Life and Death in a Digital World

Two very interesting articles passed across my rss feed this week, both of them dealt with the death of a real life person and how their passing affected the online social networks they were a part of.

The first article was found a theatlantic.com. It was an editorial from The Atlantic magazine entitled "A Death on Facebook." http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/09/a-death-on-facebook/8177/ This article recounted the experience of a woman who, after briefly meeting a younger woman at work, was drawn to her facebook profile. The photos posted on her page presented an irresistable pictured narrative. When this younger woman slowly began to fall in love, the author of this article was drawn deeper into the narrative provided by facebook. She says, "Here, I had the satisfaction of a love plot unfolding right in my living room, complete with revolving backdrops and the suspense inherent in a long-distance relationship. " But this story did not end happily. The younger woman died suddenly. As the author began to unpack the situation she was left with a rather disconcerting notion. Was her observations of the younger woman's life simply a form of voyeurism, or was it a true friendship. Even though neither of them ever corresponded in real life, or on facebook. As she states it, "How do you cry for someone you hardly know? And for what was I crying? [the younger woman] or her story?"

The second article was posted at The Daily Beast, a news site that also performs news aggregation. This article was entitled "Anatomy of an Internet Suicide." http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-08-31/reddit-suicide-how-the-internet-can-help-and-hurt/ This story documents a user of Reddit who posted at question about continuing his existence. "Give me one reason why I shouldn't end it right now," he wrote. "Go." While many members of the online community responded compassionately and with sincere pleas for him not to end his life, he committed suicide a few hours later. While many of the Reddit users responded in an effort to help, a few members took a different tack. Some encouraged him to take his life, labeling him a coward or a faggot in the process. It would be almost impossible to know whether or not the responses of the Reddit community could have ultimately saved or doomed him.

How significant is our digital life in comparison to our embodied lives? If you would have asked me a year ago I would have told you that the digital world wasn't really that important. At the most, it provided ever increasingly sophisticated ways of giving us much needed attention. In other words, social networking was simply a way to live in an artificial glass house. Although this distinction is partially false because whether consciously or not, those who use social networking intentionally chose what they want to post and what they don't want to post.


Recently, facebook unveiled "places." This app would allow users to spatially define themselves. One could mark where they were geographically and situationally located in real time and space. This sort of application already existed, though within a much smaller online community called "foursquare." These sorts of developments only highlight for me the ways that online social networking, and online self identification continue to bleed into the embodied world. These two stories of suicide and death only highlight how jarring this seepage can be at times.

A professor at the college I attended once described living in community as throwing a bunch of rocks into a box and then shaking it vigorously. The sheer violence of the continued contact eventually smoothing out the rough edges. But he thought that online communities life facebook were more like the centrifugal force rides like one would find at a state fair. The riders pinned to the walls by the physics of the spinning cylinder they found themselves encapsulated in. Everyone can see one another, but there is no real contact. Each person was contained against the pad that gravity smashed them against.

I would generally agree with this professor's assessment. While the woman from the atlantic article would doubt her own connection to the younger woman who died, the fact is, the author was a silent witness to the unfolding drama of her tragically short life. And while no member of Reddit might have been able to stop the young man who died from taking his life, the emotions many poured into their comments trying to stop him was very real. Whether or not that silent witness, or those heart felt emotions amount to a genuine revolution in the way we engage in community with other embodied individuals is still up for debate.

Midwest by Stephen Dunn

Midwest
by Stephen Dunn

After the paintings
of David Ahlsted

We have lived in this town,
have disappeared
on this prairie. The church

always was smaller
than the grain elevator,
though we pretended otherwise.
The houses were similar

because few of us wanted
to be different
or estranged. And the sky

would never forgive us,
no matter how many times
we guessed upwards
in the dark.

The sky was the prairie's
double, immense,
kaleidoscopic, cold.

The town was where
and how we huddled
against such forces,
and the old abandoned

pickup on the edge
of town was how we knew
we had gone too far,
or had returned.

People? Now we can see them,
invisible in their houses
or in their stores.

Except for one man
lounging on his porch,
they are part of the buildings,

they have determined
every stubborn shape, the size
of each room. The trailer home
with the broken window

is somebody's life.
One thing always is
more important than another,

this empty street, this vanishing
point. The good eye knows
no democracy. Shadows follow

sunlight as they should,
as none of us can prevent.
Everything is conspicuous
and is not.

Astronomy....Prejudice

I am at once inspired and confused as to how my Astronomy professor played varsity soccer. The guy is so precious!! ...nerdy in that "I like physics" kinda way, not the kind of person I would take for a varsity athlete. But he also ADORES his family. He's one of those guerrilla picture people who sneak pictures of their family into places you wouldn't expect so you have to admire them. Guess it just shows that you can never judge a book by its cover. Without any introduction at all I would have never guessed that this guy could play soccer. But apparently he was good at it.

This actually raises an interesting point about prejudice. I should probably stop here and point out that prejudice doesn't necessarily have to carry a racial and therefore negative connotation. Prejudice used to be a legal term. In some ancient systems, a group would hand out a prejudgement to some plaintiff, sort of like an indictment. This prejudgement could be negative or positive, but the final judgement did not always have the same verdict as the prejudgement. It was simply a way of acknowledging that any given jury was inclined to view the evidence in such a way that would render such and such a verdict.

The philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer believed that our prejudices help make the world intelligible. Gadamer's definition of a prejudice was, "a judgement that is rendered before all the elements that determine a situation have been finally examined." Gadamer was intensely interested in the study of Hermeneutics of Language. He was curious as to how language, and the way we process it is related to understanding the world, and by extension our fundamental way of being in the world. For Gadamer, we reach out to the world around us; we are not simply static creatures that passively collect information like a camera. Part of our reaching out to the world around us in a quest for understanding what's out there is prejudice.

The key to prejudice is understanding that you have them. For Gadamer, no one will ever be able to completely rid themselves of their preconceived notions and prejudices. But so long as you can understand and anticipate where you will make those expected projections gives you a deeper understanding of meaning, being, and yourself.

So maybe its not terrible that I would have scoffed the first time I saw my professor and thought there was no way that he was a varsity athlete. But what would be terrible is if I scoffed without realizing the projection I was making about his ability. It's the things that we don't understand or acknowledge about ourselves that control us and make life shallow.

Snowflakes, Fragility, Senioritis

Do you realize the intricate beauty falling around you?

"Under the microscope, I found that snowflakes were miracles of beauty; and it seemed a shame that this beauty should not be seen and appreciated by others. Every crystal was a masterpiece of design and no one design was ever repeated., When a snowflake melted, that design was forever lost. Just that much beauty was gone, without leaving any record behind."

Wilson "Snowflake" Bentley 1925

Sometimes I think my thoughts are cliche enough to be sermons for Joel Osteen but a thought is a thought, and I figure this one is worth sharing.

I went for a walk the other night. It was snowing. And while this might not be a shocker, especially for those who happen to live in the Wheaton area this time of year, it seems to me that a lot of the time its the average routine things that happen during the day that sometimes carry the most meaning. It was late at night and every once in a while I would either be passed by a car or would pass a streetlight. In both instances, for a few moments the biting cold of the night would give way. In its place would be snowflakes falling lazily and lightly.

Snowflakes are infinitely complex and intricate creations. No two snowflakes are alike, which is rather shocking if you think about the absolute volume of even an inch of snow. Snowflakes are also infinitely fragile. One breath was enough to melt the snowflakes that rested upon my hand.

So as I pondered these facts I found myself standing at the end of a rather long street staring up at a rather large house. As I stood there under a street light watching the snow fall around me I couldn't help but think about all the energy and work that went into making that house a home. Someone's livelihood is wrapped up in creating that place. Hours of work a week, years of planning and decisions, and countless hopes and fears. And yet, it wouldn't take much for all of it to come crashing down. Shake the earth hard enough, or blow a wind strong enough and the entire structure could collapse.

Our carefully constructed lives are so fragile. In the scriptures, James likens our lives to a vapor, "which appears for a little while and then vanishes."

And yet, like the snowflakes that were falling all around me each life is unique, precious, and beautiful.


Thoughts about life and its manifestations have been repeatedly coming up in my mind, and I figure the main reason for that is that I'm about to graduate and start living it on my own... no safety net, no supervision. Fear is a byproduct of all that thinking, but as I stood there that night and looked at that house I had this funny feeling that everything was going to be okay. Is life fragile? Yes. But its also a beautiful thing to watch unfold. Everytime I talk to my parents about my post grad plans or the struggles I'm having they get this look on their face that reminds me of some kid watching his favorite cartoon.

While snowflakes and life might be fragile, they sure are beautiful to watch.

Why the Change?

So, as some of you may...or probably may not know, I used to blog under the title lensereflections.blogspot.com....so why the change?

Well, to put it simply, I lost my password, and the backup e-mail that I would use for it was also sadly lost so I had no way of redeeming my password. So here I am. I hope to continue blogging, much about the same things simple reflections and thoughts. But this is how I thought it might be a good idea to explain the change!!