INTERNET ANXIETY

I'm very interested in the way movies reacted to the internet becoming mainstream. An entirely new method of communication, analogous with many old technologies but also totally unique. Requiring entirely new metaphors to comprehend - the information superhighway, the world wide web, the data stream. Pages, threads, drivers, wizards. A repository of information without any clear way to navigate it - akin to a library where all the books are unlabelled until you open them. Living through the proliferation of this would be disorienting, especially as it becomes explosively popular and effectively mandatory. A lot of movies flat-out disavow new technology as evil, scary and poisonous (The Lawnmower Man comes to mind). Others explore technology as a vector of the human experience through horror (See the original Ring). But what I really love are the films that really burrow into the core reason we created the internet; connection. Connection with information, with opportunities, with each other.

The turn of the millenium was an era of heightened anxiety surrounding technology. Feverishly feared and then laughingly disavowed when it was averted, Y2K points towards the way most people approached the internet; ignorant to the underlying mechanisms, but well understanding our new dependency on it. The explosion of globalism entrenched this feeling; life was no longer local, but influenced by elements far outside your control. You depend on people you never meet, and understand implicitly that others depend on you. Peep "TV" Show is a memorandum of that confusion. How do you live your life when a terrorist attack across the globe plagues your mind? There's an infinite distance between you and what scares you, but you understand that distance is illusory. The internet, too, is both close yet far. You set up a webcam to watch someone sleep. They could be anywhere, but they are right beside you, sleeping with you. You are intimate while alone in your room, obsessively cleaning your hands, willing yourself to be brave enough to leave the house. When one character suggests visiting New York, another tells her it would be meaningless. Physical distance no longer holds weight in our psyche; the world has collapsed in on itself, becoming a single point.

Loneliness is a core theme of these movies. In Pulse (2001) loneliness is quite literally the same as death. To accept your own exclusion from the rest of the world is to immolate yourself in oblivion. But even after that, traces of you are left on the internet, no longer extant yet forever preserved, calling for help. This predicted a phenomenon now prolific; users pass away, but their accounts remain. Facebook pages become gravesites where people leave flowers. Even death is not enough to remove you from the internet.

Obviously the internet is not all bad. I'm using it to share this writing with you, after all. In All About Lily Chou-Chou, the connection the internet provides is a lifeboat. People beaten down by the abuse of others in reality can turn to it and find others like them, who care about them, who accept them. Lily Chou-Chou IS the internet, the reaching, the grasping, the attempts to cross the gap. Of course, the main character can never see or meet Lily. You can't feel the warmth of your internet friends physically. But reality is a construct, a meaning we map onto the 'real'. There is nothing less real about forum posts than a conversation. So not being able to meet Lily is an inevitable contract we sign, while always rushing over if we think there's even a chance in hell.

Trying to call the internet a net positive or negative is facile. We created it, we live in it, and it has sculpted a new dimension of experience that we must navigate. Personally, I always find myself drawn to the monitor screen as a flat, impermeable barrier. No amount of trying can make us punch through the membrane as much as we crave to, Ready Player One style. But we still try; we make ourselves feel sick with VR headsets, we cuddle our phones in bed, we track our heartrate on our smart watch. Even in the era of the digital, the final aim is the tactile, the touching and integrating, placing ourself inside our desire. Long live the new flesh.