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I think I might have discovered why undergraduate students write their thesis in their final semester. It is excellent training for the kind of work our society seems to keep doling out more and more of. This is computer-oriented work. I have been doing some brief job searching lately and have noted a common trend that runs throughout all of my search inquiry results. People are looking for other people who know about computers: how to work them, manipulate them, create them, etc. This is unfortunate for me because, although my mother thinks that I have a definite proficiency in making computers do what I want them to do, in reality, somehow I have fallen behind the times; there are thirteen-year-olds that know more than I do. But, to return to my original description…I am tired. My eyes are getting to the point where they need massaging, my room seems to close in on me, shrinking smaller and smaller around me and my laptop, and the many windows that I have opened up on the screen are failing to maintain my interest. This is the point in my night where I need a break. I never thought that after finally getting a single room to myself—no roommate to start talking to me before a philosophical breakthrough, no roommate to bring in other people to distract me from my work, no roommate to use as justification for my procrastination—that I would find myself going to a common area of my house (putting myself in harms way of 63 other breathing organisms) to “study”. Conclusion: here is only so much staring at a computer that I can take. Yet, so much of what I need to be doing seems to demand me paying attention to my demanding laptop. Even this “break” from thesis work that I am taking now involves typing on a screen. I have take break from one activity to do another but the medium has remained the same. If I were to compare my working from home to those who work in an actual work place, me leaving my thesis work to write this blog entry would be like getting up from your desk to go home but realizing that you actually live at your office. You don’t get a break—your environment stays the same. The screen still glows in front of you. But, luckily!, you can transport your screen with you wherever and whenever you want. Ah, the perks of being a college student. When I answer a craigslist ad and get the position and find myself glued to some form of a computer forty hours (probably more) a week then I will yearn for the days where I was able to at least fool myself into believing I have achieved some semblance of an environmental change. I can bring my screen to a coffee shop, to the park, the airport, my bed, class, the middle of union square etc. etc. The options are limitless!! Hah, so although my thesis work (that demands the use of the computer) is training me to learn to live in a screen, I have not been forced to fully give myself over yet. Why, just yesterday I found myself lying in the sun reading a (gasp!) book. I even moved my limbs around today kicking a soccer ball around a small field with other real live human beings. (it is fun, you should try it).
I always thought that the fact that so many psychologists have nervous breakdowns was ironic. Yet, I find myself in a comparable position in that I am studying my own neurosis in order to cure myself, to find a viable solution. I am writing my thesis on post-modern fragmentation: the loss of community, the loss of meaning and the loss of an understanding of what it means to live the “good life”. I recently stumbled upon some interesting ideas that reminded me that I can become passionate about ideas and the potential reality that they hold. Certain philosophers and moral theorists have highlighted my own inability to decide what the right life is to live, the right values to hold, what I should do with myself in a way that I hadn’t processed before. So, maybe if I can synthesize these ideas in a way that makes sense to me, I can make sense of myself. That is the idea (unconsciously prompted and recently brought to consciousness) I suppose. I am going to assess whether or not virtual communities and the connections we make with people online are going to be an acceptable solution to the problem of 21st fragmentation. And I presume that I will posit some sort of dystopia for the reader to chew on for a while: envisioning a world like E. M. Forster’s in his “The Machine Stops” (written in the 20s he was able to paint a world where no one interacted directly with each other or the Earth itself but communicated through screens, living in their self-contained world). I think that, ultimately, I will argue that there is no right answer here. Virtual communities will work for some people and won’t for others. This seems to take for granted the idea that informational society will never really stabilize. The use of the internet is a multi-faceted impetus that can’t work the same way across the board (within a certain culture, population within a culture, gender, ethnicity, age group…). People are turning to online communities because there has been the dissolution of physical, tangible ones and this, in turn, has a snowballing effect where more and more communications online only lead to more. Others see their friends and family getting into them and this also pushes for online community support and propagation. People are looking for connection because what we have right now is not working. For some people this will connect them or lead them to feelings of being more connected to others; for others it will disconnect them, making them feeling more alienated than ever before (Marxian “alienation” amplified to an extreme). Ultimately, the internet needs to be judged as a vehicle for enabling such a new community to develop that would solve the fragmentation of the post-modern period. It might just make our lives even more fragmented. What would an online community look like that had members who all knew how to live the “good life” based on a set of agreeable moral principles for them to follow that the community had laid out for them? Is this possible on the internet? If it is possible, does the internet lend itself to these types of communities or are they rare and hard to come by? Is there actually more and more social interaction happening online? If so, what would a world with all social interaction online look like and what would be its downfalls? What new era are we approaching (meaning, what exactly does “the information age” really come down to for interpersonal relationships and human morality)? Is this a force that we have no control over or can it be harnessed (is it going to do its own thing unchecked by government laws and formal regulations?). Can we even envision a world that would come after this?
This is the closest answer I can presently give to people when they ask “what is your thesis going to be about?” When it comes to the answers to these questions and the way that I will eventually write about them…your guess is as good as mine. All I know is that I feel like I am doing things all backwards right now. I am getting sources and having to write an introduction for my pre-thesis writing class that is unfolding before me only one step at a time. How am I supposed to hand in the conclusions when I barely have the baby steps? Sometimes the bureaucratic aspects to formal education perplex me. So, instead, I will go wander down four stories to my kitchen where I can eat Sunday “snack” with all the other kids who are taking a break from their screens and their backwardness.