I was just thinking about my last post “Why the Internet Will Replace God” and, beyond the sorta’ linkbait-y title, I realised that, well, it may have been a bit stupid. Essentially, what I was trying to think about was the cognitive effect of the Web as it comes to occupy a more and more significant space in both our lives and consciousness. I chose religion as an analogy, largely because I think it’s the most clear example of ideology as an organising principle for the world, what I called “an operating system for the mind”, particularly if one thinks of an operating system as the inevitable medium between user and hardware – or world.
Trouble is, the internet is not ideology. It might function by and through it and it might be full of ideological material, but it isn’t ideology itself, only the medium for it. Obviously, mechanisms by which information is distributed are saturated in ideological processes, and there are some who will argue that the flows of information online are flows of capital and, as such, the internet is sorta’ ideology. But to call the internet an organising principle is not only to overstate things, it’s to be flat-out wrong, mistaking the platform for the content (and yes, I totally just opened myself up to a McLuhan-esque critique… *sigh*).
What I instead should have been focusing on is how the new virtual space will affect the old virtual space. Here’s what I mean. I tend to argue that the imagination is virtual, if by virtual one means something that has to be ‘projected elsewhere’ in order to be realised. The role of imagination is central to maintaining a sense of self, since when I think of myself and my relationship to the things that define me, I do so by projecting and narrativising these things into my imagination. Yeah, I know, that sounds a bit like Muppet Babies, but I think I mean ‘imagination’ in the way that Kant used it.
So, if our sense of self as part of something functions through the imagination, what will the effect of the narratives, communities and identities that exist online have on this process? The question isn’t so much whether the internet will become its own ideology as it is this: what place will the virtual space of the internet occupy in the virtual space of the imagination? When we conceive of ourselves, to what extent will the online texts of identity that we produce – and the online texts of identity that produce us – constitute our vision of ourselves, particularly if we consider a sort of centralisation and aggregation of cultural currency online? i.e. if what we define as the public sphere, the social, ‘society’ is located and manifested online?
So no, even though I was obviously joking, the internet won’t replace God. All I was really getting at was that the printed book had profound ramifications for thought and the internet will have its own too. Religion was the wrong analogy. Anyway, I’m just trying to wrap my head around what some of the cognitive changes the Web might engender and would welcome any and all input you may have.
(Totally tangential note: the more clips I find on YouTube of kids shows I used to watch, the more I understand why I am so fucked up…)
