Innocenece is a Kind of Insanity

My Brooklyn friends got me hooked up on friendster.

User name, heavily-edited personal profile, somewhat flattering picture all under my belt... I began the friendster journey. That was like two months ago. I have plodded along with this site, tooled around. I find what I have learned most is that I am not a hub. And this is perhaps, only the kind of realization you have in your twenties, after college, at the cusp of the career and life, before the long-drain... I have been looking up people and noticed that my circle of interest, the scope of individuals that I care to search for are limited. I find the ex girlfriends, flames, interests. I commence again for lost-friends. I end with people with whom I went to high school, college. I finally settle, bannaly, on searching for people from my midwestern town.

Frienster is an interesting study in modern humanity. It is an entertainment tool that allows people to view their connections to the world, explore possible linkages to the famous or infamous, view onscreen in a clear font the ties that bind. What do we find in this pixelated universe of people, pictures, profiles? What response are we looking for when we search by category? What need am I filling when I track down my long out-of-reach memories? What is the state of connection in this world?

My most fruitful search-quests are those that begin with broad categories like zip code, University, music preference. Through that I am perhaps lucky enough to stumble upon some social hub, some individual whose existence and prevelance connects me again to a life and world that is gone. The begged question is, why am I not a hub? Where is my social nexus that spreads out in infinite search screens, cross-references, and ultimately, contacts? The question is sophmoric, perhaps self-indulgent. The experience is no less real.

My epiphany is the smallness of my life, the soft experience that I have with others, the light impact I have. That life exists so shallowly, so near the surface as to be disturbed by the smallest realization is frightening. I believe perhaps that this is just my experience as an asocial individual. The world of linkage if one for the linked, there are clear lnikage have and have-nots. The way of the world one could say.

Regardless, where is the possibility of informed democractic interaction? Where is the possibility for consensual value systems and life worlds? Discourse? Society? The world of friendster is the world of linkage via materials, systems, objects. Is there an individual under the demographics, targeted audiences, systemitized desires and values. Faced with the singularity of my connection, challenged by the daunting task of existing in this world, I am at a loss. The loss that I experience in my insignificant impact on networks (social, economic networks, cultural, etc...) is the alienation of the individual not just from his personal power in the process of life and conenction. In the end, the permanent alienation is the individual seperate, unconnected, entirely.

I believe the age of linkage is the opposite for the individual. The increase in linkage is the increase of social relations among objects, materials. This is Habermas' point. Jurgen will stress that Marx saw this but did not understand his own view completely. Jurgen will ask what is the critique/crises, and is there salvation.

The crises is the lack of connection, which is infantile as an observation, but a startling one in the face of Friendster. Why a tool to map connection? Why a world in which it is necessary to find the rest of humanity. I see in friendster, material relations among individuals, yearning for the social; my own keystrokes merely the "social interactions of materials", a reflection of that yearning for social relations among individuals.

The word flows freely, yearn. To yearn. It is important to note the existential, what some might call the sentimental in this state. That is exactly what a scientific beauracracy, a fully systemitized lifeworld, technocracy, would name such an experience. As such, the atom of the social and the system, that would be the individual (devalued or not, the atom is always the individual), can interact with the world, experience it, in such a way that said experience has no value, is inconsequential; this demeaning of feeling is not on account of the difference in scale of the many versus the one, but because of positivism's leviathan dominance over the schema of experience itself. That is, the modern condition is one in which the meaningful, the valued, is that which exists beyond the individual (those categories can be captured, defined, demarcated) but my nausea in the face of the ordering tool cannot be captured. Here is crises.

Friendster is for me, catharsis. I can see a linkage to the world, in the world. The commonalities of man within styles, jobs, zip codes, marital statuses can bring me back to the fold of humanity. I am connected again, salvation. This is a quiet a coup. The technology and logic that has so skillfully estranged me from a social being, alienated me from my own time and labor, subjected me to ethical prostitution. This same technology will inspire within me a grand humanism, a rebirth as a member of the whole. My point and feeling here are of an obvious cynical nature. Here is critique.

At best, our connection is amongst narratives, our linkage one of symbols and objects from a consumerist world. The real link is that existential yearning to realize the entrenched social fiber and understanding that lies dead. When I logon to friendster, I am aching to find in the inchoate world of jobs and desire frustrated a world mallable, understandable, complete.

Those looking for salvation, must believe at some time that there was a fall. If there was a fall, there must of course also have been an original state, an innocence.