Ondi Timoner's film We Live In Public, winner of the 2009 Sundance Film Festival award for best documentary, grapples with these questions and many more through charting the rise and fall of late nineties Internet mogul Josh Harris. He had a vision of a self-surveilling society where human connection was mediated by technology, where we willing put our most private selves on display for a short-lived sense of intimacy or fame, and physically enacted this vision through the projects Quiet and We Live in Public. Inspired by the issues presented in this film, we created Offline Emoticon as an attempt to look more closely and critically at the total integration of Internet and Life. Our ultimate goal is to create a dialogue about our own digital well-being and to encourage self-reflective thought about what role this new, limitless landscape plays in our lives.
The choice of starting this conversation through a blog was an intentional one, intending to highlight the amazing possibilities for thoughtful communication that exist through the Internet. But we are seeking much more than irony, and our future posts will be interviews, photos, and responses to texts that we feel are relevant to these issues. Furthermore, as three young artists, we are interested in the creative potential of the Internet and how its existence influences our understanding of aesthetics and our personal art-making practices.
Now that we are in the specific cultural moment that Josh Harris predicted at the dawn of the new millennium, where do we go from here? The choices rest in our hands.
Cheers,
Rhonda, Sarah and Kylie
As a person who has grappled with my own use/abuse of the internet and its rampant availability ("only a finger's touch away in my middle class American suburb), I think this dialogue is an important one to be having, and what more exciting and appropriate means than by conversing through blog-form with three people who are quite a distance away from myself, and with two people who I've never even met before. (Hello, Sarah and Kylie. Nice to sort of meet you!)
ReplyDeleteSo, jumping off from the idea of being self-reflective, I've written the following response (transcribed because I can't copy and paste into this box):
When I think about my "darker" internet days, I mostly think about the heightened sense of depression that can occur when when anyone lives in too much of a fantasyland. Well, maybe not anyone, but to be horribly honest about my own "digital well-being," I have, in the past, spent hours and hours of time looking at images of people I barely know, wishing I were "out there in the world having an amazing adventure," and instead feeling isolated and alone in the confines of my dorm room. This, I think, is mostly a product of my tendency to be an "obsessive thinker" (or patterned, repetitive thinking that doesn't produce any positive outcome) and my inclination to self-isolate when I'm feeling poorly. So, is the internet to blame for my sense of distance from my own community and even my own sense of reality? Is Facebook at fault for allowing me to consume an ungodly amount of 2-dimensional representations of people I hardly know and to judge my life harshly in comparison? Probably not. It seems to me that in discussions concerning the internet we either forget about or ignore the all-important element of agency on the part of the viewer/participant.
We still have choices, after all. I can boot up or shut down, sign up or opt out; click to see the next page, the scintillating celebrity story or depressing tale of yet another case of gang-rape; or I can ignore their mutual existence (and seemingly shared level of importance) on the glowing screen in front of me.
So, all that being said, for me this raises two really rudimentary questions, but ones that I haven't really thought about at any great depth before: What IS the Internet? (Or, what is on the Internet--is this the same question?) and what does the Internet create? (Or what does it have the potential to create?)
Here are my intitial notes/thoughts on these questions:
What is on the Internet?
Information (maps/scholarly articles/recipes for foods, bombs, etc.)
Misinformation (All the bunk stuff that is constantly purported and perpetuated as true.)
Social Networks (a means of keeping up with friends/making new friends)
Social Breakdowns (including "digital bullies" and individuals choosing to interact with a screen or digital/distant community over a physical/local community)
Entertainment (music/video/writing/art/porn)
What does the internet create?
Closeness/Distance
Knowledge/Misunderstanding
Potential for Power (If you have an audience, you've gained power.)
Fantasy (and the related emotions of joy/disillusionment)
And that's pretty much where I'm at. The internet may have the potential power to be a "limitless landscape," but it still rests in the hands of the individual to make positive use of the possibilities and opportunities the internet offers. I think.
And now that I've potentially shared more than I am comfortable sharing in a public forum, I'll log out and try not to think too much about all that I've just said, haha.
-Olivia