The Durability and Commonality of a Potential Online World

nature. The internet facilitates new forms of communication that mitigate the importance of distance as a practical obstacle to the creation of a common political world. It is on this point that Benjamin Barber’s warnings that the internet may have negative effects for politics rely on a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of the internet. He gives the example of students in one of his lectures who send instant messages back and forth to each other without even looking at each other, despite the fact they are sitting within eyeshot. He argues this is alienating and generates a sense of solitude and loneliness.187 _In

fact what is happening is the opposite of what Barber thinks: these students are remaining in constant close communication even at a time when they should be paying attention to his lecture, and are thus finding new ways to remain connected. The pervasiveness of online communication has reached a point where the most common popular trope is no longer about the isolated individual sitting alone in front of a screen cut off from society, but simply social fatigue, as people start to want to have time to themselves where they

186 _{Lawrence Lessig, Code: Version 2.0 (New York: Basic Books, 2006), 6.} 187 _{Barber, “Which Technology for Which Democracy?,” 7.}

are not constantly answering emails, instant messages, Facebook chats, tweets, and text messages. With the early concerns about the internet being isolating and alienating giving way to over-communication, the bigger question is whether all this communication can bring people together to create a common political realm or whether it will simply fragment the world into small bubbles of hypercommunication where people no longer feel the need to engage with the larger public because they can establish such pervasive connections within their social network.188

Mirroring Fraser’s idea of multiple publics, Bohman argues that the internet is a public of publics with a distributed structure rather than a centralized one, with the implication that it does not matter if there is a single website that everyone goes to for political debate.189 While there certainly can be a multitude of publics, those publics only become a political realm when they come into contact and conflict with each other. In this sense, only temporary political realms could sporadically pop up when different publics came into conflict, but as was argued earlier, there is something wholly

unsatisfying about politics as a temporary phenomenon. If the only established place to argue our position and demand change is within a subpublic that we are already a part of and which tends to agree with our position, then such speech is politically useless. The fragmentation of existing political discussion sites into subsites based on a common viewpoint is extremely common and also politically destructive. The ease through which new sites can be created online is a double-edged sword that makes it both easier to create common realms open to all, and to leave the common world and create one’s own little realm where no opposing viewpoints can be heard. Due to the malleability of the software layer, the internet can promote both immense commonality and has the potential to create a political world which actually encompasses the physical Earth, while at the same time can also facilitate fragmentation. As has been emphasized previously, the key is the wetware layer, as people determine how the internet is used, rather than the

technology determining what is politically possible.

188 _{Papacharissi, “The Virtual Sphere,” 18.} 189 _{Bohman, “Expanding Dialogue,” 140.}

The malleability of the internet and the importance of human agency remains a tough sell, however, especially on this issue of commonality and fragmentation. Barney argues that the internet destroys the common world of things, built in an Arendtian sense through work, in favour of fleeting consumability.190 But the internet is clearly part of this world of things that form the common world and thus are the objects of dispute among those who look at them from different perspectives. The hardware layer of the internet is a literal physical thing, and the software layer enables anyone with even relatively basic computer skills to create a visible object in the form of a website and to display it publicly. These are tangible objects which can enable commonality around which relationships can be built. The importance of these objects lays in the way that they both bring us together and separate us. Any website that enables political debate does exactly this, as it provides a common forum for everyone to argue their own position in a way that a shopping mall, for instance, does not.

Furthering his attempt to use Arendt to critique the internet’s suitability to be a common world, Barney points to Arendt’s argument that the fabricated world must be more stable and enduring than the individuals within it, thus guaranteeing that their political deeds will have lasting effect and be remembered.191 Barney believes that the internet lacks this durability because of its supposedly fluid and transient nature. While websites certainly come and go, Barney ignores the fact that the internet also enables forms of extreme memory and permanence. Everything online gets copied and backed up as it circulates publicly, making it extremely difficult to get rid of something

embarrassing once it gets put online.192 This phenomenon has even spurred a number of recent court rulings where Google has been ordered to remove links to certain material that violates someone’s “right to be forgotten.”193 _{The internet cannot be both completely}

consumable and without any memory, and at the same time so extremely permanent that courts have to order the censorship of search results to allow people to hide their past. In fact, one of the ultimate technological fantasies that shows up in everything from Ray

190 _{Barney, “Invasion of Publicity: Digital Networks and the Privatization of the Public Sphere,” 110.} 191 _{Ibid., 112.}

192 _{Jeffrey Rosen, “The Right to Be Forgotten,” Stanford Law Review Online 64, no. 88 (2012): 88–92.} 193 _{Mark Gollom, “Google Looms as ‘Censor-in-Chief’ after ‘right to Be Forgotten’ Ruling,” CBC News,}

Kurzweil’s predictions to television shows such as Caprica and films such as

Transcendence, is the ability to harness the data storage and computing capacity of the internet to upload someone’s consciousness so they can achieve literal immortality. Against this background, it is clear that the internet is continuing to grow into a massive collective memory for humanity, and thus can enable the kind of durability a political realm requires in order to ensure that the uniqueness of people’s speech and action is remembered.

3.6 Panoptic Surveillance and Anonymous Cowardice as two