Nick Carr responds to Rushkoff

Douglas Rushkoff wrote:

What are the, perhaps, unintended effects unleashed by our mass connectedness?

I wonder if it doesn't act as a political soporific, at least in Western democracies. If you look at, say, 1968, you see a remarkable protest movement that spanned the globe - "with a synchronicity previously unheard of in human history," as Franco Berardi has observed. This was a manifestation of a profoundly physical "mass connectedness," an in-the-streets "mass connectedness," and yet it was spurred and coordinated without any of the information and communication technologies that we today take for granted and often see as marking a revolution in our ability to communicate and collaborate on a large scale. (Even access to telephones was severely limited among the students of 1968.) In just the last few years, we've seen a series of traumatic political and economic events in the U.S. - unpopular wars, and an excruciating economic meltdown provoked in large measure by the greed of a small, extraordinarily privileged class of people - and yet despite these powerful triggers we've seen almost no sign of any mass protests. Our intensively networked college students have been as quiet as mice.

There are, of course, a whole lot factors involved here beyond information and communication technologies, and I know we should be wary of being reductive in assessing the situation. But it does seem strange that the explosion of virtual connectedness in the U.S. has been accompanied by the disappearance of mass political activism in the streets. As we shift increasingly toward virtual communication, where the abstract replaces the concrete, where ironic detachment replaces active engagement, are we sacrificing our capacity for such activism? (I'm not sure, but this may be related to the way that online "crowds," in Western democracies, tend to be deeply embedded in the Web's commercial matrix.) Baudrillard probably would have suggested that this is yet another sign of the triumph of the simulation over the event, the Net being the most powerful technology of simulation the world has ever seen.