In business, government and education today electronic tribes gather on a daily basis to send each other millions of signals that digitally bind together people in thousands of virtual tribes. Yet these social formations so touted by lovers of high tech are pseudo-communities where physical presence is absent.

In the territory I know best, higher education, these communities take the form of e-mail exchanges, MSN “networks,” MySpace, Facebook and WebCT pages, and course outlines and notes uploaded to teachers’ personal web pages. As a result of all this virtual communication, body language and dialogue have faded from the scene. And they can’t be replaced by emoticons and MSN Messenger.

Why do people love their virtual pseudo-communities?

First, people love technology, and computer and software firms like Microsoft, Apple, HP and Sony have invested millions in new communications technology, so they have to convince people it has a useful purpose. So in part it’s a matter of high-tech capitalism saying “we have the tools, but not their users . . . let’s go out and create them!” Advertising turns cell phones, laptops and cable modems into the religious fetishes of our postmodern culture.

Second, we live in a narcissistic consumer society that to echo French theorist Guy Debord thrives on separation and isolation. There’s no better way of keeping this isolation in place than by means of e-communication. This keeps people consuming in their private spaces, and turns the suburban shopping mall into the modern town square — without the protests, carnivals and messy politics, of course. This also has the effect of shutting down political dialogue, as witnessed by the plummeting voting rates among young people, who as a group are fascinated by electronics.

Third, e-comm and cell phones allow narcissists to avoid making commitments to given times and spaces. People can virtually commute, work at home, cancel lunch or movie dates on five-minutes’ notice and give people unpleasant news from a great distance (e.g., various forms of rejection, whether personal or job-related). Why commit to meeting friends a day before if you can make up your mind 10 minutes beforehand — after all, a more interesting option might arise.

Fourth, e-comm saves shy and reclusive people from struggling through the process of overcoming their shyness, through what used to be called “building character.” University students can go through almost their entire undergraduate careers without having to talk to their professors.

I’ve had fourth-year students who have been in my classes for only two months ask me for letters of reference. Puzzled, I suggest to them that there must be some other professor who after four years of undergraduate study knows them better. They reply in the negative. Why? The answer is obvious — when you mix together mega-classes in first-year university, the dominance of e-mail as the primary form of communication and course web pages, you get bodies of teachers and students deeply alienated from each other, linked only through meaningless virtual communities.

Last but not least, computers allow lazy people to become even lazier, setting up camp behind their keyboards and screens, avoiding daring ventures to distant locales like the building across the street or even downstairs.

The results are undeniable: disenchanted students who lose interest in and the capacity for reading books, who spend more time messaging their friends in class rather than listening to the lecture, who do as much of their research online as their professors will let them get away with, who think Wikipedia is the font of all wisdom, and saddest of all, who feel harried by massive workloads at least half of which were created by the very electronic devices they see as time-savers. This comes about either directly through researching material online that would have been more effectively filtered by a print culture, or indirectly by the time lost in surfing the web, babbling on cell phones, or wasting hours messaging friends instead of inviting them over for a two-hour movie or coffee and donuts.

Ironically, personal dialogue is far more efficient than e-mail. When two people converse in the same physical space for 10 minutes, a long series of questions can be answered, not to mention the fact that interlocutors can read each others’ body language and emotional inflections, thus getting “information” unavailable in virtual exchanges. To replicate a 10-minute conversation between two busy virtual “speakers” would require several days of e-mailing (assuming the speakers don’t just sit at their computers all day and have nothing else to do).

The reason virtual pseudo-communities choose e-mail and web pages over direct conversation has nothing to do with efficiency, and everything to do with alienation and technological fetishism. There is one exception: using e-mail to send large quantities of data, for example, a report, article, or entire book — although even in this case the recipient will usually print it off to read it, which they wouldn’t have to do if the sender just mailed it in the first place!

More and more we live in a society of the pseudo-community, a society where much electronic ado is made about nothing, where the amount of information available is severely out of whack with our individual ability to meaningfully absorb it. It is a society of virtual hobbits warm and cozy in their hobbit holes, free from fears of having to deal with strangers from the county next door, not to mention the office 10 yards down the hall.

Douglas Mann is a professor of information and media studies at the University of Western Ontario.

The views expressed are those of the author and not necessarily CAUT.

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