Being Online

Abstract

Abstract: Two critiques of mass media in the twentieth century gestured at its effects on the capacity of patience. Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death and Daniel Boorstin's The Image examine how the media changed our imagining of the world, the scope of its relevance for us, and our ways of being in it. This article follows their lead by inquiring how being online further undermines the capacity for patience, manifested most clearly in the self-generating rage characteristic of social networks' discourse. It refers this effect to three basic elements of the online world: the ubiquitous timeline format, the hybrid creature of written speech created by it, and digital objects that adapt themselves too closely to our needs, imaginings, and desires. All three foster a disruption of distances, where the remote and unfamiliar are experienced as unbearably close, a blurring of distinctions between inner life and external reality. A world composed of digital objects has lost what Hannah Arendt described as its power to "relate and separate people at the same time."