Project Web: Homework #2

The Era of Conspicuous Web Consumption

There doesn’t seem to be a brighter future out there for the “visibility” of our presence on the internet, and how that affects our writing, our interactions with others, and our power relations within the online community. Writing has been transformed to a more open virtual world, with a profounder kind of agency; where people can say anything about whoever and whatever. Our interactions with others has perhaps negatively shifted, simply because people have disciplined themselves to live a somewhat “virtual world” and burst out slander about anyone and anything. Personally, it seems that the internet has become a scapegoat to avoid “damage” in their daily lives because of their opinions. Our power relations within the online community has made everyone news gatherers, in the sense that people feel disciplined to report events or opinions they consider extraordinary, even when it‘s under an alias or pseudonym.

Generations raised with communication technology are now spending the majority of their lives on chatrooms, YouTube, cell phones and music devices. The article “I Tweet, Therefore I Am,” by Andrew Lam, observes how social media is spreading like a wild fire around the world, and is playing a considerable role in how we interact with one another and the world around us. Lam himself writes, “As humans, we are beginning to believe that we do not fully exist without some sort of electronic imprint in the virtual world, a digital projection of ourselves“(25). In other words, Lam suggests that people nowadays feel so habitually glued to the Internet that they completely dismiss the outside world: reality. In this sense, people are being conditioned or even disciplined to devote the vastness of their emotional life in the virtual world, or in other words, people have “learned to split their attention, with one eye on the electronic mirror, and the other on reality” (25).

I agree that people have come to believe they don’t fully exist without some sort of imprint in the virtual world, a point that needs emphasizing since so many people believe they have to report their news to the world. Self-tracking has become a terribly vital and significant part in this day and age. As Lam stated, “Diaries, once hidden under mattresses are now online in the form of blogs and vlogs” (25). People are now investing their emotional lives online for all to see, obscuring the boundary between public and private.

The article “The Growing Cowardice of Online Anonymity” by Richard Bernstein, by the same token as Lam; describes how communication technology was created to enhance our daily lives, but something has dramatically shifted, especially with anonymity over the web, According to Bernstein, “anonymity is also a tremendous aid to the resentful, the scandalous and cowardly.” Bernstein’s point is that the internet provides a shield sort of protection for anybody who wants to say anything about anybody else, which ultimately, affects the way people interact with each other. In this sense, the anonymity over the web can be seen as “morally deformed exploitation” (350).

The internet has created a new form of discipline; a large proportion of people’s lives are being dedicated to the virtual world. In the writing piece “Panopticism” Michel Foucault, describes discipline as, “neither with an institution nor with an apparatus; it is a type of power, a modality for its exercise, comprising a whole set of instruments, techniques, procedures, levels of application, targets” (206). Foucault definition of “discipline” can be applied to how people use the internet and the power of anonymity today. It can be seen today that “more and more, we are changing our lives to cater to the digital world” (Lam 24). Personally, I feel that the digital world opens the threshold to the power of discipline.

People now get their news from online resources such as Facebook, Twitter, or other social networking sites, rather than from a physical copy of a newspaper, such as the Los Angeles Times or New York Times. Even the way in which people stay in touch has completely shifted. People have completely sold they soul to cater to the digital world, the real world doesn’t seem to be important anymore. Although, I know sending an e-mail or text can be completely suitable and rapid, I cannot help thinking that some people discipline themselves to feel that sending a text or e–mail could substitute the presences of brisk face-to-face esoteric conversations.

Works Cited

Bernstein, Richard. “The Growing Cowardice of Online Anonymity.” The Norton Sampler 7th Edition: Short Essays for Composition. Thomas Cooley. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2010. 349-353. Print.

Foucault, Michel. “Panopticism.” The Foucault Reader. Ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: Vintage Books, 2010. 206-213. Print.

Lam, Andrew. “I Tweet, Therefore I Am.” Reading Culture: Contexts for Critical Reading and Writing. Eds. Diana George and John Trimbur. Boston: Pearson, 2012. 24-26. Print.