Ideologies
are seen as political and philosophical but their mechanics and fuel are
behaviour and sentiment. Actions and feelings are thus the truth of
ideology.
In
using the Internet we take actions and have feelings, even without politics or
philosophy, without discourse, ideology will assert itself.
If
ideology is represented by its articulation, a text, of what society is or can
be then it is political and philosophical.
If ideology is immanent in socialness, that is to say, the way we
are with-each-other (I hyphenate to make you dwell), then it has dimensions
other than the linearity of language. It
has for example space of both physical and psychological geometry, it has also a
a practical ritualisation of that geometry, an etiquette.
This etiquette is the way we are to-each-other (I hyphenate again), it
is, in a most practical way, to do with getting along and putting up, or not, as
the case may be. This essay is
about how the Internet asserts an ideology via asserting a space within which
socialness exists, how existing etiquette is disrupted and changes and finally
about what the changes might do to us. There
is also a moral but primarily practical sentiment I want to advocate - civility,
which is an adjunct to both duty and a respecter of the private.
In
European culture Liberalism was founded by two pragmatic attitudes, one a
concern for trade, another and that which concerns us here, a desire to see an
end to bloody social dissension and repression via the gambit of toleration.
Philosophers of the Enlightenment saw toleration as a moral and practical
solution, a rational escape from violent contest.
As Liberalism has developed its ideological position has grown to be one
in opposition to dogma and its practical outcome - a settling, a structural
fixity of society, order. In this
process Liberalism itself has grown to be understood as without fixity, without
central premise, fluid and adaptive. Meanwhile
in the twentieth century the political ideologies which sought order, Fascism
and Communism, the intellectual progeny of Liberalism, have been disgraced
through their attempts to exact order. Liberalism
on the other hand is seen as the survivor, the last Ideology, the last pairing
of moral and practical intent, providing us a permission to be as we are and to
change as we will.
However
as part of its adaptive progress Liberalism has spawned its own contradiction,
as a practical philosophy it has had to deal with the fact that moral and social
order is still required. This has been dealt with by a progressive dissection
separating issues of order from issues of morality.
The outcome is a non-philosophy, a rationalist mirror of order -
scientific bureaucracy, seen as an inert twin of the tolerant attitude, both of
which we believe will allow us to progress to some place 'better'.
In this way Liberalism eludes disgrace, blame always being directable at
some local and particular weakness of management, which must be perpetually and
increasingly recorded so it can be perpetually improved and thus fault removed
from human culpability. The moral
imperative of Liberalism, toleration, is thus achieved by a distantiation
brought about by the device of the bureaucratic.
Through the 'objective' management of order socialness and etiquette
become discontinuous, the extreme price of toleration is to be apart and to be
alone. In this way Liberalism is
paired with a polar opposite, Anarchy.
*
The
Internet is the apotheosis of Liberalism, driven by the rationalism and
toleration which define academia and the USA and combining with a technology
which is central to extending bureaucracy.
As such if there is to be a moment of disgrace for Liberalism then it
will be with this, because on the Internet we finally see Liberalism directly
with its seconds bureaucracy and Anarchy. However
Liberalism both in practice and intention relies on deferral, its disgrace comes
in so many installments we are indifferent to it, there is likely to be no war. Instead we have a moment of fruition, an ideology triumphant,
with weapons of simulation and metaphor and an army of computers, we are in an
era of occupation. We are also in
an era of repression enforced, oddly, by the witless and blunt use of a
technology whereby socialness and etiquette, the way we are with and to each
other, have been conflated with communication, management and commerce.
Socialness and etiquette in most ways we feel, the other three are based in
actions and their histories. So our feelings become administered as so
many coins and our sentiments chill and warm to a handling outside our own.
To
talk about the Internet is difficult, to assess the overall psychical effect it
has on the individual or the collective even more so.
To predict how the Internet changes our sense of what constitutes being
with and being to each other is also difficult but it is easy and interesting to
see changes that have already taken place 'within' the Internet.
How these changes might also modify their original behavioural referents
'outside' the Internet is also interesting.
The
first difficulty we might have, talking about the Internet, arises from the
experience of it as a consistent and correlated 'channel' where complex and
serial forms and activities play into the IT trekkiejargon of 'worlds' and
'space'.
In this way the Internet can be subjectively 'ringed around' as somewhere
else. However, like Virtual
Reality, coherence in the user interface provides confidence that we are
exercising worldly sense, sensibility and actions.
In this way the Internet can be subjectively 'ringed around' as here
and now, this place I am at. In
experience then the Internet is something we look into and look upon, we move
into and move around. It is a world
within and yet part of 'the world', there is a funny kind of nesting or
recursion going on brought about by the way we have and make sense of things.
To
understand how these worlds are related we might usefully draw on Heidegger's
differentiation of space and place, simplistically we can think of them as space
- the measured world of height, distance, effort, physics etc. and place - the
world understood as thoughts and feelings, memories and actions, the humanly
valued world. If we add to these
their Internet parallels, let us call them I-space and I-place, we
can see that I-place isn't really much different from place, it's just another
place, in fact it is place. I-space on the other hand is quite different to
space, there is no length of corridor, height of door, flight of step or energy
draining mobility. I-space is
linear, sequential, two-dimensional, properly it is no more than a perpetual
menu system, one screen after another. I-space
is understood by the GUI designer or Web Page author as the space of navigation,
one screen of choices representing a fiction of multidimensionality but there is
never really more than one screen. The
Internet is the valued world chopped and scrambled in I-space.
Interestingly no one seems to much worry about this - the actual
Internet, or its effect on us, seeing the Internet as merely an extension of
place and full of things we know. Like
a high bomber our mouse button is disconnected from the damage it might cause to
our or anyone else's psyche.
If
the difficulty of comprehending the Internet
is resolvable to the presence of some new and inexhaustable type of
space, the problem is further compounded by the way place is transposed and
injected into it. In the one-screen
culture of I-space only memories of space and place might determine the next
experience. These memories in
transposition, in design, become metaphors - the company, the home, the gallery,
the shops. To the web-site designer
these metaphors are likely to be drawn directly from a context of self or
client, they will be used to define the experience of the forward or backward
step, to fill and pad the site with place and maintain some logical resemblance
to associated space. However such
designs remain only local ventures. Cast
into I-space metaphors abruptly stop and abruptly begin, place becomes
hallucination.
*
A
conclusion that can be drawn is that deeper metaphors of space and place such as
socialness and etiquette which might 'calm' the Internet are obviated by the
Liberalism and Anarchy which underwrite it.
Liberalism and Anarchy in turn assert their own deeper metaphors for the
surfer, in fact primarily one, which is "it is your responsibility to know
where you are going and stick to the path".
This it seems to me is the anarchic end of the pairing.
The idea of avoiding offence or conflict is not built in perhaps because
these are matters of etiquette and etiquette requires as much a comprehension of
space as of place. On the Internet
etiquette requires the acknowledgement by all of I-space.
Currently the tensions and separations that exist for Liberalism within normal space...the slipping nature of its control mechanisms, the administration of persuasion, the temptations that coerce us to surrender control...find different 'embodiments' on the Internet. On the good side when we take away, in the profoundest sense, bodily relations, things like keeping your distance, letting someone go in front, most surely and ultimately will find their counterpart on the Internet. At the same time the mechanisms of Liberalism that many of us do not normally encounter, or understand as part of the system we live in, will find new release and power in I-space. Web experiences we might respectively and metaphorically describe as threatened poise, entrapment, embarrasment and mugging. Liberalism will finally have its moment of disgrace, the bubble burst we might come to rue what comes after.