Meat Culture

Angry Brown Butch linked to this post entitled, “The Internet Ate My Subculture:”

One of the characters in a book I’m reading publishes an underground paper. I used to do that- it was pretty okay. We covered a lot of local news, distributed newspaper-looking newspapers in churches and convenience stores, made a fairly good show of staying on top of stories in the scene and out. I don’t think I could do that again. Not the hours or the arguments, that part was fine. I just don’t think enough people read. Or rather, I think they read blogs instead, mostly written by their friends, and regardless of the value of the content. I don’t think you can get anyone’s attention any more. And that was five years ago. What happened?

(snip)

Is it totally trite to blame MySpace? Or Friendster? Or hell, livejournal? The timing is right. They keep everyone “connected” without having to, y’know, do anything together except catechise our daily living and fuck. Memoirs are now the best-selling genre of new book. Coincidence? We can get all the kudos and sexiness we need without ever leaving the house, without ever extending ourselves beyond our individual choices of which job, which identity, which sound card, which sex act we prefer. Narrativize it, publish it, let the appreciative comments pour in…

Belledame in comments was skeptical:

While I def. agree that public culture has been disappearing over the last x years/decades, i wouldn’t frame it as the Internet being *responsible.* I think if anything it’s a kind of counter to the general lack of “meatspace” public space.

I’m conflicted. On the one hand, I don’t really know from pre-internet organizing. I was in eighth grade when zines were becoming passe.

On the other, well, my subcultural contacts wouldn’t be contacts if not for the internet. I live in a city where I can–and do, albeit not as often as I should–go see people like me live and in person every night of the week. There are bars and readings and open-mics and concerts and benefits and picnics and marches and support groups and orgies and movie nights. And, of course, people. But those are all here. Elsewhere, it’s a different arrangement altogether. Our community is atomized for a variety of reasons. That’s how I see internet interactions, from blogs to message boards to livejournals to mytribester. They allow relatively isolated people to come in contact with other people whose meat* lives would never intersect with their own. I’m not sure they’re an alternative so much as an innovation.

The internet solves distance and isolation beyond the geographical kind. A transperson or other queer who cannot come out in real life can come out and seek support online. Someone at home with a chronic, debilitating illness can talk to other chronically ill, housebound people. A parent doesn’t have to bundle the kids et impedimenta into the car for a trip across town to talk to other parents. Someone who goes to work before dawn and returns home after dark can still have long conversations with friends. Some of my online relationships have become real-life relationships, but I admit that most of them don’t and never will. Some real-life relationships have moved to become primarily online correspondence.

It’s true that this kind of contact can seem lacking in some ways, and that it doesn’t always work with real-life etiquette. A few months ago–no link, sorry–Chris Clarke posted about learning of the death of someone he only knew online. Was it appropriate to send condolences? What would he say, and to whom? Was it appropriate to feel grief? How much? (He asked these questions more eloquently than I’m representing them here.) I don’t think that these questions represent a lack of depth of feeling, or an immature kind of friendship; I think they’re a product of the lag between human relationships and the rules that cover them. And I’ve faced similar dilemmas with friends I know primarily in real life, whether deciding to send a gift or attend a funeral. Estrangement happens all the time, and it creates ambiguity between the former relationship and the remaining one.

Now, Anne isn’t just writing about a narcissistic trend in human relationships, but the confusion of identity-based narcissism with political action. I will admit that information and support and activism tend to be conflated in online communities for people whose problems are a lack of visibility and information. For some of us, the fact of other people like us is profound. Forget knowing any of them–knowing about them is enough. And some of that superficial livejournal backslapping and buttkissing–particularly the “sexiness”–is something that community members have received seldom if at all. (There are certain other problems with that dynamic, but that’s another post.) While these interactions have not created activist change per se, they don’t seem to have hindered it, or to have made people less political and selfish than they otherwise would be.

So I suppose I’m skeptical too.

*The other week, in a discussion about Amazon, I referred to Barnes and Noble as a “meat bookstore.” Is that expression about to go the way of “cyber?” Has it already? I hope so.