Saul Steinberg, Techniques at a Party (1953)

“One of the narcotizing blessings of online sociality is that you can ignore when you are ignored and make it feel mutual. People can’t turn their back to you; they just disappear. Internet sociality for now dulls the the experience both of warmth and exclusion particular to in-person social scenes.”

by Helena Fitzgerald 

In Paris this past month, I spent an embarrassing amount of time trying to pretend I was part of the Lost Generation. I sat in cafes with gestural cigarettes and glasses of wine, and imagined myself crowding dialogue, confessions, secrets, and arguments that were the same as sex or sex that was the same as arguments into the earliest, wet-cheeked, wide-eyed hours of the blue morning.

Eventually I realized these adventures weren’t going to happen. I don’t speak French, don’t know anyone in Paris, and minus a few significant exceptions, everyone I love lives in New York. In what were actually rather empty cafes, I sat with my computer and participated in what passes for that sort of excitement for my generation — brief, witty comments on relevant facebook links, and off and on g-chat discussions of what was going on back home, removed discussions of what I was reading and where I had been. I told myself that since the internet permitted me myriad social interactions with the same people I’d be seeing in person in New York, nothing was lost in the substitutions.

After all, sociality has in many ways shifted fully to the internet, and the most hopeful myth about the social internet is that it is indistinguishable from in-person sociality, each being merely a seamless extension of the other. In leaving New York for a few months, I had tried to convince myself that the difference was immaterial; one could replace the other without changing the use or nourishment I got from them. I could still talk to all the same people, still see photos of and hear stories from the events I would have attended, and still virtually participate in projects with which I was involved. If one understands the internet as an essentially social entity then it is hard to argue that there is any real difference in switching one’s social life from a real to a virtual medium.

But some things can’t be replicated on the internet, can’t be reproduced without flesh-and-blood sociality, without itchy, sordid human rubbings-up-against. So I decided to come home.

I was missing the scene.

Culture needs social scenes. In scenes, erstwhile isolated artists and intellectuals become entangled in a coherent moment somehow larger than the sum of its parts. Making art can be a lonely, solitary practice. But scenes nurture the making of art, which ends up being made as a by-product of other social pursuits. When sociality and artistic production are equated, one becomes currency for the other. If you can make something impressive, you can be socially embraced. Social desires and the threat of rejection motivate artistic pursuits.

Scenes are ugly, cliqueish, steeped in unjust and illogical hierarchies of cool, and the link between artistic success and social approval is deeply problematic — being likable is rarely the same as being talented. Generations of aspiring artists have complained about scenes and longed to finally dissociate artistic recognition from social climbing. The internet has always offered relief and escape for people oppressed by and unable to function within the exhausting game of in-person social status. The internet can easily feel, in its anti-social liberation, like a way to score an old-school democratic triumph against an unfair system.

But would we still end up with as much good art, if making art had nothing to do with wanting people to like us? The internet purports to offer such a separation. It transforms both sociality and solitude, fusing them so that each is diluted in its new similarity to the other. Solitude was once a matter of being alone in a room. Now, instead, online social interaction is assumed to be part of solitude. Lately, most of the time when I’m alone in a room I’m still having some virtual interaction with someone.

Solitude without the internet is a different thing. Being truly alone for a period of time allows one uninterrupted reflection, introspection, and a sort of emotional detoxification. Solitude in its traditional form offers the same clarity as silence; the internet is essentially noisy. True solitude is rarely a motivation toward scene, but the internet’s blending of solitude and sociality can often make one long in just that direction. Our solitude becomes more social, as our social lives become more solitary. Though we turn to the internet for social purposes, we always use it alone. While scenes have many negative and unjust aspects, the incomplete alternative offered by the internet reminds us why the benefits outweigh the costs.

The exclusion that fuels social scenes depends the brutality of in-person sociality, on seeing people talk to one other and not to you. This brutality is not yet replicable on the internet. One of the narcotizing blessings of online sociality is that you can ignore when you are ignored and make it feel mutual. People can’t turn their back to you; they just disappear. Internet sociality for now dulls the the experience both of warmth and exclusion particular to in-person social scenes.

Intellectual production requires an enlarged engagement with humanity, not a hermit’s retreat from it. Criticism, like other art forms, expresses visceral emotional experience, a desire for more of the world, a choice to engage rather than to disengage. Scenes — parties and gatherings where shared interests give an excuse for an exclusive guest list — are where arguments and intellectual pursuits become vital, not in the hermetic refusal of human company or in a classroom where obvious personal reactions are inappropriate to the situation or discussion. Too often art and criticism are perceived as anti-social or isolating activities. From this perception comes an idea that the intellect is the opposite of the emotions and that to examine something critically is to deaden one’s human response to it. Social scenes require art and criticism to be inherently and unavoidable social, which is their difficulty and their use at once. Making art or writing criticism becomes equivalent to standing close to someone attractive, and saying things that will make them like you.

We will never know how many essays, paintings or rock songs were made as part of a strategy to wrest social currency or gain social visibility. Such motivation cannot be diluted and made comfortable. When the internet offers to reduce the difficulties inherent in social scenes, it also drains away all their benefits. If it does not truly hurt to be excluded, much drive to produce interesting work is lost. Spontaneous emotional pain is fantastic motivation. The brutality of in-person social interaction is an artificial and hugely useful substitute for a work ethic. The internet is well-known for enabling laziness, but it does so as much by allowing us to selectively dull our emotions as by the distractions it offers. The particular motivations of difficult, face-to-face social stakes force us out of laziness, providing a utility that has no virtual substitute.

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