An Invisible World

The world feels as if it has shrunk since I was a child. I don't just mean that in the sense of growing up, nor in the sense of transport being faster and more ubiquitous. I think, in part its because of the Internet, which has meant so much in breaking up traditional communities and the adoption of broader, looser, and more transitional ones. In many ways that's been a boon, of course, it lets people talk to each other across the globe, and cuts down those feelings I recall from my childhood of being alone in a small town with no friends because I was a misfit. There's no doubt that for LBGTQQIAA people, women, and disabled people, the Internet is a lifeline allowing them to seek support and get a sense that their concerns and problems are shared and common. That's so important, provided what they find is support and not just an opportunity to sell them products or love bomb them into making foolish decisions (by which I mean that they may be preyed upon, not that their authentic communities are in any way cult like. The same could be said for nerds too, though my experience of them is less than positive and I feel that in many cases they are exercises in nostalgia rather than support groups. I'm not convinced they offer anything positive, in terms of development or imagination. Instead, they seem to long for simpler days where men were men and women were nervous. Okay, that may not be true, but it does feel as if that's what many of the gaming and comics nerds I see comments from want, even if they mean it in terms of simplicity rather than sexism. 

Despite all this, I wonder if the Internet is good for us as a species. We seem ill suited for communication in a medium that's predominantly text, which robs us of so much nuance and meaning. Tones of voice, and body language are lost when all you have are words - which I suppose is an ironic thing to say on a blog, given that it really is just, well, words. I find myself thinking this often with social media and fora, where meanings and intents of messages are frequently muddled and misconstrued. I suspect part of that is actually that people carry their own stories and scripts in their heads and overlay them onto what might otherwise be quite ordinary things to say. Thus, we castigate others for saying things that are praiseworthy, or at least not horrible, because they don't address our own specific areas of interest. Showing interest in protecting wildlife but not mentioning someone's personal hobby horse? How dare you not support the protection of the Lesser Spotted Guatemalan Sock Badger or the Transylvanian Dwarf Wolverine? The same is true of human rights, where anything that deviates from the usual suspects is held up as awful, even when there is as much suffering and need in all these cases. What's often particularly galling is when the debate focuses on what might be seen as micro aggressors, as noted by George Monbiot in his column about the Seaspiracy documentary, where a lot of handwringing happens because of a small issue, while the bigger picture is left overlooked and untouched. 

What's saddening is that there are people who truly seem to believe that these debates do good, that they are things that can be won, rather than great siege engines straining against each other in a pointless battle. Lex Morningstar noted recently in one of her videos that the point of these debates for many people is rarely to move the conversation on, but to prove yourself superior. I have often found that the posters who say they want a progressive, thoughtful, debate, often are deluding themselves - sooner or later they default to wanting just to be right. The siege engine always wins. 

The other thing is that Internet offers an illusion of anonymity, and humans behave badly when they think they are unobserved. Being watched, or the belief that we are being watched, makes us more altruistic, kinder, and more tolerant. Or at least, less likely to say that something we disagree with is bullshit. I've mentioned an experiment in this before, and do so again, because it stays with me as an important proof that we are troop primates. The experiment in question placed a collecting tin for charity in a prominent place and one week the researchers placed a picture of flowers behind it, and another a picture of some eyes. They found that when there were eyes associated with the collecting tin, more money was donated. Unlike many psychological experiments, this one appears to be repeatable, which makes me happy.   

The point I am slowly, and rather tenuously reaching towards is that the Internet's invisibility, but all pervasive nature, makes us vulnerable. It's not just that we behave better when observed, but that we are far more reliant on the physical world than we believe. If we spend too much time online, we start to suffer, we start to lose touch with what's real. I suspect that the likes of QAnon would have struggled to take off in an earlier age, in the same way that I suspect that there are probably more people who believe the Earth is flat than at any point in our past. The Internet is empowering bad behaviour and stupidity, and in doing so handing more power to the people who want us to allow them to do our thinking for us. Our bodies, chock full of chemicals that make us feel happy or sad, also require physicality - not least for touch, and for hugs which we have missed so much during the pandemic. 

It feels strange to talk about this now, not least because the Internet has been around for so long, and because far better people than I have written pieces about how it can have harmful effect. What concerns me is that we are pulling away into an invisible world, where we see almost nothing but what's curated for us, mire ourselves in endless debates about nothing, and become detached from the story that we call reality. In that happening, we seem likely to cast ourselves adrift in a world where we become truly helpless. I may not think much of things like protesting, and even wonder how much sway and influence our elected legislatures have, but at least they are real; which feels better than trusting to the invisible world. It may be flawed, but that just means it has some punch to it. 

What concerns me here too, is that what effect this has on our world views. It concerns me that we are ignorant, and that going back to the world shrinking idea, we are more connected but we see less. As the Internet has become more interested in fulfilling our dopamine addictions, it feels as if shutters have been quietly lowered in a relentless scramble for likes, subscriptions, and followers. The net result of that is the bubble effect on one hand, and a shallowing of the pool on the other. The philosopher, Alain de Botton, has pointed out that the news and media have become less investigative and more myopic (see below).

So, it's not just that the Internet is invisible in itself, it has allowed our real world to become invisible too. Consequently, we allow the world to be stolen from us. 

I just don't know what we do about it.