Piecing together our fragmented reality
In everything happening around us now, science and scientists have been catapulted to the forefront of public debate. For a while there was an apparent post-truth takeover, where “alternative facts” and disinformation brought liars to power. What was true or a lie depended on what, or who, you wanted to believe and when. The human tragedy of the Corona-crisis has changed that. Covid disinformation and lies have also exploded and certainly are rampant, but it is hard to deny the existence of the sickness, it is harder not to turn to the formerly reviled “experts” for a cure and for a forecast. The image of Trump sharing a stage with Anthony Fauci, or of Boris Johnson thanking NHS staff are testaments to the powerful dissonance of these liars relying on the experts they attack.
We are living through an experience of a powerful contradiction, where our physical selves are bound locally to our immediate surroundings, our homes and our streets, while our digital selves roam cyberspace to work (if we can), connect with loved ones, be entertained, and live. A clash between a definite reality and an indefinite existence.
In the history of our societies, science emerged out of a philosophy based on empirical observation and rationality, and a belief that human history had a direction forward, towards progress, and that the human being was a measure for what was good in the world. Tragically, the logic of inevitable progress became twisted, as authoritarian and totalitarian ideologies mutated modern thought into reactionary and anti-humanist monsters. First, the imperial aristocracies used modern science to amplify killing in the First World War to an unimaginable scale, which later led to the rise of Communism and Facism taking modern thought beyond the brink of horror.
Following the overwhelming tragedies of the World Wars brought modernist thinking into question, to revisit the foundations of so-called rationality that led to terror. Postmodernism was born to challenge established truths and deconstruct them, to allow more voices to speak, to question norms, and challenge power. Postmodern thinking drove forward anti-colonial, anti-racist agendas, as well as a gender revolution, a renewed understanding of democracy and a brand new undertanding of the environment.
However, in a roundabout irony of history, when authoritarians learnt to use postmodern thinking to their advantage, we got the new alt-right nationalists in Putin, Trump and Johnson. This is a menace we have seen on the rise gradually in the last two decades, and democrats have yet to find an effective response. To build up a healthy democracy, we need to build up a reflexive modernity that avoids totalitarian progress, but can reflect on itself and become ever more inclusive.
In our world today, complexity is, if anything ever increasing, but the powerful facades have dispersed and disintegrated. There are no more dense definite lines, but rather fragments for us to try and gather up.
Whereas the modern was definite and finite, with one direction, forward, fact-based, domineering, with clear strong lines, the postmodern that we live in now is indefinite and undefined, deconstructed and fragmented, multi-polar and multi-directional, with echo-chambers and algorithms and vaporous clouds of meaning that are absurd and surreal, some norms are bent, some re-shaped, some are broken. Progress is no longer obvious, nor is it necessarily evident.
With old certainties that have melted away, all of us have to look around and find meaning, find well-being. But how well is that going? How much more can we take? We are lost among the bombardment of information from pics, and gifs, and memes, videos, statuses, posts, and tweets.
In these realities, each of us faces an individual challenge of seeking the epistemological fundamentals that underpin our existence. We seek meaning, and value, we seek relevance, proximity, connection and closure. The modern era offered a challenge to all of these, and yet with its clear defining structures it also offered solutions. In the segue between the 20th century and the 21st, and in the glide evermore into digital society, we have morphed how we do things, and now we need to stop and think, to observe keenly, and to find ourselves among the thick lines of 0s and 1s.
A fundamental issue that we do not yet talk about enough is that our societies have not yet developed a frame for how we define ourselves online. We have not yet clearly defined consistent etiquette, either for our behaviour online or our conduct in the real world as we are constantly connected. Beyond our personal conduct, we are only now beginning to perceive the individual and wider social impacts of limitless automatically manipulated information, constant connectivity, increasing stimulation and decreasing attention spans. We don’t know what our rights online are, and, as anyone who clicked “Read and Agreed to the Terms and Conditions” without actually reading them, most of us find it hard to say what they should be. All this is has been made ever more pressing by the surveillance and violations of privacy in tracking Covid19.
We certainly know by now that we don’t know what we know, and the current crisis sharpens many minds. Of course we would say that our rights online must be the same as our rights offline, but how do we enforce that, and organise the web to enable that paradigm? And how do we do so urgently, so that we emerge from this crisis with a contiguous body of rights intact?
We need to find ourselves, and find out who we want to be in this new reality.
Defining our identity in the digital age requires a semblance of digital citizenship, an understanding of the role we play online as ourselves, where we fit in the environment around us. We will still some day soon inhabit the same spaces that were the symbols of modernity, shops, train stations and airports,, but we now also find ourselves roaming an online space of profiles, threads, pictures, videos and gifs, without a sense of direction. In order to survive, we must develop new tools to cope.
What we must do now is some keen observation, and to sketch out some shapes. We need to once again decipher truth from fiction and right from wrong. We need to invest in tools that enable us to understand the information we are seeing online, why we’re seeing it and how, and who is showing it to us. We need to understand how our online self interacts with our offline self, and build a healthy and safe relationship there.
There needs to be a space for some fundamental questions to be asked, debated and answered, and we must strive for definite concrete answers. Rights online, regulation, antitrust laws, transparency, yes, all of these things are urgently important. But to tackle them we need to be able first to ask some basic questions — who do we want to be online, what do we know and how do we know it, and what are our rights and responsibilities. Armed with these answers we can take some meaningful action.
There is an urgent need for education of many kinds, not for children only, but for all of us — civic education, media literacy, digital literacy. We need to understand that in a high tech AI society, education is simply crucial to freedom, now more than ever. We need a strong civil society to organise, represent and amplify these norms.
These are pivotal moments and times of drastic change. They require us to paint a new picture, in all its complexity. To build new meanings, new norms and etiquette, an online environment we would like to live in, we need massive investment in education for people at all ages. Digital literacy, media literacy, digital citizenship — education enabling people to make sense of the digital world. These are familiar concepts to practitioners in the field, but they are still relatively unknown to the public at large. This needs to become a real public priority, as part of an effort to make our democracies sustainable in the 21st century. We need to build a world-wide steel consensus that human rights are designed and built into the core of any new emerging technology that is developed, challenging as it might be.
Where there are billions of fragments, bits and pixels, there are abundant opportunities for us to gather up the pieces to shape a bright and beautiful future. We just need to imagine it in our mind’s eye, to communicate it and sketch it out in public.
