By Pat Kane (The Alternative UK and patkane.global)
In a moment where human encounters have been compelled to (at least) equally distribute themselves between proximate meetings and networked-screens, the distinction between “online” and “offline” experience is beginning to blur.
In my social activism work for The Alternative UK, what’s particularly blurring is the pejorative tone to the former - that online (or virtual) means “fake”, “thin”, “forced”. Truth be told, something like Zoom (in its very design and affordances) has become a kind of facilitatory method itself.
The latency in signal enforces polite pauses, orderly turn-taking, participatory etiquette. The recordable plenaries, side-chats, break-out rooms, display shares and transcription function allows you to effectively and efficiently turn interaction into content, research material, etc.
But particularly in Zoom’s randomised break-out group function, you find yourself meeting with genuinely unexpected others, building sometimes difficult but valuable consensus (sometimes not). I anticipate that some of this interface-shaped civility will begin to shape our real-world meetings, as and when they recur.
Alessia, your newsletter has already discussed the concept of “metaverse” as an overarching domain that could coordinate and sequence, fuse and layer, the physical and the digital experience. That may stick (not only because there is a low but advancing intellectual rumble from those arguing for “metamodernism” as the new societal paradigm).
But I’d like to additional propose an old 90s idea, and some brand new concepts. They might allow those of us who want to enhance human agency (no matter how slippery the objective conditions) to build projects that do so.
The old idea is the sociologist Manuel Castells’ notion, taken from his Information Age trilogy, of real virtuality. This flips “virtual reality” - just a digital simulation of physical reality - into a deeper statement about the virtuality of experience itself (Deleuze-heads will already be aware of the “virtual-precedes/is-more-real-than-actual” concept).
This will begin to sensitize us to the two-way motion between screen/network, and terrestrial space. The way an idea, project or initiative begun in one realm will naturally find its extensions and realisations in the other. Virtuality understood as the real potentiality or possibility of something happening, in any realm, before it is actualised.
We may need to dare and try to find a name for this new underlying unity of experience - where we expect creative and progressive possibilities to erupt from any realm, clicked or bricked, and eddy with consequences for each. Shall we say Consperience? Or Transperience? (Con- meaning “with” or “thoroughly”: Trans- meaning “across”.
A consperient or transperient event starts from a fundamental assumption that out of a general virtuality, facilitated by mass self-communcation - where, for example, memes make actions, and actions make memes - a unified experience can be composed and programmed, its effects and affects rolling through space/time and realising actualities.
This process, of course, could have terrible, explosive aspects. The real white policeman’s knee on a black man’s neck is videoed, its existence on social media allows it to actualise many million emotions and acts of outrage, and this returns to “reality” to open up massive legal, economic, cultural faultlines…which provides more fuel for virtuality and possibility, stoked by millions of new media captures.
And consperience/transperience can also have its liberatory aspects. For example, #metoo becoming an infotag, a trigger to public-space civic activism, the cue for a cascade of court cases against a patriarchal order. A “real virtuality” - real in that it has improved the existential freedoms and rights of billions of women.
Yet what new communications and campaigns might be possible, if we tried to establish a common epistemlogy/ontology, a common sense of truth and reality, as we face a deepening and unstoppable virtuality? What might a transperience or consperience economy be?