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thePuck
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oliver sutton
On “The Empathic Civilisation”
I enjoyed the video on the empathic civilization a lot, and it certainly made me want to believe, but he does leave out an awful lot.
Those same technologies that extend our central nervous system and bring us into contact with people from all over the planet condition how we understand and relate to those people. There may have been a big response to Haiti, but that’s because it was a clearly defined media spectacle that lent itself to an out-pouring of generosity. A timely counter balance to that example is the fact that that in the Niger Delta in Africa, the aging oil infrastructure bleeds the same volume of oil annually into the Delta as has been spilled into the Gulf of Mexico over the past few weeks. The effects on the inhabitants, whose lives are already desperately precarious, has been devastating (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/may/30/oil-spills-nigeria-niger-delta-shelI). I haven’t seen much empathy flowing from Europe or America for these people. Sure if it was prioritized by the traditional media in a very focused and coordinated way, there may be a trickle of empathy, but even so that would remain just an instance of a global inequality so widespread, pervasive and structural that people’s patience with it would soon wear thin.
I’m not much more optimistic about the social media. In the first place I don’t believe they can organise information and set the agenda in the same way as the traditional media. Secondly, and more importantly, given that most people have never used a telephone, let alone coolly surfed the social networking sites, the world simply doesn’t correspond to the geographically proportionate sphere that the fantastic cartoonist drew. If you were to draw a spatial representation of the globe based not on geographical space, but internet usage, Africa would be all but invisible. As Manuel Castells pointed out in his “the Internet Galaxy” the new technologies create a networked world which, in fact, has a far greater tendency to exclude those who are not connected.
So, while I don’t disagree with the fact that our technologies and media transform our perception of the world and sense of community, I would take issue with naively optimistic assumptions about the spread of empathy. As things stand I think technological narcissism is closer to the mark.
PS: Can’t we get this site firing? Maybe there’s more latent interest that the number of postings would suggest.
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thePuck
The Empathic Civilization
Watch This.
And what will allow this to happen is social media. Mark my words.
thePuck 1:10 am on May 30, 2010 Permalink |
Yeah, my theories are a bit more complex than just counting on empathy and communication, too, but I do like the way he puts together the concepts of a purposeful way of living, of remembering that the systems were live in now were not put there by some god but are abstractions, and that we can make new abstractions and organize our experiences using them.
As for the site…Yeah, I started it a while back when the social media thing was just starting to hop, but mostly among techies. Being both a techie and into social media and having two degrees in philosophy led me to some very interesting thoughts about what we are doing to ourselves with this tech, how we are shaping a new sort of narrative, on that has never really occurred before: the stream. And people share streams…ongoing coming in and out, commenting, and so on. So what we end up having is a new way to interact that actively subverts the mainstream narrative by stealing it, hacking it, passing it around…taking control of the narrative through a sort of enfolding, transforming, and then passing on.
Unfortunately at that time few people outside the geek community knew much about social media and it seemed like a toy. MySpace didn’t help. A friend of mine thinks I was just ahead of the curve because there has been a lot more interest in the larger issues lately. I decided I am going to renew the domain and keep it here, and I have been trying to put more interest into it. It just can’t be all about me, though, otherwise one of the firm principles the project was formed on is lost: we want to talk about social media philosophy using social media. If there’s nobody but me, there is little social about it.
That old movie said : HACK THE PLANET. I say : HACK THE CONVERSATION
oliver sutton 3:13 am on May 30, 2010 Permalink |
I’m interested in your thoughts about streams and narrative- could you expand or point me in the direction of somewhere where you’ve expanded (not too voluminously!) on the subject.
Well, if you’re trying to reactivate the site, I’m on board and I know a few people who may be interested.
Sorry about leaving my reply as a posting, I thought a comment would be hidden.
oliver sutton 3:23 am on May 30, 2010 Permalink |
btw: how do you edit the damn title?
thePuck 4:02 pm on May 30, 2010 Permalink |
To the right of the point, near there top, there are three silver links…Permalink | Reply | Edit.. Use edit.
The P2 Theme is a bit to figure out, but perfect for this sort of thing.
thePuck 4:25 pm on May 30, 2010 Permalink |
My general thesis is best explained here: http://socialmediaphilosophy.com/philosophy/the-return-of-the-village/
You change how many people can talk, and you make them feel free of consequences for that talk, they start talking about something pretty out there shit. And if enough of them talk in the right ways about the weird shit and kind of ignore the lame MSM versions of reality (I mean sort of sidestep it rather than engage directly), a new conversation is borne through the new rules imposed on the conversation.
Now, here online, we have the beginnings of culture, along with history (#amazonfail ring a bell?), traditions (Follow Friday, retweeting, etc), and mythological figures of unknown intent and power lurking everywhere (script-kiddies, the Pirate Bay, Anonymous, etc.
So first we built clubhouses (BBS, Usenet, IRC), which was like a neighborhood. Then , through the establishment of personal websites, that gave people houses and storefronts and share libraries and so on. This process just expanded, adding new tech as time went by, all of it allowing a sub-strata of civilization to form: and entire economy that has forced, again and again, the former reality to concede (despite the Luddite grumblings).
We can make our own world INSIDE their world. It absorbs the aspects of their world it likes and mashesup and hack the rest for its own purposes. After it has absorbed enough of the mainstream world, that world will have very little support it. It will be forced, like we have many times, to take refuge in public spaces, or spaces given to them out of charity. And then eventually there are simply no more of them left and we are living in a dreamworld we brought to life.
oliver sutton 3:26 am on June 1, 2010 Permalink |
Good God man, you weren’t kidding about the out-there shit!
What worries me are false dichotomies and false communities. Not because this stuff is on-line and that makes it less real, but because they spring up wherever you look, in no matter what context. Both represent massive, prescriptive simplifications, employed in order to allow the subsequent narrative to unfold seamlessly. But who is us and who is them? If ‘us’ is the online community and ‘them’ is not, then ‘us’ is effectively the world’s rich and ‘them’ the world’s poor.
Another false dichotomy, I know, but unravelling the narrative this way puts a new spin on things. The section of the world’s population that is bloated on consumption has grown sick and tired of the emotional blackmail which the poor majority of humans, not just in other countries, but in their own countries, are subjecting them to.
To escape this disordered, chaotic mess of unfairness, as well as the insecurity of living in a world of materiality which tends to resist our will, the bloated few are now dreaming about the construction of a virtual arc in which they can un-moor themselves from distracting concerns like the welfare of others and sail unhindered on the weightless, timeless, inconsequential ocean of their own images and imaginings, leaving the rest to rot.
I don’t underestimate the importance of social media, but I do think we should see it in the contexts appropriate to it and those contexts traverse the boundaries between on-line and off-line, material and virtual, us and them.
thePuck 4:25 am on June 1, 2010 Permalink
Oh, I am in no way implying that social media is the end-all, be-all and going to be the only solution. What I am saying is that what only enfranchised and empowered groups could do before (publish, distribute, and control information), more and more people can do now. Think about things like flashmobs…it used to be only the police or organized militia or military groups could organize large scale movements and communications; now anyone with a cell-phone can. It used to be only the governments and empowered authorities could spy…now everyone has a video camera on their phone, and rather than keeping it secret and blackmailing people, we distribute to video networks and force transparency.
And yes, I think this should include real action in the world, and I have been involved in my share of activism (two years Free Radio DJ, three years Wobblies, three years Earth First!, four years Food Not Bombs!), but I ultimately think that the way to be successful in those actions is act laterally, to avoid playing the game as the “opposition” (another false dichotomy; the enemy is us, and Chaos never died) designed it to be played.
Have you read T.A.Z. (Temporary Autonomous Zone) by Hakim Bey? I am very much influenced by his work.
oliver sutton 11:46 am on May 31, 2010 Permalink |
Damn, I’ve got to read over my postings before I post them! Castells wrote “The Internet Galaxy”, “The Gutenberg Galaxy” was, or course, our friend Marshall McLuhan.