The Digitally Divided Self: Relinquishing our Awareness to the Internet. Ivo Ph.D. Quartiroli
The inner is seen pertinent only to religion, reinforcing the historical division of powers which gave science dominion over matter and religion dominion over the soul. What is non-calculable or non-objective is mostly ignored, as are the implications of technology for our psyche.
Sensitivity to the inner is easily branded new-ageism, fundamentalism, or plain weirdness. Meditation is misunderstood as thinking. The body-mind connection is something to decode by DNA sequences. Going beyond the mind is misunderstood as going below the functionality of mind, dulled rather than perceiving more deeply. Understanding is something which we infer only intellectually. The inner void is something we become aware of only when the computer hangs and we are left to stare blankly at the screen. Mind is seen mainly in terms of cognitive capacities and performance, a set of neurotransmitters which can eventually be “fixed” or “enhanced” by pharmacological molecules.
The Promises of the Early Internet
After publishing my own books, I became a publisher of computer science books. Around 1994, when the Internet was becoming popular in Italy, I welcomed the Net in enthusiastic terms. Like many early enthusiasts, I saw the Net as a way to produce and share information in a more democratic way that could threaten big powers and even nation-states, and having the potential of shaping global consciousness.
Through Apogeo, my former publishing house, I published the first books in Italy about the Internet, convincing the traditional media that the Net wasn’t just about terrorists, pedophiles and dangerous hackers. For many years there was an opposition between the Internet on one side, and TV and print media on the other. Hostility toward the Internet was about competing interests, as well as simple ignorance. Their distorted, inaccurate and false vision of the Internet continues to this day.
At the same time, it was difficult to find a balanced, critical view of the role of the Net in society and in people’s minds. Anybody who criticized the Net risked being branded a close-minded conservative, a Luddite, an “old media” supporter wanting to limit the freedom of expression which the Net seemed to expand.
The fact is, though, that after twenty years of the Internet in our lives, most of the promises have not been fulfilled. We don’t have more democracy in the world, big media and big powers are even stronger, no global consciousness has arisen – and even though everybody can upload anything onto the Web simply and cheaply, we know less about what is happening in Iraq and Afghanistan than what we knew about the Vietnam war which was heavily broadcast. Yes, there are sites through which information can leak, but the leakage is a drop in the ocean of information daily available – and on sites read by a small percentage of web users.
Even when alternative information is presented, it is likely to be found on less popular websites that are far down in Google’s ranking. This merely deludes us into believing we have a tool for spreading information to the world – when in most cases it is more like a neighborly backyard chat. A chat, in fact, that can be traced and controlled. The big media have not disappeared – and their presence on the Net could make them even bigger.
Furthermore, privacy and control issues by governments and companies like Google and Facebook are, to say the least, worrying. What was once a place with no commercial interests is now full of advertisements, with some free services likely to become fee-based.
As soon as my company could afford it, I published a series on media studies, spirituality and Eastern culture, which reflected my personal life-path as a researcher of the truth. I switched from “updating” myself on the latest technical trends to attending workshops in different spiritual traditions and techniques. I went to ashrams in India and studied in psycho-spiritual schools in the US.
From Information Processing to Consciousness Processing
I moved back and forth between information processing and consciousness processing – from the awareness of technology to technologies of awareness. Information and my mind fed each other in a vicious cycle, making it difficult to stop and turn my gaze back toward inner silence. The mechanism of information incites us to stay within the feedback loop.
My subjective inner exploration was important not only for knowing my inner self, but also for clarity and a broader understanding of the outer world. Freeing my mind from conditioning and acquired beliefs proved effective both in my daily life and for a deeper understanding of reality. (Despite common misconceptions, spiritual paths are paths toward reality and clarity.) Beyond the conditioned mind we can see reality in a sharper way.
As every meditator quickly learns, many of our choices only seem to be “ours.” They are, in most cases, the result of early-life messages – either explicit or unconscious –which structured our minds. Those knots can never be untied if we don’t work on them with our attention and full presence.
Uninterrupted conscious attention along with silent time to look into our inner world are exactly what is rendered arduous by the technological society which, to use a term dear to Mauro Magatti (2009), sequesters our attention. The modality of the Internet, regardless of the actual content we are giving attention to, tends to split our attention – among websites, instant messaging, email, social networks, pictures, videos, software tools and more. With the growing speed of computers and the Net, everyone can keep several windows and websites open at once, jumping rapidly from one to the other.
Links themselves – the cement of the Internet – useful as they are, can be distracting. We approach even the best, most interesting and in-depth information with the same divided inner modality. Marshall McLuhan’s awakening phrase “the medium is the message” is true also for the Net. Being more than just another medium, the Net can be considered the summation of all media, and its impact on our inner and outer lives is accordingly stronger than any preceding media.
But we can always be masters of our attention, right? True, but the efforts to direct our attention and maintain it becomes harder with the growing presence of the Internet in our lives.
All in the Digital Mincer
The digitization of reality started with number crunching, a process close to computer language. Computers were initially used for scientific and engineering calculations, later extending to reading, writing, studying, working, entertainment, travel planning, connecting with friends and family, dating, sexual arousal, shopping and banking. And these activities are happening only online for a growing number of people. The “Internet of things” promises to go even further, radio tagging any object on earth with an Internet address, sucking all matter into the Net like a vacuum cleaner. The Net’s voracity doesn’t stop anywhere – including Body Area Networks that will be monitoring people’s physiological parameters.
The Net continually adds to the list of human activities which can be represented digitally – charming us with amazing applications, digitizing traditional needs and desires, and stimulating new ones. The transformation of desires into needs is one of the main activities of technological society, which in this regard shares the attitude with capitalistic society.
But we can just go offline, right? Again, true – but the Internet tends, like a gas, to expand in time and space. It follows us anywhere, through wireless connections and smartphones. With the immediacy of communication through the Net, there is a reciprocal pressure for answers to be fast. If we stay away from the Net for only a couple of days, we could miss an important job message, our friends’ updates, a notification from our airline, a juicy invitation from a person we’re attracted to, a nasty comment on our blog or social network page which we need to remove, a credit card transaction, the choices in door handles from our architect, library and credit card late notices, or a message from the insurance company.
With most of our colleagues, friends and family online, being offline will feel like living in a remote corner of the planet. Therefore, we are more than willing to transfer our lives to the Net, display them on social networks like Facebook, preserve our private documents in the “cloud,” and embrace technologies which promise to amaze and empower us. We can happily disembody into the cloud like a “pure” angel.