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I'm reading a few essays for an exam I have coming up, and one of them, by Susan Buck-Morrs, is about cultural dreamworlds. The gist is that a culture, in this case capitalist or communist, will express its cultural dream through the monuments it creates. One of her examples is King Kong in the 1930s showing the masses as a beast that can be tamed by a pretty face.
Can the internet be seen as a complex of cultural dreams? Perhaps even cultural dreams that are divorced from the IRL culture that an individual exists in. Par example, if I'm into sado-masochistic pictures of comic book heroines, I can create a website that showcases this. By putting the site up for consumption/show, I could very probably form a community around it. Said community will share an abstract vision of what the culture of sado-masochistic heroine pictures should be, and will create monuments/documents that prop up that vision. This cultural dream then intesects with others (like ones based around, hmmm, I don't know, how about psychedelic world-saving comic books that can't be seen!), and a further cultural dreamworld is created by this intersection. Or rather, a sub-cultural dreamworld that exists independently of the two originating cultures, but still relies on some of their basic ideas.
In that way, yeah, the internet can transform society by becoming a collection of societies in and of itself. There's probably an argument to be made that the culture one attaches oneself to online is far more important than the one in which one lives. Online, you can choose the culture you are a part of. I'm a part of a counter-culture discussion group that re-thinks the ways that society can run. I don't have access to that here in suburban Oakville, where the cultural dream is to own a half a million dollar home, and drink coffee from Starbucks every day.
(Though I do enjoy my Starbucks.)
Did that make sense at all? This cultural studies stuff I'm doing now seems to have limitless applications to the internet. I think the problem with the legitimacy of the internet as world-saving tool is that the cliche has become true: the internet is for porn. Now, whether your porn is naked people fondling each other, or ridiculous consumer goods that have no useful function, its still porn. The capitalist culture that created the internet has taken the King Kong idea and run with it. The internet is the pretty face that keeps us from being the wild beasts of revolution that we could be.
Ooooo, sorry, took a turn for the pessimistic there. The internet can only transform society by throwing off its capitalist culture shackles. We may think we have more freedom than countries that limit internet use for their citizens, but we only have more freedom to buy and consume. Not necessarily to discuss. Witness work email filters. And the stumbling block of the internet for collective action is that its all abstract, isn't it? For collective action to produce change, it has to manifest in the real world. Collective action online is just a discussion forum.
I think perhaps that there are bits of the internet that can function as templates for society. Yes, there always has to be a governing body. I think the evolution of the governing body here at Barbelith over the last 10 years or so has been good. There have been discussions of whether or not to shut the board down, how much authority should be given to individual posters, and who the authority should be given to. There has always been a very democratic slant to the governance of the board. That in and of itself is an excellent template for governance outside of the internet. The problem is implementation on a massive scale. Once an idea, a good idea, is sussed out, one has to figure out the mechanics of its application in the real world.
Threads like this help.
(I, too, felt like I rambled all over the place in that post. I suppose the point is to talk and talk until coherence and specificity are achieved, right?) |
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