June 3, 2003
Webbodies
AKMA reflects on the importance of bodies and how we can have important, deeply personal relationships in a bodiless world like the Web.
He calls “replacement panic” the anxiety that Web sociality will displace real world sociality. It’s a keeper of a phrase.
I do not pooh-pooh virtual friendships. Not at all. That they’re “real” (you know you’ve been in the company of intellectuals too long when you have to put “real” in scare quotes) is not in question. That they’re valuable is not in question. At least not to me.
But…I continue to worry about what lesson we learn from the fact that these immaterial relationships are so real, so valuable. Many other lessons of the Web bring us back from our alienated real-world beliefs. This particular one seems to me to reinforce our real-world alienation from our bodies. “See, we can have perfectly good friendships without bodies ever being there,” we learn from the Web.
So, I’m stuck between two ideas, both of which I believe firmly: 1. Virtual sociality is real and important. 2. Bodies are real and important. I’m having trouble bringing the two ideas together, but I am unwilling to give up either.
Trevor Bechtel, AKMA’s colleague, in his paper at the Digital Genres confabulation, broadened “body” to include social bodies such as congregations. This would enable us to say that virtual communities are still bodily. But to me that over-extends the idea of a body; there is something special about my body that’s fundamentally different than that of a community: my body can have sex, feel pain, and die. Preferably in that order. So, Trevor’s strategem doesn’t work for me. (Ultimately, this turns on a difference in faith, I believe.)
In my paper at Digital Genres, I tried the following four-part escape route.
First, we agree that what’s important about our bodies isn’t the matter/atoms of our body. Rather, it’s our peculiar relation to those atoms. That it’s my body counts for everything, but if we look at bodies just as matter, we don’t get to the my-ness.
Second, we look at that relationship. What does it mean to have a body? It means, among other things, that we care about what happens to these atoms, that we have a point of view from the space and time in which we’re rooted, and that we are able to turn towards the world with other similarly situated and caring bodies.
Third, we note that voice – in the “I am what I speak” sense – has those three characteristics: we speak from a point of view about what we care about, turning towards the world together with others.
Fourth, the Web is all about voice. Thus, on the Web we use and value the very characteristics that being embodied grants us. We learn not that the body is unimportant but that the body purely as matter is unimportant. We go back to the Real World better understanding that having a body is about having passion and a point of view, not about having atoms.
I’m just not sure I’m convinced.
(For those who are keeping track, i.e., a Mrs. Emma Frink in North Hotcake VA, this is very close to my position in Small Pieces. The main difference is that Trevor’s comments pointed to embracing the non-material characteristics of the body as a way of returning from the alienation of thinking of the body only as matter.)
