A couple of the questions I had for this week revolved around the ideas of narcissism vs nihilism and our experience with the Internet. I wondered if the internet and our usage of it shows not so much a love with ourselves as it shows a stripping of meaning including the meaning we assign leaving so many different human experiences in a digital dust bowl of monotony. I also wondered if the internet wasn't so much an example of being in love with ourselves as it was an example of being in love with a reflection or shadow of something which could be theoretically at least partially detached from our own identity.
I want to start by looking at the stripping or dulling of meaning as a nihilistic impulse enacted online. As Geert Lovnik claims, "We're operating in a post-deconstruction world in which blogs offer a never-ending stream of confessions, a cosmos of micro-opinions attempting to interpret events beyond the well-known twentieth-century categories. The nihilist impulse emerges as a response to the increasing levels of complexity within interconnected topics." In some senses we can see that Lovnik is posing this as a potential good thing and he later claims that blogging can actually help increase thought instead of shutting it down. But I also think as Lovnik discusses the "never ending stream of confessions" we can see how eventually putting a confession, either textual or visual, online over and over will result in audiences having no reaction to the confession and the very human ability to empathize will become increasingly muted.
This argument is perhaps not unlike the worry that video games and movies will eventually result in us not caring about violent crimes or finding naked bodies exciting without some extra added layer of complexity. If there is even a shred of empirical truth in the study of TV and video games, then the Internet offers a possibility of amplifying this dulling of our senses to a much greater degree since the Internet explores nearly all human emotions ad nauseum. Just as Lovnik claims, "When everyone broadcasts, no one is listening. In this state of 'digital Darwinism' only the loudest and most opinionated voices survive." This is essentially a tendency of escalation where we can no longer get our kicks from what we think of as more basic engagements of our emotions and now we have to experience everything louder, brighter, and more extreme.
I suppose what will happen is that these extreme and increasingly complex levels of engagement will eventually go so far as to implode as they too lose meaning and the Internet will, at least for a short time, go through a cycle and return to blogging and engaging potential audiences on more mundane topics or through more mundane mediums and again the crazy Youtube confessions will seem absurd and unusual instead of mainstream and regular.
I would also like to quickly engage the narcissist nature of the Internet and propose that the Internet doesn't encourage us to be in love with ourselves (though I will admit I'm thrilled at getting a bunch of "likes" on a status post) as much as it encourages us to be in love a false version of other things. A friend of mine, Rojer, recently met a girl at an event he was attending with whom he kept contact for several months. Since their contact was via facebook, this allowed a friend of his, let's call him Robert, to also engage this girl in conversation. Even though Robert never met the young woman (let's just call her Virginia to make things simple) he decided after a mere week or two of facebook communication that he was in love. Determined that fate had found him, he exposed his love to Virginia and Virginia responded by telling him that she had no intention of having a romantic relationship with him, namely because she was attracted to Rojer whom she had actually met in real life. I think this story demonstrates a number of things, and one of them is that the personal contact Rojer had with Virginia trumped the online only experience Robert had. The other, and perhaps more interesting, aspect of this interaction however is the narcissistic experience that Robert had by looking into the great digital beyond and falling in love with a reflection of something he only thought he knew.
I don't think Robert's experience was particularly unique and I
think this habit is enacted in a number of ways beyond the pursuit of a
romantic relationship. Take political blogging for instance. In many
ways this shows a certain romance with a political ideal and with the
potential outcome of publishing said ideals on such a widely spread
form of media which encourages more of this need to be the loudest one
shouting in the dark. Ultimately, this goes back to the idea of
nihilism and it shows how the Internet is essentially deconstructing
itself out of even having symbolic meaning as things like romance and
political beliefs lose their weight and become part of a series of
trite and bland exclamation. I'm not sure there's an easy answer to
fixing this, but for now perhaps it's best we consider what kind of
relationships we wish to create and what methods we as humans are most
likely to accept or reject in regard to creating those relationships.