Response to “Hamlet and the Sofas” (Steven Rosen)

You describe well what it feels like to be in cyberspace — pulled off the intimate sofa of personal relationships, pulled outside yourself and in danger of being lost in the anonymity of a vast electronic arena. No wonder agoraphobia is on the rise among us dwellers in cyberspace! Local geography does vanish here, leaving me disoriented and asking, Where am I? In this digital vapor, I’m not even sure of who I am, or even whether I am. “To be or not to be” is truly the question of our time.

You end your post by asking if I “have any ambulances for this existential question.” But, in a way, you yourself provide an “ambulance.” Your message offers no abstract theoretical analysis of the problem. Instead it describes and raises concrete questions about your cybernetic experience here and now, in the moment you are experiencing it. I believe this kind of grounded reflection contributes to embodying cyberspace, fleshing it out so that it loses some of its anonymity and emptiness — gains some soul.

I imagine that an embodied cyberspace would incorporate features from both of your “sofas”: it would have an intimacy not so different from what you experience on your living room sofa where you can share hopes and dreams face-to-face with your friends; yet, at the same time, its scope would be global and it would encompass the planetary community at large. But I don’t see such a cyberspace merely as alternating between local experiences of a personal kind and global encounters that are impersonal. Rather, an enfleshed cyberspace would be transpersonal, what Merleau-Ponty called a “global locality.” Every living part of it would be imbued by the whole, and the whole would be enlivened by each of the parts. Such an embodied cyberspace would be holographic, or, topologically speaking, it would have the properties of a Klein bottle (where each side of the surface flows unbrokenly into the other side while paradoxically remaining distinct).

But my philosophizing about cyberspace is not enough to embody this electronic medium. I also need to “move backward,” practice proprioception….My head is bowed as I sit at my computer typing this response. I have a background headache. I’ve spent a long time on this reply and feel the weight of responsibility. I’m the guy who is hosting this website, the guy who wants to seize on every opportunity to help bring flesh to the Web. Thanks for your help, T.E.K.