The End Of The World As We Know It?

In my 20’s, I was studying for a cultural studies degree. I had a small baby and already had a strong identity as the person with huge ideas; extreme, and occasionally unwarranted, belief in the potential of everyone I encountered. It seems strange to reflect now, but I also had naive ideas about where my life would take me. I reflect on my thinking at the time in order to introduce the possibility that what I was researching and what I see today some 20 years later could be influenced by changes in myself and not just the world of mediated communication (by this I mean anything other than talking to a person and picking up all the little cues we get by using our senses: hearing, sight, smell, touch, taste and that other one we call other things which may be a combination or a sense in its own right, the 6^th one!). In the year 2000 the internet had only just really taken off from 9% of UK households with access to the internet the year before to 13% when I started researching my dissertation. I was as enthralled by this new world as the next person.

The Internet Had Altered My History

This was the year Julie from Barnet was on maternity leave and said something like, “Hey Steve, I was thinking about Linda from 6^th form this morning and wondered whether she ever married that fella, oh what was his name?” and from there a whole different baby was born. Friends Reunited was the cool kid of social networking in the UK and after launching in 2000 had 2.5 million users by the end of the following year. This is a big deal when there wasn’t a social network to tell you about the social network. Old school phone calls and letters, and even a bit of face to face, spread the word of this weird virtual world where you could find out stuff about people you used to know. This was the year I found out that my childhood sweetheart was also someone else’s childhood sweetheart; that they had married and given their daughter the name we had chosen as innocent 14-year-olds. I remember very clearly being offended by the fact that this weird place, the internet, had altered my history somehow by memorialising someone’s place in my story as theirs in text on a public forum, I felt compelled to connect the dots.

The End Of The World As We Knew It

2000 was also of course, the year when everything didn’t fall apart, these new-fangled devices many of us now had in our homes, rather than just in weird internet cafes and libraries, didn’t suddenly break because they couldn’t count to more than 99. The issue known as; the Y2K bug, the 2000 problem or The millennium bug, had people stockpiling supplies and being terrified to get in a plane on the off chance it might fall out of the sky with confusion. Richard Lacay wrote an article for Time magazine entitled ‘TheEnd Of The World As We Know It’ and although this was a dive into the world of ‘end of days preppers’ and apocalyptic visions, it also highlighted the fact that it would probably amount to nothing. It was a real fear though, as real as the possibility of nuclear war, and sent some of us to the supermarkets to save enough beans to see us through. Americans, always being better at prepping than us Brits, were concerned about the people that weren’t prepped potentially invading their homes and got the guns at the ready. It seems odd now sitting here in 2020 and at the peak of a global pandemic, that a mystery bug which we kind of knew about but that didn’t have a date stamp has brought the world to its knees.

They Had Discovered Themselves There.

It is distinctly possible that I gauged the mood wrong then and just as possible that  I am equally off the mark today but one thing that my research showed back at the dawn of social media was something we all know today. It recognised that people are more able and willing to explore their personal depths in a way that historically had not been so easy. We were told stories in the press and by our friends of rekindled romances after a short journey through the ‘who can I find next?’ adventure we all went on. We heard of people falling in love in chat rooms from opposite sides of the world, we maybe even experienced the thrill of virtual romance ourselves for the first time. I paired these stories with those of pen-pals and prison romances to try and dig away at the why? I interviewed people and tried to find academic texts on the subject to reference. Although my dissertation now sits on a floppy disc in a dusty old box somewhere and my memory has died along with the collagen in my skin, I do remember how I felt about my conclusion. I recognised that love, obsession and passion were facets of our being we found hard to bring to the upper layers of our people facing selves, that we could explore these emotions in songs, art, literature and poetry but this transactional anonymous world was a safe place to play. We could try out the parts of ourselves we weren’t sure enough about to really be and regularly people believed they were more themselves because they had encountered their soul mate in a chat room rather than that they had discovered themselves there. Much like mask work has been used in theatre for an age, the internet was a place we could manipulate and create our identity, we could let all our weird and wonderful bits flow and get instant feedback; if the feedback was negative we could change the name and try again, the risk to our real-world selves was minimal.

What I Didn’t See Was Hate

                What I didn’t see was hate, it shocks me truly. We have established the fact that I am a fluffy idealist and rather than have that levelled at me as an insult, I will own that shit. I totally am, but I am no stranger to hate. By most standards, I should have left behind my whimsical fantasy of eutopia and exponential possibility, for the lived experience of deceit and darkness. I have experienced darkness first-hand in a very much face forward world. I too have witnessed the vileness of actual humans online and in the instant world of messaging (texting, yeah that was pretty new too!). Like many of us, I want to hold on to the bad taste this leaves in my mouth and when I have witnessed too much I retreat, I take a break, I curl up and wait a bit until the blood starts flowing the right way. I know the world is a dark place and there is suffering, brutality and desperation in the world every single day as far back as we can fathom. Children are dying and people find their smiles despite looking down the barrel of fear that I can’t get close to even imagining, but here in the version of the world that I find my struggles paralysing at times, along comes covid-19, coronavirus, sars-cov-2 or that virus. As people around the world enter these unchartered waters of a true global pandemic; along with desperation, frustration heartbreak and confusion, there is little dispute that we are also experiencing a collective reflection. We are inundated with new ways of collaborating, new ways of thinking, shopping, working, sleeping. We cannot help but wonder what life will look like going forward.

How Do We Make It Stick?

For me, the only comparison is a funeral. When I attend a funeral (back in the days when that was a thing we could do.) I am awash with resolve to do things differently, to make every day matter, to feel the love in the pure way I do in that moment in every moment going forward. Tell my kids how much they matter, tell my family how grateful I am they exist, tell my partner and my friends that I couldn’t have done any of it without them, forgive the wrongs and find my empathy for those I really can’t stand. I really do hope that we don’t fade back to normality as we knew it, as happens after a funeral, even with the best will in the world. I hope the collective WE runs with the hopeful resolve we see at every turn. Then I read the comments. The wonderful world of commentary, where every fucker has something to say (me included!). Where the divisions in our thinking show anything but a collective conscience. Where people trying to do the right thing are abused and threatened daily, where ill wishes are commonplace. Brutal thoughts left unchecked, running rampant. I really didn’t see the hate. I wonder, how do we make it stick? If my theorising over the future of this baby called social media led me to believe it would grow into an unbound love machine and my only fear was a loss of the senses that bound us to the real world; how could I not have seen the hate? I stood back and watched this child that was so adored and rarely challenged, grow up to be a sociopath. So full of possibility and hope, crawling with beauty and wonder, wanting to make everything and everyone smile; but when it bit down hard on a playmate and drew blood, there was nobody there to stop it. My only suggestion is that we get the work done now. There are people charging headlong towards doing great things and we must do them now, we don’t wait, we fill every space we can with kindness and warmth. We have been given a chance to think about what we want and what we need, we have a duty to get up and do it. I hope I have the courage and If you came this far with me, I believe in you too. Go do that thing.