Le petit lien du week-end fétichise la déconnexion

Un très beau texte à lire sur le(s) fétichisme(s) de la déconnexion. Dans The New Inquiry. "The IRL fetish". Là. http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/the-irl-fetish/

<Update d'Hubert en commantaire> La traduction française de l'essentiel de ce texte est proposée sur l'indispensable InternetActu) </Update>

Ce texte est – notamment – une réponse aux thèses de Sherry Turckle développées dans Alone Together.

Après avoir dans un premier temps rappelé l'importance et l'omniprésence de notre vie connectée :

"Each moment is oversaturated with digital potential: Texts, status
updates, photos, check-ins, tweets, and emails are just a few taps away
or pushed directly to your buzzing and chirping pocket computer —
anachronistically still called a “phone.”

"Hanging out with friends and family increasingly means also hanging out
with their technology. While eating, defecating, or resting in our
beds, we are rubbing on our glowing rectangles, seemingly lost within
the infostream."

"Smartphones and their symbiotic social media give us a surfeit of
options to tell the truth about who we are and what we are doing, and an
audience for it all, reshaping norms around mass exhibitionism and
voyeurism. Twitter lips and Instagram eyes: Social media is part of
ourselves; the Facebook source code becomes our own code."

L'auteur prend le contrepied systématique de cette thèse, d'une manière que je trouve assez … jubilatoire 🙂

"But as the proliferation of such essays and books suggests, we are far
from forgetting about the offline; rather we have become obsessed with
being offline more than ever before. We have never appreciated a
solitary stroll, a camping trip, a face-to-face chat with friends, or
even our boredom better than we do now. Nothing has contributed more to
our collective appreciation for being logged off and technologically
disconnected than the very technologies of connection."

Pour enfin en arriver à défendre la thèse principale de l'article, cette fétichisation de la vie "offline" :

"The current obsession with the analog, the vintage, and the retro has everything to do with this fetishization of the offline"

Et d'en expliquer les raisons :

"In great part, the reason is that we have been taught to mistakenly view online as meaning not offline.
The notion of the offline as real and authentic is a recent invention,
corresponding with the rise of the online. If we can fix this false
separation and view the digital and physical as enmeshed, we will
understand that what we do while connected is inseparable from what we
do when disconnected."

A vous de lire. "The IRL fetish". Là. http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/the-irl-fetish/