Pixellated Communities? Biiiitch Please

What Nick Carr thinks of Twitter:

The great paradox of “social networking” is that it uses narcissism as the glue for “community.” Being online means being alone, and being in an online community means being alone together. The community is purely symbolic, a pixellated simulation conjured up by software to feed the modern self’s bottomless hunger. Hunger for what? For verification of its existence? No, not even that. For verification that it has a role to play. As I walk down the street with thin white cords hanging from my ears, as I look at the display of khakis in the window of the Gap, as I sit in a Starbucks sipping a chai served up by a barista, I can’t quite bring myself to believe that I’m real. But if I send out to a theoretical audience of my peers 140 characters of text saying that I’m walking down the street, looking in a shop window, drinking tea, suddenly I become real. I have a voice. I exist, if only as a symbol speaking of symbols to other symbols.

I’d buy his argument if the majority of the activity in the blogosphere was taking place among atomized, yearning individuals lost in the anomie of consumer culture. But in my experience, on-line communities augment, rather than replace off-line interaction. Facebook research is still in its infancy, but what’s emerging is that Facebook uses extend their existing off-line networks on-line (see Danah Boyd’s work on this question).

We are “symbol(s) speaking of symbols to other symbols:”

Comments 1

Kenneth M. Kambara — April 19, 2009

Well, here's a question I'll throw out there. What definition of community are we going on? Sociologically, it's a nebulous concept, at best. The Benedict Anderson sense of "imagined communities" speaks to me loud & clear. He speaks of a nation as an imagined political community::

"It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion."

Carr often gets carried away with his own cleverness and, let's face it, weak-form commodity fetish critiques are a dime a dozen. The fact of the matter is we DO NOT face an existential crisis of identity, as the ubiquity of simulacrum (all is a fabrication representing something "real") or hyperreality (all the world is Las Vegas or Disneyland) encroaches on our psyches. Far from it, as we're quite comfortable in our Appaduraian imaginaries::

"the imagination as a social practice. No longer mere fantasy (opium for the masses whose real work is somewhere else), no longer simple escape (from a world defined principally by more concrete purposes and structures), no longer elite pastime (thus not relevant to the lives of ordinary people), and no longer mere contemplation (irrelevant for new forms of desire and subjectivity), the imagination has become an organized field of social practices, a form of work (in the sense of both labor and culturally organized practice), and a form of negotiation between sites of agency (individuals) and globally defined fields of possibility. This unleasing of the imagination links the play of pastiche (in some settings) to the terror and coercion of states and their competitors."

In my mind, we are articulating our meaning systems based upon a set of "imaginaries," not out a sense of an identity crisis, but, if anything, out of a sense of assertiveness. We embrace the symbols, as opposed to feel lost amongst them.

Bitch please, indeed!

TwitterVersion::
NickCarr @Twitter=EpicFail! Bitchpleas!. S***tty faux post-marxism. Read Benedict Anderson & Arjun Appadurai. Lv.culture crit to Palahniuk.