"Through social networking we receive not prayers and graces but links and likes."

A new issue of Intercollegiate Review, one of my favorite publications, is now available online. There are, as usual, a number of excellent articles. One of those is titled, "Liberty, Technology, and the Advent of Social Networking", written by Gladden J. Pappin, a doctoral candidate in the department of government at Harvard University. Pappin makes the following observations about the assualt of virtual reality upon reality itself:

The Internet and digital imaging technology allow you to imagine yourself anywhere in the world at any time, doing anything or just about anything. But should you actually travel there, the sights quickly shrink in size to the display screen on your camera. The moments of life become a database, ready for facial recognition software to find you in every digitized picture. The world, emptied of meaning, presents an unbearable situation in which meaning must be imposed—any meaning you can find, any time—an unlimited constant announcement of meaning, available for anyone and inescapable. To see a flow of constant interpretation is to witness the death of events, their memory, their study. If an action did not happen before it was interpreted, if our knowledge of far-away events is greater than our knowledge of events nearby, if events nearby seem dull in comparison, significant only if they are tweeted, then in what sense do events happen anywhere in our life? That was Baudrillard's question, a question that grows more pressing as virtual reality extends itself.5

Although the Internet appeals to the desire for privacy and for liberation from place, it also involves networking around particular, shared goods, and the creation of something like a protopolitical community. Social networking apes the old politics of common goods, but it leads to a manic intrusion of the virtual upon the real. In the phenomenon of flash-mobs the virtual passes over into reality on the condition that the real is momentarily treated as the virtual, a pure resource, full of possibility and consequence-free. As any survivor of a flash-mob knows, the damage is not merely virtual. The low entrance fee of a virtual community, whether formed for a virtuous or a vicious end, has the same effect that any other price does. A place in reality has too high a start-up cost by comparison. The currency of good deeds is driven out by the rigor of Gresham's law. The ease of virtual community is offset by the ease of virtual hooliganism.

The community of the Internet is now as spiritual as the communion of saints once was, so it is fitting that McLuhan thought Thomas Aquinas's angelology was important in understanding the media. Through social networking we receive not prayers and graces but links and likes. The church triumphant appears in virtual reality, where all things are possible and everything is realized virtually in the mystical body of the web. As in the resurrection of the body, logging off from your account gives you your body back, this time not glorified but fraught with anxiety, the church suffering after triumph rather than the reverse. Signed off from your account, you are now unaccounted-for. Reality itself becomes the afterlife, the postmodern No Exit where hell is virtual people. The advent of virtual reality, not to say the beginning of modern politics itself, detaches human beings from the consolations of church, city, and family that wayfarers in this life once thought they had. A late-modern Augustine could not see technology as just another dimension of alienation from our heavenly home. We are now aliens twice removed.

Read the entire piece.