What elements of your life are most significant to defining you? You, a conscious, fluid, three dimensional, emotional, spiritual being.
We've been discussing the way our lives have been reshaped by the recent exponential development in telecommunications. Previously we began talking about the new age of the global village, the digital highway to online communities and the invention of a sort of 'theoretical time'.
The vast increase in our avenues of communication have created for us an ever-expanding letterbox of information for us to reply to, an exponentially contactable persona through which we may be reached. Theoretical time is the concept that we can carry around a chaotic dinner party of conversations in our pocket, that we have tried to evolve beyond our temporal limits, with a trajectory of speaking to all people at all times.
The sacrifice of theoretical time is the relegation of real-time intimacy for the sake of a faux-celebrity identity, constantly being reached out for by 'friends' who function for our egos more like fans.
But there is more to the network growth than simply our notion of time, it also impacts our very notion of ourselves. The logical result of this way of living is a theoretical life, expressing itself in our collective and personal consciousness. Our ideas of community, relationships, and self have been reshaped by this new digital existence, resulting in 'theoretical lives'.
Firstly, our collective understanding of community has been affected. As we grow and sprawl and expand in our communications with those around us, drawing the world ever closer into a united, conscious representative whole of the human race, we naturally begin to redefine our notions of belonging. It's human nature to want to belong, we are social beings.
But whereas for years we have done community in close proximity to our homes, jobs, families – necessarily following the axiom that 'you belong to those with whom you communicate and commune'. Recently, however, we have lost the edges to our relationships, new technologies have thrown open the gates of communication and torn down the borders of belonging. Our axiom remains the same, but the implications have changed dramatically.
Our tribe now spans states and cities and crosses oceans. The result is a collective confusion of our lives, and who, and what, fit into our circles. Our sense of familiarity with people means we live in a sort of theoretical community, a shared history with people we've never met in physical life. Our 'village' now stretches to include a global society, who are related through a theoretical community life.
We no longer relate to a suburb around us, but we feel as connected with people all across the planet as we do with those next door. We will now quickly shift in conversation, from talking to close friends about our lives to talking about events none of us witnessed, involving people we have never met.
You can see this clearly if you're ever with a group of people who start to share YouTube videos, the avalanche is deadly. From one moment of "do you remember?" to another of "did you see?" and then forty minutes later you've all shared a series of videos that slightly relate, but you're left with a general confusion about how any of those things connected to what you were just talking about or why this specific group have gathered in the first place.
We now have the recent news of a friend's promotion in the same basket of social relevance as that little American girl who sang so unexpectedly well. Our collective consciousness has grown to include both types of people in our circle without realizing it. But for much of this trivia, it has no bearing on our actual realities, these are theoretical lives that we have essentially downloaded into our tribe mentality.
These theoretical lives also function at a personal level. While we may now discern our relational landscape with some haziness, we also see ourselves in that fray with a similar confusion. More than ever we are being asked to define ourselves, to express and represent ourselves. While the majority of our personality and character used to come from how we lived our lives, we are now increasingly defined by how we use a set number of profile options and online expressions to show who we are.
As with our collective identity, we are on the receiving end of a feedback loop, whereby the digital categories we begin to put ourselves in soon come to define who we are in the first place. Not that we are changed by our online status, but we are developing theoretical lives – a notion of living and self that is far removed from real life and has no weight or sound or worth in the cold, conscious arena of reality.
We now take aim at the means not the end. We have learned a language and an image that accompanies a desirable life. But instead of living such a life we mask our own with a veneer to match theirs. We are pursuing the claim of experiences, not the events in themselves. We just want symptoms, not the real disease. We are far more interested in sounding educated than being educated, we are adamant that we always appear to be beautiful and interesting and fun, hoping that somehow it will make us so.
But in all of this we are pursuing theoretical lives, intangible notions of a community, and personality, and permeating it all, a relentless performance mentality. We are better connected than ever before but at the cost of knowing with clarity who we are and which tribe we belong to.
Our expansion of our communities costs us intimacy with those who actually exist in our lives, and our redefining of identity leaves us envious of our theoretical selves rather than moving in any way towards actually becoming them.
Sam Manchester is currently a theology student with an inescapable sociology degree behind him. In an attempt to reconcile the two, he reflects and writes about their coalescence in everyday life.
Sam's archive of articles may be viewed at www.pressserviceinternational.org/sam-manchester.html