Internet soundings

The creative use of light and shade are what make a painting work. The same is true with words and ideas. Light and shade, ambiguity without trickery, make for composite truth. We need this kind of composite and intuited truth in order to establish an anchorage, or footing, for love and in order to communicate that love effectively. Considered ambiguity makes for intuitive communication. So if communication is to be in any sense meaningful, it has to be undertaken at depth, perhaps through the medium of art or music, or through the internet. The internet has revealed that deep intuited communication leads to understanding and to solidarity with people, particularly with the oppressed because communication can involve not just two people, but millions.

These are not just abstract ideas. They are the concrete reality which is currently being explored in the abstractions of internet social networks. In the past, before the arrival of the internet, a social network consisted of a group of friends, or of like-minded people, possibly of a similar social class with similar economic advantages or disadvantages. You were most comfortable, socially, with your own kind. The same may be true today, but in a far less limiting way. The internet has helped us re-draw social demarcation lines. We are freer to choose where and with whom we belong, or to belong to everyone and to be at home everywhere. But freedom is not something human beings handle very well. It frightens them, so they construct new and different ways of delineating and separating themselves from one another, defensive lines against people they neither know or understand, and who they at times fear.

The internet, and social networking sites in particular, give us a new and rather strange freedom. If you take away real faces and real social situations, the way in which social demarcation lines are drawn, or re-drawn, changes. The internet gives us permission to draw lines, or efface them, without ever taking responsibility for the human being who is at the end of the fibre optic cable. We seldom have to look them in the face or even speak to them personally. This isolates the individual at both ends of the cable and makes them anxious about other people and about themselves.

Working through the internet, as a writer, is liberating and exciting, but it also induces a certain amount of paranoia and anxiety. Is there anybody out there? Even if you manage to catch sight of a twitter follower or Linked-in connection in some real but still somewhat fabricated way (with the help of u-tube, perhaps), the person is still not quite ‘real’ to you. The body, the voice, the nuanced expressions, the memories pertaining to a specific encounter are missing. If you do find the person on u-tube, or its equivalent, what you see is at best a different encounter, someone else’s. It is second hand.  And yet, the new follower is real because they have decided to follow you for a particular reason. There has been a communication between you and them. But how are you to respond, and how are you to maintain the line of communication, given the limitations of time? Replies and re-tweets only take you so far. They don’t sound the depths when it comes to real human and creative exchange.

This being said, there is some hope where twitter is concerned. While the individual is still remote, he or she usually has a ‘face’ and a tiny profile description through which you glimpse them as a person. I’m always pleased when new followers appear. I can’t deny that a couple of new followers every day is reassuring. Followers tell you that there are people out there who may possibly be reading your work and, as a result, want to signal their existence, their ‘reality’ in the particular thought world which you and they inhabit. This is a great blessing, and it is a blessing which grows exponentially with the number of seconds you are prepared to ‘contemplate’ that follower as a person with what little you know of them from their profile. Simply following more people in order to get them to follow you back is not the same thing as meeting them singly, on a one by one basis. 

One of the things that the internet offers, at least in the sphere of twitter and linked-in, is the opportunity to look at a face and hear the ‘voice’ of a complete stranger via their profile. You can read a profile in the way you might look at the face of Christ in a painting or icon, allowing the mind’s ‘heart function’ to fill in the shadow areas. The contemplation of paintings and icons involves filling in what is absent, where light complements dark, or shades merge. Something similar can happen, conceptually, in the world of twitter. By sensing the presence of our followers, as people with whom we are creatively involved, we are already engaging with them at a deeper level.

This kind of deeper engagement, or sounding, requires a different and deeper level of attention to our own work, as well as to the people who might read it. Paying deep attention is a form of blessing. When we bless our followers, by taking a couple of seconds to actually look at them, we are being grateful to them for blessing our work, for paying attention to it, and it is in this mutuality of blessing that the real work of communication begins.