- guardian.co.uk,
- Monday April 10 2000 16:07 BST
Part one: Culture jamming
Part two: The Manchurian consumer: are you authentic?
Part four: The new activism (fire in the belly)
I know a young man who has spent the last few years surfing the electronic media. His whole existence has become a surfin' safari. Nothing is more or less important than anything else. He's supernatural now. He picks up a book, skims a sentence. Looks at a bit of this and a bit of that.
He absorbs everything, but not deeply. Everything is nonlinear. Nothing can be sustained - not his interest in his job or his colleagues, not even his marriage: If it's not going well, his first instinct is to surf away.
In related news, a colleague recently watched his upstairs neighbour undergo a slow personality shift. It began when she discovered a particular chat group on the Internet. Her mild curiosity about this new world grew into a full-fledged addiction. Day and night she jumped in and out of conversations with strangers on one topic or another. These strangers, who may or may not use their real names or genders, who may or may not tell the truth, came to seem almost like friends. She knew some of them as if they were family.
She lost ten pounds after discovering this chat group - because she forgot to eat. "Sometimes I go out," she'd say, but she didn't mean "out" out, she meant "out" of that chat group and into another site somewhere else on the Net. She was reluctant to sleep because she might miss an interesting thread. One time my friend saw her on the street, and she hadn't showered in four days.
Now she's a very smart woman, but her addiction - she calls it that herself - changed her. She grew so accustomed to typing her thoughts that her verbal skills suffered. She spoke too quickly, running her words together so that it all sounded like one long word. Her eyes were fixed and liquid and her teeth were a strange color. She behaved erratically. She vacuumed at all hours. At one point she considered getting another e-mail address under another name, so she could "flame" herself.
A psychologist might diagnose this woman as being in the early stages of some dissociative disorder. But she's still fairly grounded compared to others who have more fully immersed themselves in cyberculture.
All across the Net, people (mostly young men) haunt cyberhangouts called MUDs (Multiple-User Domains), where role-playing fantasy games are always in progress. These places are as complex and esoteric as the imaginations of the players allow. They are "transformative," in that they let the user determine the outcome.
In her book Life on the Screen, American psychoanalyst Sherry Turkle describes one young man, an inveterate webcrawler, who's a character in six MUDs at the same time. In each MUD he is a different person: a teenage girl, a history professor, a dog, an Arthurian knight, a cyborg and William S. Burroughs. In none of them is he actually himself. Yet each persona has come to feel as real to him as his "real" self. When not directly participating in one group, he sometimes puts that self to "sleep." The character is still in the game, can interact with other players on a superficial level via artificial intelligence programmes, and can summon the real guy back to assume his MUD alter ego via a "page" if something exciting is about to happen.
Reading this story about mediated self-constructions reminded me of an article Ann Beattie wrote for Esquire about ten years ago. She had tagged along with a bunch of Japanese tourists on a bus ride through San Francisco. What struck her was the way the passengers, confronted with scenes of beauty or recognizable iconography (like the Golden Gate Bridge), reflexively put their cameras to their eyes. Only when these things were thus "framed" did they become valid. Only when they were memorialized on film did they live. This, I think, is the hazardous fallout from an overmediated world, where nothing that happens becomes real until you can make it fit into the spectacle, or make the spectacle fit into it. "I knew a Californian who read his poetry aloud at parties until his friends learned to silence him," writes anthropologist Edmund Carpenter in his book Oh, What a Blow That Phantom Gave Me! But when he played recordings of these same poems, everybody listened." The Situationists might say such tales, as they accumulate, mark the end of authentic experience, and therefore the end of the authentic self.
Perhaps there's no such thing as an authentic self. Maybe Walt Whitman was right: We contain multitudes. Part child, part adult. Androgynes. Cyborgs. We understand intuitively that machines are becoming more like humans, and now via the promise of virtual reality we have the opportunity to meet machines halfway.
The MUD aficionados Sherry Turkle investigates in her books tend to use the Net to create bigger and better (nonauthentic) selves. They often use it to beef up the parts of their lives that are failing in the real, concrete world. In Life on the Screen, we meet Matthew, the nineteen year-old son of a distant, alcoholic dad. In actual life his girlfriend had dumped him, but on the Net his chivalrous MUD persona was enormously attractive to women. Then we meet Gordon, who likewise invests his on-line characters with "qualities he's trying to develop in himself." The game, Turkle concludes, "has heightened his sense of self as a work in progress."
Turkle coins the term "slippages" to refer to "places where persona and self merge, where the multiple personae join to cornprise what the individual thinks of as his or her authentic self." MUD addicts end up inhabiting a world somewhere between real life and virtual life. It's too real to be a game, yet too artificial to be real. They hover in "the gap."
To a lesser extent the same could be said of all of us creatures of the media age - which is why a mortal's entry into the world of MUDs seems like a good metaphor for our immersion into What Turkle calls "the culture of simulation." A place where a word like "authenticity" may no longer even apply.
If you spend enough time in cyberspace, emote commands start taking the place of emotions. "Emoticons" - those cunning little sideways faces typed with punctuation marks - substitute for real smiles and frowns. Over time, the computer drives out what we thought was an innate art: living through all of our senses. In her short story "Web Central," Fay Weldon paints a portrait of a dystopic future along these lines: The privileged classes sit alone in sealed rooms with computer terminals, their moods regulated intravenously.
The idea that spending a lot of time in cyberspace might have an ill effect on mental health has until recently been intuitively sensible but hard to prove. In August 1998, findings of the first concentrated study of the social and psychological effects of the Internet, a two-year effort by Carnegie Mellon University, were released. The results? Netheads were lonelier and more depressed than the average population. You'd guess that it might be because the lonely and depressed tend to gravitate to the Net. But that wasn't so. "Participants who were lonelier and more depressed, as determined by standard questionnaires at the start of the... study, were no more drawn to the Internet than those who were originally happier and more socially engaged. Instead, Internet use itself appeared to cause a decline in psychological well-being." "Connect, disconnect" may be our generation's answer to "Tune in, turn on, drop out."
Eventually, and perhaps sooner rather than later, there lies a world where most human beings are simply incapable of experiencing the emotions that life ought to evoke. Whatever they see or hear or taste, no matter how raw and beautiful, will promptly be pillaged for its usable constituent parts. And of course, once an emotion is corrupted, it can never be uncorrupted.
In John Irving's novel A Prayer for Owen Meany, the family matriarch dies in front of the television, rigor mortis sets in and her thumb is fixed on the remote. They find her body in front of the live set, the remote endlessly scanning the channels. It's a prophetic image. As we travel deeper into corporate -driven cyberspace, similar haunting figures loom on our own horizon. Fractured humans are laid waste in front of their wall-size TV-cyberscreens. Their attention spans flicker near zero, their imaginations have given out and they can no longer remember the past. Outside, the natural world has all but vanished and the social order is breaking down. The citizens of this new world order are trapped inside their living rooms, roaming the thousand- channel universe and exercising the one freedom they still have left: to be the voyeurs of their own demise.
Excerpted from Culture Jam by Kalle Lasn, Copyright © 1999 by Kalle Lasn. Excerpted by permission of Eagle Brook, an imprint of William Morrow and Company, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Part one: Culture jamming
Part two: The Manchurian consumer: are you authentic?
Part four: The new activism (fire in the belly)
