The Internet and Care

This video is worth watching. The style of the lecture is a bit strange and classically rhetorical. This soap box rant does illustrate what I like about the internet—the radical democracy of the whole “mosh pit.”

The internet (and the collections and interactions of data there-in) creates a flux where people are asked to radically reconsider what they care about and how they care about.

Our trite mindless goings with our sad little ifs (could haves and should haves) get broken apart by the internet. Expensive possessions, violent leanings, illiteracy and sexually repression get thrashed a bit… even if only slightly. I guess this might be grasping at straws… but things like blogs, youtube and pornography (although this is often horribly reductive and objectifying) don’t cost money to use… and they open people to seeing different perspectives (or hold the possibility of this).

It is strange that this radical network is based off trite binary codes and logical if/then structures. As interesting and powerful the internet is, it is also troubling—things get reduced by logical systems and whatnot.

Example: people spend hours upon hours on facebook—a medium of interaction that favors trite reductions. There is a whole set of phenomena that can be described in relation to facebook but that isn’t my goal here—I just want to point to the tension between the reductive aspect of the internet and the radically democratic aspects.

The reductions prevent people from taking long term (prophetic) stances within the medium. I have a nostalgia for the newsgroups and discussion groups I used to participate in on my 14.4k modem back in the day—but I think the inclusion of more people in the discussion is wonderful (even if a large portion of these people are just in the discussion to go on youtube and call things “faggot-y”).