Multiply - The Eschatological Impact of Vitual Annihilation

Wednesday, August 22, 2012 11:42:09 AM

The social psychology of virtual mass execution and cyber genocide.

I have this vision of this lovely organic internet place where we can all roam freely .....its like a digital concept of heaven that has grown out of being condemned to cyber death. The grief of a community torn assunder by forces beyond their control. It is an interesting sociological and psychological experiment and it suffers from the classic problems of social science too, in that the subject is analysing the situation in such a way that both the observer and the observed are subtlely altering the environment in an unstated relationship, an uncontrolled and often unacknowledged set of variables that killed off positivism and makes all social research contingent and situational.

I have become fascinated by the scramble of Multiply social networkers and bloggers to find a new home in the blogosphere when the platform upon which they have created a personal space in which they formed close relationships is scheduled to collapse. I refer to these condemned souls in the third person but of course I too am one of their number, my little project is threatened with obliteration and our community is to be broken up.

I have tasted all sorts of flavours from this approaching doom and symbolic connections to every society that has faced this in the past. I am currently reading a fascinating book called 'Radical Hope' subtitled 'Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastaion' by Jonathan Lear. It is about the cultural genocide of the Crow Nation as told originally by Chief Plenty Coups (otherwise known as Aleek-chea-ahoosh 1848 – 1932) as told to Frank B Linderman who the chief trusted to be his 'sign-talker' a few years before his death in 1932 at the age of 84. I have only just started the book, but I can see a symbolic connection between the fate of the Crow Indians (they are reported to prefer to be called Indians rather than any more politically correct designation) and the condemned captives of disappearing Multiply.

At this point people may well say, 'isn't it a bit trite to compare the cultural destruction of a once proud and independent nation with the plight of a bunch of displaced bloggers, unhappy that their virtual world is about to be lost? The answer to that is obviously 'yes' on the face of it, it is.....but what interests me is the existential connections rather than any direct comparison between these events. It is the sense of loss that makes Muliply the disappearing buffalo of this corner of cyberspace.

I am also reminded in some of my correspondence of communicating with someone on virtual death row, the end date set, the appeal underway, the hope of a 'basket' to put all our 'eggs' into in the future, the putting our houses in order, the feeling of the innevitable closing in, the sound of the hammering as the scaffold takes shape outside.

All the ingredients seem to be there, the loss, the grief, the anger, the hope against hope, all there in symbolic digital form of helplessness, hopelessness and despair.

Of course I exaggerate, this is only a virtual community of strangers spread right across the world who were initially only united by the ability to communicate in written English. But I think most Multiply users I know feel that it is rather more than that, that their friends and contacts are much more than just keystrokes on our screens, but real gendered and connected people, a sort of digital family in which all sorts of emotions and feelings (both stated and implicit) determine the relationships in much the same way as other types of social relations can and do.

I think the demise of Multiply is teaching us much about the meaning of online communities and human interaction in new and previously inpossible ways which give meaning to abstract notions like globalism and virtual reality and a new realm of remote intimacy that has more to do with spirituality than it does the concrete relations of material existence.

We do indeed exist in "interesting times" charting them is part of what I see my role as a blogger is and always has been, we are all at peril upon the raging sea where the threat of sinking to the bottom of the Information Ocean is an ever-present risk.