[木] 2021-12-22 庚子年冬月十九

Okumura Masanobu - Taking the Evening Cool by Ryōgoku Bridge

The term ukiyo (浮世), describing a kind of dreamlike or unreal feeling of the world, was used to describe the life in the late Edo period in Japan.

It’s not hard to feel that we are in a similar type of age, a type of dreamlike age, in which reality has become surreal. A new type of ‘lost generation’ has become forged due to the social isolation forced by disease-control measures caused by the pandemic, where the Internet has replaced interpersonal communication face-to-face as a primary form of communication. But an online form of self is a type of untethered self in that for example, on a platform such as Discord or Twitter, you can create a entirely artificial or constructed or ideal self or persona… taking advantage of anonymity to present oneself with a parallel identity based on certain interests or perhaps novelty, etc. The sense here however is that there is increasingly a sense of loss in that this online identity feels more authentic as the consistly accessible online community provides a sense of belonging for seemingly every sort of niche interest; meanwhile, this persona must be reconciled with the ‘irl’ “in real life” actual perception of self relative to those interacted with face-to-face in daily life. The floating phenomenom here consists of the displacement of the grounded or ‘irl’ identity by the persona identity, perhaps because no matter how niche an interest is, it can for better or worse find a crowd of likeminded peers online. A virtual community that is welcoming and accpeting becomes a kind of refuge against ‘irl’ peers who might be yet more judgemental or critical.

The next point can be made somewhat controversially, which is that, this virtual reality is increasingly taken as genuine reality, that is, the persona or virtualized self becomes increasingly viewed as the primary authentic self, with spillover effects into society. Although this claim isn’t necessarily as controversial as it might seem because the Internet is in actuality indeed a significant part of society, so this is just an expected consequence… Discord and to an extent Twitter form a type of second-generational social media which replaces real-name homepages (social media pages on Instagram, Facebook etc.) with more anonymous or more intimate types of virtual spaces, in some ways hearkening to the early blogs that intitially populated the Internet but now adding an interactive aspect. For example, on Discord, you can join servers for all sorts of interests and communities: gaming, manga, language-learning, linguistics, academic interests, student clubs, technical support groups or development groups (e.g. Linux servers), etc. Universities are characteristic in that they are smaller microcosms of society, with a somewhat younger makeup vs. the general population. This type of trend is taken to further extent in virtual spaces that self-select for members sharing similar interests (including potential gatekeeping etc. in the form of bans and custom criteria to join the community).

A 2011 novel, Ready Player One, anticipated this type of trend with the premise that VR (virtual reality) spaces would become a primary form of social interaction and have a significant economic and political role. In the novel, public schools had shifted to teaching their courses online, with the aid of technology. But, the world portrayed in the novel was also very contrite and depressing world of urban and societal decay which was masked by the type of technocractic illusion of plentifulness that the virtual reality provided. It feels especially pertinent to highlight the present in this regard, where Discord has become the number one social media amongst the younger generation (and provides social spaces similar to those in the VR in the novel), schools have been forced to move to virtual classes held on video software such as Zoom, while even entire industries have shifted to online operations, some indefinitely. The novel also anticipated that celebrities etc. would become more inclined to run for political offices as others would defer from politics. You can draw your own conclusions here :).

Another interesting development following this novel’s shadow, or perhaps influenced by it, is the rise of so-called “web3” along with “crytocurrencies” as a social phenomenon and economic craze. Although it does seem to many to be marketing hype, buzzwords, and smoke and mirrors, it’s possible that some features of these will for better or worse impact the future. Facebook for example, remarketing themselves as “meta” after the so-called “metaverse” was perhaps influenced by the sort of ideas present in the novel. Not to engage in celebrity rich man idol worship, it still however must be noted due to their social influence that Jack Dorsey, ex-Twitter CEO and Elon Musk have also exchanged on Twitter regarding their views on so-called ‘web3’, which supposedly promises a blockchain-based and decentralized Internet based on the technologies behind virtual cryptocurrences such as Bitcoin.

The Internet and World Wide Web, conceived as the world’s largest library, is also the world’s largest social experiment, and, cynically one might remark, perhaps the world’s largest open-air asylum. The revolutionary impact of information technologies shouldn’t be underestimated in history, however, given the past impacts of technologies such as writing, printing and moveable type (and human language as a whole). The fruits of each these technologies took a while to bear fruit (literate agricultural states and empires arising from administrative efficiency enabled by writing, industrialization and mass media enabled/foreshadowed by printing proliferation). The plot still remains to be seen as to how the development of the Internet as an information technology will fully influence the trend of world history. It has enabled an unprecendented amount of interaction and cross-pollination between different cultures and within societies, has made the wealth of the world’s accumulated knowledge accessible to every corner of the globe but also contributed to division and conflict. As we surf the internet waves of our new floating world, we should remember to be humble.