I’ve said for a while that the Internet tends to isolate us, and our opinions, from other people and their beliefs. I believe it’s in the way the Internet was designed. I think Eli Pariser, president of MoveOn.org, does as well.
“Instead of connecting us to the world, the Web is connecting us back to ourselves in an invisible feedback loop”
I suppose one could always look for the opposing view, which is rarely offered. Using the system is definitely something that relies on the individual fighting their own instinctual tendency, but I think he skirts the root of the problem which has to do with the nature of search and retrieval systems themselves – the main way we deal with the Internet. We find what we are looking for, and by extension, people who share our views and places that reinforce them. So fighting that tendency is not only fighting human nature, it’s fighting the nature of the network itself.
If the comments are anything to go by, some people are threatened to the point of anger by this article, which seems to criticize their perfect totem. Another example of the kind of tribal microculture that has become so prevalent.
I’ve noticed something that may or may not be happening, and what I’ve noticed is this: In the ‘digital age’, culture hits but doesn’t stick. The artifacts are ephemeral, not only in their physicality but also in their cultural presence. People experience them, enjoy them, then the novelty wears off and they abandon them – and it leaves no lasting resonance with the predominant, ‘mainstream’ culture. Media, political events, trends in fashion or religion – they all seem to come and go without making much of an impact on people’s way of thinking or doing as they did in previous decades, not much of a dent in the edifice of the ‘overculture’.
If my hunch is right, I think there are a couple of reasons this might be happening. One is that if something has no money potential it doesn’t get the investment it needs to make it enduring in the public mind. Another might be that there are fewer hard and lasting artifacts being created, no discs to transmit culture in a concrete way, it becomes like TV where the hardware is the artifact and the shows are emanations from the artifact – the screens and players are totemistic, the ‘content’ disposable because it has lost it’s object-ness. Clothing etc., is of lower quality so those artifacts are of a more ephemeral nature as well. Combined with the network’s dynamic of speed, culture has no time to ‘set in’, develop, and become ritualized, the culture is discarded before it can make any impact. These characteristics create a perfect storm where we forget our collective culture as it happens.
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