The
Internet provides kinds of opportunities that people could never have imagined
before it came into existence. One kind
of opportunity relates to the ability of people to assume many different
identities within the different social media, other websites and e-mails in
which they participate. People today
like to assume different presentations of self with the different groups of
friends and acquaintances with which they interact in different Internet
formats. On the Internet, this is so
easy to do. Before the Internet, people
needed to take extra time actually traveling to and from meeting places for
their external world groups. And because
physical travel required additional effort, once a person arrived at a group,
he was going to spend some significant time there in order to make the trip
worthwhile.
When
the telephone came along, people no longer had to physically travel to
communicate with other people in real time, but it proved cumbersome as a tool
for communicating within groups of several people, and it certainly proved very
cumbersome for trying to go back and forth between conversations with different
individuals.
But
with the Internet, a whole different situation arises. One can switch back and forth between
different chat conversations on Facebook, Twitter and other social media. What constitutes communication within an
encounter in a group can be a few phrases here and there. And traveling between group conversations is
not carried out by actual physical travel, but by a click of a key on the
computer or smartphone or tablet. So
this means that a person can maintain the time, energy and state of mind to be
a member of a much larger number of groups than when he was only engaged with
groups in the external world. And he can
communicate with a much larger number of people. Granted that there can be some overlapping
membership between some groups, but being on the Internet also means that one has
a greater opportunity to be a member of some groups that the people in other
groups will know nothing about. It also
means that because one doesn’t have to be physically present, except maybe
through an avatar, one can be an anonymous member of a group or a member with a
made-up name and identity. One can wear
a cyber-mask, and no one will know the difference.
Because
these groups exist in the cyber world, in the screen world, they are vacuumized
groups that don’t create organic bonding between members and that don’t create
organic grounding in a palpable organic external world filled with flowing
blendable continual stimuli. These
groups create numbing ghost-like connections, and as people focus on making and
keeping connections within all of their disparate Internet groups, they become
numb and lose their capacity to make and preserve solid organic connections
with the solid organic manifestations of other people. These Internet groups do not involve a lot of
time, energy or state of mind to maintain.
They do not involve the organic friction that allows a person to feel
fully alive in his interactions with other people. So there is this paradox regarding the
Internet. It allows people to make more
connections with people than was ever possible in purely external world social
interactions. But the nature of these
interactions is such that they don’t generate bonding with others, grounding in
the template of the organic external world, or organic friction to help a
person feel fully alive and to move him through meaningful narratives in the
external world, where he can make, preserve, and receive organic imprints which
allow him to prepare a surrogate immortality and thus prepare for death.
Now
this covers the people who have basically well-meaning intentions in their
social manipulations on the Internet.
There are the people who use their social manipulations on the computer
to get the kicks they crave from so many interactions that simultaneously pull
them out of the base numbness that they feel while spending so much time in the
experiential void of the Internet screen.
And yes, having to make so many unbonded, ungrounded presentations of
self leads to their actual senses of self becoming fragmented, one might say
even pixilated. Which, of course, leaves
a person vulnerable to becoming robotized or avatarized in order to defend
himself against crumbling apart from entropy.
And
then there are the people who use their multiple connections on the Internet to
do things that they consciously know will hurt the people with whom they
cyber-connect. I am talking about those
users of the Internet who create false identities in order to scam other
people. I am talking about users who
create cyber-masks that allow them to generate bogus business opportunities
that draw strangers to invest money with them.
Once the pretend businesspeople get their money, they, of course,
disappear, something that is very easy to do on the Internet. Then there are the bogus courtships, where
cyber-users, particularly from foreign countries, seduce lonely partners and
convince them to send large sums of money to help their new cyber-lovers out of
difficult financial circumstances. Once
the cyber-lovers receive their money, they disappear.
It is
easy to condemn these cyber-criminals for taking advantage of their anonymity
on the Internet in order to extort money out of their unsuspecting
victims. But it is also useful to
understand them, to realize that these cyber-criminals are extremely numb
people as a result of the technological
experiential vacuum in which they live.
They are people who, over and above the financial advantages that they
gain, use their criminal acts as incredible kicks to pull them out of the
extreme base numbness that they feel.
The criminal action still requires taking a risk of getting caught and a
risk of simply not being able to carry the scam through to its desire
conclusion. The cyber-criminal lives for
these risks that stimulate him out of his profound numbness.
Certainly,
the relationships that the cyber-criminal forms don’t lead to deep bonding,
deep grounding or the normal balanced kind of friction - organic friction - all
of which help people to feel more vibrantly alive. But like the first category of Internet users
discussed in this article - the more ordinary law-abiding users - they immerse
themselves within the field of experience that has been made so readily
available to them and to which they have grown accustomed. The template of a more natural more
traditional organic environment is no longer as readily available for those who
live in modern technological urban living environments. And even for those who live in rural
environments, the exposure to modern technology has made them less capable of
absorbing the organic stimuli that surround them. Hence, the opioid epidemic in rural America
where abrasive kicks are substituted for organic stimuli. So people today relate to others as best they
can – in many relationship fragments that correspond to their fragmented
pixilated personalities. Lots of
different presentations of self and very little core. In terms of satisfaction, fewer quality truly
bonded truly grounded relationships can’t be beat. But one has to be receptive to such
relationships in order to have them.
© 2017 Laurence Mesirow
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