"Net Culture:

Culture Between Conformity and Resistance"

Wolfgang Schirmacher

The human individual is a cultural being that with the aid of linguistic symbols creates a world not provided for by nature. We are ‘artificial by nature,’ as the philosophical anthropologist Hellmuth Plessner emphasized, and our cultural achievement consists in technological ingenuity, in the constructs of institutions; it reveals itself ideally in media and art. With culture we create a human sphere and establish realms of private and public encounter. In the last few years a cultural phenomenon has developed with the Internet which seeks its equal in history in its intellectual consequence and incomparable power to generate and foster communal belonging. Not even in their golden ages did the world religions possess such global force of attraction, allowing a world culture to hold sway and rendering regional differences obsolete. In the Internet, cultural imagination meets with the material conditions of many varied societies and transcends these. The long dominant difference between public and private sphere has been suspended, and the Internet has become the universal venue of encounter. The functioning of society at a very basic level is affected here, one which usually escapes our attention. The cultural change effected through the new media cannot be overestimated, but it is yet uncertain where it will lead.European reaction to the Internet fluctuates between euphoria and rejection, and for a long time it was the more educated among those scornful of the net who most dramatically conjured up the digital devil. But Internet use in Europe has in the meantime caught up with that in the United States, and it is conceivable that in the near future no one under 80 will be without Internet access. Being a netizen is not a matter of age, merely a question of becoming accustomed. The net culture has to be learned -– like any new way of life. At first this doesn’t even appear difficult, as the Internet increasingly offers a doubling of our familiar reality. For one, it meets our habitual needs in its capacity as gigantic department store and well-stocked, diverse flea market, fulfilling our expectations. Shopping online is designed to be convenient and save time, but its virtuality ends as soon as you give your credit card number. The real world does the rest, since all purchases still need to be delivered. Even where illusion is for sale, as with interactive Cybersex, the customer must be satisfied in the end with self-service. In short, with regard to its materiality, Internet culture offers very little that is truly new, if one discounts the lack of hierarchical structure by virtue of which the familiar and the little known exist side by side (for a fee, of course, search machines will list one’s website among the first 50).

If the Internet culture is not defined by new products, then we’re left with the lifestyle to which the net clearly beckons. Popular and high culture blend together in the net to become a media culture which seems to follow only one’s personal tastes. Nevertheless, it cannot be overlooked that Nietzsche’s appraisal of the herd mentality in humans retains its validity even under present conditions in the Internet. Internet critics Geert Lovink and Pit Schulz [www.fiveminutes.net] see in it the workings of a “multi-cultural mass conformity, full of micro-practices and management of the self.” And in view of the perpetual stream of information, how is it even possible to form a standpoint? Paul Virilio calls for us to slow down -– a provocation in a culture committed to speed. But the “will to connection” (Lovink/Schulz) is probably divided from the start: we want to belong but not at the price of self-abandonment. The me-generation learned its lesson well, words of advice from the psychoanalyst Erich Fromm: You have to love yourself before you can love another. But this cannot be reversed; Richard Sennett’s versatile human is incapable of adaptation in this one sense: the autopoietic self is as essential as the Other. Life would be intolerably boring otherwise.

Net People Like You and Me

Isolated monad or receptive net citizen -– what type peoples the Internet today? It is clear that the era of the anarchic net is past, and the hacker ethos figures chiefly in films nowadays. The World Wide Web with its simple use has insured that one needn’t possess specialized knowledge to be able to play the game. And with the affordable flat rates being offered, no one has to tap into another’s telephone line to take full advantage of the netlife. More and more real women are turning up in chat rooms so that the virtual “Marilyns” of the early years have become rare. For the first time, in the spring of 2000, more women than men were online in the United States. The normalcy of human relationships has also reached the Internet culture, with all its advantages and disadvantages. The fact that the male of the species lapses into mating behavior as soon as he reads a female name and would like nothing better than to meet privately with the obscure object of his desire is nothing new (only as embarrassing as ever). This proves merely that netizens are not better people, the net culture is not a higher cultural form, we simply now find human-all-too-human foibles in electronic form. The Internet is a mirror of existing conditions, and Internet culture cannot make up for what education and self-development have neglected. Instead of making possible the venturing forth toward new horizons, security is a high priority in the Internet, and the unexpected I LOVE YOU mail turns out to be a potent computer virus (what’s so astonishing is how many romantic souls fell for it).

Will the Internet become a virtue machine? Visual sex still remains the item of greatest demand, and the porno hawkers, as usual, come up with the technologically most sophisticated websites. But the more people who make their appearance in the Internet and through their sheer numbers rouse the desirability of economy and politics, the cleaner the net will become. Moralists have an easy task when it comes to solving the problem of control, for the programs which allow us unlimited access also record where we have been and what we have done. Privacy, in its traditional sense, no longer exists, transparent human becomes reality in Internet society. If we lock ourselves in, we lock ourselves out. Fortunately it is no longer a problem in the 21st century to live privately as we do publicly, since the institutions which once punished deviant behavior and even thought crimes have been decisively weakened in their sanctioning powers. You have to be Catholic nowadays –- and that voluntarily –- to commit a mortal sin, and the postmodern critique of morality has, to a large degree, destroyed the consensus on what society considers unacceptable. This however does not hinder those in positions of power from attempting to constrain persons within their limited reach: parents install the NET NANNY program, employers read their employees’ e-mail, and moderators of discussion groups make sure insults and obscenities are avoided. But of course security programs can be outwitted, e-mails securely encoded, and verbal S&M practiced in private chat rooms. But by the same token Internet culture is in this practical sense a deeply tolerant culture, since restrictions that can be so easily evaded are hardly suited to enforcing virtue.

Educators are not wanted in the net, and when they do turn up they have to seek their own pupils. But there is indeed a great need for intelligent helpers, i.e., programs which, like a good butler, know the tastes and preferences of their employers and work independently to ensure that everything needed is at hand. An outstanding butler (Sir Anthony Hopkins would certainly play him on the screen, that is, when he’s not busy eating people) corrects his master inconspicuously, and, according to the principle of a self-fulfilling prophecy, raises his level. Internet butlers and netizens would soon become ever more alike, consequently, the educational process would change over to a self-directed method. It cannot be too highly stressed that the net culture strengthens self-initiative and rewards creative interaction with the new media. Those who prefer a passive mode with the Internet instead of moving within the net as an imaginative artist squander most of what the net culture can offer. As much as it may reflect our everyday culture in real life, net culture is distinguished by certain qualities through which it becomes genuine and heralds a different life.

In Praise of Undefined Life

From first-hand experience garnered in his Hollywood exile, Theodor W. Adorno once accused the American cultural industry of transforming the pursuit of enlightenment into an operation of mass deception. He saw sacrificed in serial production precisely that which distinguishes a work of art from its social environment: criticism of existing conditions. But not in his wildest dreams could the leading philosopher of the Frankfurt School have imagined the fury with which comedians in the United States would come to attack the American way of life. Whether Jerry Seinfeld or Eddie Murphy, Beavis and Butthead or South Park, whether films such as Kids or American Beauty, no taboo is sacrosanct, and the critical eye is merciless. The net culture carries on with what the media giants were unable to prevent in their programs – a culture without reverence for which the busy sex life of a president is material as welcome as the slow death of a cardinal. No masses are being deceived here, each piece of information is freely accessible and begs to be used. The problem of the net culture is not the repression of information, but rather the selection from a sheer overwhelming glut. The noise never ceases, barely glimpsed, the image, the text, the message disappears without ever really registering. Cultural critics such as Jürgen Habermas deplore the blurring of contours and definition which paves the way for indifference to criticism; they charge postmodern culture with diffuseness, not asking themselves whether this endless flow and the return of the eternally same isn’t much closer to the reality of the life we live than symbolically constructed culture. Niklas Luhmann, on the other hand, appraises the media world in its most clearly expressed form as net culture more coolly. This insightful sociologist has observed we are not first and foremost merely passive consumers in our dealings with the media, instead, we organize a selection of information suited specifically to the respective individual. This selection follows a “limited rationality,” not aiming for totality, and for this reason is often disdained, for only in retrospect do we feel we are putting it all together.

But isn’t it precisely the advantage of the Internet culture that it starts from the limitations of human reason and that of our social involvement rather than setting impossible standards which will necessarily be disappointed? If one interprets the will to net power as the insight into the futility of our grand designs, the exciting prospect of net culture’s innate possibilities opens up. For instance, life technologies are practiced as if natural, they exhibit nothing spectacular, yet they give new direction to the project of the human individual (not to be confused with the once highly touted project of modernity). Humans who grow up in the Internet culture learn to deal confidently with their artificial nature prophesied by Nietzsche: the human being is the undefined animal, a transition, the arrow of Zarathustra. Would-be breeders of humankind, irrespective of confession, whether gene- or education-oriented, need remember that, unlike the existence of our fellow creatures, “natality” (Hannah Arendt) and mortality do not mark beginning and end of the human individual; they are instead the existential techniques generating our entire lives. We are always capable of dying, and the individual’s death – as renunciation, parting, flight, change – annuls even the best education. Even more powerful is the creative side of human beings: the designing of worlds, the ease with which we can forsake what is given us as legacy and task. Because the human being is a finite event, as Heidegger noted, his openness cannot be limited and the extent of her horizon is unbounded. No determination with its directness can restrain a fulfilled life whose theories are developed subsequent to living and abandoned cheerfully at the moment of their generation. Those who can join in the praise of a manifold life, as Gilles Deleuze reminds us, have no fear of information pollution, they take unreserved pleasure in the primary flow of the World Wide Web.

Internet technology is unobtrusive, our legitimate interests nomadic, and the community we build with others is indirect. The fact that technologies become human only after they are no longer noticeable is the basic principle of a post-technological era, as proclaimed by the visionaries of the Internet. Our technical equipment, from nanocomputers in the bloodstream to superjumbo jets, will be interlinked and manage the care of vital processes too circuitous to have need of our watchful decision. It is a senseless waste of human intelligence to act as overseer of processes which with the aid of internal feedback function smoothly. The software will be outsourced, found instead in the Internet, removed from individual view, and the childlike rejoicing at each new technical variation will abate at last. In post-technological times the best machines will be in operation and no one will find this in any way remarkable. Anyone who finds this observation unbelievable should take note of how rarely in social discourse the wonder that is our organic existence is spoken of – we take for granted our breathing, the many functions of our skin, a soothing gesture of the hand.

The Internet culture encourages a nomadic lifestyle. But these are nomads who are at home everywhere, who practice sustainability in their dealings with their environment. Nomads of earlier times who were not at home anywhere, pulling up stakes and moving on without regret after laying waste to their surroundings, are not welcome in the net (there are such parasites in the net, to be sure, and they will invariably be attracted by “free” offers). We bring our whole self into the virtual culture, from our own individual website to our innermost desires and we are surprised at what we discover we hadn’t yet desired. Were there many critical voices in the early years of the Internet accusing cyberspace of being hostile to the human body, today such claims are made only by superficial observers. The so complex and alien equipment with which body artists wanted to make their contribution to cybersex have already become museum pieces. Anthropologists of the virtual world such as Sandy Stone from the ACTLAB at the University of Texas, Austin, have successfully demonstrated that human body awareness is nowhere needed and used more than in surfing the Internet. It seems not everyone has heard that sex is a product of our imagination, its biological expression becomes stimulating only through artful application. Thought bereft of sensation is pedantic and boring. In order to even hold our attention the offer on the screen must evoke life in all its fullness. How else might this be possible but through the presence of our unconscious biography, through the immediate summoning of sentient qualities which have enriched us since the womb. To borrow from Hegel, sustained consumption takes place in the nomadic netlife, for our own production exceeds external demand.

Generation of Friends

Perhaps the most significant feature of the Internet culture is its intensification of social life. Often under fire for being a solipsistic, isolating medium, the Internet has in truth revived a traditional form of communal life which can be objectively described as a circle of friends. An individual is not accepted into the virtual community through the process of socialization, but rather, having learned the basic techniques of netlife, each person seeks his/her own circle. Belonging to such a group does not mean giving up one’s individuality, on the contrary, the expression of one’s own specialness is the prerequisite for being received as a friend. Net culture makes possible a social intercourse once reserved for the cultural elite, in that each individual is at liberty to choose from an extensive pool of potential partners those persons with whom he/she wishes to communicate. There is a certain relief in having the option of being able to talk only with those who are of kindred spirit, and the quality of such relationships is unrivaled. This has nothing to do with elitism since anyone can find and/or open a discussion forum and mailing list of one’s preference. The danger of cultural exclusion is negligible since in the net culture we are constantly in an in-between stage and friendships take on a certain lightness of being. This kind of indirect communication corresponds to the openness of connection and the ease of passage between net worlds, a communication which perceives and appreciates the Other but does not overshadow. Avital Ronell has analyzed such empathy in the rhetorical act of greeting and she stresses that our strongest bond of friendship exists where we retain a certain distance. The rehabilitation of politeness as social gesture is wonderfully compatible with net culture.

Can this quality of friendship also embrace the solidarity which should extend to the disadvantaged and those we have all but given up on? Schopenhauer’s ethics of compassion shows us how fragile is the distinction between happiness and misfortune, an ephemeral moment at best. But this warning against the illusory belief we can be spared the misery others endure speaks for the generating of friends who deal with each other in a very human manner without patronizing, without direct interference. This respectful restraint, quite typical of net culture, will be considered offensive by all those who feel compelled to dictate to others how they should live a better life. Yet it is probably the only way which will appear acceptable to a netizen whose freedom of choice can no longer be withdrawn.

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