Echoes

I found, in the first instance, that my time online was time well spent. A blurry selfie by a thirteen-year-old child in a blue and yellow blouse came into the world. The world at that stage being nothing more than my own family and a handful of similarly aged friends. This was good: I realised that I had a voice which could reach further than I had previously imagined.

But I am not sure how to reconcile this decade old version of the internet with its current incarnation. We are currently witnessing some of the most severe and large-scale attacks on human life ever encountered, and we are witnessing them online. We are no longer able to argue isolation; the internet provides us with the echoes of millions of voices. These voices linger.

I think that the dividing line between a person and their online presence is like a membrane. This is especially true if we think about online presence in psychoanalytic terms; as a haunting, an absent presence. A body which is visible, but unreachable. Something which we can recognise as human, but which cannot be fully grasped. So a membrane is the best analogy for this relationship. A bodily boundary. Online presences are mediated by real human bodies. The membrane of the internet is an echo of myself and others. 

We can argue ad infinitum about echoes: Is an echo still my own voice?  Or are its reverberations animated only by the ghostly presence of others? It doesn’t matter; online presence, echoes, they are all versions of selfhood. It’s like this: little waves of speech which disperse and distil themselves into the wider reaches of the internet. And along the way they might collide with the speech of others, a melting pot of watery noises. 

These voices linger; we could call them word-skeletons. Reverberations of real people which are waiting to be taken up and made material. Of course, they are material already, but mediated by the internet’s biology they are made to seem not quite yet material. It is the job of the recipients of these echoes to fill them out. Or reanimate them. Or dig them back up. To recognise their immediacy.

I hope that this may act as a reminder to- next time you open Instagram or Facebook- listen to those echoes. They are haunting voices, waiting to be taken up and believed. Aside from romantic notions of aesthetic subcultures and pockets of stylised individuality, the internet rumbles with voices waiting to be heard. This collective rumbling is loud, and flies in the face of an increasingly authoritarian internet culture.