In the post last week, I started to explore the idea that Instagram is bleeding into life and to what extent life exists as something connected to social media. Essentially what I was beginning to explore was the idea that life is becoming disembodied. I looked at the mind body duality and how the mind, our subjective experience is increasingly being transferred online. This week I want to briefly explore this idea in more depth and also in relation to the current global situation of lockdown.

I think that lockdown has made more visible and more integral our dependence on technology. We are highly atomised but none that less we remain connected with others. This is more alarming than it first appears to be. While the world has changed, I don’t think it has changed to the extent it would have done previous to the advent of the internet age. We were already on the way to a disembodied existence.

Heidegger in the mid-1950s began to question the effect of technology on our life and our understanding of being. His work in this area is highly prophetic of the internet age and the work of many post-modernist thinkers. He argued that modern technology was reducing distance. While distance is reduced modern technology, for Heidegger, does not create a sense of nearness. We have a lack of distance and also nearness. We may travel across great distances in shorter and shorter amounts of times. We may also be able to contact people in other places, in different time zones. This does not allow any real connection to the world that we inhabit. We are no closer to the people that we are connected to. We remain with a screen between us. Blocked from the deep connection that arises from living within a space, living with others in a place.

With the rise of the internet which Heidegger did not live to see this lack of distance and simultaneous loss of nearness has increased. The more connections that exist within the network of online world the more we lose our sense of nearness. Society has grown ever more atomised. We are highly individualised. We are part of a network, connected through machines, rather than citizens of a community.

We are all the time more and more lacking closeness to anything. Staying connected doesn’t mean we are together. We are not really with the people that we are in contact with. We see them but they are not with us. They are not part of our lived-in world; we constantly step outside the realm of our genuinely lived experience in order to talk to them. We see a disembodied version of people we know. They may be people we have spent time with, that we have existed with in the embodied sense of nearness but now they are apart from that.

As lockdown started that began to be a war time rhetoric, emphasising the fact that we are in this together, that we will make it through the pandemic of coronavirus as a nation together. There was, and is, very much the idea that we are acting as a community. It is an odd claim, one that is not true, or at least not wholly true. The change in rhetoric suggests that the neo liberal ideology of individualisation has been left behind but I think that this is far from the case. Are we not only able to be in this together because we are able to remain atomized? There hasn’t been that much of a change. Our disembodied experience of the world continues and because of this, to a great extent, the world is able to continue. We are disrupted but not as much as we could have been. Our lives, to an extent, due to our disconnection from others in real life, haven’t changed that much.

It would be optimistic to say that the world will change as a result of lockdown. I think people are still selfish. They are only not able to be selfish because this means that they are able to be alone still away from other people who have grown to be a possible threat. The world is putting up with this, waiting to return to the normality that they want to return to.