"Disappointed" in the Internet

Why do so many accounts of new technology (in any era) focus on disappointment, with our unrealistic fantasies and expectations dashed and replaced by disillusionment.  Ah, we had hoped for so much!  Ah, we had hoped for everything!  And what are we left with . . . nuthin.

Well, not really.  We're left with a lot.  But because we aim so high, buying into a false promise of romance and happy ever after, we don't even see all the ways we do change, all the ways technology has transformed our arrangements and should be (therefore!) transforming the ones that require our participation.  What?  It doesn't just happen externally, because of the Internet?  We have to do something too?  What kind of a basis for a relationship is that?  (I'm being sarcastic in case my blog tone eludes you.)

This insight of how "disappointed by the Internet" is really an erotics of false expectation is borrowed from the brilliant work of my friend, colleague, and new writing partner Sharon Holland, a professor of English and African and African American Studies at Duke.   She is writing what will be a major, groundbreaking, paradigm-altering book, almost finished now, called "The Erotiic Life of Racism."  Her argument is profound--and I know she has given many talks on this so I'm not giving this away, simply adding fuel to all our eagerness for this book so we can all read it and assign it.  Here's how her argument plays out for racism (and with apologies in advance to Sharon in case my quick summary glosses over key and sophisticated parts of her complex argument).  To simplify:   First, we invest insanely unrealistic hopes in the object of our cross-race attention.   It's a bit excessive, a bit sick, over-invested, too attentive.  That's the erotics part.  Like all false loves, this one is based in unreality not only about the Other but mostly about ourselves and our own vices (such as racism or, as applied to technology, our reluctance to change).   Then, when we attain the object of our desire (let's say, in historical terms, emancipation; or let's say, in personal terms, a crossracial friendship; or let's say in political terms, the first Black president), we start watching . . . but we are watching (whether we know it or not) for failure. 

We didn't want a relationshp. We wanted to be swept off our feet.  We wanted a fantasy. We wanted happy ever after.  Painless, with no investment or change of our own, with no need for us to do anything, for that is the fantasy erotics of this attraction.  It's all done for us.

Of course it fails to live up to expectation.  And then, of course, we can go back to what we believed before the fantasy ever began.   It's called "disappointed."   And disappointment then justifies going back to the pre-erotic cynicism.  Tried it once, it failed me, never again.

This past week, at lunch with a brilliant colleague, a professor of gender studies, she said, "Aren't you disappointed in Drew Faust?  She really hasn't done much for women at Harvard, has she?"   I thought of Sharon Holland's "erotic life of racism" and realised there is an "erotics of gender" expectation too.   I turned to my friend and told her Sharon's theory of erotic disappointment for race and said, "Hasn't Harvard been an all-maie university for most of its 400 years?   Aren't we asking a lot of the first woman president, who has been in office a year or two, that she should change that history overnight?"   My friend paused and (because she is a stunningly smart woman), got it immediately.  Yes, of course, why would we invest that much hope in a standard variety white guy president of Harvard?  We wouldn't of course.  We would measure every accomplishment as an accomplishment . . . not as a dashed hope against some impossible standard of perfection, promise, and fantasy of happy ever after.

And now, it has dawned on me, high above the New Mexican dessert, as I blog on the GoGo Internet connection provided to me inflight by American Airlines, that the same logic applies to New Media.  And here's the bottom line.  If we invest New Media with an erotic life, overdetermined by expectation, and therefore destined to fail, then we don't have to do much at all to ensure the success of those things that are changing.  Nor do we have to change.

Hmmmmmm . . . Nor do we have to change.  We can do our business, teach in our dull schools, and go on and on about the good old days because change, well, it happens somewhere else, in fantasy land, and has nothing to do with us.

We are disappointed in the Internet.   It hasn't made all our lives better, richer, easier, in all ways  . . .    We are disappointed in the Internet because it is lots easier to be disappointed than to work to make a relationship (including with new media) a success.  That takes work.  And it requires us to change.  Not the fantasy, not the erotics of romanticism, but good old hard work of reform that requires us to deliver and not simply to expect.  

Thank you, Sharon Holland, for kicking this paradigm of fantasy transformation accomplished otherwise and outside us, over and over, in different guises (race, gender, and eve new technologies) right out from under us.   The point of her "erotic life of racism" is that high-promise and high expectation of the Other means that we ourselves don't have to change at all.  Disappointment ensures that our bad attitudes stay safely, forever in place, justified by our  . . . disappointment.   There is so much in Sharon's argument that I suspect I'll be thinking it over and thinking it through over and over again.  Try it on!  You'll be amazed (and chagrined) at how often it applies.