Abstracting Otherness

“The Internet is a prosthesis of [the] unconscious in the sense that it is a virtually limitless digital repository of all of the features of the social world that have imprinted themselves on the subject…collective element[s] of group subjectivity, until [they are] made accessible…function as a blind spot.  A source of judgment and action that remains hidden from conscious thought” – L.M. Sacasas
 
As the conscious mind can grapple with only so much at a time, we find ourselves quickly undone, over flooded with so many traces which chase after the tail end of other traces. We have learned how to be “alone together” as Sherry Turkle aptly terms our new irrational relational wrong turn. Families sitting in the same room of the i-phone glow, each no doubt drowning in painful anxieties and paranoia around the lapses, missed beats, and evacuated fleshiness of intimacy and of mattering.

I have been wondering why it seems so easy to abstract who a person is online, to have almost no regard for what their “right now” moment in the world consists of. Disagreements with someone’s ideology on social media almost instantly take the form of snarky, sarcastic, and I would say, violent attacks on a person. Such behavior is reinforced online in ways it hardly ever is in the real world. Decorum normally keeps us in thrall to social cues, emotional and body language reads, knowing the drift of where we are and who we are with.

Online all of this seems to disappear. A type of psychological anarchy grips our use of things. And indeed we quickly turn people into things. Yet this is anarchy without its messianic moment. It is purely Hobbesian, a war of all against all.

Perhaps part of it is that being online allows us to find the perfect comeback, the thing we always wanted to say in the moment but were never able to find the right words for.

Imagine someone tweets an insensitive comment while undergoing chemo, their body wracked with pain and emotional turmoil, abandonment by friends and family, alone in a scary confrontation with their fragile mortality, because, you see, not all who are dying are noble, easily lovable spirits, or go gently into that night. There is context here that comes up missing online. Does it matter, the circumstances surrounding an event?

A comment is made, and suddenly who a person is, their whole story, the span and arc of a human life, becomes reduced to a single moment in their evolution. They are fixed into an identity we form for them. Why does the rest no longer matter to us?

A “good person” rebuts with a sharp barb, lol, emoji’s, ‘oh snap’ GIFs, a cascade of vicious critiques and comebacks all seemingly meant to demonstrate one’s higher moral standing than the one who is paying the cost of their words.

Here’s what haunts me. Why is their no cost to the words of those who, seen as on the right side of whatever, are just as viscous and in need of condemnation as those of the chemo patient? Group reinforcement takes over with a vengeance. If the tide is moving one way you’d don’t swim out against it. Yet we know that out humanity consists in precisely this. There hasn’t been a more noble moment in history than when a person risks everything to go against the mob.

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Sherry Turkle writes;

“We live in a technological universe in which we are always communicating. And yet we have sacrificed conversation for mere connection.

At home, families sit together, texting and reading e-mail. We text (and shop and go on Facebook) during classes and when we’re on dates. My students tell me about an important new skill: it involves maintaining eye contact with someone while you text someone else; it’s hard, but it can be done.“

To seem present when one is anything but, is this part of what splits our ethical decorum while engaging in online communication? If we’re not even reading the relational cues of our physical surroundings how could we possibly hope to translate that kind of attention to our online selves and to others?

There is a scene in Life As a House, where Kevin Kline’s character is in the hospital with a terminal cancer diagnosis. He tells the nurse who is attending to him (changing his IV) that he hasn’t been touched in years. “Really” she asks, “That’ can’t be true. Not even by a loved one, your family, no one?” “No one” he says, teary eyed. “Everyone needs to be touched”, the nurse says, now also teary eyed, as she reaches out her hand and touches his face softly, he lets out an existential sigh, tears rolling down his face. “I’m sorry”, the nurse says, pulling her hand away, the intensity of the moment almost too much to bear.

What took place here is genuine connection. Navigating the risky terrain of the here and now. We are different people when we are together and present with one another, even as perfect strangers. We recognize more easily our common humanity, our common fates of joy and sorrow and in time, of death itself. Ethics is predicated on vulnerability. If I cannot recognize the harm I cause you, then I cannot access my ethos, my way of authentically being in the world.

“We’ve become accustomed to a new way of being “alone together.” Technology-enabled, we are able to be with one another, and also elsewhere, connected to wherever we want to be. We want to customize our lives. We want to move in and out of where we are because the thing we value most is control over where we focus our attention. We have gotten used to the idea of being in a tribe of one, loyal to our own party.” Ibid.

The thing we know about human attention, it is so rarely a thing completely under our control. Being two places at once has cost us, I fear, the largest part of our core humanity. Our ability to connect with one another is about, in part, recognition. It’s harder for me to recognize you as human in the technological sphere than it is in a solid, tangible social space. Intellectually I may know you are human but am less able to know it emotionally, especially in heated, quickly down spiraling, online exchanges.

“A 16-year-old boy who relies on texting for almost everything says almost wistfully, “Someday, someday, but certainly not now, I’d like to learn how to have a conversation.” ibid.

Trauma also disconnects us from the ability to make such connections. How might technology and social media be seen as re-traumatizing instruments, almost parental failure/abuse like in their feel and effect on the shadow side of our earliest experiences? Why is it so hard to say we are sorry when have been wrong and hurtful online?

A large part of our new lives online entails a constant editing and reconfiguration of our frailty and vulnerability. Delete or edit, polish and shine, we never have to accept the painful unknowing of our current state. Again, for those of us with deep trauma the risks here are always more perilous.

So often traumatized individuals traumatize each other online.

If we think we are in the right while doing so then we might never be able to wrestle with our own imperfect and harmful way of moving through the world.
“In the silence of connection, people are comforted by being in touch with a lot of people — carefully kept at bay. We can’t get enough of one another if we can use technology to keep one another at distances we can control: not too close, not too far, just right.

Texting and e-mail and posting let us present the self we want to be. This means we can edit. And if we wish to, we can delete. Or retouch: the voice, the flesh, the face, the body. Not too much, not too little — just right.

Human relationships are rich; they’re messy and demanding. We have learned the habit of cleaning them up with technology. And the move from conversation to connection is part of this. But it’s a process in which we shortchange ourselves. Worse, it seems that over time we stop caring, we forget that there is a difference.” ibid.

Forgetting the difference, the feel of vulnerability, this deep amnesia, perhaps partly chosen, partly enforced on us, is making our souls sick. A sickness unto death without a messianic moment, a sabbath for the dark and tired soul. Civility cannot be sustained. Worse, we lose contact with ourselves, the selves we find in moments where we are truly alone, our inner thoughts carrying the breath of who we are to the deep inner messy heart of us.
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Cruelty will always, no matter the context or platform, be an impoverished form of love. A trauma passed on under the guise of the perfect comeback. The thing we could never say otherwise.