Synopsis: Liminality & Ekstasis

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Summary Ekstasis and the Internet: liminality and computer-mediated communication.
new media & society
Copyright © 2005 SAGE Publications
London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi

Abstract

Anthropologist Victor Turner suggested that all social worlds are composed of two parallel, yet seemingly contrasting models: society as social structure and society as communitas. The relationships between these two basic elements of human social and cultural life are mediated by ephemeral experiences of liminality. Other major theoretical traditions also recognize these relationships, representing a distinct conceptual framework of direct significance to advancing understandings of the internet. The internet is a natural environment for liminality and ekstasis, a place where self and society must be made to exist in a process where both are translated into the conventions of the medium. Some people actively toy with these representations while others do not. However, in the final analysis these communicative dynamics are rooted in the liminal characteristics of the medium – not the motivations and intents of internet users themselves. Approaching the internet in this way stands in stark contrast to other latent conceptual orientations that are largely concerned with moral dynamics.

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Synopsis

Dennis D. Waskul is a scholar at the Minnesota state university and writes a lot about sexuality and the online. This article is less about sexuality but tries to articulate a new conceptual framework through which we can understand the internet. Waskul does this by applying the concept of liminality as described by anthropologist Victor Turner to the internet.

The texts start by explaining how nothing in the digital world is ‘there’, everything needs to be constructed - made to exist - through symbols, words and images that represents ‘us’. The question is how must we understand the internet in relation to our society, culture, communication and personhood? The article aims to analyse and understand the internet from a distance and create a framework base on the theoretical model of liminality articulated by Victor Turner (1967, 1969).

So what is this concept of liminality? According to Victor Turner (who in his turn based it on the work of anthropologist Arnold van Gennep (1909)) there are two parallels that we live by in this world. On the one hand the ‘structure of rural, political and economic positions, offices, statuses, and roles, in which the individual is only ambiguously grasped behind the social persona’ and on the other end there is the ‘society as a communitas’ a relatively unstructured and undifferentiated comitatus, community or even communion of individuals.

The text continues looking at different anthropologists who used liminality in their writings, ending with George Herbet Mead. He sees human selfhood exists out of separate, yet dialectical poles of a single process; the I (the acting self-reflexive persona) and the ‘me’ (the social-self, composed of internalised sets of expectations largely embodied within the roles and structures of society),

The internet and communicative games people play in it. The internet is an environment where people ‘craft’ their representation and sometimes they differ much from everyday life. Waskul writes how Sherry Turkey (author of the most widely cited internet participant studies) and other scholars critique the internet for it’s addictive qualities without understanding and overlooking the qualities of the medium. I’ve read some of Turkle’s work and must say that I, just like Waskul, mostly disagree with her. The internet-phobia or technophobia that these scholars embrace feel to me like a conservative way to look at ‘new’ technologies. But where I disagree with Waskul is this; ‘Even when she is not moralising on the grounds of one (false) dichotomy or another, Turkle (1995: 254, 261) variously suggests that the internet provides people ‘with an excuse for irresponsibility’ that is ultimately linked to a ‘heightened consciousness of incompleteness’. In short, Turkle clearly suggests that some uses of the internet symptomatic of cultural crisis.’ In a way I agree with Turkle, especially within the relation to the idea of the liminal digital. The space being one that is dealt with through representation, or seen as a game, it does take away part of of the responsibility. But this can also be seen as a positive thing; it makes room for experimentation.