Pornography of the Virtual

Last evening my daughter asked me a question taken from the book she had on her lap.  “Is it the road that chooses us or do we choose the road?”  I answered that I suppose it is neither…or both.  But in the end a road cannot really choose.  We are responsible for our public highways.  

Uhmmm…. So what am I ‘doing’  or ‘thinking’ now...

I, like so many others, have been lured by the excitement, the immediacy, the ‘comfort’ that comes with email, text messaging and social networking. I have meaning because someone is there to confirm at any moment that I am and I do. And I am part of a community.  I might get a brief comment, a thumbs up for my thoughts or simply be ignored; acknowledgements easily made in front of a screen, with no real commitment, little thought and no active engagement.   It is, I suppose, a social network but without giving of ourselves, can we really claim to be social beings?  Or are we becoming virtual, a generation of ‘almosts.’

In a world where there is automated everything and where only those who will be interviewed will be contacted, there is a lot to be said for confirmation that I ‘am’.  Network power may well be a social movement protesting our loss of connection to things meaningful…meaningful work (not employment), meaningful love (not relationships), and meaningful sex (not a hook up). And even meaningful fear. But the road we chose may well be choosing us.  Our social networks have become algorithms for life, care maps providing us a ‘way’ to be in the world that is acceptable.  It is a movement that has been co-opted by Coke and ‘fan of’, by causes that we join but do nothing for and by events of no consequence or depth that simply serve to entertain us.

The display of the thing without consideration of the meaning or feeling behind it I call the pornography of the virtual. We glorify the mundane, the simple act, as we describe what we are doing.  If others do it too often or are not creative enough we can simply ‘defollow’, ‘defriend’, ‘detach’, ‘dewhatever’.    Conversation, actual face to face interaction, carries risk…we might actually feel badly about what we might have to say. We might have to be tolerant of the opinions of others or we might have to work through our own complex thoughts as we deal with the ‘whole’ person in front of us.  In a face to face encounter it is far more difficult to ‘defollow’ which may well give others time to evolve, to grow through our patience with them.  Real social interaction, like real sex is fraught with opportunities to say/do the wrong thing but also that we might allow the other person and ourselves to explore, to become something different.  If it is true that humans are social beings then choosing our road means that sometimes we slow down for others who are learning to drive, sometimes we pick up a hitchhiker, sometimes we are the hitchhiker and sometimes we need to haul out the shovel and fill the potholes to make the road smoother for us all.  

I do consider what others might say about all this opinion of mine.  But she is writing a blog!!!!  Blog! Yet whatever my over the top moralistic opinion is based upon, it is not egoistic in nature. The internet is the marketplace of Socrates.  What is different is that women and those outside public life, those who were thought to, at best, have no right to an opinion and at worst to not exist, can speak.  And if you got this far you have not defollowed me yet.