linguistic entrenchment Ⅲ: digitally defined
Where do we turn for news in the world, truth about life, and connection to other people?
Information, worldview, community. We seek these through the gentle clicks and haptics of our keyboards. Through the glow of a screen on a Google search. Through the infinite scroll of a media distributor’s feed.
The internet is our culture’s principal mode of knowing about itself.
The implications of this idea are multifarious…
How the internet presents the world becomes the model for how the world presents itself.
The internet created social media platforms to “connect the world.” Instead of connecting the world, it created a new one that incentivizes “connection” through parasocial relationships. Even those we know offline are commoditized in this alternate reality as “likes” and “friends” through simple, dopamine-releasing design features. This reductionism seeps into our interactions with nature, travel, and learning. The model for online growth prompts users to ransack their experiences for whatever content available.
How the internet licenses truth becomes the way truth seeks to be licensed.
The destruction of context, doxxing of characters, and denial of grounds to have a conversation have reached a heightened prevalence in public discourse. From its early days, the internet proffered answers to infinite queries through one-line searches and, in return, one-line answers. Hyperlinks add to the mess as they propel readers through a series of strung-together texts to gain only that information necessary to understand their original probe from the barest extraneous details.
The syntax of the internet is speed and always has been. Efficiency is the goal that devours competitors who race to create the (next) fastest micro-processor or software bump. This is the conduit truth must travel to reach each pair of bored, inattentive, sluggish eyes. This same channel eviscerates dialogue. As the medium dictates the message, so too does the prudent user find themselves at odds with any attempts at serious, analytical discussion.
How the internet interacts with its constituents becomes the way its constituents interact with each other.
We are torn asunder from locality to centrality. Forgetting our sense of home, globalization and the internet age lure us from good-faith communication and tight-knit community in tandem. We’ve all felt it. Increasing hostility across ideological lines. Decreasing tethers to common points of connection. The subtle impression that the device and network in our pocket knows us better than the person across the table ever could. We await Cupid’s Kiss from convenience-tech that caused the slumber from which some never wake. Like Psyche in her mythological slumber, we become “a corpse asleep” drifting down a digital Styx…
