Connections

“We need to founder in the face of difficulty, we need to suffer solitudes, we need to know how utterly weird it is that we're here, no?” This is the question that Sven Birkerts puts in the online conference that appeared in The Atlantic Monthly Online on the America Online network. However, he does not ask for an answer; this is a rhetorical question that comprises his biggest critique of how we all make use of the Internet. Birkerts claims that we, as students, yearn to be connected all the time to as many friends as possible, and forget to spend some time with our own self.

It is interesting how Birkerts points out that more and more students fail at the “old print rituals” such as reading and understanding a book, but it is not our fault. So, what charges can be brought against us?

We have not been born in cyberspace, but it is true that most of us have been exposed to computers from an earlier stage in life. So, it is then normal to turn to the electronic communications, but have we not gone a bit too far? This is where Birkerts’s questioning of our uses of the Internet might seem reasonable.

The monster from every childhood is the darkness. As we grow, the feeling of being left all alone in the dark seems to be replaced by having no friends on Facebook, or no one to chat to. We live in a world in which the one with most likes on Facebook is the most popular and the one who is not connected is simply left behind. This is a world that we have created – it was not implied with the birth of the Internet – and this is what Birkerts criticizes.

An explanation might lie in our way of measuring success in life.  If more people know our name, it must mean that we hold a very important social position and we are much closer of achieving our dreams of greatness. As we move forward on this path of becoming celebrities, we advance farther away from our own self; Birkerts has noticed that “For some decades now we have been edging away from the opaqueness of private life and toward the transparency of a life lived within a set of systems, electronic and other”.

There are definitely unquestionable advantages that the existence of Internet has brought upon us. Nevertheless, as with all other things we have created, there is also a downside. After all, the Internet did not come with a manual so we have started using it in ways that are not exactly proper. Personally, I am not against any web related activities, but I cannot help wondering whether the desire of being connected is taking over our lives, our private selves. This feeling of “connectedness” has effects similar to the ones of a drug. Once the light from our contact point appears on the circuit board that Birkerts talks about, we become happy. But will it not also make us numb to what happens in the real world? In this content, what the consequences that Birkerts foresees, the flattening of historical perspectives or transforming ourselves into shallow human beings are definitely plausible.

Birkerts, Sven. "Into the Electronic Millennium". Boston Review (1991). Web. 28 Feb. 2011. http://bostonreview.net/BR16.5/birkerts.html.

Online Conference - "Is Cyberspace Destroying Society". The Atlantic Monthly Online (1995). Web. 28 Feb. 2011. http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/unbound/aandc/trnscrpt/birkerts.htm.