As you well know, I'm a big fan of technology (and modernity). I am not ranting that technology makes our lives worse. However, I don't think I see it the same way you do.
The problem goes beyond K-12. Mass shootings are not only perpetrated by teenagers. The fact they are perpetrated almost exclusively by young males (14-30) speaks to their mental makeup and how that mental state reacts to the modern environment they live in. The same-age grouping in school is incidental and acausal. Growing up in Jordan, where people have as easy an access to firearms as they do here, I do not recall a single school shooting, or any of the nihilistic mass shootings we hear about every other month in the US. That is because a tight-nit community exists outside of school, despite the fact that the schooling system is identical.
And it is not just mass shootings. It's everything else that stems from the separation from the tight communities that humans evolved to exist in. The increasing suicide rates, the astounding rates of anti-depressant use, and so forth.
Unfortunately, I don't think technology can create a real sense of community for the reasons you mentioned. It DOES create opportunity. Technology is power. And community can only be forged from the steel of mutual suffering. A community of choice cannot truly exist, because community brings with it its own set of problems. And as long as you can go "**** you people, I'm out of here", real community cannot exist.
Technology has created this community for me. It is really the only community I'm part of. I know some of the people of this forum better than I do anyone else in my life beside my family and a couple of my closest friends. And yet, I can just log off one day and never come back. My life would go on the same, and I can join other similarly loose communities.
But that is not the same as being in a real community. Think of the people of East Germany before the collapse of the USSR. They lived in ugly apartment blocks in a state of relative economic poverty. But due to the limits of their resources, extended families lived together, kids would be playing outside together, mixing up with adults, and were cared for by the "tribe" at large for most of the day. That's community. Once the USSR collapsed and East Germany modernized, that construct of community disappeared. They gained in material terms, which is important. But they also lost in human terms.
So I don't think technology can create meaningful community. Only scarcity can. At least, not the type of community that many humans naturally crave. The one that leads to group-think and makes an enemy of otherness and judges your every action through a thousand eyes. But that's the type of community that gives many people a sense of belonging.
When Steve Bannon talks about foreigners destroying "the civic society", he's mourning the loss of community. His attribution is wrong. The same would be the case even if he lived in his white-only utopia, because the culprit is modernity, not skin color or "culture". But he is talking about something real nonetheless.
Good question. I think any technology would have that effect. A homo erectus with a stone tool can more easily separate from his tribe than one without. A homo sapien with access to pocket computers and a global communication network can doubly so.
It is a matter of degree. The more capable our technology, the more independent the individual can be from others. Like I said in my response to alt13; community is only formed once it's forced on you. The modern world is constructed around the idea of individual empowerment. It is the anti-thesis of community forming.
We all hold concepts differently -- and then thread them onto different conceptual lines -- so don't take what I'm about to say as a negative evaluation. It's a critique, but I dig your style, generally speaking. That said, I have some fundamental differences to you... and laying these out will require me to get mega-abstract. If it's all too tl;dr, that's fine. I've been needing to reboot my thinking on these subjects anyway, so I'm taking advantage of the opportunity here.
For me, there's something odd and unhelpful about the way
technology and
community are being related in your statements. That relation depends on a central image: the individual, who is whole, and either autonomous or capable of being so. Your statements rack the focus onto him, and ask the analyst to bend their understanding of events relative to him.
Community is constructed as separate and larger abstraction by which we are to understand the relative autonomy of that individual. These are the underlying assumptions your imagination depends on. They are the classic assumptions of liberalism.
We live in an environment where liberal stories have been
de jure for hundreds of years now. There have been loads of variations, and 'new' variations continue to spawn wherever a new conceptual fetish emerges which can be related to the individual and how he behaves. For example, the fetishes of
information and
technology are more recent than, say,
feudal duties and
Eucharist. But as long as they ask you to relate these things to the movement of the unquestionably whole individual, they're essentially telling different versions of Snow White: sometimes she encounters 7 dwarves who have a range of common emotions, other times she encounters 5 who have monstrous traits, other times she encounters a million who act like viruses, but in each story we are asked to imagine how the dwarves will impact her journey. We've been telling Snow White for so long that, I argue, the terrain of possible stories is pretty much explored. That's probably the biggest sting of my critique: your story feels mostly redundant. I'll get the other stingy one out of the way right here: your rendering of
community feels either wistful, nostalgic, and dependent on our reflective consciousness of them and their values (you talk about them in terms of
meaning) OR, as previously stated, separate from and encumbering to human action. That's a rock and a hard place. For the former, I could very easily claim that the strength of communities remains strong, that modernity and its population explosion has simply multiplied and complexified the types of community, and that we are part of communities whether we consciously reflect or have any awareness of the fact that we are a part of them (as I was looking for an example, I realized that I'm certainly involved in a Korean-American community because of where I live and spend my money; but I've honestly never reflected on that until now [the shops themselves aren't Korean, but I'm sure that the landlords are]). The latter I would simply toss out as the product of bad assumptions.
The
individual is just an abstraction. We are composed of entities who have just as much of an independent existence with the Earth as us. So what happens if we start from totally different assumptions? Perhaps some that don't rely on the (tired) myth of individualism? --Even in the image of the man raised by wolves: every one of that man's bodily affordances has a genealogy which emerges from a horde of humanity; and even on the absolute fringe of what you would consider 'community' it is fair to question whether his expressions/decisions are his own. He expresses wolf affects; he expresses human variations of vision and concentration while hunting and foraging; he cannot speed up his development and must suckle off of his wolf mother for 3 years and then depend on the pack for food -- nothing like wolfness but entirely dependent on it. Every step outside the human community is, for him, a step into a wolf community. Your position tries to address this, but it will fail as long as it relies on the central image of the autonomous individual.
Let's forcibly remove the concepts of
community and
technology. Let use substitute the concepts of
style and
network instead. Next, let's remove the concept of the
individual and replace it with the concepts of
organ and
labor. The word organ, from the Greek via the Latin organum, can mean a tool, but also a part of the body. So a hammer and a kidney are on the same analytical playing field. When heart-lungs-esophagus-stomach-eyes-hammer-etcetera are in relation, then a
hammering body emerges. When the hammer is dropped and berries are picked up, an
eating body emerges. Both of these labors are happening in some kind of critical mass (i.e. they are frequently expressed at some node in the human network as humanity constructs its milieu and nurtures itself) AND gain their use-value by hooking up with other forms of labor which are adjacent to them (sawing proceeds hammering) or simultaneous to them (sawing, hammering, and eating can all take place while laborers are engaged in the telling of myths which provide motivation and energy), etc.
So, gone is some
individual. What we have instead is multiplicity of organs which are variously hooked up to complex networks of labor.
Add more more thing to this image:
style. Each time a laboring body emerges it's not a total reinvention of the wheel.
*Hammering bodies riff on the styles of previous hammering bodies.
*Each labor has memory and a huge amount of redundancy; so while they are under constant variation, that variation is slow.
*Hammering styles vary geographically, just like berries.
*Networks have internal stylistic differences and different rates of stylistic variation.
When a gun-organ is connected to heart-lungs-esophagus-stomach-eyes-hammer-etcetera, then an incipient
shooting body emerges. Why would I assume this body expresses an ill? why would I assume that this body expresses a lack of community? Those are merely moral accusations relative to my stance on health and good community. Isn't a
shooting body an expression of a violent network that has deep and obvious tradition?
In short, I'm just not buying your set-up of the problem. I like salt13's better because it directly addresses the unconscious.
