. Some people have theorised that language evolved as a form of grooming, and I imagine that language can certainly play this kind of role - especially our non-word sounds. I wonder if texting is another form of grooming.
In the absence of a community to be involved in, we find substitutes in, for example, soap operas. Even quite intelligent people can get caught up in the lives of fictional characters, or in media creations in the form of pop stars. Whether it's JR Ewing, Harry Potter, or Lady Gaga, we want to feel like they are part of our lives. We know all kinds of details about the lives of people who've never existed, because we have a faculty and a drive to be socially involved, and if we don't use it we suffer. Just like a horse or a dog kept in isolation will slowly go mad, we humans do not thrive alone. But more than this we don't thrive when we are surrounded by strangers most of the time. The individual is not the smallest viable unit of humanity. However our communities are no longer spatially contiguous, and we have begun to rely on technology to bridge the gap. For many people their "community" is a disparate group only loosely connected. Such a community may be no more than a series of overlapping sets of cellphone numbers. I suggest that this is why people will interrupt a face to face meeting to answer their phone. Community is a value we all share. But note how isolating relying on the one to one connection of the phone is in case of the interrupted personal conversation.
Our online persona becomes like a soap opera that is processed and sold as entertainment and enriches those who facilitate the process, with little or no real benefit to us despite the hype. All of our selves become commodities to be bought and sold. Nowadays our electronic identity can literally be stolen, and the selves of some celebrities are being hijacked by online impersonators. And we buy into this system, I suggest, at least in part because we are no longer embedded in a community. The whole enterprise is presented to us as a remarkable leap forward in human interactions that is facilitating closer relationships and easier communication, but it only seems attractive in a world where our neighbours are strangers and people are isolated. Accept no substitute.
~~oOo~~
Notes
- The full text of Humdog's essay is online in many places. I consulted the version on The Alphaville Herald website.
Supplemental
"When girls stressed by a test talked with their moms, stress hormones dropped and comfort hormones rose. When they used IM, nothing happened. By the study’s neurophysiological measures, IM was barely different than not communicating at all." Wired Science. 7.1.12
20 comments:
I agree with every word.
As human beings we are made for face to face contacts preferably in small communities.
Evolution has not prepared us for the internet. It is there, so we have to deal with it, but it is a poor substitute for face to face contacts.
Thank you for expressing your stimulating and most interesting viewpoints.
Thanks Roeland. Evolution has not even prepared us for writing, except in very general terms!
I;m not sure about this whole evolution thing. Why would evolution evolve something that was not beneficial? Isn't that what it does?
You raise some interesting and highly valid points. I can't help but think though that you are giving too much importance to the realm of Facebook. My 'relationship' with the internet has evolved over the last five years and I have moved away from Facebook after the initial fascination. I use it now to share links and scan for useful links from others, it serves very little social function otherwise. I can't help but think that for semi-intelligent people like myself the fascination wears off eventually. I found now that if anything I spend too much time reading articles online as opposed to getting down to the books I have waiting on my desk. Now there's a distraction.
I just want to point out that if it weren't for Facebook, you and I might never have met and become friends!
@Spiritual Realaw
I'm interested in how people interact online. Facebook is simply a high profile example. I'm not focussed on it, though I do use it. And yes the wasting of time, and the shortening of our attention spans is problematic.
Jayarava
Hi Dhīvajrī
Even without Facebook we have mutual friends that I have met in person, and a context in the Order that meant we were thrown together. I have no doubt that we'd have met anyway despite living on different continents!
Love
Jayarava
@Anon re evolution
Evolution gave us big brains that can adapt and learn. These brains have out-stripped our physical/genetic evolution. So for instance everyone naturally learns to talk (with a very few exceptions) without any instruction. Talking is something we've evolved to do. Almost no one has ever spontaneously learned to write. Learning to write is laborious and difficult. Writing is a skill that can be learned, but we're not specifically adapted to doing so. In writing we're hacking our software and hardware to get it to do something it was not designed for. But then the brain is very much a general purpose machine.
I hope this helps to illuminate what I'm talking about.
Jayarava
Leaving out the commercialisation aspect (you can run blogs, forums, even small social networks on open source software) I would have thought that most of this is technology exacerbating already existent tendencies rather than creating something altogether new.
For example people have had pen pals, we have journal collections be they technical or like shabda, libraries give us access to huge swells of information. The oldest example is probably gossip - is it better to gossip about soap characters who will not be harmed by it?
On the other hand I've been in internet communities that have started meeting, travelling hundreds of miles to see one another. I've certainly seen dating, and some people found new physical community groups based upon it. The occupy and climate camp movements seem to be decent examples of what can happen.
I think the key differences between now and the past are speed and opportunity. It is hard sometimes for me to remember that we've only really had Facebook etc. for five years or so. I take an optimistic view that we will eventually catch up to the reality of global instant communication and ask how we want to use it rather than plunging in blindly.
Jayarava, yes we would have met and possibly become from friends. But with FB we had a chance to get to know a little about each other and our interests (or I did re you), and I think that made more of connection possible on first meeting face:face (and I got a real thrill on the convention out of meeting the two or three people I had already met via FB).
I will admit, I like knowing what's going on with my friends who are spread far and wide, and who I rarely see and most likely only talk to or have a significant email exchange a few times a year. I definitely commodify myself trying to put up clever posts and status updates, but there doesn't seem to be much traction there anymore (and I only have a few actual friends who still do that). But I still really value little glimpses into the lives of my friends.
YT,
Dhīvajrī
Funny, when I watch person-to-person (p2p) relationships I see ersatz relationships too. Martin Buber, in I and Thou, discusses this, if I remember correctly. Often, we aren't really talking to a person, we are talking to ourselves. Or we imagine the person to be interested in us in ways they aren't. The list goes on. Perhaps internet 'relationships' exaggerate this effect, or maybe they make it more clear. I am unsure.
The grooming you spoke of seems obviously true, but often it is co-operative self-grooming: "look, you let me self-pleasure myself in pretending to relate and then you can take your turn. We'll call it a conversation." The same commonly happens in sex. What is a 'real relationship' in light of p2p relationships largely being of this poor quality, leaves me puzzled at times.
Looking at relationships of a practical level may help: the value of p2p relations is that in hard times, some of them come through and actually help us. We have conversations, parties and exchanges of little favors as an insurance effort for bad times. Using this as a measure, one would question if it happens in internet relations, and the answer is "yes" but not as commonly. But it does happen. People do get emotional support on the internet that they may not get in real life. And we have all heard of cases where even financial support comes via the internet connection between people with only prior 'virtual' relations. These are rare, of course and thus a far worse insurance gamble than shallow p2p friendships.
You wrote:
So our online persona becomes like a soap opera that is processed and sold as entertainment and enriches those who facilitate the process, with little or no real benefit to us despite the hype.
I agree that we are bought and sold -- but this has always been the case. I think, however, that there may be real benefit for some in internet socialization. I get that you are taking the devil's advocate to some degree here, and I think your chastisement is helpful. You remind us to beware of many pitfalls. Value from relationships (internet or p2p) is best gained with conscious use -- but that is very difficult (-- as you illustrate well).
Thank you for making me think about it.
PS: I just looked back at the pic you used. Are you using this to illustrate "selling of ourselves"? I think selling of ourselves is how we survive -- I can imagine no other method accept robbery.
Hi Sabio
You appear to be even more pessimistic and cynical about people than me! LOL!
Have you ever Jane Goodall In the Shadow of Man? There are some wonderful insights in that book.
Jayarava
LOL -- with a chuckling smile on my face. Rarely does my cynism receive hints of complimentary affection.
Well, there is a reason spiritual traditions don't exist among other animals -- they don't need it! :-)
No, I have not read her book. I will look into it. Thank you.
Ersatz greetings to the virtual Jayrava
IMO, this follows on from yr recent post about the 2nd precept & stealing music, albeit as computer files. I think the tin of baked beans analogy fits well for content such as music or social chat (the beans) in computers (the tin). Computers are sold as expensive machinery on the promise or allure or illusion that they will provide access to an abundance of free content.
Most debates about how to make internet pay for the content-providers normally return to this expectation that content should be free. This was certainly the case in the 1990's & early part of first decade 2000. Online newspapers have a bad time of getting enough paying subscriptions, Wikipedia is begging once again, etc.
I also note that Amazon (beans) via Kindle (tin) is trying to make profit from copy-right free online literature. What would happen if you could only buy certain beans because you only had a certain tin?
If we choose to give our thoughts (and, in my case, jpegs my paintings) as free content, then that is our choice, not that we have a very large range of options. I don't think that neither google nor face book would even bother to answer a request from my part to be paid. As you say, advertising is the principal money earner for web-content, in which I included permissive advertising such as 'advertorials' as well as interruptive advertising such as adverts & jump-up windows.
Re-online social relationships : more delusion ... these funny non-existant, half real others in my imagination.... but I have learnt a lot from reading yr blog. And if I didn't comment, then what I have learnt would definitely be a lot less. Commenting makes it somewhat less about passive consumption. So thanks.
Re-Evolution & virtual community vs.real-life community : The Occupy protest movement use internet for the dissemination of political information & community building, if I understand correctly from my apathy. Email petitions as a political tool such as <a href ="http://www.avaaz.org>avaaz.org</a> may well prove to be important tools for the survival (or not) of the human species. Homo Informaticus or Home Conscious?
Hi Adam
I am unwilling to continue that discussion, as it seemed to go nowhere.
However I will say that I don't think people are *choosing* to commodify their lives. Most people, as you hint at, are only passively participating in the so-called "information revolution". Most of those who are actively participating are suffering from *data* overload, and knowledge starvation, certainly wisdom starvation. I first heard the term "drinking from a fire hose" back in '88 or '89 when I started working in libraries. Information overload was a problem before the internet. It is not orders of magnitude worse.
Regards
Jayarava
and by the way you must close the quotes before closing the tag, i.e. "> which is why your link didn't work.
Whoops.... sorry for the HMTL typo & the other typo 'home conscious' which should have been 'homo conscious'. Sloppy on my behalf, especially on the site of such a diligent word-smith & philologist.
Thanks for your reply/teaching. Lots to think about as per usual.
Nothing I write is "a teaching". Ever. It's just my opinion, or a reported fact (which often boils down to someone else's opinion).
Jayarava
Dear Jayarava,
personally, I am not on facebook, nor on twitter, nor do I run personal blogs. I write a lot on line, but always from the point of view of my intellectual/professional life. The boundary may be subtle, but not that much (I do not post photos of myself (and avoid having other people posting them), I do not discuss anything about my personal life, I do not tell about my friends, relatives, family, etc.). I also do not want to virtually connect with people I lost touch with (since I lost touch with them, this must mean that we did not care that much for each other).
By contrast, I had a few very interesting intellectual "meetings" on the web and in still fewer cases I even had the chance to physically meet the people I had known through blogs (as it happened with you). In both cases, I feel intellectually close to these people and deem them to be real friends, although "mono-dimensional" ones (since we hardly speak about our family lives, etc.). Don't you think this might be possible?
elisa
p.s. sorry for the personal comment!
Hi Elisa
I admire your stand on Facebook etc. I am partly so critical because some compulsion draws me to participate in these media! But yes I think the internet is good for conveying information (this is after all the real strength of print) and that it is possible to make a connection on the basis of shared interested in ideas as we have done. I have a similar connection with one or two other people (if they are real people). I'm reminded of you saying how different I was in person than my writing! (Thanks)
And from time to time a really good writer comes along who can move me through the written word. But it's a rare gift.
BTW I'm reading a lot of Michael Witzel lately and I'm in awe of his command of the evidence, the breadth and depth of his vision of history. It's very inspiring. He's got a fantastic command of the written word.
Oh, and did you see that Vincenzo's Sanskrit manuscript project has got going?
All the best for 2012. I hope our paths will cross in the real world again at some point :-)
Jayarava
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