the following will be covered over the next few issues.
i’ve been thinking a lot about how we interact with each other online. in the 1994 essay "pandora's vox" by internet user ‘humdog' (this is required reading for the next few newsletters), the author discusses topics of surveillance, commodification, and whether authentic online communities/relationships are even possible:
cyberspace is a mostly a silent place. in its silence it shows itself to be an expression of the mass. one might question the idea of silence in a place where millions of user-ids parade around like angels of light, looking to see whom they might, so to speak, consume. the silence is nonetheless present and it is most present, paradoxically at the moment that the user-id speaks. when the user-id posts to a board, it does so while dwelling within an illusion that no one is present. language in cyberspace is a frozen landscape. (italics mine)
the concept of space has been distorted by the invention of the internet——we can now communicate with those hundreds or thousands of miles away from us, yet we are more isolated and physically alone than ever. when we post——either to online forums or social media——we are speaking to a room that we perceive as being as empty as our physical space, whether or not any other “user-id” is viewing the same page. we are invisible to each other online until we leave a stamp saying “i was here.” these marks are always in the past-tense, existing as instant artifacts of our online personas.
by rendering our existences almost entirely in a virtual space where every word is permanent and instantly shareable, these marks represent infinite manifestations of our virtual selves, with no distinction between past and present. our online words have come to signify more than our ‘irl’ actions. as humdog writes, “the idea of electronic community is a manifestation of the triumph of sign-value over worth-value. … the problem of cyberspace [is] the desire to invest the simulacrum with the weight of reality.” the self we perform online——and the social capital or vitriol we may amass in these online spaces——has become at least as substantial and significant as our physical selves.
in her essay “the I in the Internet,” Jia Tolentino writes of Web 2.0 and the birth of the social media era: “as more people began to register their existence digitally… [eventually] you had to register yourself digitally to exist.” this is, of course, more true now than ever. almost no one i know exists entirely outside of social media, and those who do eventually give in. there is social pressure not only to register yourself online for others to view and analyze your digital presence, but also to engage in online humor and meme culture, which has come to define interpersonal interaction among gen-z and millennials, both on- and off-line.
it has become common practice to unearth tweets from 2009 and extrapolate them to define an individual in their whole. we have also unrealistically marked ourselves as socio-economic equals; a working-class person making minimum wage can be ‘cancelled' just as easily as a gucci-wadrobed influencer, with little consideration of the difference in impact upon the lives of the two. there is a difference between exposing predatory or racist celebrities and doxxing a walmart employee for tweeting the word ‘f*g’ in 2011.
there are facets of human existence that are impossible to fully delineate on the web; the most significant is the complexity of personhood. as stated before, the internet emphasizes sign value over worth value, leaving the most complex aspects of the self completely outside of the picture. online, the self exists merely as a collection of data points, with no sense of personal, cultural, or historical context. and as the digital continues to overtake the physical, the more we participate in an online discourse that is rarely forgiving and inherently detached. sitting in our silent and isolated online rooms, we see each other flattened——one comment, one tweet, one like.
all my best,
lily