Quote of the Day
The political slant of Leon Sterling’s post in New West is hard to dispute; especially in the context of the last presidential election. In essence, Leon worries that political action conducted over (in? on?) the Internet is deceptively self-referential in that it appears large and impactful but, in reality, does not stand up to the real world effects that can be brought about by well-funded “traditional” efforts and tactics. As someone who has knocked around this industry for a few years, I can confess to quite a few moments of doubt in which I wondered, when assessing the impact or significance of what happens online, if there is any there there (thank you Gertrude Stein). Or, is the Internet like the recently re-packaged city of Las Vegas? “What Happens There, Stays There.”
In any case, it’s only appurtenant to Leon’s main point, but I found the following quote to be quite poignant:
Something needs to change so that e-feelings leave the “virtual space� and re-connect with the real world. Today, our beliefs are like fireflies – they shine for a few brief moments, but then they disappear, and no one knows where they went.
E-feelings are different from regular feelings — or at least they are expressed differently. Unlike Leon, however, I don’t worry that e-feelings evaporate and are lost to posterity. Quite the opposite, I worry that the electronic transmission of feelings distorts and deforms them in important ways, and that these modified expressions are actually preserved forever on server drives and email archives. I worry that the picture we are gradually drawing of ourselves (and each other) digitally, is one which we may one day prefer to lose to the clouds.
If the foregoing seems heavier than the usual CoFactors fare… well, it’s just the direction that the e-feelings are taking around here lately.
Thanks (and congratulations!) to Steven Madoff for the lead.
July 7th, 2005 at 7:21 pm
I think these points are well taken, but the wholeness “of the picture we are gradually drawing of ourselves,” as you say, is an extraordinary, sprawling world record of the history of humanity-a stunning jar of fireflies indeed.
July 11th, 2005 at 1:14 pm
Thanks for your elucidations of my thoughts. My main worry, in this context, is not just that our feelings, however strong, are at the mercy of the “ephemeral quality of digital communications and ruminations,” but that we seem to have come to feel that posting to a blog or forwarding e-mails is enough. My impression is that the energy that used to go into causes is now going into the keyboard, and thence? Does it all go the way of Gertrude Stein’s comment about Oakland? Digital technology is not necessarily the problem so much as our slow adaption to the new rules of communication. LS