Jackie Danicki

Live it, learn it, love it:

Individuals often have more control over the online environment than off-line. Paradoxically, many commentators bemoan the fact that people online are self-obsessed, they talk about the echo chamber. At the same time, they also complain about the lack of awareness, sophistication and professionalism of online interactions. Both may be (and are) true but this points to something else that is going on - people are learning something. They are learning self-determination and unlearning decades of one-way communication and mass broadcasting. The ability to express and respond to things on their own terms and their own way is what this is about.

Emphasis mine, not Adriana’s. I remember when she first told me about how, after the revolution and overturning of communism in the place where she was born and raised, so many people struggled with basic day-to-day tasks that people in the western world take for granted. Things like getting the phone service hooked up in a new apartment could take months, partially because the person who needed the service was having a hard time doing things that, previously, the government had not allowed them the opportunity to do. People were thrown into basic living with freedoms that they had never had in their lives, and there was a lot of unlearning - and a LOT of flat-out learning - to do. The parallels with what is happening with individuals all over the world and how they are living with and using the internet are pretty clear.

Filed under: Individuality vs Collectivism, Life, The State Is Not Your Friend