mynetworkedidentity-blog

[mynetworkedidentity-blog]

Touched by touch

Lockdown is over, at least here in Italy. Not completely over, of course, but we can go out for a walk if we desire to. Thought I would be enthusiastic about it, thought I would immediately go out and find my lost freedom, breathe the air of liberty. But the air I breathe from my window, secluded, is quite the same air I would breathe outside. 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen and 1% other. What is it that I’m really missing? Every time I’m in bed, ready to go to sleep, for some reason I cannot relax enough to fall into Morpheus’ arms. I start playing with my hair, caressing my cheeks, tapping on my lips, delicately touching my eyelids, brushing my eyebrows; I hug my stuffed animals, rubbing their fur. And I fall asleep. You guessed: I am missing touch. Not whatever touch: the intimate, loving touch that only another human being can provide. Let me tell you, the fact that I caress myself is not only weird to read for you, it’s weird for me to do in the first place. It’s some sort of non-sexual-masturbation.

The nurturing act of touching is necessary for the brain to learn to connect human contact with pleasure, and it sets the base for empathy.

Did you know that babies can die from the lack of touch? Orphanages have infant mortality rates as high as 30/40%, because babies do not receive enough physical stimulation. Babies raised in orphanages begin to fear touch and avoid it, and by not getting or giving intensive, repeated, loving contact, they lack the capacity to form relationships further in life.

What scares me most of all about COVID-19 is not the lack of freedom, but rather the fear of touch that will follow: physical contact, in fact, is the easiest way to get infected. Even though screens have made us feel closer to each other, helped us work online and keep track of time and what was happening in the world, their smooth, anonymous texture cannot replace the touch of another human. Screens can receive our tapping, scrolling, caressing, but they can’t give it back to us.

I once read that if we want to have an empathetic culture, we have to learn how to touch and be touched: the thought that this virus might severely affect - and by affect I mean decrease - this kind of human contact, the kind of human contact that can make us empathetic and build strong relationships since birth, makes me sick.

[mynetworkedidentity-blog]

“Let he/she who is without sin cast the first stone”

In Eva Illouz’s “Cold Intimacies”, an essay about dating sites, she reports several cases of women being disappointed by men who they met online when meeting IRL. Sometimes their handshake was too mushy, sometimes they didn’t look exactly like their pictures. To “disappoint” means to fail to fulfill hopes or expectations. Now, to which extent are those people who fail to meet hopes or expectations responsible for those? Can we even call them a disappointment, as if it was their fault? Aren’t hopes and expectations quite abstract, aren’t they fantasies we create in our minds?

Maybe we should be disappointed by our allowing ourselves to be disappointed, in the first place. But it’s difficult to take the blame. Much easier to say that it is someone else that didn’t meet our standards, rather than saying that our standards are irrealistic. One might argue “but they edited their pictures, they manipulated their online self and I was just expecting what they displayed on their profile”. Can’t argue with that, it makes sense. But who did not ever manipulate their online self? Who? You never put on a filter o changed the lighting of your pictures? You never cut a piece of your legs out of a picture because you thought they looked chubby? You never tried to edit out pimples, wrinkles or cellulite? Really? Congratulations if all the answers to these questions are ‘no’, cause I would answer ‘yes’ to all of them. What makes me feel authentic is not avoiding to edit my pictures, but rather admitting that I do. Here is a picture of me before and after edits. The one on the bottom is on my public Instagram profile; the one on top, rests in the privacy of my phone gallery.

Manipulating our online selves is completely normal, almost natural. The online is the place in which we can be the better, ‘perfecter’ version of ourselves, and to be honest, I appreciate having this opportunity.

But I cannot be disappointed IRL, it would be hypocritical of me: I could be the ‘disappointment’ in the first place. Even though it is normal to have hopes and expectations, we cannot carry them into real, physical life from the online world, or else we will, 99.9% of the time, feel disappointed. And we cannot blame the other for our disappointment, if we are manipulating ourselves online in the first place. Even if we do it slightly and no one can tell.

You can only cast the first stone if you are without sin.

[mynetworkedidentity-blog]

And I’ve been definitely practicing all of these lately. The first one to avoid complete isolation, the second one to fake emotions, the third one in memory of the good old days, the fourth one while writing this post, the fifth is my mother tongue, no need to practice.

[mynetworkedidentity-blog]

Sexting is more than sending nudes to a random tinder match. Change my mind (actually, don’t).

Sexting is art. If rhetoric is “the art of effective or persuasive speaking or writing”, then sexting is the digital, perverse version of it. And it reminds me once again of how much power words can have. As the ancient Greek sophist Gorgias states, words have a power “which by means of the finest and most invisible body effects the divinest works”.

This screenshot is taken from the chat with my ex boyfriend, right after having finished sexting. As you can notice, he did not only compliment my physical aspect or my depth of thought, but also my ability to use words - specifically in the context of sexting. And my being “so fine with words” did not derive from an innate ability to talk dirty, but from my knowledge of him, of what turns him on and what he likes to imagine about me. This is why in the first sentence I wrote “sexting is more than sending nudes to a random tinder match” (even if there’s nothing wrong with that): real sexting requires intimacy, desire to make the other feel good from a distance and knowledge on how to pursue this. I can state with extreme certainty that I have never sexted with someone I haven’t slept with before. In order to be “effective” in sexting, you have to create a context and act in it (this is why I find it helpful to relate to previous IRL experiences); you have to make the other sense your tone of voice, your look, your smell, your touching them... all through words. Essentially, you have to condense all five senses in one: sight. And not necessarily sight of your naked body through nudes, but sight of pixels that compose words on a screen. When I am able to engage in good sexting, and when I tell that I am making someone excited just by using my words, I feel extremely empowered, and almost proud of myself: being able to sext well means I am a careful observer of what people like and desire, and that I am able to create images, fantasies in others’ minds using merely my words. And let me tell you, these fantasies don’t always mirror “reality”, or at least my physical self in that precise moment. Actually, they hardly ever do.

This is what I mean. I created this meme with my best friend, Elena Santoro @iamyourhappyaccident. We are very intimate and we will, without any problem, share our sexts and talk about them openly. We always joke about how guys might have expectations of us laying in bed, in a very sexy outfit or naked, in a submissive position... all because of how good we are in creating this fantasy in their heads. Instead, we are literally looking like sh*t. Citing Gorgias once again, “A single speech charms and convinces a crowd when skillfully composed, rather than when truthfully spoken” (Helen 13). To make it more relatable, I will change it into “A single sext charms and convinces the receiver when skillfully composed, rather than when truthfully spoken”.

[mynetworkedidentity-blog]

“Hic et nunc” ; “wherever and whenever”

I spent the whole day in my head, do a little spring cleaning is the start of one of Mac Miller’s songs I was listening to today (its title is “Good News” and it has really good lyrics), and I think it’s relevant to the approach to writing I will take on for my auto-ethnography. In fact, instead of analyzing my emotions and feelings - which sincerely haven’t quite changed - I will do some “spring cleaning” and take out and develop some thoughts that have been “quarantined” in my head.

I always believed the internet was some sort of materialization of the expression “hic et nunc” (here and now). In fact, it compresses time; it annihilates space. Everything is here and now. With immediacy being its fundamental trait and goal, the internet provides us with actuality and an extreme sense of closeness. The flow of information online is available always and everywhere, it reaches us creating a “hic et nunc” dimension. Or at least that’s what I thought. The truth is that the internet is more of a “wherever and whenever” dimension. The expression “hic et nunc” refers to a very precise place and moment, it gives context to a piece of information. What the internet does, is to decontextualize information. The fact that information can be everywhere and available at all times has as a consequence that it’s unimportant whether it is here or there, now or later. Information online goes beyond space and time, almost annihilating it.

The concept of “hic et nunc” has to do with the nature, the existence of something. It confers to a piece of information an “aura”. Benjamin in his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” explains this “aura” in terms of art: in fact, it is the very “hic et nunc” that makes an artwork valuable; the existence of the artwork in that very precise moment and in that very precise space, makes it a masterpiece. The reproducibility of art and the fact that it can be seen wherever and whenever, makes it less valuable, it deprives it of its aura. In the same way, we could say that information that is available wherever and whenever is deprived of its “aura”. And the aura can be interpreted as its meaning, once again going back to Baudrillard and his annihilation of meaning caused by the overload of information. We have to stop believing that the internet or social media represent a “hic et nunc” dimension. The “hic et nunc” dimension creates meaning, context. The “wherever and whenever” dimension creates entropy, decontextualization, annihilation.

At this point, I would like to go even deeper. If we deprive information of its “hic et nunc”, we deprive it of its meaningful context. But what if we deprive ourselves of our “hic et nunc”? I thought about this while changing my position on Tinder and putting it in the US - specifically in San Diego, California. In fact, with this whole quarantine situation, Tinder made its “passport” option free, meaning that people sitting home can “be” wherever in the world at whatever time and get in contact with people from all over the world - rather than merely the ones that are maximum 100km away. Thinking about this, I thought about Martin Heidegger, who, in his “Being and Time” writes about our “being”, our “existence” as to be collocated in the “hic et nunc” in which we act. Our being and our existence is therefore a “Dasein”, a “being there”, always connected to the spatial and temporal dimension and contextualized by these. Essentially, no “hic et nunc”, no existence. No “hic et nunc”, no humans.

Going off from this understanding of being and existence, a couple of questions arose in my mind. How could our online identities, our online selves exist, if the internet doesn’t have the “hic et nunc” dimension? How can we even call “self” or “identity” and riconduce to our human condition something (such as our tinder profile with the “passport” option) that, unlike ourselves, “exists” wherever and whenever in such a decontextualized manner?

Unfortunately, no good enough answers arose.

It would be useless to answer these question online in any case, wouldn’t it?

[mynetworkedidentity-blog]

Kinda sad how this man doesn’t dream of having sex with me, but of sexting with me. Is my online self more attractive than my in real life self?

[mynetworkedidentity-blog]

Some Marxist told me it’s because the exchange value is being dictated by capitalism instead of representing the use value :(

“Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.”

—

[mynetworkedidentity-blog]

That explains a lot.

“Art is to console those who are broken by life.”

—

[mynetworkedidentity-blog]

“Will adapting lead us to numbness?” is a question that may arise in many of us, especially during these days. We went from all to nothing from one day to the next. We were deprived of aspects of our lives that we thought were “normal” and that probably, we always took for granted. We adapted to new rules and learned new terms such as quarantine, social distancing, self isolation.

Pretty much all around the world, we are locked in our houses. The connotation we give to “home” is slowly switching from “peaceful“, to “hollow”. Home is not somewhere we feel safe and protected, it’s a prison we want to escape. We find ourselves in an abusive relationship with boredom: we are scared of it, but can’t run away from it; we try to distract ourselves from it, but it’s hiding behind the corner, ready to hit us again, and again, and again. Until we become numb in front of it, we let it take over us, passively. This forced cohabitation with boredom is challenging our feeling “alive”, threatening our most human, primordial trait: being able to feel.

Numbness is, par excellence, the state of not being able to feel, both physically, mentally, emotionally. It even goes beyond the concept of anhedonia: it’s not merely the inability to feel pleasure and pleasurable emotions, it’s the inability to feel. Period. We couldn’t even feel bad emotions, if we wanted to. Scary how boredom could take our humanity away this easily, if we let it.

But did we do it to ourselves? Did we consensually welcome boredom in our lives by adapting to this situation? In a way, yes, we did. But adapting, in our situation, was the bravest thing we could have done. Adapting has some inherent passive connotation: if we are adapting, we are changing ourselves to fit into a context. If we are adapting, we are not brave enough to make a change. In this case, adapting was the most active thing we could have done. We might think about activism as going out in the streets, fighting for what we believe by screaming it out loud. Now, activism is about staying home, going from our beds to our couches to our kitchens. It’s about scrolling our social media for hours, ranting about how much we would like to go back to normality, showing what we do to spice up our days. It’s about posting stupid TikToks and #tb pictures to keep our social media accounts active. Activism, right now, is also about being bored.

So, what I want to tell all of us sitting in our houses bored out of our minds and feeling hopelessly apathetic, is: we are f***ing activists. Beyond all the numbness this adaptation brought, we should, at least, allow ourselves to feel PROUD.

[mynetworkedidentity-blog]

Vanity is definitely what keeps me from deleting my Instagram account.