The use of information and communications technology, the Internet and social media in particular, has emerged as one of the most important leisure pursuits of the twenty-first century. Starting out as a medium to allow for the exchange of military information and the sharing of scientific data, the expanded accessibility of the Internet to commercial use and entertainment-focused media since the middle of the 1990s has changed the way we spend our leisure time. Apart from the great variety of entertainment materials to consume, we use the Internet to access news media as well as scientific information for research purposes. More than being a repository of information to access, and probably more importantly, the Internet has become an exceedingly important domain for social interaction, creative expression and experimentation. The Internet and social media make it possible for people to interact in ways that are quantitatively and qualitatively different from more traditional social interaction possibilities, which involve meeting people face-to-face, sending letters or using the telephone. And increasingly, mobile technology is making it possible for us to do all these things whenever and wherever we wish.
As these changes in the way we spend our time and engage with others become more profound, the opinions about whether these are good changes vary considerably. One might claim that hundreds of millions of satisfied customers do not lie, so that the members of the public, the younger generations in particular, have embraced the Internet and social media as essential and largely beneficial parts of their lives. However, there are also critics (e.g. Greenfield 2003; Helprin 2009; Carr 2011), who claim that the way people use the Internet and social media changes social interaction, constrains or transforms the way we express ourselves and engage with each other in ways that depend on the (im)possibilities of the technology rather than what would be best for us in a social and/or psychological sense, e.g. as social animals who evolved to be a particular way.
In Chapter 4, we briefly introduced the theory of embodied cognition. This theory states that explaining the mind (psychological processes) requires taking into account the way in which that mind controls the body, and how the properties of that body in turn enable and/or constrain the activities of the mind. Expanding upon this notion, many maintain that cognition is also embedded, meaning that properties of the environment (i.e. factors external to the organism) are crucially important to the explanation of cognitive processes as well.
In Chapter 4 we also introduced the thoroughly embodied phenomena of affect attunement and theory of mind capabilities – knowing in a largely intuitive sense what someone else is thinking – which forms the basis of most social interaction. As we noted, we need such embodied participatory sense-making processes to explain how a sports team can play a game together, or how a jazz group can play an improvised piece of music; these complex interactions require a lot of non-verbal, body and facial expression-based communication. Immediate, almost subconscious actions and reactions, intention-ascriptions and extremely quick planning of one’s own actions in anticipation of the decisions of the other make it possible in these cases for games to occur, or for music to emerge.
The embodiment perspective can help us explain leisure choice behaviour based on those fundamental features of human perception and action. Bodily sensations form the foundation of many pleasurable experiences in leisure, from simple fun and excitement, to an important leisure pursuit like sex, to more extreme leisure pursuits like using drugs, pushing physical boundaries through extreme sports and riding extreme rollercoasters.
Embodied intuitions (e.g. emotions, gut feelings) function as input for moral decisions and key features of one’s identity. The theory on the origin of moral norms called ethical naturalism is specifically focused on linking embodied sensations to social moral norms. The core claim is that morality is a by-product of particular biological predispositions, e.g. the instinctive tendencies to like, desire, be appalled by or in general feel strong emotions in relation to certain people, actions or situations. These gut feelings are closely linked to the phenomenon of affect attunement mentioned above. Along similar lines, Shaun Nichols (2008: 269) says that ‘emotions played a role in determining which norms survived throughout our cultural history. In particular, norms prohibiting actions likely to elicit negative affect will have enhanced cultural fitness’. His affective resonance-hypothesis, then, is the idea that ‘norms that prohibit actions to which we are predisposed to be emotionally averse will enjoy enhanced cultural fitness over other norms’. The core idea here is that most people across cultures (except sociopaths) are ‘biologically programmed’ to react to emotional expressions of others in a particular way. That is, our emotions are largely embodied, automatic and intuitive, and our conscious decisions, including our moral intuitions, often have an emotional basis (see also, e.g. Gallagher 2005; Damásio 1999)
These insights on the role of the body in determining our moral behaviour and features of our personal identity are important to our understanding of virtual, online leisure, because the relevance of these body-based properties and processes is quite different in an online context compared to an ‘offline’ context. In online forms of social interaction – a major leisure pursuit to be sure – this embodied dimension, this source of so much vital information about the thoughts and feelings of the people we interact with, is all but ignored. When someone sends an e-mail, text message or joins a conversation on a discussion forum, the interaction occurs via text, which means that body language, facial gestures and voice inflection as input for our participatory sense-making are not available. Multiplayer video games are perhaps even more complex: people can talk to each other, but the behaviour and ‘body language’ that is most prominent in the interaction process with other players is that of their chosen characters in the game, not that of their own body. On the other hand, and quite confusingly perhaps, despite the diminished role of embodiment in the virtual domain, social connectivity in particular is very important.
In this chapter, we will look at the contrast between embodiment – a theme that we have already established as fundamental to the understanding of human identity – and virtuality – with using the Internet and social media and other varieties of online expression emerging as an ever more important class of leisure pursuits. An additional point of note is that virtual leisure (via the Internet, social media) represents a particularly powerful example of the liquidity of leisure suggested by Tony Blackshaw (2010). Taking all this into account, we can claim that the rise of the virtual represents a transition in leisure behaviour, culture consumption and social interaction. Our question is: how do these forms of disembodied, virtual interaction – being extremely widespread leisure practices – change social interaction, and leisure behaviour more generally?
The evolution in social dynamics caused by the Internet and social media use is one that is borne on the back of technological development – the development of information and communications technology. The idea that the use of technology somehow interferes with the ‘natural’ functioning of human beings is not new – it is a recurring theme in the philosophy of technology, a sub-discipline of philosophical anthropology, which deals with the ways in which technology affects and changes people, in sometimes fundamental ways.
The Industrial Revolution (late eighteenth to early nineteenth century) in particular, with its increasing prominence of technology – machines, factories – in the lives of regular people, made it necessary to reflect philosophically on man’s relation to technology. Dijksterhuis (1950) sees the Industrial Revolution, and the continuing expansion of technology in society, as the outcome of a very long process of methodically applying mathematical schemata to reality (a strategy started by the geometers and philosophers in the ancient world, e.g. Pythagoras, Plato). Understanding the world in highly structured, measurable and calculable terms ushered in an evolution in how humans conceptualised the world, from a mythological world view towards a mechanistic conception of reality, in which the world works without intervention of a higher power, and is, in principle, rationally describable and understandable. Making that conceptual step was a precondition for the arrival of the Enlightenment (see Intermezzo II), and the correlated efforts not merely to understand, but also to control the world through tools and machines that was the seed of the Industrial Revolution.
According to Gehlen (1940), the use of tools and technology signifies something essential about human beings. That is, he defines man’s essence as a Mängelwesen, as a creature of insufficient ability and strength: lacking the strength, speed or sharp senses that some other animals possess, we utilise technology to compensate for our deficiencies. In the eyes of some continental philosophers, such as Heidegger (1977), modern objectivist science and technology are both expressions of a conceptualisation of the world which makes a fundamental ontological distinction between natural things on the one hand, and tools and other technological artefacts on the other (Franssen et al. 2009/2013). Understanding, furthermore, the world as a collection of things, of objects, of raw materials, makes it possible – in this view – to use that world. That can mean to mine it for resources, to change the landscape by building cities and factories and roads, but it can also mean to regard the world objectively, as separate from human observers. Then, so the metaphor goes, one could wrestle away knowledge from the clutches of reality itself, by force if necessary – which is what observation and experimentation by objective, detached scientists would amount to in the empiricist mode of doing science suggested by Enlightenment scholar Francis Bacon.
Now, despite the success of modern technology and science, many continental philosophers oppose this ‘Baconian view’. To them, the possibility of being completely objective, of mentally placing human beings outside of the natural order, is impossible – recall our discussion in Intermezzo II about the inherent context-embeddedness of experience. Using technology, or doing objectivist science, means to deny (or even to become estranged from) the natural mode of situatedness, of Dasein, the being-in-the-world that precedes any cognitive analysis, but rather makes it possible to perceive, experience, grasp and understand. Believing that we can step away from that fundamental situatedness obscures the truth.
Now, while Bacon did design the outlines of modern scientific methodology, which includes a mechanistic conception of the world, it turns out that he did not actually support the separation of mankind from the rest of nature as he is accused of having done in this line of criticism. If anyone should be ‘blamed’, Descartes was responsible for that, with his distinction between the living souls or minds of humans versus the rest of nature, which he claimed to be mechanical and soulless (Mathews 2013). If this is true, it appears that at least some of the continental philosophical criticism of ‘the Baconian view’ rests on a straw man argument (i.e. attacking a caricature of an opponent’s views instead of what she is actually saying). However, despite this logically fallacious misstep in the main narrative of classical continental philosophical criticism of the Baconian view, the core insight of this analysis of the human use of technology still makes sense. Using technology does indeed influence the abilities and behavioural possibilities for humans, and this evolution does, in part, involve a process of abstraction and objectification.
The idea that the use of tools and technology can have a profound effect on the development or evolution of human abilities, e.g. can unlock new physical, cognitive and/or social capacities in the users, is a core insight of evolutionary psychology. Barkow et al. (1992), Mithen (1996), Noble and Davidson (1996) and Gärdenfors (2003), to give some examples, all assign special significance to the capacity for abstract thought, expressed (among other things) as language use and the wielding of tools. In these theories, language and symbolic thought created awareness of the self and of the environment, and made it possible for proto-humans to differentiate between the two. Tools made it possible for our ancestors to use this abstract thought to compensate for deficiencies (as Gehlen noted), and to exert some measure of control over that environment, i.e. to build safer dwellings, to make weapons to kill larger prey, and fashion clothing to persist in harsher conditions. Vaesen (2012) sees the level and breadth of human tool use as characteristic for our species, even compared to the impressive, but ultimately much more limited use of artefacts that, for example, chimpanzees exhibit.
In such evolutionary processes, tool use changes our cognitive capacities. Even now we can see certain (hypothesised) correlates of these changes in the brain, for tool use changes neural activity: neural activity for objects within an agent’s reach, i.e. within what is called peripersonal space, is markedly different from activity related to objects outside that reach. Providing a test subject with a tool, e.g. a stick, will change the contours of peripersonal space to include the extended reach provided by the tool (Maravita and Iriki 2004). This is thought to result in a modification of the way in which space and spatial relations are ‘represented’ in the agent’s brain. Furthermore, an agent’s canonical neurons exhibit specific activation patterns when objects are present that afford action (Gallese et al. 1996).
Based on these, and many other insights, from archaeology, anthropology, psychology, neuroscience and other fields, the general idea is that the invention and implementation of mechanical tools, machines and engines has greatly expanded the capabilities of human beings. Physically, we can travel faster and further, build larger buildings, and so on, than we could before. Conceptually, technology creates meanings and facilitates experiences. Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton (1981), for instance, say that using a tool or a piece of technology, even something as comparatively simple as a ukelele, opens up not only physical possibilities for action, but also supports the ascription of different meanings:
[This ukulele] allows the man to use his skills in musical expressions, to have fun in the present while reliving past enjoyment, and at the same time, sharing the fun with those he loves. The ukulele in this case is a catalyst for a many-sided experience; it is not only an instrument for making sounds but it is also a tool for a variety of pleasurable emotions. In playing this man recaptures the past and binds his consciousness to that of others around him.
(Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton 1981: 73)
The development of the computer in the twentieth century was one of the major technological advances to complement not physical but cognitive and social capacities, capitalising upon one of the defining features of the Internet: the incredible potential for connectivity both in terms of social relations (connecting people) and in terms of information (providing access to huge amounts of data by opening up and combining databases). The philosophy of information and communications technology, as a variant of the philosophy of technology, attempts to understand the impact of these developments. As an extrapolation of Dijksterhuis’ ‘mechanization’ process, we can say that television, the Internet and social media are now facilitating processes of ‘informatisation’ and even ‘virtualisation’. This means that the question at hand is: after this long process of cognitive and social evolution due to tool use and technology, what happens if we move into the virtual age?
This is a question that resonates with a topic that we addressed previously. In Intermezzo II, we explored the changing modes of experience throughout the modern and postmodern (or liquidly modern) era. In various essays (e.g. ‘Der Erzähler’, ‘Über einige Motive bei Baudelaire’, ‘Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit’ – see Benjamin (4 vols., 1996–2003)), Walter Benjamin also explored this very idea, and his approach was, at least at a surface level, pessimistic. He lamented the decline in the quality and very essence of experience, and the actions that people undertook in response to that development. The context of his analysis was the acceleration of urban life around the end of the nineteenth century, which he said had profound consequences for the ways in which people were able to experience the world. As noted, we have already seen his distinction in Intermezzo II, when we discussed Dilthey and Schulze: deep and singularly meaningful experiences were forced out by droves of repeated, superficial ones, Erlebnis (‘momentary experience’) thus replacing Erfahrung (‘momentous experience’).
One of these processes of decline Benjamin describes has to do with the changing nature of stories: in his eyes, and in the era he studied, modern ‘stories’ (e.g. novels, newspaper articles) offer pre-explained information, whereas the openness and underdetermination of an actual story (e.g. a campfire tale, shared in a decidedly social event) invites audience participation, therefore that story is ever-evolving, and due to that filling-in of the blanks facilitates reflection on the characters’ motivations, and therefore on human nature as such. Something is lost in the decline of the story: the possibility to transmit, share and/or evoke experiences/wisdom in this highly effective, interactive way. Benjamin saw this as a process of estrangement from artisan roots (comparable to how Marx saw the existential disconnectedness emerging in the advent of mechanised labour), trading this ‘honest’ embeddedness for a more ‘technological’ superficiality of experience.
In various writings, Benjamin conceptualises the truly authentic and unique meaningful experience as something (e.g. a unique work of art) possessing an aura. Benjamin defines the aura in terms of ‘a unique appearance of a distance, however close it may be’ (Benjamin 1996–2003, vol. 4: 255), as such attempting to illustrate this notion by referring to the semi-mystic phenomenology associated with the experience of the overwhelming beauty of nature. As potentially sad as the decline of the aura, of authentic and deeply meaningful experience, in postmodern society might appear to be, Benjamin does not see this decline as full decay, for the aura is replaced by something else: shocks.
One of the most shocking postmodern phenomena, in the sense of encompassing stimuli that are omnipresent, very frequent and highly intrusive (recall our reference to Schulze’s Erlebnisgesellschaft in Intermezzo II), is the way that the Internet and social media are used these days. And certainly, there are many critics that would claim, in line with the aforementioned anti-Baconian sentiment of some continental philosophers, that the ways in which the Internet and social media are used, and the intensity at which this is done, is threatening to estrange us from our ‘proper’ embodied situatedness. Is this true? What happens when, in liquid modernity, that part of leisure that we seek online becomes virtual and (largely) disembodied?
In previous chapters (e.g. Intermezzo II), we saw that Blackshaw (2010) reconceptualises postmodernity, which he says is too unspecific a concept, and instead uses the concept liquid modernity (inspired by Zygmunt Bauman 1992). The core of this idea is that modes of interaction, meanings of concepts and ideas, and functions of institutions are fluid, can change through time or be different depending on whom one asks. Leisure, Blackshaw claims, is an important domain for the exploration of these dynamic meanings and functions.
A large amount of our leisure time is spent online. When we factor in the Internet and social media as an important aspect of liquidly modern leisure behaviour, it is useful to remark that this liquidity expresses itself in various forms. Of course there is the social fluidity that determines the changed status of leisure pursuits and organisations as connected to specific social strata, and the predictable nature of leisure behaviour (or lack thereof) between groups or individuals: where once society was structured along divisions of gender, class and race, our current leisure options are much less rigid (even though the old divisions still have not been discarded completely). Overturning these old social structures, much of our leisure today is defined by individual freedom. The Internet and social media enable particularly ‘fluid’ forms of social liquidity, as we will investigate below. However, particularly important when we consider the role and effects of social media, the characteristic liquidity of liquid modernity is also expressed as psychological fluidity: opinions, experiences, categorisations online are contingent, hence dynamic. That is, the Internet and social media offer a cacophony of different voices to compare to one’s own, and, significantly, also allow for the possibility that one’s own voice changes very quickly, or differs from context to context.
There is one additional issue, which we have already mentioned: online, we largely lose another important anchor that informs and structures our behaviour: the role of embodiment is diminished in our online interaction. Gut feelings and intuitions that we derive from embodied interaction, sensations that evolved over the course of millions of years and which form the cornerstones of our moral and communicative capabilities, are of diminished use. So: there is a potential conflict between our deep-seated embodied dispositions, and the new forms of interaction and behaviour facilitated by the virtual (disembodied) character of online activities.
The Internet and social media have changed, and are continuing to change, the ways in which we interact with each other, the ways we consume entertainment, and the ways we form our opinions. This virtualisation process transforms core psychological processes that, normally, would be dominated by input from embodied interaction (see also Van Leeuwen 2015). We will discuss three examples of such transformations: (1) online social interaction; (2) the idea of ownership and copyright of non-physical media; and (3) the idea of penalisation in the absence of physical interaction.
The Internet and social media have greatly expanded our capacities for instantaneous social interaction with people from all over the world – we can now connect to people who live far away with an ease and on a scale that has never been seen before. This means that in an important sense, social media is a strong catalyst for the kind of liquid interaction that we can claim is characteristic of postmodernity/liquid modernity.
As we have already referenced above, online, the potential for social fluidity – the interactivity of many different kinds of groups and individuals, and the variety of interaction styles and scripts associated with the relations within and between those groups – can be great. Correspondingly, psychological fluidity can also be quite profound. Kerr at al. (2004: 15; quoted in Crawford 2013: 563), for instance, say that:
New media … allow for and foster the users’ experimentation with alternative identities (Turkle 1995). This is true for computer games as well as internet chat rooms etc. The pleasure [is] of leaving one’s identity behind and taking on someone else’s.
This fluidity can be accidental, similar to how in real life one can exhibit different kinds of behaviour in different social contexts (e.g. being among friends versus visiting one’s grandmother). However, the variety of different contexts online, plus the swiftness with which one can switch from one context to the next is quite a bit greater than in ‘real life’. For instance, one can go from a pleasant private chat about personal topics with a friend, to a formal e-mail about work-related affairs that is sent to a colleague, to an intense verbal battle on a hobby-related discussion forum, all within minutes.
This psychological fluidity can also be intentional, e.g. to engage in active ‘impression management’ (Chester and Bretherton 2009). This would include consciously selecting which messages and pictures to post on social media, through which a user can present herself to ‘followers’ exactly as she would like to be perceived. This is important because an important part of how we understand ourselves depends on the feedback that we get from others. What we say and do, our body language and facial expressions, they form the input that other people use to form an opinion about us. Online, it is this self-chosen ‘impression-managed’ presentation, and not the much less malleable reality of one’s physical appearance or difficult-to-control facial expressions that are so dominant in face-to-face encounters, that others see, and respond to. Taking all this into account, from one moment to the next, or from one discussion context to the next, which opinions, experiences and categorisations someone expresses can vary quite profoundly.
There are two perspectives on this socio-psychological fluidity that people can experience online – one is pessimistic, the other more optimistic.
The pessimistic perspective has to do with the disembodied character of most online interaction. In Chapter 4, and earlier in this chapter, we argued that embodied participatory sense-making processes, including basic affect attunement, are particularly important for the development and continued constitution of someone’s personal identity. The interaction we engage in online is mostly devoid of the kind of embodied cues (body language, facial expressions, voice inflection) that we instinctually depend upon to make sense of what the other says and does. Kross et al. (2013) suggest that the impoverished nature of social contact via social networking site Facebook is the explanation for their study’s findings that frequent Facebook use in a given period was a good predictor of low levels of experienced well-being and life satisfaction. Furthermore, in Chapter 4 we imparted narrativity with an important role in identity construction: stories inform our theory-of-mind capabilities, and we derive our sense of self from a narrative ordering of experiences. Now, the socio-psychological fluidity facilitated online makes it possible for us to explore not one, but multiple social networks, and not one, but multiple social interaction styles, and not one, but multiple parallel storylines connected to the various roles we play in those various networks. The internal coherence in the personal identity narrative can then grow to become quite tenuous, and potentially psychologically harmful.
The more optimistic perspective has to do with an aspect of leisure that we discussed in Chapter 2: the idea of playing as a hermeneutical exercise. The potential for social and psychological experimentation by capitalising upon the fluidity that is possible online might be risky for the reasons mentioned above, but it can also be beneficial, if explored sensibly. The Internet offers almost unlimited resources for the kinds of behaviour that children use to acquire insight into how the world works, and how other people react to specific kinds of behaviour, specifically exploring different social scenarios and (playfully) assuming different identities. This would suggest that ideas about online leisure skills – being able to use the Internet and social media as a healthy leisure pursuit – should also include a pedagogical concept like digital literacy (Sonck et al. 2011). Digital literacy is not only about practical skill (being able to find what you need online) and safety (avoiding websites with harmful content), but also, and crucially, about the capacity to determine what the scientific, moral or artistic value is of something one finds online. Being able to assess the hermeneutical value of one’s experiences in the socio-psychological fluidity of online leisure can be extremely important for children and their parents in optimising the beneficial aspects of online leisure, while minimising the negative aspects.
One of the main ethical problems associated with the Internet is the illegal downloading and sharing of copyright-bearing material – music, movies, books, images and ideas. Helprin (2009) argues that specifically post-modern (or liquidly modern) professional social interaction formats such as (online) collaborative learning, crowdsourcing and other non-individual work styles have caused the people familiar with those methods to develop a disregard for personal property and individual achievement. In his eyes, this would explain the highly problematic marriage of property law and the Internet: in the eyes of many Internet users, the fruits of collaborative efforts (such as movies or most music) do not belong to any single person or entity, which would imply that everyone is entitled to possess or use it freely. This rationale is then extended to anything that can be digitised and shared online – the product already exists and is already available for download, and trading it without paying for it will not truly make a difference any more. The serious reduction in paying customers due to this behaviour saw (and, at the time of this writing, still sees) content companies like music labels struggling to find viable business models in light of this reality.
When it started to emerge in the early 2000s, this was not a completely new development, although the scale at which the Internet has allowed it to happen is a true game-changer. Tape-trading in the heavy metal subculture in the 1980s was officially maligned by record companies, but often supported by the artists because this practice got their work into hands that the official LPs would not reach quite as easily. Raising awareness and demand equalled an increase in requests to play concerts, which is where the real money for the artists often was. While in the 1980s tape-trading was a comparatively marginal problem, the Internet has enforced a radical shift in the kinds of business models that the music industry and artists in particular need to implement. The main change is that the element of the product portfolio where the main income is generated has changed completely: instead of physical CD or DVD sales, as it was in the past, most money is now made in streaming content or live events that offer features that cannot (easily) be reproduced at home (concerts with elaborate stage shows, the possibility of meeting the artist, cinema presentations in 3D with massive, multi-channel sound systems, etc.).
Apart from contributing to the problem, social media also creates part of a solution: using social media offers ample opportunities for those artists, authors, musicians and moviemakers to cut out intermediaries (e.g. a record label) and connect directly to a potential audience. This audience can then buy tickets for live performances, which is where today musicians make a significant part of their income. Here we see how technological developments facilitate consumers in seeking new, more advantageous (e.g. cheaper) ways to get the content they want, and how the producers of the content need to look for ways to keep up with consumption trends.
Obviously, copyright infringement is a real problem for content producers, especially those who still use the business models that worked several decades ago. However, when it comes to media sharing, the Internet also holds a lot of positive potential. That is, online connectivity can serve as a catalyst for another major phenomenon: the (co-)production, recycling and recombination of ideas, texts, images, video files and media associated with intellectual properties. Easy access to all these songs, movies, texts and ideas for people to rework, remix and modify, and easy ways to share these home-made products (i.e. once again via websites and social media), creates the proper ecosystem within which a society of hobbyists can emerge – people who create new media out of existing media that they are passionate about. Bolter and Grusin (2001) call this remediation. Obviously the quality of this remediated content is not necessarily always very high, but the freedom to experiment plus the possibility to connect to an audience do present a potentially nurturing environment for truly talented individuals to hone their craft. And once again, the remediation of older material is by no means a new phenomenon, since artists have been interpreting and reinterpreting the work of others for centuries, but the scale at which the Internet facilitates this behaviour is truly staggering. Interesting to note is that this is how the Internet enables some of the playfulness that is so important in leisure (as introduced in Chapter 2).
As a conclusion to this section, we can say that the concept of property, and the associated property rights or copyrights, are thoroughly transformed in the virtual environment. The disembodied nature of both the interaction with the owner or copyright holder, and of the actual media that one can own (one does not buy a physical object, like a CD, in a physical store any more, but might download a file for free) engenders different concepts of ownership. However, the positive potential is that of remediation, in which the diminished reverence for freely downloaded material might very well be a precondition for the emergence of creative communities that rework this material into something potentially new and exciting.
The peculiar properties of social media have far-reaching consequences when it comes to crime and punishment. The simple fact that social media use creates possibilities for people to connect to others creates many positive possibilities for people to come together, such as remediation, as discussed above, but also crowdsourcing – mobilising a network to solve problems that require more manpower, resources and/or talents than those that are directly available.
However, there is a darker variant of this kind of phenomenon, sometimes called crimesourcing – using the connectivity of the Internet and social media networks to realise an illegal goal. An amusing urban legend tells of a message on online advertisement website Craigslist calling for dayworkers to gather at a prearranged location and time, dressed in a yellow hard hat, blue shirt, gloves and boots, for the chance to be hired for a construction job at an attractive wage. When a money transport at that location and time was robbed, the description of the perpetrator – yellow hard hat, blue shirt and so on – was useless, because many people fitted that description. Furthermore, the importance of social media in many people’s lives, the extent to which we take messages seriously, is such that a terrorist does not even need to organise an actual attack to cause the kinds of chaos he is looking for: merely threatening to carry out a terrorist act is often enough to cause a severe disruption of normal operations at the intended target (a public place, a building or structure, a company). Milder forms of acts like this have even become a form of leisure for some people, using social media to create flash mobs, often also filming the ensuing (sometimes disruptive or chaotic) developments to post online.
People who do this apparently feel that they can get away with it, or that it is ‘fun’. The level of experienced freedom on the Internet and social media is quite high, and we suggest that the disembodied character of online interaction is an important reason: the primitive social control mechanism of physical retaliation – punishment, the threat of physical violence – which tends to constrain our embodied interaction in more extreme cases, is absent online. If someone does something that is deemed to be unacceptable, the possibilities one has to enforce acceptable behaviour are rather limited compared to most ‘real life’ situations, where more direct interaction is possible. If someone who lives on the other side of the world insults you, there is little that you can do in retaliation, other than respond in a similarly insulting manner, or perhaps appeal to the discussion forum’s moderator to ban the culprit. Suler (2004) calls the sometimes shockingly harsh, morally uninhibited interaction online ‘toxic disinhibition’; the fact that some people feel that they can behave in severely antisocial ways has to do with the relative anonymity and invisibility offered by online interaction.
An extreme manifestation of this toxic disinhibition is the illegal parts of the deep web, which is a container concept denoting those networks hidden from regular Internet search engines. Most of the deep web is legal – company intranet networks, subscription websites, databases hidden behind paywalls, etc. – but the deep web also has darker corners. The dark web denotes all those sites and networks where illegal material and services can be found, which can include child pornography, drug dealers, contract killers, terrorist rings and other expressions of mankind’s anarchistic, dark and deviant tendencies (see, e.g. Van Hout and Bingham 2013). These things can exist because they piggyback on the freedom of the Internet, and this is what makes this phenomenon morally complex: obviously most people would agree that child porn and assassins are bad, but if the price to exorcise these excesses is that basic online freedom needs to be curtailed, the discussion becomes rather more complex and controversial.
Online freedom is very important to many people. In a relevant sense, the Internet is like a society without a singular, organised police force. Despite some countries having more active government control and the existence of cybercrime units, the Internet is a global phenomenon which transcends national legislation and security efforts. There are many technological possibilities via social media to share opinions, ideas and files that might be illegal in a specific country, simply by providing those services from a location where the laws are less strict. And even if a user engages in undesirable (flaming, trolling, online slander) or even illegal activities, the risk of being caught and held accountable are lower than in ‘real life’.
The resultant sense of freedom makes it possible for people to implement a do-it-yourself normativity (Van Leeuwen 2009) in their online behaviour: the technology and the resultant interaction system as such is underdetermined when it comes to the kind of moral rules that need to be used, so people will start looking for whatever they feel is appropriate, or acceptable, or what they think they can get away with. In some cases, that results in dark web-related practices. However, the ethical situation is not quite as dire as it may seem, because, as in any complex, dynamical system, we do see self-regulation processes emerge. In non-criminal, social interaction situations via social media, or the expression of opinions via blogs, the continuous back-and-forth of replies, feedback and ‘likes’ already suggests a control mechanism that is, at least in potential, ethically utilitarian (i.e. focused on realising a good or acceptable situation for as many people as possible). In these kinds of cases, we can see the co-creation of an in-group moral code (Cenite et al. 2009), even in the absence of embodied social interaction. In this dynamic, the importance of impression management becomes apparent again: a particular user will need to align her behaviour with whatever moral code exists in the networks that she values, and wishes to remain a more-or-less respected member of.
Based on the considerations above, we can once again see that in the virtual environment, classical notions of (physical/embodied) punishment and the moral behaviour that it might enforce become fluid. However, we can also see new morality structures emerge in the social interactivity of social media, which gives rise to forms of self-correction in social groups.
In Intermezzo II, we explained how Blackshaw (2010) characterises the liquidly modern conception of leisure by contrasting two metaphors. On the one hand, there is McDonaldization (exemplifying an emphasis on efficiency, calculability and predictability, with the intent of controlling the leisure process). On the other hand, there is IKEAization, which he claims is a more appropriate characterisation of current leisure behaviour, as it captures the liquidity of personal freedom in leisure.
Based on the cases discussed above, we see that the Internet offers an important domain for the liquidity that Blackshaw says characterises current leisure: via social websites, discussion forums and e-mail the contours of our social space are being updated almost constantly – this amounts to social fluidity. The constant redefinition of one’s social role within these shifting networks, plus the availability of vast amounts of information and contrary opinions, also influences personal identity: both the resources and the social pressure to see one’s opinions, ideas and defining properties as contingent amount to psychological fluidity.
If we focus on the liquidity of online leisure, perhaps we can suggest the term Nintendoization as an appropriate metaphor, referencing Japanese video game producer Nintendo. We intend that term to reflect several different aspects of the specific fluidity/liquidity that online leisure behaviour represents. Especially if engaged in as a leisure pursuit, the online environment facilitates a playful conception of social interaction and creative expression. In much online behaviour, a kind of levity reigns, and in its users a realisation appears to shine through that if you wish, you can ‘play fast and loose’ with the rules a little bit, and that you can capitalise on freedoms that the Internet offers which open up people to new behaviours. This aligns with the hermeneutic character of playfulness explored earlier: playful online leisure facilitates exploration. Additionally, there is the realisation that online leisure is virtual, hence perhaps does not feel completely real – there is a fantasy aspect (and certainly a fantasy fulfilment aspect, for whatever desire or interest one would wish to quench) to our virtual leisure pursuits. Also, there is a strong drive towards collective behaviour and social attunement (i.e. playing together), but in many different ways according to the moral norms that self-organise in a particular online context. And, finally, very often, the Internet and social media are simply fun, as they form one of the most important leisure domains.
We already mentioned some of the potential positive aspects of this Nintendoization of online leisure, such as crowdsourcing and remediation, but the exchange network that this exchange dynamic facilitates is much broader, allowing different people to come together in ways that would be impossible without the Internet and social media. A very simple, and very effective, networking dynamic occurs on online forums connecting people who share an interest or hobby. These connections can lead to offline meetings (e.g. conventions); online dating has surged in popularity in recent years as well.
One aspect of our Nintendoization-metaphor is the idea that people can do positive things in a domain that they can define, for themselves, as a leisure domain. Recall that we have been conceptualising leisure as a domain of (relatively) free choice, of intrinsically motivated and optimistic participation defined by subjective and intersubjective norms based on the quality of experiences. If people can conceptualise doing volunteer-work-like activities, as small and humble as they may be, as something they do in their leisure time for ‘fun’, right next to playing a game on a mobile phone and checking the latest party pictures of one’s friends, this changes the attitude with which people approach these tasks. The enormous size of the Internet, and the great diversity of possibilities to reach out to someone, or support a particular cause, makes it easier for people to find something that they can truly be enthusiastic about. Furthermore, the Internet is patient: people can choose the time and place to do whatever they feel represents their preferred effort, and they can do as much or as little as they want. Obviously, whether giving a ‘like’ or leaving a brief message of support on some website constitutes a truly, practically helpful contribution can be a matter of discussion, but an interesting point is that the Internet and social media create the potential (in the form of a supportive infrastructure plus the accessibility of the necessary information) for many people to contribute in one way or another. A possible negative aspect here is that people would also frame the commitment they give to such a ‘volunteer-work-like’ activity in a ‘fun leisure’-type way, i.e. as something casual, relatively unimportant. How exactly this very postmodern dynamic of a variety of interacting intentions, commitments and motivations to contribute to something worthwhile can result in something sustainable and functional, is possibly something important to investigate.
At the more serious end of the collaborative spectrum facilitated by the Internet and social media, we see the possibility of international networking and collaboration projects in the arts (a band recording a new album need not be in the same recording studio – they can record their own sections and exchange the files via e-mail or file-sharing services), science (researchers collaborating on a project sharing data and successive versions of a co-authored paper via the Internet) and in education (students can access papers and books online, can view recorded lectures and share their homework via their university’s electronic learning environment – also when they are away on academic exchange for a semester in a country far away).
Of course these technological interaction possibilities can facilitate more convenient and flexible contact between people from the same social, cultural or intellectual community, but the truly interesting potential is that this technology also enables the interaction of individuals and groups of people across geographical and cultural boundaries. In this sense, the Internet and social media can (and do) facilitate cross-cultural exchange in ways that overcome embodiment; impoverished stimuli (i.e. no body language, facial expressions, just text) can perhaps force people to focus on the content of the message rather than on the mode of delivery. The difference in culture that can be bridged through online connectivity can range from small – different personality styles between neighbours, different professional styles between companies in the same city – to large – people from completely different parts of the world, with radically different customs. The do-it-yourself normativity (Van Leeuwen 2009) inherent to virtual exchange, and the tendency for at least some kind of moral structure to emerge in whatever social interaction dynamic one finds oneself in, creates at least the possibility that cross-cultural exchange will occur. The very reason that these representatives from different cultures meet each other – for instance, they have a shared interest, a shared hobby – could then be a catalyst to ensure that the moral structure that emerges is one that enables pleasant cross-cultural exchange.
This does not mean, of course, that there still cannot be a lot of misunderstanding and antagonism online – there definitely is, and divisions along lines of personal preference, social class, cultural background and whatever other distinguishing characteristic one wishes to focus on, are certainly common online. However, for those people who wish to reach out to people from other backgrounds and cultures, the Internet and social media have made that much easier to accomplish.
There is one final point to make. Recall Walter Benjamin’s ideas on the decline of storytelling: novels, newspaper articles and other forms of modern ‘storytelling’ presume to represent a finality that a classical story does not have; instead, a story, Benjamin says, invites participation, and reflection on human nature. Having discussed what we have discussed, here is an interesting idea to investigate: could social media enable the revitalisation of (essential aspects of) storytelling, as Benjamin understood it? After all, in a sense, social media is about sharing stories around the (virtual) campfire, and retelling (sharing or remediating) them with your own revisions, enhancing them with your own experiences/interpretations (comments, likes). What possibilities for the deepening and/or transformation of experience lie encapsulated in these modern forms of mediated collective narrativity?
Recall also that Benjamin spoke of an aura, a spiritual experience associated with unique works of art, due to these objects containing authentic traces of their creation and subsequent history. This authenticity and historical embeddedness gives real art its authority. Embodied, face-to-face, person-to-person interaction appears to have a similar privileged status, and an important aspect of the conservative criticism on social interaction via the Internet exists as the idea that online interaction and social media, i.e. technologically mediated communication, exemplify a devaluation of social interaction.
Van Leeuwen (2009) argued for the idea that online social interaction can also have an ‘auratic’ aspect, because people can truly feel connected, at a very deep personal level, to another person, even if that connection is as impoverished (from the embodiment perspective) as consisting of brief text messages. This auratic sensation, and the authority that it has, the meaning and significance of the contact, is dependent on the belief that another person is the causal origin of a particular message, that one is truly in contact with the other. The Internet and social media make that kind of contact possible across vast geographical and cultural distances.
Based on all of this, we can say that the Internet and social media are true examples of the fluidity Blackshaw (2010) places at the centre of his analysis of current leisure behaviour. However, contrary to what the fluidity-metaphor might suggest, this fluidity does not necessarily mean instability or lack of structure. The fluidity of online social networks has two sides: on the one hand, making new contacts, and exploring new social roles and forms of interaction, is exceedingly easy. In the fluidity metaphor, we can say that water flows where it may, and is difficult to pin down in any definite shape. On the other hand, and interestingly, the possibilities for connectivity represented by the Internet and social media also allow for the strengthening of bonds irrespective of geographical or cultural distance. In the fluidity metaphor, we can say that if a river has set, it can dig deep into the landscape and become a powerful lifeline between different individuals or communities along its stream. The comparatively disembodied nature of interaction via the Internet and social media facilitates the required liquidity – the dynamic, casual, creative, fluid, playful, leisure-like nature of online social contact – that opens up new possibilities for cross-cultural interaction.
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