The tourist division offers a useful key in deciphering phenomena related to the immaterial and the role of Internet. We might ask ourselves what inspires millions of people to visit places like Disneyland in California, St. Peter’s in Rome, to crowd into the halls of the Uffizi in Florence or the Metropolitan Museum in New York (speaking of New York: the latest in tourist destinations is Ground Zero).
There are millions of tourists: some of them must visit the Uffizi because they love art, or go to St. Peter’s because they are fervent Catholics, but how many? Why do people sustain heavy expenses and put up with long trips, just to ‘taste’ a corner of Florence or Rome? The French ethnologist Marc Augé provides an answer in a precious little volume published a few years ago, dedicated to ‘tourism and its images’, when he writes of his visit to Disneyland:
“Suddenly, I thought I understood. I thought I understood what was so seductive about that spectacle as a whole, the secret of the charm it exercised over those who allowed themselves to be caught up in it, the effect of reality, of the surreal, that was produced by that place, the epitome of make-believe. We live in an age that puts history on the stage and makes a show of it. In this sense, it makes reality unreal, whether it is the Gulf war, the castles of the Loire or Niagara Falls. This distancing, this ability to make things spectacular, is never so sensible as it is in tourist advertising, which proposes a series of ‘instantaneous’ visions of tours, which will assume their maximum degree of reality only when we ‘see them again’ through the slides that we impose on the viewing and exegesis of a resigned public of friends and relatives upon our return. In Disneyland the show itself is made spectacular: the scene reproduces what was already scenery and make-believe – the house of Pinocchio or the space ship of Star Wars. Not only do we enter into the screen, inverting the movement of Woody Allen’s Purple Rose of Cairo, but behind the screen, we also find only another screen. Thus, the trip to Disneyland is tourism ‘to the umpteenth power’, the very essence of tourism: what we are coming to see does not exist. We gain an experience in pure freedom, with no object, rhyme or reason, without gambling on anything. We find neither America nor our infancy, but the absolute gratuity of a play of images in which everyone around us, whom we shall never see again, may make their own contribution. Disneyland is the world of today, at its worst and at its best: the experience of emptiness and freedom (Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Super modernity, Verso Books, 1995).
Disneyland is the classical non-place: but not in the sense that it doesn’t exist. On the contrary, it has a powerful existence: you can visit Disneyland, eat at its restaurants, have fun like children (because Disneyland is a place for adults; the children are just an excuse), but you experience it again and again through the personal medium of your memory. The non-place represents what we tend to recall in order to say, ‘I was there too’.
Disneyland has a lot in common with Internet: Internet too, in effect, is a spectacular show, something that is realised – in the sense that it becomes reality – thanks to a series of make-believe events, made possible by web technology. What is more ‘make-believe’ – more virtual – than words? But much of the communication that takes place over the web is pure text, written language, words. Words with which some even lie. This is a particularly interesting aspect of what takes place on the Internet: on the web, reality may be easily and effortlessly transformed into lies, and with the same ease, lies can be transformed into reality.
In the eyes of many, this is an entirely negative element – and when it assumes the status of a pathology and engenders dependency, it is doubtlessly negative – but it is also the demonstration of the need of users to experience entirely new emotions from what they can find in the ‘real world’. The relationships that are created on line – albeit in their often ephemeral, transitory and temporary nature, possibly even precisely because of this – represent desires and emotions that are no less real than the ones we experience off line.
From this point of view, the world online assumes almost magical connotations, because it permits us to overcome our finiteness, material and psychological barriers in a single leap: of course, there is a risk of being bewitched by this ‘illusion’, but at the same time it is an opportunity of unbound freedom and opening up towards others.
On the web, the majority of relations take place through texts and the written word: chat lines, email, forums and newsgroups are all purely textual forms of communication. In these forms, identity is something that is much more fluid than what we are used to experimenting in the world off line. This fluidity in identity pertaining to on line relations translates into a greater degree of changeability in personality: it becomes ‘situational’, in the sense that it is capable of changing according to the context and perceived identity of the counterpart. All of this for a simple, but fundamental reason: on line, the ‘real’ body is absent and all non-verbal interaction is excluded by the limits of the technical means. We may only write.
That this should actually be considered a limitation, however, still has to be demonstrated. The fact that users prefer purely textual means of communication is probably due to the greater freedom that such means imply. It is precisely thanks to this ‘limit’ that you can be whatever you want to be in computer-mediated means of communication; on the balancing scales there is the uncertainty of the identity of the other person and even the possibility of perpetrating illegal acts, under the protection of anonymity: everyone must build their own personal scales and evaluate the different weights and positive and negative aspects.
Many feel that virtual ‘rhymes’ with false, or at least with unreal. But experienced navigators know that on line communication can be violent: screen-mediated communication, where the body is not involved, frees people from fear; interaction is more uninhibited, to the point that it is not rare to witness (or participate in) hard verbal battles, abandoning oneself to flaming. The term flame is used to define a particularly hot discussion between users of a mailing list or newsgroup. Flames in general originate during the discussion of technical aspects, but degenerate to the personal level, to the point of heavy insults that would be judged intolerable off line.
Flames confirm that lack of a body during communication liberates people, because it is no longer part of the game; with our body safe, our mind can travel freely, confer upon us characteristics that it would be impossible to have – or perhaps – simply too risky to have, off line. It is obviously a temporary situation, tied to the time we are connected to the web, and ends when we disconnect. When we decide to cut off our on line communication, our ‘real personality’ once again prevails.
It is a temporary situation, however, in which our defences are not entirely eliminated. In fact, if some element is requested that may lead the counterpart to the true identity of the one on the other side of the screen, the classical defensive mechanism of refusal comes to the fore and the communication is often interrupted; or in any case, from that time forward interaction is generally more cautious.
This is probably also the reason why many virtual communities last for only a short time. After a period of communication between two or more users, it is only natural for the counterpart to ask something more about the person’s identity in the off line world; sometimes – not very often – this request is granted and it may happen that a virtual relationship turns into a ‘real’ one. But usually, requests of this type produce the effect of terminating the communication, especially if they are pressing and repeated.
Every time we speak of the web and the on line world, we are obviously speaking of mutual trust: through the web, the premises are created for interaction between subjects. It may even be said that the web is perhaps pure and simple interaction. As any other form of interaction, it can only be consensual, the fruit of mutual agreement. The web is therefore a social space, in the sense that those who inhabit it give themselves rules, just as they do in any other community: in effect, relations created on line are not characterised by total freedom; on the contrary, they hide and develop inside a framework of fairly stringent rules. Virtual space, therefore, has characteristics that are not dissimilar in many ways from real space: both develop a system of rules that permit interaction and the development of relationships.
But there is a fundamental difference between the on line and off line worlds: the fact that in the virtual world a variety of forms of ‘disguising oneself’ are possible. It is the means itself that naturally permits this. In practice, there is a sort of endless digital carnival on line. Like in every carnival, there is every sort of reversal of roles: people met on line are almost never what they seem to be, because the disguise is often the essence, the raison d’être of many virtual communities.
Asking a person met on the web their identity doesn’t make much sense, because the characteristics that usually serve to identify a person off line – sex, age, physical characteristics, etc. – may be and are easily hidden or misrepresented. But then, what makes the web attractive is precisely this ‘carnival-like’ nature: if the ‘true’ identity of a person were transmitted on line – the identity we normally assume off line – it wouldn’t make sense to use the web, except for ‘technical’ reasons. Chat lines, newsgroups and forums are attended precisely because they permit this disguising and not because they allow people to communicate in a simple manner.
Another characteristic also contributes to the web being considered as a sort of digital carnival: precisely like off line carnivals, the on line carnival must be able to count on collective forms of identification and on the consensus of those who meet on the web. In other words, those who choose to communicate on line must take it for granted – implicitly or explicitly – that they will perceive others – and others will perceive them – with different forms and characteristics. Clearly at this point, the metaphor of disguising oneself is in effect the most apt one for computer mediated communications: those who choose to wear a mask do so with the understanding that others participating in the carnival disguise themselves and together they participate in a game that makes sense only if everyone plays.
It is essential for the consensus attained between those who communicate be based first of all on separation from their body (intended in the ‘real’ physical sense) and the subject (intended in their entirety); this separation takes place on the web, thanks to its technological nature, but above all thanks to the choice of a ‘poor’ form of communication, as is written text. And to think that many of us had the preconceived notion that with the advent of different forms of computer mediated communication, written text would have disappeared!