Nurturing Virtue in Community

A summary of:
Schultze, Q. J. (2002). Habits of the High-Tech Heart: Living Virtuously in the Information Age. Baker Academic: Grand Rapids, MI, USA.
Chapter 7 - Nurturing Virtue in Community

This chapter was interesting. It affirms the importance of placeness as part of community - "community of virtue is above all a dwelling place" (166) - in that one needs to be a participant in and recipient of the pluses and minuses of one's actions in order to cultivate virtuous behavior, which requires some rootedness to a place. So while what makes cyberspace so unique - and Wertheim suggests a place that can accommodate the soul, ironically! - is that it obliterates placeness, or that it stands outside of space and time. The flipside of this is that it is "de-localizing" us and "unrooting" our lives, and "we increasingly live in a 'situation' of instantaneity, immediacy, and ubiquity" (168). Timelessness and spacelessness leaves us without moral anchors, and "Today, manufacturing online communities is like creating gold-rush towns that come and go with the promises of the day" (169). How can we cultivate compassion in this gold-rush scenario? - "Eugene H. Peterson says that we 'discover the meaning of the free life in acts of compassion and loving service, not in running after people who make big promises to us'" (170). Another helpful analogy is that in cyberspace, we are always tourists - "Cyberculture tends to identify us as tourists roving across geographic space rather than as neighborly inhabitants of a particular place" (171) - which means that we are interested in appropriating whatever it is (commodities, friendships, etc.) and then getting out of there, returning to our "real lives" and leaving the mess we created in our hotel rooms for someone else to clean up. The first step, then, is to become more individually responsible, which will only happen when we have to stay to clean up the mess; i.e. we have to become rooted to the space/time. And the second step, a more difficult one, would be to become hosts in this space. The antithesis to tourism is hospitality:

Hospitality thereby transforms homelessness into neighborliness. There is no 'virtual' equivalent of hospitality, since it occurs in a place. Illich says that hospitality requires a 'threshold' over which one can invite another. Communication technologies, he argues, tend to abolish the walls, doors, and tables that we need to practice hospitality. He says that we need to recover 'a practice of hospitality... threshold, table, patience, listening.' Such hospitality provides the 'seedbeds for virtue and friendship' and hence the place for the rebirth of community (172).

Secondly, Schultze argues that oral communication is fundamentally different from and superior to the kinds of communication that the Internet facilitates, because it is oral communication that "is crucial for nurturing communities of virtue" (166). Firstly, oral communication - in person - captures a great deal more depth than technologically mediated forms, which increasingly require us to include little emoticons to ensure we convey our messages to the receiver. Bizarrely, Schultze argues that oral communication is important for two other reasons: hope and memory. I understand the memory bit. Here's how he describes the hope (I think it's lovely!):

Technologically mediated expressions of hope are nearly always abstractly instrumental; they direct our attention away from our own communities and focus it on some distant state of affairs. Such instrumental expressions of hope thereby tend toward a form of propaganda predicated on using technique to gain audiences' attention and to enjoin them to desire something - such as becoming more attractive or believing in an ideology. Advertising and movies are filled with such propagandistic expressions of hope - hope for cosmetic beauty, happy endings, and cleaner wash. Moral hope, on the other hand, comes not through rhetorical manipulation but through authentic dialogue nurtured in communities over time. It flows from the life of the community as members commune orally. Ong calls this kind of hope 'arrested dialogue,' an expression of mutuality and shared desire. 'Hope,' writes Ong, 'is the difference between information encoded in machines and real knowledge in the consciousness of man.' Words enable us to share hope, like an invitation to riposte, to life with others (177).... Speech carries a kind of sacramental potential that enables us to re-invoke special meaning and significance into our understandings of our lives in relationship to others (178).

This chapter has made me wonder if a radical revisioning of the Internet might be based on an oral conversational / hospitality model: What if we could capture conversation (videos of people talking, removing the anonymity of communication) and then invite one another to participate in the furthering of that conversation? What if people could search this space for conversations that interest them and then introduce themselves to the people having those conversations? People could have private conversations in this space, but what if those people could make these strangers feel welcome and in appropriate cases invite them to join in? And what if these conversations were more rooted in time (if not space), so that they had an expiration date on them and in order for a conversation to continue - as in the real world - there would have to be continued interest in that topic? There would have to be commitment to the preservation of conversations and stories, as there has been in oral cutlures of myth and religion. (As a side point: I think we really need to reevaluate whether 'progress' in itself is preferable to 'continuity', which is what oral cultures value. Valuing continuity is a step toward becoming more responsible the earth and to future generations.) And there would have to be an effort toward consensus making, toward shared understanding, etc. in this vision (in contrast to the ways in which cyberspace currently "fails to advance our capacity for dialogue, cooperation, and consensus" and instead "appeals to the individual ego" (183)). The emphasis of such a space would be on conversation, whereas now "cyberspace usually substitutes consuption for conversation" (183).

Schultze states: "Cyberculture tends to reject the possibility of the very thing that it most needs to foster community: an overarching moral vision predicated on personal responsibilities, framed by shared obligations, and forged through civil dialogue" (185). But more important than communication, Schultze concludes that we need communion! This would "include words that help us tell stories, nurture intimacies, and build trust" (186). This is about really experiencing other people, not just abstracted representations of them; and empathizing with each other, and experiencing intimacy in the space of the Internet. While Schultze says this is the goal, he does not have a solution for fostering communion. Nonetheless, I think it's worth figuring out how to do so.