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Personalism Instilled in me at a young age by my dutiful mother were certain key elements of what might be considered “good-breeding”--writing thank-you notes, holding doors and responding promptly to RSVPs. So naturally, my mother was not pleased by my flat-out refusal to respond to an e-vite I received this Christmas for a party of a family friend. Besides the fact that I don’t check my email regularly and therefore hadn’t even received the invitation until after the RSVP deadline, I have little respect for email as a form of communication and so I felt no need to respond. My frustration extends well beyond e-vites. I resent my cell phone and the expectation that I will use it as my primary form of communication simply because I own it. I find the Internet overwhelming and distracting. On a very basic level, I don’t like looking at screens and therefore make conscientious efforts to avoid having to do so. Family and friends like to write this off as a forced quirk, motivated by my desire to assert my identity as some Neo-Luddite. For me, the choice to avoid habits which perpetuate human-machine rather than human-human interactions is both aesthetic and moral. Aesthetically, I just don’t find computers or televisions or cell phones very pretty and prefer instead looking at a human face, reading actual handwriting, listening to the intonations of a real voice. Morally, I firmly believe that any normalized behavior which promotes isolation will limit our ability and motivation to organize in resistance against systems of oppression. Simply put, we will only be motivated to resist when we realize that other human beings are as fed up as we are; we only realize that other human beings are fed up as we are by talking to them. Wendell Berry, philosopher and farmer, writes, “Abstraction is the enemy wherever it is found” (Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community). He states this in the context of conservation and sustainability, but I think he would deem it appropriate in understanding social abstraction as well. I can’t think of a more abstract form of communication than text messaging. Fragmented words and phrases appear on cell phone screens, devoid of the normal conventions of conversation. The more abstracted our daily interactions with one another become, the more distant we grow from our identity as a community and what, as a community, we are empowered to achieve. This, I believe, is the goal: for us to forget that as a group of people who are angry about the same thing we can demand change. Those who prosper from our complacency love anything that will make us feel isolated from one another. They love when we believe that no big changes could ever happen. What they fear most is two or twenty or two hundred people coming to the same conclusion: we aren’t satisfied. In their mind, what would be most disruptive to the system that allows them to prosper from economic, racial, and social inequality would be for mass groups of people to reject how that systems works. In his book Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda, Noam Chomsky succinctly describes how and why we are maintained as a “bewildered herd”--isolated individuals who are comfortable because of their complacency. In Chomsky’s view, any system that depends on the quiet obedience of the bewildered herd will go to great lengths to always and at all times keep them distracted and isolated from one another. Chomsky writes, “People have to be atomized and segregated and alone. They’re not supposed to organize, because then they might be something beyond spectators of action. They might actually be participants if many people with limited resources could get together.” As long as we remain fragmented individuals, we will not have the opportunity to realize our shared dissatisfaction with the status quo, and without realizing our shared dissatisfaction we will never have the impetus to organize against the powers that be. One good way for those in charge to perpetuate the illusion of isolation and complacency is by limiting the amount of human interaction we have each day. It seems that more and more often we are encouraged to opt for a machine to do a task that at one time demanded human interaction. We choose self check-out at the grocery store. We “talk” to recordings on the telephone, “voices” that eerily mimic the intonations of a normal human. We turn to Wikipedia for historical or cultural information that could most likely be shared with us by a neighbor or family member. We drive alone in our cars; if we drive with children, we are encouraged to buy cars with television screens in order to keep children quiet thereby choosing not to interact with them, let alone taking the responsibility to parent them. Living in community with one another is an active way to reject a system which prefers us alone and resigned. Through sharing time, work, food, and space each day, we are reminded that there are others who share our frustration and we see that as a community we are able to achieve what we could not as individuals. Major changes against systems of oppression will not happen by individual efforts but only through shared ideals and the organization of human beings. At the end of The Long Loneliness, Dorothy Day recalls the very beginnings of the Catholic Worker Movement. It didn’t happen while they were staring at their televisions, sending text messages or setting up websites. As Day recalls, “It all happened while we sat there talking, and it is still going on.” Lauren Brown
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