Cybersuicide
Is this a word yet? I'm sure it's got to be a concept already.
Yes, I know, it's ironic talking about this on a blog, but I suppose it's one of the things I would be giving up.
To erase your online identity. Or at least delete your web 2.0 networking sites. Delete the MySpace, the Flickr, the Blog itself. Cyber Suicide.
It's not just deleting yourself, your thoughts, your images, your music, but deleting your contacts. Removing yourself from a network - especially when you feel that network has rejected you.
How far do you go? Delete your email address? Your ILX account? Your Yahoo account? Can you actually withdraw, can you actually go without it? I'm not sure I can. I know it's an addiction, a compulsion, and I know it isn't necessarily very good for me.
A week and a half without internet, and so much of my moodswings stablised. Or maybe that was not having to go to work - then again, so much of my work time is wasted on the interweb. The interweb creates the illusion that you aren't isolated. But this is both blessing and curse. Sometimes it can be a reminder of just how isolated you are.
I'm not saying that I'm doing it. It's just something I'm thinking about.
Yes, I know, it's ironic talking about this on a blog, but I suppose it's one of the things I would be giving up.
To erase your online identity. Or at least delete your web 2.0 networking sites. Delete the MySpace, the Flickr, the Blog itself. Cyber Suicide.
It's not just deleting yourself, your thoughts, your images, your music, but deleting your contacts. Removing yourself from a network - especially when you feel that network has rejected you.
How far do you go? Delete your email address? Your ILX account? Your Yahoo account? Can you actually withdraw, can you actually go without it? I'm not sure I can. I know it's an addiction, a compulsion, and I know it isn't necessarily very good for me.
A week and a half without internet, and so much of my moodswings stablised. Or maybe that was not having to go to work - then again, so much of my work time is wasted on the interweb. The interweb creates the illusion that you aren't isolated. But this is both blessing and curse. Sometimes it can be a reminder of just how isolated you are.
I'm not saying that I'm doing it. It's just something I'm thinking about.
posted by Masonic Boom | 4:37 pm
5 Comments:
I'd be sad if you did. I can't say doing the same thing hasn't occurred to me though, using the Internet too much puts me in a bad mood, even when I just use it at work. As now.
I don't think it's very good for people with an obsessive quality, like us. Too much information, at our fingertips, all the time. It can be very distressing, almost like IO.
Maybe I'm just noticing it more today because I've been offline for so long. It's a bit of a shock to get back into it after a break.
The availability of information - not even information about things, but information about people. It starts to bother me.
Yeah, there's the icky contradiction there. One has all this information and a certain dependence on having it there, because one can fool oneself into thinking one is clever or informed enough to create a context for all that information.
But then, with people, that doesn't work properly and periodically that gets obvious. And then the internet can seem like a big sea of decontextualised people revealing themselves and being revealed in ways our brains haven't evolved to handle.
But then 100 years ago people in my father's village waved bloody sheets out the window when brides got deflowered and extended families in Northern England shared bedrooms.
It doesn't really make it better, but I wonder if humans weren't built to be a little more social than they are at the moment and the use of the internet as a social tool, which wasn't really predicted by capitalists, wasn't a response to that very capitalist system whose patterns of work and consumption had fractured our more established and deeper social connections.
See, traditionally I would have been able to say those last three paragraphs to the woman hoeing the terrace above mine in the mountains of Calabria, but if I talk in my office about anything that isn't about television, work, or my sex life, people think I'm odd.
People in offices have invented a sort of shared culture which both promotes the illusion of, yet ultimately prevents *real* intimacy.
But then again, who wants *real* intimacy with people you are forced to spend time with, not through shared heritage or common interests, but this meaningless post-industrial work?
In the past 10, 12 years of interweb experience, I've learned to use those starting points to get to a deeper level of conversation. I forgot this yesterday - one of my colleagues saw me looking at the Dr. Who site and asked if I'd seen the Christmas Special. I hadn't, but immediately entered into a conversation about which episode was most terrifying to us, and therefore the psychological basis of terror itself.
And he just looked at me like... well, he just thought it was some daft show his 3 year old watched.
I find it very hard to do that sort of superficial "how's the weather?" conversation, so in many ways, the interweb is a lifesaver for me, connecting me to minds that do like to discuss the symbolic meanings of things.
But you are getting at something, Spliffe, that the rate of technological change and the rate of societal change, and human psychology are all going at different speeds. And the last of those is the slowest to change o all - humans evolved in millions of years of small extended family tribal groups. This is why things like group politics and gossip are built into our very brains.
But the power of the human brain is its ability to adapt, to learn from experiences, to re-wire itself in a way.
What is strange to us, in our post-industrial world, (or, specifically to *me*, rather) is how *public* it all is now. My mother grew up in a tiny village in the Transkeii, which might have well have been the Victorian age. I suppose she was used to a level of everyone being involved in everyone else's business in a way which is very alien and foreign to me - who grew up in flux, constantly moving, with the idea of anonymity and privacy in the sheer numbers.
Things are changing back. I'm not sure I like the village aspect of Web 2.0, though.
I suppose you went away from this bit of it then - I know you're on MySpace but all those pictures and Fox properties intimidate me too much to follow.
Dear oh dear. I miss you. I'm always on Facebook if you ever are though, because I doen't need musical skill to have an unannoying presence there.
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