Digital Existentialism: from "Nausea" to the "Writer's Fugue" can social media polyphony save the world?

Readers who've followed this blog since the beginning four months ago  will know  that - after years as a professional arts writer and academic - I have recently started to blog and am enjoying the freedom of experimenting with what feels to me like a new philosophical condition of digital existentialism, blogging and nothingness, I call it, that I keep returning to here in my posts.

I'd be interested to know if anyone has thoughts to share on their experiences of writing in digital media, how does it shape your sense of identity, how is it different to non digital writing - or not...do you have a different sense of yourself in online writing...is it more, or less, sociable... is there life beyond the screen and how much does that matter?  Does it keep you sane? is it a lifeline or a form of disconnection and dissociation that keeps you attached to the eye of the screen and away from real life?

 I’m not quite sure about that one as I spend so much of my time online.

This blog is like my writing has always been: my way of filling an empty space the realisation of one's own  existence in a cold world. Sartre called it "nausea" in his novel by the same name. I call it 'the writer's fugue' and explored the condition in my PhD: 'The writer's fugue: musicalization, trauma and subjectivity in the literature of modernity'. I may write about that here in later posts... meanwhile I am applying my idea of the 'writer's fugue' to writing in digital media, and it seems to me we're all doing it.. in the process creating a new global polyphony... Maybe if we can create enough positive energy and creativity and love for humanity through digital media writing, reflected in writing that shows the truth of what is happening in the world and what it means to be human in this new digital age of  human/machine,  this will counterbalance the wars and destruction and exploitation of this world and repression of our humanity... before it is too late....and we run out of time in the virtual reality of cyberspace... 

21st Century Writer's Fugue

Blogging and Nothingness... I must have dozed off mid-flight as we passed over the Middle East.  I was on my way to a conference in London, Culture and the Unconscious... I had in my cabin bag a copy of the paper I was presenting: 'The writer's fugue: a creative gift of magical absence'.


In my dreams the words scrolled across the screen in front of my eyes, and as I watched, hands-free,  the lines of text lit up and began to disappear...


Frantically, I clicked the buttons but the text was escaping without me.


I woke up, sitting on my bed in the cottage in the small Australian town. It's years later and I have been writing as if possessed by the spirit of the times, about terrible events in the world that jump out of the screen every time I turn on the computer. The Norway massacre... over seventy killed by a madman.... Refugee children turned away from Australia's shores and sent back into the darkness of unknowing...massacres, revolutions, wars, crisis after crisis...then the riots begin in England, London, pulling me back in my mind to the city of my birth.


It's the third day of the riots.


As I write the word "insurrection" my browser closes down. A dialogue box pops up. We are sorry [browser] has had to close unexpectedly. Please try to restart [browser] in a few minutes. I persist, restart.


A couple of days later I am writing a piece with the title Don't Blame Single Mothers, about "exemplary" punishments for single mothers who did not take part in the riots; reported in the global online media. One mother facing eviction from her council flat because her 17 year old was in the riots; another "single mother" given a five month jail sentence for accepting a pair of looted shorts- she  should have thought about the example she was setting for her 1 and 5 year old, the judge said.


As I write the word "gangs" the whole line highlights in blue: superfast scrolling up the paragraph, my hands are not even on the keys. The page flicks back to the first page I was writing, highlighting all the text as if looking for something- then just as fast scrolls down again leaving the paragraphs intact-  then flicks me back to the page I was writing. The two paragraphs I had just written about the single mothers, and housing estate children who join gangs, had been erased.


Disappeared.


I stare at the screen without a word. Blank to blank.


It's not just the cottage that's haunted. My computer is haunted too.


I remember that a similar thing happened just after Christmas, after I clicked "like" on a piece someone put up on Facebook with a link to an article in the New York Times on Julian Assange. I thought it was a good article, it seemed to be well researched, factual and seeking to give impartial and contextualised insight into the character and motivations of the founder of wikileaks, apparently it had taken the journalist months to arrange the interview; it read well.


I was surprised to find, a couple of days later, the same item on google  - it had been added to a Facebook group on Julian Assange; my name was prominently displayed- although what I was supposed to "like"  was unclear.


I pressed "unlike".


Instantly, the page started to wobble and shake, the text disappeared, and my computer crashed.


When I was able to restart it with some difficulty, I found that I could not get into my email account.  All my word files - around 1000, 8 years of writing- had disappeared from My Documents.


The files returned a day or so later. And I was able to re-access my email account the next week after contacting the provider and resetting my password.


That was in the end days of my (very) old computer, before I was able to buy a new laptop (a long story that I touched on in some of my early blog entries here).


What is going on?


What are these UFOs on the Other Side of the screen, that shadow us as we write?


That steal our thoughts and eat our words?


On social media sites, many spend considerable time constructing arguments in conversation, finding media clips, links to articles and podcasts, putting thoughts into words.


The page scrolls down and it all disappears.


Where does digital writing on social media sites go?


Forget writing into a void.


In the digital age of virtual reality


we're writing into Nothingness.


In the digital era,


Nothing


has never been more tangible.

21st Century Writer's Fugue

Blogging and Nothingness... I must have dozed off mid-flight as we passed over the Middle East.  I was on my way to a conference in London, Culture and the Unconscious... I had in my cabin bag a copy of the paper I was presenting: 'The writer's fugue: a creative gift of magical absence'.


In my dreams the words scrolled across the screen in front of my eyes, and as I watched, hands-free,  the lines of text lit up and began to disappear...


Frantically, I clicked the buttons but the text was escaping without me.


I woke up, sitting on my bed in the cottage in the small Australian town. It's years later and I have been writing as if possessed by the spirit of the times, about terrible events in the world that jump out of the screen every time I turn on the computer. The Norway massacre... over seventy killed by a madman.... Refugee children turned away from Australia's shores and sent back into the darkness of unknowing...massacres, revolutions, wars, crisis after crisis...then the riots begin in England, London, pulling me back in my mind to the city of my birth.


It's the third day of the riots.


As I write the word "insurrection" my browser closes down. A dialogue box pops up. We are sorry [browser] has had to close unexpectedly. Please try to restart [browser] in a few minutes. I persist, restart.


A couple of days later I am writing a piece with the title Don't Blame Single Mothers, about "exemplary" punishments for single mothers who did not take part in the riots; reported in the global online media. One mother facing eviction from her council flat because her 17 year old was in the riots; another "single mother" given a five month jail sentence for accepting a pair of looted shorts- she  should have thought about the example she was setting for her 1 and 5 year old, the judge said.


As I write the word "gangs" the whole line highlights in blue: superfast scrolling up the paragraph, my hands are not even on the keys. The page flicks back to the first page I was writing, highlighting all the text as if looking for something- then just as fast scrolls down again leaving the paragraphs intact-  then flicks me back to the page I was writing. The two paragraphs I had just written about the single mothers, and housing estate children who join gangs, had been erased.


Disappeared.


I stare at the screen without a word. Blank to blank.


It's not just the cottage that's haunted. My computer is haunted too.


I remember that a similar thing happened just after Christmas, after I clicked "like" on a piece someone put up on Facebook with a link to an article in the New York Times on Julian Assange. I thought it was a good article, it seemed to be well researched, factual and seeking to give impartial and contextualised insight into the character and motivations of the founder of wikileaks, apparently it had taken the journalist months to arrange the interview; it read well.


I was surprised to find, a couple of days later, the same item on google  - it had been added to a Facebook group on Julian Assange; my name was prominently displayed- although what I was supposed to "like"  was unclear.


I pressed "unlike".


Instantly, the page started to wobble and shake, the text disappeared, and my computer crashed.


When I was able to restart it with some difficulty, I found that I could not get into my email account.  All my word files - around 1000, 8 years of writing- had disappeared from My Documents.


The files returned a day or so later. And I was able to re-access my email account the next week after contacting the provider and resetting my password.


That was in the end days of my (very) old computer, before I was able to buy a new laptop (a long story that I touched on in some of my early blog entries here).


What is going on?


What are these UFOs on the Other Side of the screen, that shadow us as we write?


That steal our thoughts and eat our words?


On social media sites, many spend considerable time constructing arguments in conversation, finding media clips, links to articles and podcasts, putting thoughts into words.


The page scrolls down and it all disappears.


Where does digital writing on social media sites go?


Forget writing into a void.


In the digital age of virtual reality


we're writing into Nothingness.


In the digital era,


Nothing


has never been more tangible.

Death in Newcastle

It’s on days like this that I feel, dangerously, ominously, like von Aschenbach in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice. 

Feels like the triumph of the petty functionaries of the state institutions over the beauty and exquisite sensation of the human spirit.

Where is the sensitivity. 

I wait at the station; I stare wordlessly at the hard blue sky that is filled in my vision with  

images of official buildings, a clock tower, the council buildings. 

I am sure the train will be on time.

But I cannot wait for it, impelled by a sudden inner force to move, away from the station with its on-time train and lines of dismal passengers slumped on seats, away down the street,

to there and back again.

Death in Newcastle

It’s on days like this that I feel, dangerously, ominously, like von Aschenbach in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice. 

Feels like the triumph of the petty functionaries of the state institutions over the beauty and exquisite sensation of the human spirit.

Where is the sensitivity. 

I wait at the station; I stare wordlessly at the hard blue sky that is filled in my vision with  

images of official buildings, a clock tower, the council buildings. 

I am sure the train will be on time.

But I cannot wait for it, impelled by a sudden inner force to move, away from the station with its on-time train and lines of dismal passengers slumped on seats, away down the street,

to there and back again.