virtual dating is an endeavor done every day by lonely and/or devious individuals. When finding out something about the potential date, it is quite apparent the other person could be lying about their identity. It is impossible to know the intention of the other; one can come to know they are not telling the whole truth about themselves. In fact, the whole truth cannot be conveyed. Only a fictive relationship can be created.
What are relationships for? They are for communication and community, which are the contexts for transformation. What do relationships require? Visual, auditory, tactile, cognitive, emotional, and spiritual aspects of a life together are the requirements for healthy relationships. What do relationships look like? Representation is today’s measure of interpretation in this matter. The content of one’s life is digital information on a screen. The way one performs life on an individual basis consigns each of us to interpret each other through social isolation. It is dissonant, the way one is supposed to balance isolation with pretending to be social.
Western culture has ingrained in people the notion that the person is cognizant and in control of their own cognitive destinies. The Cartesian model doubts all senses except the mind and what a person is thinking; hence Descartes iterates the words “I think, therefore I am.” As Drew Leder has stated, “It is only because the body has intrinsic tendencies toward self-concealment could such tendencies be exaggerated by linguistic and technological
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extensions.”1 In other words, why is the Cartesian model, with its
dualism and absence and alienation of the body, so persuasive to
many? My explanation would be similar to the words of Martha
Stout: “as a result of our histories, and of our inborn disposition to
become dissociative when our minds need protection, moderately
dissociated awareness is the normal mental status of all adult human
beings.”2 This may be why so many think the way they live is
best described by the Cartesian model. Persons existing within such
a modality of thinking do so without considering their bodies.
Descartes leaves no room in this particular statement for
the body. The physiology of the person is often manipulated with
medication, and often with the intent to change cognitive processes.
Agents are available to alter the person’s awareness of particular
problematic thinking. Substances are used and abused for
recreational purposes as well. Body chemistry is so connected to
relationships that this chemistry, when given other chemicals, can
destroy personalities and families. Of course with all this internet
reality, virtual as it is, there is internet sex, which feeds from internet
seduction fantasy and internet relationships. No worry though,
there is internet counseling.
Virtual relationships are about as personal as getting a text
and an adrenaline chemical boost from that exchange of information.
The lure may be the content of the connection; however, I contend
it is the very process of fusion that secures these affairs and the
content is only ancillary to engagement by the fusion process. The
seduced becomes reduced to an object in media relations. The same
is true of the many that spend hours playing video games, internet
games, engaging with social media, or watching television. The subjective
experience of the person is subverted by the intense feelings
gained from interaction with media; there is a way to address this as
an addictive force in the person’s life. But it is more than that; media
subversion of the subject makes for a more complete understanding
of the process and ramifications of this affair.
1. Leder, Absent Body, 3.
2. Stout, Myth of Sanity, 104.
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The most social some persons get these days is through social media. Is that even real relationship or community? These kinds of relationships are self-serving. Steve Pavlina states: “The notion that we are completely separate from everyone else is merely an illusion. Think of your relationships as external projections of the real you.”3 I agree with this partially, but contend there are others whom a person is in relation to and has relationships with that are more than just projections. Certainly there is interpretation of the other’s behavior, but the other has acted and therefore can and is perceived. That perception is dependent on the action of the other, as a bodily being.
When one uses information-processing models to explain larger and larger slices of behavior, they seem compelled to isolate as their core something they can think of as being beyond information. The Cartesian model is flawed in that the body of the self and the other ought not to be left out of the equation. This contention preserves the other’s bodily and soulful experience and behavior. In reaction to this lack of interactivity, there seems to be something very amiss; there is the need for the whole person to be involved in relationships. This is mostly achieved through communal interaction or through ritual.
It seems the idea of a virtual relationship without a bodily manifestation is a pseudo-relationship, not a relationship in actuality. Internet relationships exist as virtual and as concoctions of media over will. The key here is that virtual relationships are not real relationships. Virtual relationships are poorly constructed, unlike real relationships, which have the nuances of social reciprocity and social cues, or bodily cues. The bodily experience and/or the subject are excised from one another within virtual relationships. Regardless of the relationships that are made on the internet, a large amount of them are made with virtually no real knowledge of the individuals engaging in this interaction. Many people make these virtual relationships while they spend their time in isolation. This
3. Pavlina, Personal Development, 59.
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loneliness is indeed the realer than real that Massumi has written
about.4 A friend is a friend indeed but not bodily, only virtually.
The disastrous thing is these pseudo-relationships seem realer
than real, realer than everyday, real-life human relationships.
The preference is not for the existential relationship lived in the
world, but rather the virtual relationship, lived in the fusion process.
Virtual processes replace ritual understandings and familial
connections. Some people might forsake their actual relationships
in the real world in favor of the virtual world. The process leaves
one destitute and bereft of meaning. This leads many into isolation;
often young adults end up in the basements of their parents
houses suffering from a dissonance between their online friendship
or relationship building and the real anger, loneliness, or depression
experienced when one is cut off from real life and the real world.
What is the actual nature of human identities and relationships?
Do they simultaneously include verbal, visual, auditory, and
tactile dimensions? What kind of relationship is practical and what
kind is not? One would think that the notion of relationship would
need qualifiers or requisites. A real relationship requires cognitive,
emotional, and tactile/kinesthetic components. One qualification
for relationship is communication; other qualifications are based
on the senses. Media process expects only two phenomena in order
to operate on us: vision and hearing. The other senses are eliminated
from communication and relationship in fusion. As Maxine
Sheets-Johnstone has illustrated, the West (and for that matter, the
whole world) is so “mesmerized by vision” that the real emotionfeeling
body has been neglected.5
Every communicative relationship has content and process:
what is said and how it is stated. Communicative relations involve
reciprocity, either intentional or implied. There is no way not to
communicate when one meets another in actuality. Even so, there
is a measure of interpretation in relationships. Human relationships
involve nonverbal communication as observed through bodily position,
proximity, and gestures. Also, communication often includes
4. Massumi, “Realer than Real,” 87.
5. Sheets-Johnstone, Roots of Power, 13.
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behavior and observable actions. In fact, as soulful and/or bodily beings, there is no way to avoid communicating when interacting in a real-life social situation. A facial or bodily expression is always perceived by the other, whether in a relationship or not. The person is forever in relation to others and has an affective dimension.
One could ask: Why are real relationships not easy? Media make it easy to avoid the hard stuff, and what is forgotten is how to do what it takes to sustain a real relationship. Many have forgotten or have never learned to read social cues. Baudrillard suggests “media are not producers of socialization, but of exactly the opposite, of the implosion of the social in the masses.”6 In fact there is a way of desocialization that is creating a culture of autism. Simple communication induces so much anxiety that one becomes either isolative or socially phobic. People read social cues and expression; the social cues are the most affected in a detrimental way through fusion, because there is no way to have a full human interaction without a person recognizing these cues. These cues are social in nature; therefore, social cues involve full interaction in a social space.
In such a social space there is a duality implied, not a single voice (univocal), but a dialectical moment created for the two voices involved. This, however, is impossible by the sheer fact that one cannot know the nature of the individual they are communicating with; one is simply caught up in a fusion process. This fusion occurs and media drives the desire and intentionality of the conversation or messaging. No eye-to-eye contact, no body, no body language, no social cues: there are only text and screen. The Turing test demonstrates the slight difference between the communication of sentient beings and that of machines (computers). When one is on the internet chatting with another, they may not know with whom or with what they are communicating, because all of their senses are not engaged. This phenomenological situation implies one can no less know the other, nor the supposed intent of the other, which is in fact no other at all, but one’s desire for another.
Relationships involve contingencies; virtual relationships take away this relative dimension. Relationships between persons
6. Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 81.
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involves dependency, but this is not so for virtual relationships. In
the thinking of the American philosopher Richard Rorty, everything
is contingency and relativity.7 In virtual reality there is no
contingency, only process. In the virtual there is nothing that has
relationship with anything else. This is because everything in the
fusion process has become one with the process. In the process
there are no distinctions. If everything is contingent, then a person’s
existence is contingent upon something or someone else. It is
evident persons are undefined until they enter a relationship with
another; in this vein, it is not likely that one is defined by a machine
(i.e., an interaction with a computer is machine-like). Therefore,
human relationships are based on communication, bodily reality
or tangibility, and expression. This is not the case with machines.
Media process defines what a person is and encapsulates the subject
into this process. The subject becomes one with the process and is
part of a violation that is beyond the control of the subject, as media
violate the subject.
Relationships are about exposure and vulnerability as well as
rooted in alienation, which starts with the split subject. The alien in
the word alienation implies the nature of the subject and its other,
which is both alien and foreign. The conscious and unconscious
worlds are troubled by this fusing of entities into the one process.
The subject is split between the conscious and the unconscious;
this causes alienation and vulnerability. Evans expresses it this
way: “The subject is fundamentally split, alienated from himself,
and there is no escape from this division, no possibility of ‘wholeness’
or synthesis.”8 The fusion process of violation happens partly
due to the fact that alienating is a significant factor for violation.
Once the nature of the subject is exposed, then the way fusion happens
to the subject becomes evident. The split allows the process to
cross the two domains of the subjective life of the individual, both
the conscious and the unconscious. This exposes the relationship
each person has with media and with the other. The relationship
one has with media is much like the relationship a person has with
7. Rorty, Irony, Contingency, and Solidarity, 187.
8. Evans, Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, 9.
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other people; if the subject is exposed enough, alienation is the result, making the conscious and the unconscious available to being ensnared. Vulnerability also speaks to the nature of relationship; once vulnerability is made apparent, it is easier to access the other’s mind. If one loses oneself, one stands to gain a relationship more so than if a person preserves their inner world.
Relationships are at the heart of what it means to be a person of a nation, race, or ethnicity. At the heart of what it means to be in relationship is the conscious and unconscious world. Communion with the other comes with the admission of vulnerability. Relationships through the sharing of conscious and unconscious spaces, through communion and ritual, are made manifest in the richest and most meaningful ways. The most significant way to interact socially is through ritual, which can be as simple as a handshake and as complex as rolling out a red carpet; but this possibility is stripped away by the fusion process because it disallows physical and material manifestations of the will. Real communication is communion with others and is the place of transformation of the subject.