Well, we're moving into the fifth week of lockdown here, and really this weekend it started to hit me just how boring it is to not be able to have human contact.
And really this seems to be- there's something happening in this situation that's like an acceleration of what's been happening already.
As we become increasingly digital, increasingly electronic in our behaviour, our interaction, the world we live in, becomes increasingly one that is translated through electronic medium.
And the idea of humans, analogue flesh and blood, actually touching each other, has become less and less important, less and less central.
And now this situation is putting that into overdrive, so that really, anything to do with the physical body is now dangerous, now something that must be controlled, something that we have to be very, very careful and protective about.
Whereas anything that involves digital electronic communication: completely free.
We can do whatever we want.
We're not restricted in any way in our ability to live electronically.
It's only real flesh-and-blood interaction that has been to a large degree shut down.
So the feeling that I get out of this, the word that's been coming to mind, is "disembodied".
We are less and less centered in our body.
The body becomes less and less important.
It becomes almost inconvenient.
It needs to be fed, cleaned, housed, but it's no longer something that we can really make central to our lives, except within the limited sphere of our own homes, and with whoever we happen to already be living with.
And for those living alone, then they are instructed to continue to remain alone and not have any physical contact.
So the body is almost kind of withering, fading.
It becomes something peripheral.
And moving towards the centre of our lives is, you could say, the computer, the phone, the screen, the electronic communication system.
That's now the centre.
That's moving towards becoming the centre.
So, of course, we're not all the way yet.
We still do have bodies.
This is a trend moving in this direction towards the body becoming merely an interface, to interface with electronic communications.
So we use our eyes to see the screen, our hands to control the input, and so we have this kind of feedback loop between eyes and hands and screen, controlling it, seeing what it delivers, and then giving more controls as we interface electronically.
And it's increasingly now so much more of what is important in our lives is now being done through this medium, so that I really feel the sense of the body becoming kind of faded to the background.
And it's a very dry feeling.
It's a dry, thin, brittle feeling, the feeling of living entirely through the neurons, through the through the hands and eyes, brain.
This is our- this is life.
Maybe it's like this with a computer, or it's like this with the phone, or however it is, the gesturing, the reading the screen.
That's become so central now.
I feel like somehow, there's something wrong with this, clearly.
I'm not quite sure what we can do about it, but certainly one piece is to just take some time away from any screen and anything electronic whatsoever, even if it's as simple as going for a walk.
Or even if we can't go for a walk just maybe jumping up and down.
I don't know.
Any ideas? What can we do to keep living in our bodies and not simply become pieces of the internet? Well, I'll start by turning off the screen.
#disembodied #pluggedin #internetlife
