Sorry y'all for the late post....My selected passage is as follows:
In Robbins' article "Against Virtual Community," he points out many potentially negative things about virtual community and the virtual experience that he dubs in the passage I selected as 'that which does not exist'. He states that those that favor the immediacy of 'that which does not exist' over real experiences are escapists: people who seek to get away from life's unpleasant realities by retreating into other realities or fantasies. He says that if we seek to truly master the virtual realm, then we are headed towards a collective disavowal of true experiential community.
On one hand, I can see his point. Communicating through a digital space to someone else who exists in meatspace isn't as personal being in the physical presence of that person. Also, people could very well lead lives quite disconnected from a typical person's involvement in physical society with the ever advancing virtual tools and technological progressions perpetuating that..
On the other hand hand, however, I most definitely want to argue in favor of our collective access to virtual community as something that exists as a compliment to how we (humans) are naturally programmed. I'm not saying that it was natural for us to inevitably integrate the virtual and the physical (we could just as well have not have had the industrial revolution and been fine), but it is an allusion a generalization that I believe to be justified: all people are made to relate to other people, and it is true meaningful relationships that we are naturally drawn to.
I, along with many of you I'm sure, are drawn to new tech and new spaces because they are intriguing and it feels adventurous to explore new things, but if not for the people that inhabit virtual space, why bother? I know many who might not be the most technologically savvy or even interested in the idea of a Facebook or Twitter account for example, yet they pioneer the space because the prospect of connecting with people drives them to do so (even if they don't ever post and just follow people). Robbins' words hold credence when thinking critically about the dangers of these new and unexplored things, but if there wasn't something fulfilling about the virtual experience and the relationships experienced in virtual space, only then would his words be fully valid in my opinion.
Take Twitter for instance. How foolish, right? It glorifies the mundane; who honestly cares about you having to take your cat to the vet because she has the sniffles? Yet, over time, the fragments begin to collectively create a sense of the person who is putting those fragments out there. I can have a dim sense of what is going on in the life or mind of someone who I realistically wouldn't get to ever talk to save a couple times a year maybe because of the problem of distance. Using Twitter, I could have a sense of how that person is doing and have a wider basis of conversation the next time I see that person. Things like Twitter allow for maintaining a range of contact not possible apart from the virtual even if it isn't as pure as it could be relationally speaking.
If experience is the issue, I believe Robbins misses the idea of the virtual experience being better than no experience. Time moves on, and with it, people do too. Staying connected to those people requires participation through media whether we're talking about a phone call, texting, skype, or a simple letter. Communication over distance requires mediation. The lines are continually blurring because people care about legitimate communal experience, not because we want to escape it.
You and Sheila seem to have read the same essay, and I agreed with both, for someone to be online they have to be willing to participate and be social even if in their personal life the are shy and quiet, they are choosing to live something through other mediums.
ReplyDeletegood post, Adm. SP.
ReplyDeleteI agree with what you are saying
ReplyDeleteI think that communication with people in real/meat space is great and all but communication in virtual space is better than nothing. And what about those people that have friends or family that live far away … should they not talk to them but once a year, if they’re lucky … I think that advances in technological communication is an asset to the human race, not a detriment.