As I swim my laps a couple of times, a week, I think about copy and paste. On the computer, if you type out a text once, you can copy it and paste it into all the places in your document where you need it. You don’t have to type it over each time. The teachers’ old punishment of writing “I will not chew gum in school” one hundred times loses its edge through copy and paste. But laps don’t work like that. You swim a nice first ten laps, and the you have to make the next ten, one lap at a time.

That seems so odd to me because in the rest of my life I don’t have to perform simple repetitive motions. There are other such tasks, of course, like swimming laps: gardening, and knitting and cooking, for example, but for much of our efforts, we can just copy and paste.

In Goethe’s poem “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” which we all know better from Fantasia, the apprentice addresses the magic water-broom that carries water over and over, flooding his house, “O, you ugly child of Hades!” and says:

No, no longer
can I let him,
I must get him
with some trick!
I’m beginning to feel sick.

Now that sick feeling is more likely to strike me if I have to do something over and over. Pondering this has made me think about the ways the computer has changed our sense of what is normal and reasonable.

Any new medium changes us. Plato was right to issue this warning in 370 BCE:

[Writing] will introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it: they will not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing, which is external and depends on signs that belong to others, instead of trying to remember from the inside, completely on their own. (Phaedrus 275a).

And that was my question about the computer: are we diminished by our animated brooms? Are we losing ourselves in using “signs that belong to others”? So many things we deal with today are no longer concrete. We speak of documents, files and archives, but the “objects” we describe are ethereal, or, if you prefer, a fantasy. We speak of our Facebook friends, but the word means something else now, doesn’t it? I remember an entry on Live Journal in which the writer described throwing a party for her LJ friends — she had hundreds. One person showed up.

I wish I still had that entry, but it is lost for ever in the ether that constitutes Live Journal, where I hardly ever post any more. By the way, that too is a change in how we live: parts of what we knew disappear and are unrecoverable. As Plato predicted, I don’t remember who wrote about her party of one, but it does suggest that we have redefined what a friend is on the computer.

Of course, there are still people who “friend” their “real-life” friends, and there are people who turn virtual friends into real-life friends, but the term does not apply in the same way to the dozens if not hundreds of people some people have as “friends,” stockpiling them like objects.

Despite its government origins, the Internet is certainly a capitalistic enterprise, and Karl Marx suggested that in capitalism, we become alienated from the product of our labor, and fascinated with, or even enslaved by commodities, instead of just using them. In addition, we turn relationships into commodities. The result, he argued, is a kind of universal alienation. I don’t know if Marx was right, or if the alienation came first and the friends we like to collect as commodities came later, but the Internet sure does have a lot of social networking, where friendship means something other than what it used to.

Though some resist the sick feeling Goethe complained of, we are increasingly particles whose movements cannot be tracked by the naked eye. We have become motes in cyberspace, which Gibson defined as a

consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions … Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding.

There can be a kind of anarchic pleasure in these mote-like motions. In this sense, there is a change in our sense of what it is to be a member of a community. Before the Internet, we were separate entities that operated through our own individual choices, now we have chosen to be moved by the wave, to be jostled and pummeled and carried in the mosh pit. One of these amusing waves is the flash mob, a kind of improvised one-night-stand organized via the Internet and repurposing a mundane location into a work of art. A fine example is the freeze at Grand Central Station.

Of course, some of the new forms of activity do not involve creating works of art but bringing participants into contact with the worst traits of human nature. Megan Meier, the teenager who committed suicide as a result of cyberbullying by the mother of an acquaintance, is perhaps the most notorious example.

And then there are the activities in between. I recently had a look at Second Life, which was touted a couple of years ago as a place all faculty needed to be familiar with for the good of our university. I didn’t get it then and I’m afraid I still don’t. I dropped in at a random point in that universe, and found myself surrounded by nearly naked people and weird creatures with miscellaneous body parts.

The creatures I saw were a little like Horace‘s fantasy of joining

a human head to the neck of a horse, and spread[ing] feathers of many a hue over limbs picked up now here now there, so that what at the top is a lovely woman ends up below in a black and ugly fish.”

It was not comfortable there.

I was no more comfortable in my own skin: I had selected a body from a palette of choices, and struggled to make it more familiar, which I am sure was not what was intended. I figured out how to make it fat but I couldn’t easily get it to have white hair, and I saw that I would have to work to acquire less stylish and more comfortable clothes. I was able to make the pants looser and so I set out for a look around, leaving the chimeras to their amusements.

Eventually, I found Drexel’s dragon-shaped island with only a couple of trips to the bottom of the sea as a result of poor landings. Much of what I saw was off limits and that seemed to be part of the point, like those Hungarian neighborhoods where you walk along the street, passing pretty little houses with charming gardens, and at each, a snarling, roaring locomotive of a dog throws himself terrifyingly against what you hope is a sturdy gate. Despite the immersions, I found that I was neither drowning nor waving in my travels.

In my experience, Second Life seems like an intersection between a marketplace and a videogame, though it does have an amazing handicraft and design component. It seemed homogeneous, and not very interesting, at least to the casual visitor. The one insight I gained was that, as “real” life is not quite what it used to be, maybe Second Life isn’t a bad approximation of the life we are actually living and haven’t yet noticed: isolated and a little frightening.

Murakami’s After Dark explains the tenor of modern life as I see it. In it, we are

a nameless part of a collective entity, while also being a human being with a different face and mind. … The ground we stand on looks solid enough, but if something happens it can drop right out from under you. And once that happens, you’ve had it: things’ll never be the same. All you can do is go on living alone down there in the darkness.

This sounds like a bleak vision, but the dark perspective merely underscores the importance of the ethical choices to be made.

There’s a web page that discusses the contributions Murakami’s message can make to business startups – I guess it’s one step short of “What would Murakami do?” On this site, Merredith says,

What I take away from Murakami … is to have perspective, let your knowledge and memories instruct you, and not lose sight of any beauty that gives your life meaning. In “After Dark,” one of the heroines points out that memories “are the fuel that life burns on,” and without the time to make them, we literally and figuratively lose ourselves.”

But I don’t want you to think that computers make me queasy. I have a great time in cyberspace though I probably don’t understand the half of it. My pleasures are in seeing the changing shapes of an ever-evolving and dissolving polity. To me, the Internet is like the campground at the Philadelphia Folk Festival (it’s weekend after next, by the way) at night: a magical impromptu village of color and light, built for an instant.

All kinds of people camp at the Festival and the campsites are decked out with every important aspect of civilization. You see finery of every sort and you are witness to negotiations accompanying all kinds of relationships. Some are terrifying, and you scuttle away. People touch each other in various ways, fleeting and lasting. Music, of course, is at the heart of it all, and as you walk around, you traverse a kaleidoscope of sound. My favorite was the guy who had a grand piano in his campsite and played Elton John songs all night. There seem to be a thousand fiddles and a million tambourines. The astonishing drone of bagpipers pierces the morning haze. And then it is all gone on the last day.

Until Second Life can give me that feeling, I’m not going to get queasy over the Internet.

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