We Seek To Remain Unscathed

The more I read about mutuality – the art of affecting and being affected by another, particularly within the context of a therapeutic environment – the more I realize that the online world is a place (or a thing) which appears to function this way, yet in practice is typically abstinent and unilateral.

With the Internet (as much as I hate using that word so generally) we have a vast infrastructure – insert plumbing/transit/Tower of Babel metaphors – whose sole purpose is the nearly instantaneous transmission of information. Yet, the ways and methods that we — its users, managers, and architects — have managed to communicate with each other have not evolved in-step with the technological state-of-the-art.

This is not to say that we cannot experience mutuality via internet communication, but rather a) current technological interfaces do a better job of anonymizing the personalities of its users rather than accentuating them, and b) the interpersonal efficacy of this technology has not progressed past what was available in 1996, since the advent of full-duplex sound cards. Aside from scale and deployment, there is nothing about Skype, Facebook, or even (cringe) Second Life that speaks to the state of the Internet’s current technological capability. And yet, at the end of the 21st century + 11 years day, we’re sitting at devices (be they desktops, laptops, tablets, or smartphones) and pressing buttons to communicate with each other. We stare into cameras and see choppy videos of others. We still use fucking emoticons.

I’m not trying to say “it should be the same as being in a room with another person”. That isn’t the point. The point of this technology should be to create its own form of that, even if what that eventually becomes isn’t anything like being in a room with another person. I’m saying that we’re nowhere near “the room” or the Internet’s ideal alternate interpretation of that. I don’t think I am being utopian when I say: when can do better.

I come back to the beginning and I ask whether it is a fear of mutuality. Do we truly (truly) want our technology to provide us with something that is possibly more intimate (that is to say, more affective) than being in a room with another person? Is it that the people most apt to be the architects of online communication are – by virtue of the personality characteristics necessary for those types of positions – less apt to see further into a more penetrating interpersonal dimension than the current talk/text/avatar (videogame?) toolset we’ve used for the last decade-and-a-half?

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