The Internet Has the Potential to Bridge Our Differences of Experience | Virginia Heffernan
- 6 years ago
In the digital era, you have two choices: unplug your modem or bear witness to the world. Virginia Heffernan explains how the internet is more than an entertainment arena, it's also a courtroom floor. Heffernan's book is "Magic and Loss: The Internet as Art" (http://goo.gl/Ertv9O).
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Transcript - Let's take the video of Philando Castile’s death. So that was shot by his fiancée and her readiness with her phone and her quick instinct to use Facebook Live was very potent in that video. People may remember that she is watching her fiancé bleed to death and at the same time calling out to two entities to witness her. The first is God and the second is Facebook. So she wants our witness. The purpose that we as users, as responsible users, as humane users of the Internet have, our responsibility is to bear witness in that way. Not to experience it ourselves so much as to testify to the fact that it happened, to serve as a massive jury of peers who give credence to the experience of other people.
And in that way I think that was an extremely profound moment crystallizing the way that we all use Facebook when we use it right or use Twitter when we use it right. You have Newt Gingrich now even saying white Americans don't understand the experience of black Americans. And that chasm, that gap in understanding has been one that the Internet is in large part responsible for, that there's a huge vocabulary, there's a set of symbols, that's what I think of it as an idiom set but also a testimony about experience of each of us, of each of us in different dialects that we weren't allowed or we didn't have access to communally share. Now we are, as some people say, in this adolescence with digital culture and we're trying to determine what to do with this infinitely polyglot culture, it speaks so many different languages. Read Full Transcript Here: http://goo.gl/8NBZUo.
Read more at BigThink.com: http://bigthink.com/videos/virginia-heffernan-on-the-internet-and-social-divides
Follow Big Think here:
YouTube: http://goo.gl/CPTsV5
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Twitter: https://twitter.com/bigthink
Transcript - Let's take the video of Philando Castile’s death. So that was shot by his fiancée and her readiness with her phone and her quick instinct to use Facebook Live was very potent in that video. People may remember that she is watching her fiancé bleed to death and at the same time calling out to two entities to witness her. The first is God and the second is Facebook. So she wants our witness. The purpose that we as users, as responsible users, as humane users of the Internet have, our responsibility is to bear witness in that way. Not to experience it ourselves so much as to testify to the fact that it happened, to serve as a massive jury of peers who give credence to the experience of other people.
And in that way I think that was an extremely profound moment crystallizing the way that we all use Facebook when we use it right or use Twitter when we use it right. You have Newt Gingrich now even saying white Americans don't understand the experience of black Americans. And that chasm, that gap in understanding has been one that the Internet is in large part responsible for, that there's a huge vocabulary, there's a set of symbols, that's what I think of it as an idiom set but also a testimony about experience of each of us, of each of us in different dialects that we weren't allowed or we didn't have access to communally share. Now we are, as some people say, in this adolescence with digital culture and we're trying to determine what to do with this infinitely polyglot culture, it speaks so many different languages. Read Full Transcript Here: http://goo.gl/8NBZUo.