Ada's thesis outline

⭐ intro (what is this text about)

Digital lifelines of shared vulnerability.

- what happens to our sense of self when different identities cannot coexist inside us?

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

- what can this way of using the internet tell us?

Through these questions it will explore the relationship between marginalised individuals and online community, focusing on how these individuals find identity and belonging in virtual spaces. To do this, I will share people's stories of fragmentation, healing and support. The stories are backed and intermezzo-ed by theories about these people, places and moments written by social scientists, physiologists and theologians. It is a honest, guttural and soft portrayal of an online people.

⭐ 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?

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Berlant, L.G. (2022) On the inconvenience of other people. Durham: Duke University Press.

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Smith, N., Wickes, R. and Underwood, M. (2013) ‘Managing a marginalised identity in pro-anorexia and fat acceptance cybercommunities’, Journal of Sociology, 51(4), pp. 950–967. doi:10.1177/1440783313486220.