Communication Front 2000 Book, "Crossing Points East-West"

"What's-been-said" on the Internet

The Virtual Almightiness and the Collapse of Identity

Daniel Smilovski

Introduction

Before I start, I need to clarify that the discourse of this essay is one that constantly moves on the edge of its own validity. It is not trying to close itself into the shell of a perfect self-defining system but on the contrary: its strength lies in its capacity to allow for its own failure to materialize, to remain open towards its Other - i.e., towards the Future it is announcing.

We could say that when "speaking" on the Internet we constantly call into question our own perspective. If we are to remain adequate, we cannot speak of the current state of the media itself, but can only try to describe it in its movement. Any attempt to speak about the "Net" is like a challenge thrown by the heretic Now into the face of the Unpredictable.

In the beginnings of the Internet as a medium the sociologists made attempts to anticipate and predict its development. These attempts have remained unsuccessful in all cases. According to a marketing study of the Wired magazine, one of the main reasons for the failure of some "high-tech" companies is their attempt to follow a predefined business plan, even when the dynamic environment of the "unfolding" future has already left the framework and escapes the notions it is based on. Formalization stands in the way of development, because here, development means adaptation. The current discourse calls itself into question in exactly this same sense. It is written with the awareness that its validity is linked to a given situation. Any change in the situation would shed doubt on it, and such change is certain to happen. This is why what is written here is like a theoretical photograph of a selected moment in the development of Internet communication. A photograph that attempts to struggle with its being static and to escape the sharp contrast of set notions, trying to express and anticipate movement.

The Internet situation and its paradoxes

When talking about the net, we are talking about globalization. This is an overused notion, torn apart into a multitude of meanings by those who use it. In fact globalization is one of those metaphorical words of the time, rendered by the discourse rather as a mood or ideology. Fashionable and self-evident, they eventually tell us nothing.

The globalization of the world via the Internet can also be interpreted as cultural integration, but instead of emphasizing the uniqueness of that media, this definition defaces it, lumps it together with the other vehicles of mass communication and information. The globalization of culture is a process that started long before the appearance of the Internet and is a feature of every media.

Let us try to view globalization via the Internet as a process of changing our ontological feeling of space. Human thinking in all of its aspects is spatial thinking; it puts things in their 'place,' assigns an order to them and places them in this order. The notion of 'distance' is central to the perception of this type of space. Objects are at different distances from each other, positioned in relation to each other, and this makes them unique in their being and as things-in-themselves. Spatial sensitivity is also deeply involved in every mode of thinking about the world. Each logic, each philosophy develops its notions in its inherent self-conditioned situation, which predefines the positions of the "objects" of thinking and their arrangement in space with respect to each other.

Internet sensitivity differs from conventional thinking by a nearly ontological idiosyncrasy. Here things are perceived not according to their distance or proximity, but rather according to their accessibility. [1] In the Internet, each piece of information, regardless of its physical location, is equally close - one 'step' [2] away in the sequence of interventions by the user. I use the notion of 'accessibility' in a double sense here: On the one hand it takes into view the sequence and order of the 'steps' we must with which we move in the field of information (in order to find a piece of information, you need to 'step' from one page to another). On the other, it refers to the different levels and rights of access to information. In this peculiar space, 'saying' and 'doing' coincide. Saying I'm doing something is doing it. The very essence of virtual reality lies in this fact - there is no difference between what I am and what I want, between being and notion. We are faced with a situation in which identity threatens to overflow, and eventually spill into the channels of unlimited possibilities, and disappear. Let us look closer at this 'spilling out' in a paradigmatic case of Internet communication.

The Text-in-Itself: I Write, Therefore I Am

It is clear that the immediate task of such an experiment is to discover, in the ocean of informational interaction on the Internet, the 'undercurrents' which are the immediate producers of culture and, respectively, identity. Let us try to define the prototypical situation of communicating via the Internet. Someone has logged on, ready to 'share' virtual reality with us, to exchange information and synchronize his meanings with ours. On our monitor this may read approximately as follows:

Hello, anybody there?

What does this prototypical notification of communication 'tell' us? First of all we become aware the presence of the other. His existence is embodied in the text we see on our screen. If we want to actually communicate declare our existence, we too must write something. For example:

Hello

Now the other person also knows about us and notes our virtual being. If on the other hand we had not written anything, we would not exist for him. We have come to the fundamental principle of virtual communication in its current form: "I write, therefore I am." Reality is virtual because it's all encompassing, all mighty, contained in what is said, in the text as an act. Typing makes reality come true.

This is a radically new formula that can be fully realized only on the Internet. To prove this we will look at some characteristic features of language as a basic tool of communication.

In the first place, language is a conventional vehicle operating through a set of foreseeable meanings agreed upon in advance. When I speak, I declare my intention to be heard and understood - i.e., socialization, the idea of the Other, underlies the very concept of language. When we say something, we translate the material characteristics of Being into a universal code accessible to everyone involved in the communication.

It would however be imprecise to stop here. Language is superimposed on reality. I agree with Bertrand Russell that words express not only existing things but also things that would be impossible without the existence of words. This allows us to construct abstract ideas with no reference to immediate physical elements (such as 'freedom,' 'eternity,' 'principle,' etc.). Those words do not have counterparts in the material elements of the world. And yet even the notion of 'infinity' contains the idea of space and its objectification. The concept of 'principle' could not arise without a reflection on the interaction between real objects. Language is 'anchored' in the depths of our physical being even as it floats on the currents of culture.

Let us however imagine a situation in which language fully relies on pre-acquired meanings and is not grounded in the parameters of physical reality. In this case, the act of speaking does not point to something in the outside world, but merely evokes relations present only in consciousness. Reality is turned into text. Words do not signify things, they ARE things. What we just described is a speaking situation on the Internet.

This statement could easily be disproved if it refers to the singular naming of objects. After all, if my interlocutor from Egypt says he has bought a bicycle, an adequate understanding will be possible only insofar as we have both seen what corresponds to the word "bicycle" in the physical world. Although we are talking about two different bicycles thousands of kilometers apart, we would both be able to recognize the correct reference, i.e., the truth about the word 'bicycle.'

If we speak not about objects, but about identities, things are rather different. Let us imagine the continuation of our imagined Internet conversation:

Who are you?

I am Homoludens

Obviously, neither the question "Who are you?" nor the answer "I am Homoludens" are in any way adequate. Who am I on the Internet? As we've already noted, my existence is based on the principle: "I write therefore I am." The text is the only vehicle of my identity; I fully invest my virtual 'self' in words. In the world outside the Web, the notions of 'true' and 'false' are based on the relation between words and physical factuality. There I am forced to struggle with real time and place in order to exist, and also to keep up my personal continuity and the social adequacy of my behavior. Virtual space allows me to escape these difficulties, but at the same time it deprives me of my identity. In an Internet discussion, the criterion of untruth lies only in the discrepancy between a statement and another, earlier statement. My virtual life is my text, a text closed in itself and therefore fully autocratic. Who am I if I can be anyone I wish? The absolute freedom of this situation destroys the external imperatives that keep me whole. The virtual turns out to be anti-social in the sense we give the word today.

Consequently, if someone communicates with me, he sees me 'from the inside,' i.e., he has at his disposal my 'knowledge' of myself, without being able to construct his own independently. All his attempts to reach my real identity slip along the surface of this text-in-itself, which I am on the Internet.

Translated from Bulgarian by Zornitsa Dimova


Notes

[1] In the Bulgarian original, the author uses a special notation for the word "accessibility." To access, in Bulgarian is dostypvam, literally "to make a step towards." The author writes "do-stypvam" and thus separates "towards" from "to step," or rather, in this case, "do-stypnost," accessibility - eds.

[2] Remember that "to access" in Bulgarian is "to make a step towards" - eds.


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