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Cyber’s wide angled, far sightedness might encourage our coming to grips withrefusal of tribalism,
might outpace the ClanAncient in us through a sum totaling,
OUTPACING OUR CLANANCIENT
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Continuing her close reading, Shash responded to this idea of the Cyber outpacing our ClanAncient:
Will cyber "outpace the clanancient"? In addition to being a liberating space, good arguments have been made for the Internet being a fertile haven for tribalism… As a reader, I felt a twinge of lack of safety for myself, if you, as my trusted guide, might possibly have not wrestled with these more sinister options. It would have comforted me to be sure that you have not been overly charmed by the cyber, but are still guiding me, in safety, along paths you have already investigated.
ANNIE RESPONDS RE: SHASH'S CONCERNS
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Reading of your twinge made me want to immediately explain my attraction to, & advocacy of the Cyber. Heaven forbid anyone feel unsafe, as I very much want to be your trusted guide!
I know my openness to the Cyber, perhaps my susceptibility to its charms, has to do with a determination, as a digital non-native, to not be left out of any conversation because I don’t understand the language.
Additionally, I perceive the Cyber as being, at base, a tool. I cling to a practice of refusal to be intimidated by its “toolness” (realm of boys/men) and try to stay aware of, but not be discouraged by the abusive cultural/social influences it’s bringing to/out in us.
My personal strategy of maintaining this attitude does not make the Cyber any less dangerous in the ways you mention. Its wave after wave of shocks are the same as those of the sharpened bronze blade in Homer’s stories that “transformed human relations”; tools bring cultural wealth to us along with more efficient ways of killing one another.
However, as much as we can enumerate the harms of the tsunamic change brought by our succession of tools since the cave I, a woman, have no desire to go back there. (I know who rules in caves.)
At end and as always, the challenge is in gathering/keeping the pressure on the collective Will and Consciousness to bend our tools to their beneficial uses.
Additionally, I feel within this revolution is an opportunity to channel our emergent & empathetic SternMothers in the hope we can implement our growing understanding that all-is-relation, no human unconnected.
This understanding is, of course, a message/meaning of the Cyber as well.
You’d have to say my first contact with what would become the Cyber was early. I remember punch cards. When she was young, my mom worked in data processing at the college. I would wait for her in the “women and family rest room” after walking from kindergarten close by.
Those rectangular, manila cards with lines of filled or empty holes - little beige dots of absence - digital predestinations found everywhere: the floor, clothing, in your braids.