Virtual anxiety: The disturbing new reality of life online. By Olivia Sudjic
The internet promised
transcendence of the physical, but has developed into a no man's land where
incomprehension, lack of ethics and insufficient regulation meet. This
lawlessness at once part of its appeal and its central problem.
Currently, those who
benefit most from the internet are those who run it, and Facebook's CEO Mark
Zuckerberg may soon run for president of the United States. His intimate
understanding of the digital fabric of our daily lives, not to mention his
contribution to the way the last election went, means he'd likely win. Anyone who still
thinks internet culture is superficial can wake up now. After all, what's so
superficial about Facebook? It is deeply human to look to others, compare and
copy. But to gratify natural drives to the extent social media enables is the
same as binge-eating fast food because it is natural to be hungry.
I think of King Midas,
and how everything he touched turned to gold. Do we want to be that app-happy?
To live with the illusion of mastery over our environment and others, while
becoming a prisoner of this power? To live without limits to our greed and
selfishness, without personal boundaries, without control over one's selfhood
and personal data is, to me, a scary place.
The idea that the
internet's mission is still about connection, making our experience of the
world seamless, persists in the names of the digital companies breaking down
the divide between two words to make a new one. Social media still professes to
support an enhanced empathy for others and a more porous, better-networked
self. While this may have been the case for some (arguably people who would
have been nice to strangers anyway), there are plenty of racist, sexist,
xenophobic, transphobic homophobes coming out of the woodwork every day for
whom Instagram has apparently done the opposite. Well, that's life, you might
say. And yes, it is: Real life and digital life can no longer be considered
separate.
I read a description
from the early days of the internet likening a chat room to a room full of
people talking to each other while facing the wall. That early dream of
anonymity is over. The further our IP address shadows us, the faster our images
-- via Facebook, Instagram (owned by Facebook), Snapchat and Periscope --
proliferate, the more our corner of the Internet becomes Plato's allegory of
the cave. We grow used to distortion and normalize what once seemed strange. We
do not feel the need to leave our cave. Increasingly, it will not occur to us
to do so.
And so we are
corralled into groups whose ways of thinking and points of reference mirror our
own, and we encounter fewer and fewer instances when we are forced to confront
this. The rest of the time, we're in the dark, in a delusional kind of unity…
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