"The blog broadened my outlook enormously, for when I responded to one reader, another person whom I didn’t know and would never meet could read what we had written and share their own perspective. Direct, sincere communication with others was no longer a fantasy—and it felt just as real as a declaration of love. I relished the endless possibilities of assuming multiple, separate online existences, and the fragmented, inconsequential, fleeting moments of emotion and engagement it gave me. Every character that I tapped on my keyboard was emblematic of a new kind of freedom. By enabling alternative voices, the internet weakened the power of autocracy, dispelling the obstacles it tried to put in the individual’s way. Freedom, of course, inspires expression, and soon my readers understood me even better than my family did. On the internet, social coercion is nullified and the individual acquires a kind of weightlessness, no longer subordinate to the power structure.... ... I was like a jellyfish, and the internet had become my ocean. I began to see life no longer as an activity taking me in a single direction, but rather as a succession of countless instants and junctures.... Every instant could be presented as a complete world in itself, unpredictable and unrepeatable, dispelling classic meanings and goals. This was empowering rather than destabilizing, and, under a tyranny intent on cheating us out of history and memory, here was a new way of telling our stories."
From "1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows" by Ai Weiwei.
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3 comments:
"On the internet, social coercion is nullified and the individual acquires a kind of weightlessness, no longer subordinate to the power structure"
If only. A brave and good man, but he hasn't learned enough from his dad's experience.
I feel as if I can't understand what this person is saying and I better read the book. I can't quite see how: "Every instant could be presented as a complete world in itself, unpredictable and unrepeatable, dispelling classic meanings and goals" goes with: "under a tyranny intent on cheating us out of history and memory, here [the internet] was a new way of telling our stories." Yet I feel that this is a serious person even if a sometime Dadaist and he's proposing paradoxes to get at something.
I relished the endless possibilities of assuming multiple, separate online existences, and the fragmented, inconsequential, fleeting moments of emotion and engagement it gave me. Every character that I tapped on my keyboard was emblematic of a new kind of freedom.
From an artist's perspective, I can understand how it can be liberating to assume "multiple, separate online existences".
But from a societal perspective, at least in the west, I think users using multiply anonymous monikers online weakens public discourse. I'm thinking of not just trolls, bots or paid internet mercenaries, but individuals having the integrity to stand behind what they say. To do that you need to show who you are.
In the context of this blog, which I've been following for many years, I've noticed that many of the nastiest, baseless comments, on both sides of the political spectrum, are made by users who don't show their face or have anything in their profile to indicate who they are. I suspect that some of them are posting here using multiple identities. I do think this blog is a useful forum for exchanging ideas, but it is weakened by posters who don't have the courage to show who they are.
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