Blog Post #10 (Due Saturday April 28, 11:59 PM): 'Contagious desires' and the dangers(?) of the internet

The return of 'semantic contagion,' as another van mows down another street full of innocent pedestrians. 

I do not want to commit murder. Never really did. I also don't want to watch it really happen (though my small addiction to 'police procedurals' on Netflix gives me pause, because these represented murders either don't touch me or just feel 'just and right'—Justified, all the Jack Reacher novels, Bosch, John Sanford's Minnesota carnage novels, The killing, and, and, and).

But apparently some people do. I (and lots of us) were a little relieved to learn that Alek Minassian's act was not 'national security related.'  I suspect we'll learn that he is 'mentally disturbed,' indeed early media reports say he was distant and strange. So—as with Dr. Brang's account of apotemnophilia ('a genetic abnormality of the pareital lobe'—I was relieved to cast this as a person 'out of his mind.' Beyond the realm of reason. Other.

Mental illness.  Sad, horrible—but a we're all a little safer now. It's not ISIS. It's not 'political.' My favorite view of 'human nature' is safe.

→ But why a rented van? And in Nashville, why a military-looking semi-automatic? Why do we kill the ways we do? ←

Carl Elliot calls apotemnophilia 'a new way to be mad,' assuming that some of us have always been 'mad' but that the particular shape illness takes is deeply local and specific. Hence: 'new way.' Here's his relevant section, worth reading now (my emphasis):

Suppose doctors started amputating the limbs of apotemnophiles. Would that contribute to the spread of the desire? Could we be faced with an epidemic of people wanting their limbs cut off? Most people would say, Clearly not. Most people do not want their limbs cut off. It is a horrible thought. The fact that others are getting their limbs cut off is no more likely to make these people want to lose their own than state executions are to make people want to be executed. And if by some strange chance more people did ask to have their limbs amputated, that would be simply because more people with the desire were encouraged to "come out" rather than suffer in silence.

I'm not so sure. Clinicians and patients alike often suggest that apotemnophilia is like gender-identity disorder, and that amputation is like sex-reassignment surgery. Let us suppose they are right. Fifty years ago the suggestion that tens of thousands of people would someday want their genitals surgically altered so that they could change their sex would have been ludicrous. But it has happened. The question is why. One answer would have it that [1] this is an ancient condition, that there have always been people who fall outside the traditional sex classifications, but that only during the past forty years or so have we developed the surgical and endocrinological tools to fix the problem.

But it is possible to imagine another story: that [2] our cultural and historical conditions have not just revealed transsexuals but created them. That is, once "transsexual" and "gender-identity disorder" and "sex-reassignment surgery" became common linguistic currency, more people began conceptualizing and interpreting their experience in these terms. They began to make sense of their lives in a way that hadn't been available to them before, and to some degree they actually became the kinds of people described by these terms.                      —'A new way to be mad.'  p. 10

So maybe—just maybe—digital media can really create new ways to be bad. 

4 chan /b/ represents itself.
LOTS of our 'creating community norms' stuff going on. 

'Come out' versus 'created' by the internet.  'I'm not so sure' (if the internet creates new, maybe bad stuff).  Nope; not sure at all.  Let's explore why (and how) digital media might 'create' new ways of being—some of them pretty 'dark web' and disturbing. Or just rude and juvenal. Or innovative and boundary-breaking. (Check out 'know your meme' HERE; warning: rabbit hole, and Finals are coming.)  

The Project: Extend the work we did in our reading, discussion, Background Reports and Debate with an example of your own of a case where the internet (or digital media generally) might be seen as changing us, individually / collectively / both.  Commit (as best you can) to whether it's a good or bad thing and explore why (do remember that it really CAN be good: video gamers have better hand / eye coordinations and are better drivers). Flight simulators train pilots). And if it looks like you identified a source of trouble, maybe talk about what we can do.

Walter Benjamin's essay is a master class on both why (for him, creeping fascism) and how (for him, a dialectic analysis of history) to care about these issues. If (and only if) you want to try your hand at applying his concepts (aura, authenticity, or just 'reproduction') to our contemporary techno-media world, you will make Brendan a very happy instructor indeed.