Rush the Iceberg

Networks are not communities In a sneaky way, this part of the book shook me most profoundly — because it was written before social media, it doesn’t mention “social networks” explicitly, but so much of it applies to Facebook, Twitter, etc., and how we often mistake those virtual places as real places, with real community. A real community allows you to be a whole person: A community is a place in which people face each other over time in all their human variety: good parts, bad parts, and all the rest. Such places promote the highest quality of life possible — lives of engagement and participation. A network, however, requires only a  piece of you: it asks you to suppress all the parts of yourself except the network-interest part — a highly unnatural act although one you can get used to. In exchange, the network will deliver efficiency in the pursuit of some limited aim. This is, in fact, a devil’s bargain, since on the promise of some future gain one must surrender the wholeness of one’s present humanity. If you enter into too many of these bargains, you will split yourself into many specialized pieces, none of them completely human. And no time is available to reintegrate them. This, ironically, is the destiny of many successful networkers and doubtless generates much business for divorce courts and therapists of a variety of persuasions. Over time, too much networking leads to a feeling of malnourishment: If the loss of true community entailed by masquerading in networks is not noticed in time, a condition arises in the victim’s spirit very much like the “trout starvation” that used to strike wilderness explorers whose diet was made up exclusively of stream fish. While trout quell the pangs of hunger — and even taste good — the eater gradually suffers for want of sufficient nutrients. We all know that feeling from being on Twitter too long. I’m also thinking now of the ways that a website like NextDoor attempts to bring community together, but really just re-organizes a community as a network — most of the stuff I see happening on my neighborhood message board is atomization, or splitting apart of the community: all you people who aren’t putting out your garbage vs. those of us who are, mom’s groups, cyclists, craigslist-like transactions, etc. Networks divide people, first from themselves and then from each other, on the grounds that this is the efficient way to perform a task. It may well be, but it is a lousy way to feel good about being alive. Networks make people lonely. They cannot correct their inhuman mechanism and still succeed as networks. Gatto says that, yes, networks have their place, but that they lack any real “ability to nourish their members emotionally.” He says “the only ones I consider completely safe are the ones that reject their communal facade, acknowledge their limits, and concentrate solely on helping me do a specific and necessary task.” (LinkedIn? Ha.) I want to repeat this until you are sick of hearing it. Networks do great harm by appearing enough like real communities to create expectations that they can manage human social and psychological needs. The reality is that they cannot. Even associations as inherently harmless as bridge clubs, chess clubs, amateur acting groups, or groups of social activists will, if they maintain a pretense of whole friendship, ultimately produce that odd sensation familiar to all city dwellers of being lonely in the middle of a crowd. Which of us who frequently networks has not felt this sensation? Belonging to many networks does not add up to having a community, no matter how many you belong to or how often your telephone rings. Gatto sees compulsory school as an “involuntary network with strangers.”