When we engage in discussions about the contemporary online world they are often in a one-dimensional manner shaped by moral panics about online trolling, cyberbullying, cybercrime, terrorists online, etc. The often cited “extremist agenda” for internet politics is about control, surveillance and censorship. But we can come to grips with the contested relationship between online panic attacks and mindful understanding.
In a over simplified term we can identify the problem as ‘a crisis of presence’ and/or our concepts of ‘self’. As I have spoken about before, our presence can take on the flavors of our current environment.
Focussing on the concept of presence, and the challenges that our changing presence poses to our ethics, privacy and public discourse, we can boil it down to how our own line presence and personalities have created a disjuncture between how we think we exist in the world and how we actually do exist through our use of such personas.
The solution, is not to focus exclusively on ‘content’ and its regulation as much as it is to examine, understand and resist the alienating aspects of the media itself and how we may emotionally identify (with or against), such as the technological ordering, metaphysical abstraction and mediation which increasingly define our social encounters and presences.
Such a “resistance” involves several ambitious revisions in our ethical, emotional and technological aspects of daily living regimes. Yet we a good attitude and proper perspective to how this unfolds for each us we can boil the complicated menagerie to this – Awaken to our emotions minute by minute.
Peace and Love, Jim
