Commodified Community vs RSS
A sports writer for the Boston Globe has an occasional column with the introduction “turning the bag upside down to see what falls out” or something like that. He then presents a potpourri of brief observations and sports reports. This post is something like that, a collection of quotations from books I’ve read over the past year or so. I suppose I could have posted each of them separately with the commonplace tag, but they grew together in my mind as I thought about the sense of community I have each morning while reading the day’s RSS feed.
[Mark Zuckerberg] uses the word “connect” as believers use the word “Jesus,” as if it were sacred in and of itself: “So the idea is really that, um, the site helps everyone connect with people and share information with the people they want to stay connected with….” Connection is the goal. The quality of that connection, the quality of the information that passes through it, the quality of the relationship that connection permits — none of this is important. That a lot of social networking software explicitly encourages people to make weak, superficial connections with each other … and that this might not be an entirely positive thing, seems never to have occurred to him” (Zadie Smith, Feel Free, p. 52).
Today, people frequently invoke the term ‘community,’ but in doing so they refer to a commodified form of society. It does not create a we. Unbridled consumption isolates and separates people. Consumers are lonely creatures. Digital communication, too, turns out to be a form of communication without community. Capitalism transforms time itself into a commodity” (Byung-Chul Han, Vita Contemplativa, p. 4).
Attention capitalism has taken the holistic experience of mass spectacle, the social unity of paying attention together, the ecstasis of being one of many all pointed in the same direction absorbed in the same senses, and divided it into composite process each experienced individually and alone — watching something, and then sharing it. A viral meme is our current form of ‘paying attention together,’ but it’s attenuated in this crucial way. The collective rush of watching an opera or concert or singing together at mass have been decomposed into a two-part process, each solitary. I view and then I share. I view and then I share. Then we laugh together but apart (Chris Hayes, The Sirens’ Call, p. 153).
I trust you see that the sort of commoditized community discussed in these three quotations is decidedly different from the sense of community I have each morning. I have an odd sense of connection with the bloggers in my RSS feed. It’s not just that I learn from them. It’s that I get a sense of who they are. And what I realized this morning is that this collection of bloggers whose reflections I read regularly are informing my sense of my audience. It’s not that I think they’re reading what I’m writing. (For the most part, it’s clear to me, they’re not.) It’s that I can’t avoid thinking as I write about things they say and the people I think they are. I’m still sorting this out, but I’m already thinking that this indieweb community is not the commodified community that Han is disparaging. And this, in turn, leads me to reject his generalization that digital communication is “a form of communication without community.” It doesn’t have to be, and giving up the algorithms of platforms like Facebook is a huge part of what makes authentic online communication possible. I know that I’m sitting alone as I read my RSS feed, and that you’re likely sitting by yourself as you read this and other posts. But somehow my having chosen the people I’m inviting into my conversation makes this feel more authentic to me.
I’m sure this isn’t the last I’ll have to say about this — the community itself pushes me to think more about it.
