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< | The day our internet best friend betrayed us | >
> | An introspective account of the internet: Realising there’s another person in the room | | | | |
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< | -- By JulieLi - 20 Oct 2020 | >
> | -- By JulieLi - 1 Feb 2020 | | |
Introduction | |
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< | Fear, suspicion and aversion to pain are the evolutionary senses that have driven our survival as a species. In today’s world, where technological advances including the internet have fundamentally changed the way we live, these senses are no longer adequate to ensure the survival of the human race as we know it. Changes in our minds are occurring without our knowledge or detection because things that should inspire fear are now pleasurable, and things that do violence to our bodies are now painless. This essay seeks to reveal but one such instance of this painless violence in the form of the internet best friend and hopefully, offer a moment of clarity. | >
> | If you stepped back in time to September 2020 and asked me to provide an analogy for my conception of the internet, I would have said that it’s like a remote control. At that time the internet to me was a tool, a conduit that could be controlled in the palm of my two hands and told to lead me to the content that I wished to consume. I soon realised, after taking a step back during the course of these last few months that this conception was wrong. By conceiving of the internet as an inanimate object, I had implicitly discounted the risks and dangers it posed to my wellbeing. Thus began my journey of re-evaluating my relationship with the internet and coming to the realisation that really, being with the internet is like being with another person. | | | | |
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< | The rise of the internet best friend | >
> | The inanimate/animate divide | | | | |
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< | The internet best friend, like the internet, began innocently. With the launch of YouTube? in late 2005 under the banner ‘Broadcast Yourself’, a ground-up, egalitarian community was formed where tech-savvy youngsters could make videos about almost anything. This inclusive, fertile, womblike interface lent itself to much experimentation by users and became birthplace of the video blog or ‘vlog’ as we now know it, which effectively transformed the wildly popular early 2000’s blog into video form. These videos, usually of a longer nature, documented the everyday life of the vlogger and could contain anything from exciting adventures to what they were eating for breakfast. | >
> | Inanimate objects are generally perceived to pose a low level of risk. As David Ropeik would say, our ability to control inanimate objects deactivates their inherent danger, while our recognition of their ability to chronically affect our wellbeing is discounted in the present moment. This lack of fear for inanimate objects is evinced by modern insurance products, a large part of which eschew insuring the individual for harm caused by objects and instead providing contingent protection from the actions of others. Animate objects on the other hand, are perceived to be infinite sources of risk and therefore account for most human fears. I, for example, fear spiders, men walking behind me at night, ghosts of all descriptions – the list goes on and on. This leaves the in-between, the pseudo-animate objects that are both inanimate and imbued with the thoughts and feelings of the animate. This category includes most of the content I consume on the internet, which to me inspires neither fear nor indifference, but instead a sense of wariness, a self-reminder to apply critical thought to the communicable meaning. | | | | |
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< | The vlog was thus born a splice of public and private. On one hand it was a raw, confessional, intimate and incredibly detailed record of everyday life through the sheer detail that could be captured with a single swoop of the camera. And yet it was also performative and entertaining, designed to capture attention. In the abstract, the prospect of watching someone go about their everyday business could not seem more boring - and yet, the vlog form flourished. From a human need perspective, the vlog satisfied viewers’ voyeuristic desires as well as viewers’ innate yearning for human connection. For perhaps the first time, ordinary users of the internet could peer into a stranger’s life and observe not only their trials and tribulations, but also the intimate details of their homes. Indeed, to follow a vlogger was to go through a process of metamorphosis whereby the viewer transforms from momentary voyeur to consistent voyeur to developing a one way, but very real, human connection with the vlogger as they experience the minutia of everyday life, growing up, falling in love, breaking up, getting married and so on ‘together’. In teenage girl parlance, this relationship could only be described as that of a best friend and thus the internet best friend (IBF) was born. | >
> | Where should the internet be placed in the animate/inanimate divide? At first instance the internet appeared to me as an inanimate object. It seemed indifferentiable from a television set, being merely the gateway to infinite content. Alas this conception was too simple. In reality the internet is a nervous system consisting of billions of individual nervous systems. Through years of strip-mining the human consciousness, the internet has been producing information about how individual nervous systems behave and has made available to the highest bidder such a vast amount of consumer information that it has the potential to influence the behaviour from which it was made. Indeed, the internet as we know it has the power to control what we see, engender us with certain perspectives, to take advantage of the human eye and steer us in a particular direction, and so much more. | | | | |
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< | The apple, or the loss of innocence | >
> | A personal example | | | | |
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< | The loss of innocence occurs when the vlogger becomes a tool for the amplification and normalisation of the panopticon through which the State subjugates its citizens. The act of surveillance on the vlogger is obvious. The vlogger’s work is the work of being watched. Although the vlogger believes that they are not subject to constant, comprehensive surveillance because they choose what content they publish, surveillance becomes total through the vlogger’s continuous need to produce new content that reveals more and more about their existence. | >
> | An example from my own life is one of my guiltier pleasures – vlog content. Evolved from the wildly popular early 2000’s blog, the vlog is a confessional, intimate and incredibly detailed record of the vlogger’s everyday life commonly broadcasted via Youtube. In the abstract, the prospect of watching someone go about their everyday business could not seem more boring - and yet, the vlog is a staple of Youtube and my daily consumption. The vlogger, being a splice of public and private, satisfies viewers’ voyeuristic desires as well as viewers’ innate yearning for human connection. Indeed, to follow a vlogger is to go through a process of metamorphosis whereby the viewer transforms from momentary voyeur to consistent voyeur to developing a one way, but very real, human connection with the vlogger. Thus the vlog transforms what would ordinarily be considered to be boring into comforting everyday content that feels, when consumed, like catching up with a friend. | | | | |
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< | The act of surveillance on the viewer manifests in two different ways. The first is through advertising, a product of the viewer watching while being watched. Indeed, the IBF is now considered to be one of the most versatile and effective advertisements ever made. Having taken on the role of the trusted ‘best friend’, the IBF is able to leverage this relationship of loyalty and trust to be an ultimate source of word-of-mouth advice. Each second of the IBF’s video is either an advertisement for a product that can be found and bought or of the IBF’s general lifestyle which seems within reach if you just purchase X items. Data on an IBF’s viewer engagement is powerful in that it tracks viewers’ purchases through discount codes and has the potential to predict what is happening or will happen in viewers’ lives through analysing the IBFs that the viewer engages with. This phenomenon feeds into the damaging effects of surveillance capitalism and instrumentarian power (Shoshanna Zuboff). The second act of surveillance occurs when viewers normalise the existence of surveillance itself. The process begins with the viewer observing the IBF sharing intimate details of their life, which bears a key behavioural message: that it is now permissible and normal for people at large to know the everyday details of our lives. This act of normalisation then amplifies surveillance, as the viewers emulate this behaviour and become the producers, so too engaging in the production of overly revealing, everyday content. As Foucault wrote, “the panopticon… has a role of amplification… its aim is to strengthen the social forces – to increase production, to develop the economy, spread education, raise the level of public morality; to increase and multiply.” All at once there is more production of content, more surveillance of that content, amplification of surveillance on existing content, and thus multiplying surveillance throughout society. The final stage is when the sheer prevalence of surveillance leads to the viewer’s adoption of the notion that surveillance is merely a side effect of modern life and needs not be challenged or removed. | >
> | What the vlogger and consumer do not realise is that they are both producers in a much larger equation. By engaging in the work of being watched, the vlogger produces intricate, highly detailed information about their daily life. Simultaneously, the vlogger transforms the viewer from consumer to producer, as the viewer’s passive act of watching becomes the production of consumer information. One need only briefly peruse a vlog to realise this is true. Through never-ending embedded and host web advertisements, the vlogger becomes a conduit for collecting data on viewers, engagement, purchasing, relatability and much more, delivering the information to be stored, used or sold at a later time. Though perhaps not intentionally, the vlogger feeds the internet’s nervous system and thus perpetuates its ability to be the source of more content that might influence the human mind. | | | | |
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< | The tumor | >
> | My reflection | | | | |
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< | The IBF is thus a collection of paradoxes. It is an advertisement, but not; a reality, but also a fantasy; a voyeuristic experience, but also an exercise in surveillance. Viewers are so distracted by what the IBF purports to be and the sheer pleasure of consumption that the silent changes within us go undetected. By the time we realise, the tumor has already formed. Our apathy towards surveillance will be so deeply engrained in our tissues that it will be impossible to remove. All that remains is for mankind to be subjugated by the state, divided into little cells flooded with light. | >
> | With a great deal of introspection, I have realised that for the purposes of my own evolutionary responses, I can no longer consider the internet to be an inanimate object. By being able to control what I see, consume, what others see of me – it has developed a nervous system of its own that transforms it from mere instrument into a living network that poses a fundamentally unquantifiable risk. Understanding that instinctive self-defence is ancient and hardly adaptive, I must re-categorise the internet as animate, thus activating my inbuilt defensive response. | | | | |
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But "the viewer" and "the vlogger" are not the whole of humanity, or even the only personality states of the persons who are sometimes the "viewer" and the "vlogger." This means first that the question of friendship should be more thoroughly considered: friendship is a relationship in which multiple personality states take part, without the state-filtration function of the intemediate technology. The fact that most people are never either vlogger or viewer, just as most people could not, as US teenagers did for a whole generation, spend hours a day on the phone with their "best friends." The need to immerse in the fact of relating in this way—accompanied by the partially-permeable barrier of the written letter, the phone, or needles and straps accompanying YouTube—is a "developmental stage," as well as being a form of social interaction mediated by available technology. Whether it is a developmental stage in the life of humankind as well as of individual human beings is certainly an open question, but the draft will be stronger if it isolates that question more completely from the background, if it is really being pursued here at all.
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> | How is this to be done? My plan is simple. In the spirit of Patricia Piccinini and her anthropomorphic objects, I have stuck a set of eyes to the top of my laptop screen. This functions as a constant reminder of the animation that belies the internet and the dangers of habitual passivity. So far I have only positive results to report. After two weeks of being literally stared at by my own computer I have found myself to be engaging in less screen time and more measures to protect my privacy. Surprisingly, I still feel the distinctive twist of my stomach when I am drawn to the presence of the eyes. Let us hope this continues, or I’ll have to start adding hair. | | |
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