Ada's thesis outline

⭐ intro (what is this text about)

My love,

Before we start this journey, I want to make sure you're prepared. Do you mind if I ask a few questions? The story I need to share is delicate, and if your heart is heavy, it may not bear its weight. So, let's begin by checking your heart. Take a deep, slow breath, and let it soften. Focus on how it feels as it fills your lungs and envelops your heart. Are there any sharp edges, any hardness? Can the next breath come in even more smoothly, or does it encounter resistance? If it does, maybe it's best to return to this story at a different time. Just remember, the breath is like a river and can soften rough edges if you let it.

If you found your heart to be soft and warm, I trust you'll be able to carry mine with yours. Imagine this story as a delicate, raw-skinned creature, in need of gentle handling.

Safe dreams now, and I talk to you soon.

The story goes like this: there was no beginning, but there was Heaven and Earth. Earth was for bodies to sit and for leaves to grow, fall, and rot. Heaven was the origin and the destination, where all things came from and returned to. All creatures existed in bodies that moved, loved, and rotted but also in Heaven. Creatures tirelessly searched for Heaven throughout the embodied earth. Some found it, some made it, and others awaited its revelation. However, not all creatures were made equal; for as Heaven split into form it could grow and be moulded by how much love it received. Yet, for those who needed, there were windows to Heaven. Angels came to earth as both messengers and messages of Heaven, Divine Machines.

The language I've been speaking with you it's that of Abrahamic religions. If you are not comofrtable with this, there are other ways. This is an old story, this is the only story, yet it can be told many ways.

I can explain it the way human creatures explain things through shared words. It might go like this: when people undergo multiple traumatic experiences that cause lasting harm, they fracture their sense of self. As a survival mechanism, trauma survivors split their "bad" selves that suffered the trauma, from their "acceptable", daily selves. This strategy exacts a heavy emotional toll, necessitating ongoing dissociation, denial, and self-loathing. Ultimately, it leads to the abandonment of the vulnerable selves to survive an unsafe world (Fisher, 2017). Socially marginalised by their trauma, people start to seek alternative places to identify and reconnect their fragmented selves. The internet offers as such a refuge; a safe haven for those with unconventional identities, offering support and easing the feeling of cultural displacement. Online communities help people challenge their marginalised status, manage inconvenient identities, and receive empathy without fear of judgment (Smith, 2013). The digital space is thus unique as it exists both "out there" and "in here", simultaneously public and private, extending one's self and connecting with others. These communities offer a back-place to build your own culture, even if still influenced by the physical world (Adler & Adler, 2008).

I could tell this story by asking you one question too. When was the first time you felt loved?

To me, this is the most painful way to tell this story.

The easiest approach is the way of fairy tales, where there are good children and bad stepmothers. If I used that narrative form, the story would really be quite simple.

Once upon a time, all people were stars in the night sky. They shined together, forming one magnificent entity that expressed itself in thousands of ways. When they wished it so, they would come to Earth and each inhabit a small body and experience a small life. Some of these lives were joyous ones, where the stars could feel a parent’s love, eat chocolate and swim in the ocean. Others were less fortunate, and lived lives full of people who had forgotten they were too once stars. They experienced a pain so strong that it shattered them into a million shards, all sitting neatly inside a human body. Fragmented stars went on living their human lives, did homework, laundry and had conversations; forgetting The Great Sky from which they came. There were, however, windows to find glimpses of it. These windows were not what you may imagine; they were intricate machines made of cables and circuits. The machines helped them find others, both shattered and whole. The shards reflected onto each other and shone so much light back into the stars that some started slowly mending and rekindling their starlight.

Hello again. Have I lost you? Perhaps I have, I never knew you for one to read fairy tales. Trust me, you will find them relevant. I will tell you some traumas and they all have truly happened. I promise you now not to ever hide the truth or soften its impact, for facing it can be so liberating. All I can do to protect you is to prepare you. It is not crucial to find out who endured what type of suffering, but rather to know that suffering was endured. You may have encountered some of this yourself, or it might have manifested differently for you. I’m not sure, as you never shared that with me. Please, be as gentle with my pain as I will be with others' and indulge a little of my storytelling.

Love,

Yours.

⭐ key issue 1 = chapter 1

fragmentation of the self as a result of trauma and marginalisation

what happens to our sense of self when our identities cannot coexist?

When trauma occurs you dissociate. Your personality splits when trauma happens, a wounded part and a part that has to deal with it. Fragmentation of personality causes trauma to stay with you. Seeing the experience, experiencing it as an adult with compassions supports your wounded part and heals.

Fragmentation and compartmentalisation of mind and body in traumatised clients, self-alienation. Trauma-related disorders are not disorders of event but of body, brain and nervous system. Biological adaptation how individuals adapt to caretakers who are both protectors and danger.

Internally fragmented, paradox. Surviving the unsurvivable, reconciling opposites. Survivors of abuse, neglect and other traumatic experiences feel better because of compartmentalisation. Contradictions of true and false self cause pain. Over time, self-alienation can only be maintained by most individuals at the cost of increasingly greater self-loathing, disconnection from emotion, addictive or self-destructive behaviour, and internal struggles between vulnerability and control, love and hate, closeness and distance, shame and pride. Hurt, lost and lonely parts experiencing love, self-compassion for each part, a balance of parts (Fisher, 2017).

Alienation from the self and from others. Alienation sees both a negative sense of otherness and feelings going from rage to depression. It’s a subtraction, a withdrawal and distance. Again, a fragmentation. One manages the inconvenience of the world by creating distance from within. It’s an inside-out loss. If your relations to those around you were truly over and failed, you would need no distance. One only needs defence against something or someone who is still present (Berlant, 2022, p.26).

⭐ key issue 2 = chapter 2

online communities as safe space to manage identities that are outside the norm

how do alienated people find community and what are these communities like?

Online communities can give people a space to link their fragmented selves, explore and manage identities. Socially marginalised groups find in online communities a safe space to manage identities that are outside the norm. By building a community, you embed it into your daily life. Sources of social support and identity construction give marginalised people a space to understand and create the self. It’s interactive, archived and anonymised. I can use the online to manage an offline body. Deviant identities and bodies form disembodied communities. Goffman (1986) talked of “back places” as places where one does not need to conceal the source of deviance from the norm. By being witnessed you allow the self to be affirmed for the first time. Membership to a group of peers gives an antidote to the cultural dislocation. Communities provide management of a certain self and do harm-minimisation. You may challenge your marginalised status, manage inconvenient identities and receive sympathy without the risk of exposing yourself to parties who may not be sympathetic (Smith, 2013).

The immaterial cyber world is a dimension that is both “out there” and “in here”, both public and private, of the self and the other (Adler & Adler, 2008). Confused and believing oneself to be alone people seek help on the web. People find a community that can finally accept the shadows of your fragmented self, but the mirror shows scary images. One can find identity in community, the dispossessed finds a reservoir of hiding places to form your own culture, even if still influences by normative standards. Your relationships become the narratives you construct (idem).

The internet as a tool influenced by your social capital, intended as economic resources, mutual support, shared language and norms, social trust and a sense of mutual obligation. Disadvantaged groups use it to broader their social networks whilst advantaged groups use it to reinforce existing ties. If you lack social capital it’s thus likely that you use computer mediated communication to make up for it. Communicating with new people introduces access, information and opportunity into a network that had none (Gonzales, 2015). If you do have social capital already, you want to strengthen bonds. If you have little or none, it’s a necessity to seek for.

People in virtual communities do just about everything people do in “real life” but we leave our bodies behind (Rheingold, 1993).

⭐ key issue 3 = chapter 3

Sacramental web: a new vision of the role of the internet

what does this way of using the internet tell us?

Formulating a view of the internet as a place where people can find fulfilment, help and wholeness requires a re-analysis of what it is as a space. So far, we have seen conceptualisations of the web that distinguish it into four mindsets. The internet as an information space, an utilitarian tool to transfer data; the internet as a common mental geography or a mechanism to construct shared worldviews; an identity workshop or a place to learn and test new ways of being and a social space or a space to make connections with others. Summarised, it becomes a common space for constructing identity, pursuing information and meaning.

A new view sees a broader attitude towards it, identifying the internet as a sacramental and spiritual space. A sacred, holy space that has been set apart to assist in a human search for meaning significance. Online activities exist in this model as a part of one’s spiritual life guided by needs that can be for identity, community or information. In the immaterial and timeless, spiritual pilgrims form techno religion.

There are three main view of the interaction between spirit and technology. Machine-God, Electronic Creation and Sacramental Cyberspace. The first one is a search for a higher power within technology, a use of the internet as spiritual in itself. Techno-paganism falls into this, as does pro-modernist thought and progress fetishisation. Electronic Creation sees technology as a necessary tool for consciousness to evolved, a tool for harmony. Lastly, Sacramental Cyberspace sees the internet as a digital replication of physical religion (Campbell, 2005).

This thesis borrows heavily from the second category to build a third overarching view. As disenfranchised and alienated people turn to the internet for their search of a sense of community and well-being, the internet becomes transcendent. Technology and the internet are an extension of spirit, a tool to experience a reality beyond the solid. A moment without a body, a place without time. Religion-online and online-religion are but expressions of a search to name the invisible and intangible. It is absolutely not in the business of establishing the moral connotation of the internet or discuss its right to exist. It is here, we may not go back. What can it be? How can it help?

The connection between community and spirituality is itself the connection between the individual and the collective. The well-being of the individual is intertwined with the well-being of the community.

Spirituality is the inner sense of self we use to define who are. It is based on experiences of divine dimensions of reality and doesn’t rely on any special location or person to facilitate these moments (Pruyser, 1968). It’s a relationship between the individual, the collective and the universe. We experiences these sacred dimensions outside of institution, only through our own bodies, nature as a whole and technology.

Religion is one of the many ways through which spirituality can find expression. An institution based in faith through which practice becomes tradition. It necessitates a division and polarisation of the natural from the super and shrouds the divine in mysticism. Spirituality is, at its core, fairly simple. It’s a conscious interconnectedness where the divine could be in everything and life is but an expression of a network of unity (connects to bridle network of the more-than-human) (Chile, 2004). It’s trust, a search for meaning and purpose, a sense of connection and a transcendence of the self that results in inner peace and well-being. It requires a relationship with something greater than the self and an holistic wholeness (Delgado, 2005).

Technological determinism reconceptualises machines and organisms as coded texts that we can use to write and read our reality. Haraway talks about a boundary between physical and non-physical that is blurry and indistinct. These dichotomies between mind and body, animal and human, organism and machine, public and private, nature and culture, men and women, primitive and civilised are all in question. Home, the workplace, public arenas and even the body itself can all be dispersed and interfaced in infinite ways. Communication science has been translating the world into a problem of coding. The solution to key questions is a theory of language and control. It sees a world divided. By boundaries where information sits neatly as a quantifiable emergent. Social connections are seen as a network with hubs and edges, classifiable. The idea of a universal theory is a mistake that misses most of lived reality. We must take responsibility for technology by reconstructing boundaries to connect with other and with all of our parts. Escape dualism, rebuild and destroy machines, identities and categories. Though both are bound in the spiral dance, I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess (Haraway, ?)

⭐ conclusion

The project, how can this inform the production of a community platform?