At the screening of We Live In Public I attended last month, director Ondi Timoner explained that the film was ultimately about the loss of intimacy in the internet age. This informed her choice to open the film with footage of Josh Harris saying goodbye to his dying mother via video, refusing to be there in person. This question of connection, intimacy and openness is brought up again and again in conversations I have about the internet and its affects on social relations. Here are two opposing opinions concerning the notion of openness concerning web-based social interactions. The first from "the Elvis of cultural theory," Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek, and the second from cognitive scientist and ethnographer Stefana Broadbent.
"[With the internet], all information from texts to music to video will be instantly available on my interface. However, the obverse of this suspension of the distance which separates me from a faraway foreigner is that, due to the gradual disappearance of contact with 'real' bodily others, a neighbor will no longer be a neighbor, since he or she will be progressively replaced by a screen specter; general availability will induce unbearable claustrophobia; excess of choice will be experienced as the impossibility to choose; universal direct participatory community will exclude all the more forcefully those who are prevented from participating in it. The vision of cyberspace opening up a future of unending possibilities of limitless change, of new multiple sex organs, and so on, conceals its exact opposite: an unheard-of imposition of radical closure."
-Slavoj Zizek, The Plague of Fantasies, 1997
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