No Context: Impermanence Online
By Jane McBride
Illustration by Isabella Mac Ghiolla Ri
“I am fading.” – Boa, Duvet
Being online is about connection. Being online is about disconnection. Both are true. Everything is contradictory. Embrace it. That’s part of the joy of being online. Or maybe not even joy. Just relief.
In Everybody, Olivia Laing writes about the burdens that come with having a body: “We’re all stuck in our bodies, meaning stuck inside a grid of conflicting ideas about what those bodies mean, what they’re capable of and what we’re allowed or forbidden to do.” Physical presence is heavy. I can remember being a very young child, lying in bed, becoming aware of my breathing, and of my parents’ breathing. When you become aware of it, you start to get tired. As Laing continues, “[t]here is no escape, no possible place to hide.” No permanent escape. But maybe there are temporary hiding places, or at least places that give the illusion of escape. Maybe the internet can be like that. Online, you’re not free of that heaviness, but you can trick yourself into thinking you are. Is that a good thing? To trick yourself like that? Or is it even an illusion when you know it’s one?
There’s a term from medieval Japanese aesthetics, mono no aware. It’s difficult to describe, and my own understanding is limited, but it means something like the beauty of the temporal. You can see it in literature from that era, such as The Tales of Ise, and its echoes are there in modern works too. And while the internet is so often used to document and preserve things, from images and sounds to identities and ideas, I’ll always associate it with that term. In our attempts to record things, we reveal their impermanence. Everything fades, disintegrates, or even decays, no matter how many copies we make. When we’re online, we need to be aware of that impermanence, and of the beauty that comes with things not lasting.
“Much of the Low City survived on the morning of September 1, and then, in forty hours or so, most of it disappeared.” That’s how Edward Seidensticker describes the impact of the 1923 earthquake on Tokyo in Low City, High City. So many of the city’s old buildings from back when it was called Edo were destroyed. According to Seidensticker, Jun'ichirō Tanizaki (one of my all-time favourite writers) “rejoiced in the destruction of the old city, and looked forward to something less constricting.” As wrong as it is to celebrate a natural disaster, I get it. All this stuff from the past was gone. It wasn’t decided by anyone, just wiped away by nature. And now there’s a chance to build something new and different. You’ve been given a chance to make something new. Leave all the old architecture and the ideas associated with them behind. It's depressing to walk around somewhere and realise that most of the architecture is from decades or even centuries ago. Everything looks damp and cold, uninviting, not belonging to the present at all. The internet is a welcome escape from that entrenchment. Tanizaki’s essay In Praise of Shadows describes how Japanese houses from the past were built with impermanence in mind, so that they could easily be disassembled, moved, and put back together. It reminds me of Kisho Kurokawa’s Metabolist buildings from the 20th century, which are kind of like Lego or some aquatic creature in their design. Maybe our experience online can help us take similar approaches to how we design things.
Offline, people are afraid to let anything go. But online, we have the chance to embrace impermanence. The internet allows us a chance to see things differently. We can be like the Cheshire Cat, our faces floating over virtual scenery. Or like Alice. In Girl Online, Joanna Walsh claims “[a] girl online is an Alician subject,” constantly returning to Alice as a reference point. “Distilled, like my fellow objects, into words and images,” she writes, “I am less an object in a system of objects than a value in a system of values. My relationship to them is not one of possession but of orienting myself in their direction.” Walsh describes how perspectives and spatial awareness seems to shift and change (“my tininess suddenly so big, or vice versa”) and what’s more, she does it in a refreshingly positive way, genuinely curious about what she experiences.
In Be Still My Heart, Stephanie LaCava also explores the ephemerality of being female online, using nymphs as a reference point in a similar way to how Walsh uses Alice. In a line that reminds me of Bridget Crone’s ‘flicker-image’ concept, LaCava writes, “These nymphs are generated figures, flashing in the in-between. Film stills, but not still.” Her article is a dark one, touching on suicide and the romanticisation of mental illness, but it is also beautiful in illuminating how such things are processed online. A digital nymph “lives momentarily between land and air. This outside is without picket fence. It is outer space-Interweb. This young woman flickers on and off. She shows up to disappear.” This reminds me of Lain Iwakura; someone I’ll be returning to later.
According to Walsh, “[a] girl online is an avatar for everyone.” An avatar is a virtual mask, giving you partial anonymity. You’re allowed some distance from yourself. If done right, that can be healthy. When Annie Ernaux writes that she “wanted to forget that girl. Really forget her” about her teenage self, I feel an empathetic ache. A lot of the time both myself and my surroundings, my past and my present, become overwhelming. I need to retreat, but not just that. I need to work through my feelings from a disconnected place. That’s why I make art. That’s why I engage with other people’s art. That’s why I go online. (Well, I also do all those things just out of boredom, but you get the idea.) Going back to LaCava’s article, she writes, “There’s long been talk of a Tumblr sad girl, of pastels and magic sparkles, of wide-eyed girl-women with an air of impending doom, like singer Lana Del Rey. There is something else, though, a palpable push for distance from this kind of hysteria.”
In Hello Avatar, Beth Cooper coins the term “X-reality – a continuum of exchanges between virtual and real spaces” which she says, “speaks to an extension of agency.” Cooper writes that an “avatar provides a shorthand for the experience of the networked subject, describing different practices of agency, identity and network capability.”
So, you’re a human body and a disembodied avatar, flowing through a series of tubes and floating down digital rabbit holes.
Online, you can find all sorts of ephemera from times past. It’s an endless museum, but without the physical clutter. Online, ephemera becomes even more ephemeral. You have the chance to wander through it all without getting too attached. The past nestles against the present, then melts into it. When I read Svetlana Boym’s work on nostalgia, both in cities and cyberspace, it reminded me so much of my own time lurking at night on the internet, watching old videos or scrolling through PDFs.
It’s difficult for me to navigate the physical world; it’s vast, scary, impenetrable, made up of incomprehensible directions and systems. I’m always ten hundred steps behind my peers, with nowhere near the amount of life experience they have, but at least the internet allows me some kind of substitute. It has its own dangers, but if I can learn to navigate those, maybe I can apply that knowledge to the physical. It has certainly helped me stay in contact with others and form more intimate connections with my friends, something that would have seemed impossible otherwise. I’ve never understood how easily most people seemed to flow into one another’s lives, but at least I have devices to stay in touch and plan things out. Our mediated interactions, even with close friends, are often stereotyped as shallow or cold, but they don’t have to be. (People probably made similar sweeping statements about letter-writing and phone calls.) It’s different from face-to-face interaction, but that doesn’t make it bad. In The Future of Nostalgia, Boym writes, “[t]he computer medium is largely tactile, not merely visual; and when two strangers meet on the web, their fingers unwittingly search for that erotic keyboard of their own beloved computer, not for the other person’s hand. Somehow the e-lovers discovered that when the distance of cyberspace was gone, so too was the intimacy.” You can read that in different ways. It shows that intimacy in the internet age comes with its own highs and lows, its own unique happiness and sadness, its own closeness and disconnection.
No context. If you spend a lot of time online, you’ve probably come across that phrase. Clips from movies and TV, shared on social media, made funny or strange from their lack of context. The internet is the perfect place for this kind of thing. While mostly just meant for quick laughs, this no context meme could also be used for online collage work. It reminds me of sampling, or musique concrete, where sound clips are isolated, then reworked into something new.
In ‘real life’, you’re burdened by context. Online, you have the chance to decontextualise. Partially, anyway. You see an image or watch a video clip online, and you don’t know its source, but you do know that you like it. It still has context, but you’re given the illusion that it exists free of that. And you’re given the illusion that you exist free of context too.
Some sites and applications delete your posts automatically after a set amount of time. In a society where so many things are expected to be preserved in physical form, I find this beautiful. You capture a moment, thought, or feeling in amber, but then the amber dissolves. Enjoy it for a while, then give it up.
Don’t get me wrong, I know how often the internet’s ephemerality can be used in troubling, harmful ways. Julian Dibbell described how physical crimes can be replicated in uncomfortably disembodied ways in his 1993 article, A Rape in Cyberspace. And many works of fiction have explored this too, such as the unsettlingly anonymous dating site in Erika Kobayashi’s Trinity Trinity Trinity. We should be careful about how we behave online and stay responsible for how we treat others. The thing is that, unless some dramatic change happens, the internet exists, whether you like it or not. You might as well take advantage of its existence, learn how to use it for good and beautiful things, and figure out how to protect yourself with it. Pretending the online isn’t real (or just as bad, treating it as more than real) won’t help.
In the 1998 anime Serial Experiments Lain, the Wired (i.e., the internet) is omnipresent. And Lain, a naïve 14-year-old girl, is omnipresent too, because she is God of the Wired. The series is a cult classic. Considering its prescience, its popularity online is haunting. It predicted so much about our relationship with the internet, from terminal identity (a term coined by Scott Bukatman) to liminality. But one of the things I love about it most is that, for all its darkness, there is a lot of hope, sweetness, and love in Lain. While scared, isolated, and confused, she still uses her ghostly presence to protect and watch over her friends.
You can’t let your body or the world around you go. You shouldn’t have to. But a feeling of momentary detachment, whether from reading a book, listening to music, or surfing the web, can be a necessary thing.
The internet doesn’t allow us true impermanence, just semi-permanence. Even impermanence doesn’t last forever.
