The pandemic has opened the floodgates for millions of identities on digital screens. With its looming threat, we find ourselves spending much of our time online. If you want to connect with someone, there is no other way than to do it virtually. As a result, we see avatars of our loved ones and friends via Skype, Zoom, or any other digital platform each day we get the chance to.
In turning to the internet as a “refuge” in these times, we are often faced with practical questions such as, what about those without access to the internet? However, there are also questions coming from our own contemplation: What happens to our emotional needs when we communicate with others as cyber incarnations and not as physical beings?
In Michel Foucault’s “Madness and Civilization”, he introduced “Stultifera Navis” which roughly translates to “ship of fools”. According to Foucault, water and navigation play an important role. Being confined on the ship, the madman is delivered to “a great uncertainty external to everything”. The madman, in other words, is a prisoner “in the midst of what is the freest, the openest of routes: bound fast at the infinite crossroads.” In times during the pandemic, cyberspace is the ship we are currently in. Our isolation turns inward in a continuous mockery; we think we are at our freest, when in fact, the truth that we hold is limited only in the expanse between the point of departure (a digital screen from one end) and arrival (the digital screen on receiving end), upon which both places cannot belong to us.
Indeed, our corporeal being is apparent in the experience of the isolation we share in common. When we communicate with friends and colleagues through our laptops or phones, there exists an expanse between us: We cannot feel each other’s breaths or share the same object in our physical environment. What we get is only a semblance of our emotional freedom.
Social distancing and the stress of inadequate physical interaction manifest the truth of our emotional connection: we are beings capable of being embodied, as well as our emotions. However, in craving the warmth of the touch of another, we crave its physical aspect, not just its virtual proximity. In interfacing through our screens, we feel the absence of others even as we see their representations.
As emotional beings, we feel that something is missing in our virtual encounters. We tell ourselves that it might be because of the inconvenience of our technical mediums, but you can’t seem to shake off the feeling of absence. It’s alienation in its raw sense bound by the intimacy of distance. It is our emotional self that keeps telling us that our cyber incarnations are not us. We are not mere streams of consciousness on screens; we crave sensations through flesh and blood.
Our biotic vulnerability presents itself in newspapers and media platforms on screens — it continues to upscale, albeit susceptible to uncertainties. We all resort to our little cyber sanctuaries when we run out of physical distractions. Such emotional deprivation resulted in our analogue lives, indeed. Will cyberspace supplant the illusion of our emotional needs with its digital escape?
It is worth noting, further, that cyberspace and isolation can be used to help us appreciate what we really are as emotional beings who are taking up physical space. Our bodies are bound to be with others, as well as our minds yearn for the thoughts and feelings of another.
I hope that what we share in cyberspace is truly us. After all, if we explore the metes and bounds of our emotional needs using the virtues of online interaction while being aware of the factors that limit our sense of “being emotionally free”, we might even find our virtual activities liberating. Free from the weight of our physical expanse, cyberspace can definitely create an avenue for us to be with anyone, anywhere, and at any time.
Despite the pandemic’s seeming void that eats up our freedom to emotionally connect and seizes the same to the limits of cyberspace, may we continue to strive for the things that make us humans who are emotionally driven to be with others in person — skin and body — not just cyber incarnations.
As a piece of reminder, the emotions that we share with the person receiving our virtual avatars on digital screens will remain the same, regardless of our virtualisation or corporeality. There is more to your emotional being than the anchors of cyberspace, isolation, and the pandemic combined.
