Participating in Online Ecology
“The architecture of this work is rooted in the temporal. Every human problem must be considered from the standpoint of time. Ideally, the present will always contribute to the building of the future. And this future is not the future of the cosmos but rather the future of my century, my country, my existence. In no fashion should I undertake to prepare the world that will come later. I belong irreducibly to my time. And it is for my own time that I should live.”
For a long time I’ve regarded the Internet with much suspicion — as an elusive and immaterial space that I never felt fully confident being present “on”. It’s a force that has encompassed and transformed our social relations and cultural landscape at a dizzying rate. It’s referred to as many things: at first as a “web”, commonly as a “platform”, often as a “tool”. However, as much as it’s conceptualised as being useful, it’s just as fervently regarded as detrimental, with insidious effects at the individual and social level. Both positive and negative — the way we interact and integrate it into our lives seems to evolve every year. And frankly, I was never bothered to be that actively involved. That is, besides my own personal communications and utilitarian needs, I’ve used the Internet comfortably with the voice in “off”. The way I saw it, trying to actually say something or show something online was the equivalent of trying to speak up in a vast crowd of people talking all at once — a mass with little to no attention span. Why bother shouting into that space? What response would I have? What effect would it make? The fact that viral trends and viral news both seem to be very short lived further convinced me of its futility. Every crisis, celebrity and joke seem to last as long as a fruit fly. So I’ve been quite content to be a little tech-hermit, selectively tuning in when I felt like it.
But my bubble popped upon graduation, which comes as no surprise. Throughout the course of my International Studies BA, my days were paced by lectures, classes, researching and writing. By specialising in Latin America and the Caribbean, I was introduced to a critical cross-disciplinary illustration of its history, culture, politics and economics. The more I learnt the more questions I had; my essays and projects seemed to facilitate what felt like an active conversation in which I would interrogate the social reality that characterises this region. This conversation kept me busy, and my pursuit of “explanations” was a satisfactory endeavour in response to the many complex issues rooted in the systemic exploitation of the region’s population and environment. But I’ve now exited this academic institution — my energy is no longer centred on a curriculum, I have no assignments and I’m no longer required to actively respond or even pay attention to these issues. But I have been paying attention, and my hands idle.
This has been a recipe for unease, restless unease. Time and time again I have been advised to “establish an online presence” in the context of career networking. I never quite knew where to begin in that pursuit… it seemed to suggest curating a persona with certain objectives in mind. It seemed like acting, and I’ve always been a terrible actress. But yet, many important conversations are taking place on the Internet, which by its nature is more democratic, that is, more accessible than university classrooms. One of the reasons I didn’t sign up for a Masters degree was due to my discomfort with the seemingly isolated nature of these academic conversations. That is, it was striking to me that, particularly in polemical subjects of political and economic development, many actors are left out of the table in these larger institutions.
I perceived an imbalanced transmission between “active” institutions deploying solutions to benefit “receptive” subjects — those directly affected by polemical issues. But how can solutions be applied without their active (and autonomous) participation? How can they fully participate if not fully informed? What if it is the institutions that have failed to be fully informed by those affected? There is also the significant dimension of translating the jargon and terminology of the issues at hand, making the conversation dominated by those with the privilege of having accessed higher education. For these reasons I felt need to look beyond the university to engage with what I guess is called social activism — but which I think should just be considered the normalised venture of conscious participation in what’s going on around us. Of the many perspectives I gained from my study, one is that neither politics nor economics are simply ideas, professions or interests, but rather realities we all participate in everyday. To what extent we are active agents in challenging and changing this reality varies — but this is where I realised the Internet is truly potent.
This became searingly clear during these past monumental weeks in which Chile despertó — Chile has woken. For both personal and political reasons the complete upheaval and mobilisations of the people there has stirred a true awe in me, and my eyes have been glued to the screen for the past three weeks. One of the most impressive and distinct features of this movement is the way in which it is facilitated and sustained through social media — it’s no small feat to initiate a mobilisation of up to two and a half million citizens across a country. Furthermore, it has been able to contest and speak back to national commercial media. Previously, the press has always had the monopoly on reporting events, but today we are smartphone-citizens, who can continually project — live and direct — a broader light on things. The framed set-ups have been exposed; the nauseating gangster behaviour of state forces have been exposed; and the accusations of delinquency by those in authority who wish to delegitimise its citizens’ demands just serves to expose how deaf they have become, because the rage on the street is not delinquency, but the result of too many years of neglecting to engage in the basic responsibilities of a government to provide a dignified quality of life.
In light of how easily Sebastián Piñera’s government could slide back into repressive dictatorial reflexes, it is indeed those in office who are plain criminals. The many grave violations of human rights, murders, rapes, and battery of citizens by a state which was a so-called stable oasis of neoliberal success in the region, should be a serious concern to everyone, everywhere. Now, the history of Chile’s not-so-distant brutal dictatorship and the extreme concentration of its plentiful resources to benefit a small elite class is long and complex. But when taken into account, the state of affairs today comes as no surprise — as a Nigerian proverb says “A man who lives on the bank of a river does not use spit to wash his hands.” That is, Chileans have been so blatantly denied the basic securities that their country can so clearly afford — so why shouldn’t they break out of the routine of precarious survival in order to reform the illegitimate system that benefits illegitimate, and quite sordid authorities?
The use of social media also goes beyond the initiation and coverage of this movement, it is also facilitating new forms of “autogestión” (self-management), the spread and sharing of critical information and ideas, and the organisation of assembly meetings. It is an instrument that is making new ways of proposing and and debating visions of the future possible. I don’t intend to sound positivistic in assuming that this means that this instrument thus makes these visions possible — what will unfold will undoubtedly be messy and chaotic. But it does change the character of social and political conversation to be more inclusive, more accountable and both better informed and informative. Witnessing these developments has jolted me into seeing how incredibly constructive these various outlets are, and that I can no longer play the tech-hermit if I am to be held accountable to my own ideals and beliefs.
So I renovated the idea of “online presence”, to see it in my mind as a very much alive and evolving network with interrelated functions — such is an ecology — within which I am obliged to participate in… because, as Franz Fanon so concisely says, “I belong irreducibly to my time. And it is for my own time that I should live.”
I don’t seek to be a pseudo-journalist on international affairs, but rather give voice to my agitations, to highlight what strikes me, and to share what should be shared. Towards that goal I will also publish translations of articles written in Spanish, as I think linguistic divides should be no barrier to making a greater diversity of sources more widely accessible. At the moment I don’t know how or if I could make the distinction between personal and political writing, because to detangle them from each other would take away from the true dimension of things. It’s an imperfect process, but I have to put my hands to the task and see how it evolves.
