Who are we in the modern Internet age? 👩🏽💻💾📱💻
And a reflection on what we lost when live music shut down
Hey everyone! 💯
Thank you for joining me on this journey. I’m excited to share what I’ve been writing and working on over the last few months.
I thought I’d start high level and share a discussion post about how the Internet has changed us as human beings. The early days of the Internet brought so much promise and optimism on how we’d “use” the new technology as a “tool.” But just as we shape technology, technology changes us.
I also want to share a reflection on live music being catharsis and a way for us as human beings to connect, share our emotions, and come together. It’s in those moments that we realize that we’re not alone in this universe and we’re all broken people trying to put together the pieces.
I think what connects these two pieces together are themes of humanity and connection and how that has changed over time. In today’s age, we are “superconnected” (to use the Broken Social Scene song title). And while there’s more work to do in this contested battleground for governance, if we can find those little moments of connection between us, there is still magic and hope in this world.
Below are abridged versions of my writing. You can read the full pieces by clicking on the links and going to my blog!
Who are we in the modern Internet age?
Written as a discussion paper for PUBPOL707 – Architectures of Digital Ecosystems for the McMaster University Master of Public Policy in Digital Society
The Internet and the modern digital age has fundamentally changed who we are and the human connections we have with one another. As Marshall McLuhan theorized, media – or in our case, modern digital technology – becomes extensions of ourselves and our bodies. The Internet is no longer just a tool or a “hammer” as Mark Poster argued in 2001 – we are no longer just “users.” In an idealistic way, we are digital citizens, our politics transformed from national geographies bounded by socially constructed demarcations of space to a digital sphere untethered to physical geography but increasingly governed by corporate interests. In this dimension, “code is law,” as Lawrence Lessig proclaims. And in today’s Internet, far removed from the idealistic anarcho-libertarian freedom dreamed of by the early hackers, social media platforms and the emerging “Internet of Things” (IoT) have made us the product and unpaid labour of the big tech companies, collecting our data and using our created content to sell to advertisers and generate profit. As a result, the Internet has transfigured our humanity. Who have we become in the Internet age – our current era of domineering social media platforms, big data, algorithms, and AI? And how will policymakers respond to the potential harms that these technologies impose?
Digital Citizens
We now belong to the Digital Agora. We are beyond “content” and “mastery” of the Internet as a “hammer.” The Internet has radically transformed our relationships and interactions with one another, which has affected our role as political individuals and the constitution of power. Darin Barney reflects on the concept of “Citizenship” by asking: what is our relationship to the State and to one another? Beyond the usual ideological traditions, I also think of citizenship as “who belongs” and “who is excluded,” of sharing a “collective memory” or “collective amnesia.” Or the “imagined communities” of Benedict Anderson that unites a nation. Or the “public sphere” of Jürgen Habermas.
We are rarely pursuing the collective good, instead arguing for individual digital rights. We should question whether social media platforms create individual harms that should be remedied or collective harms as Martin Tisné argues. The collection of data and the emergence of algorithms have ceded our power to the tech companies who sell our behaviour and attention to advertisers. Our digital citizenship has been turned into profit, and we are both the product and the unpaid labourers.
The Internet is no longer a “tool” to master. As Langdon Winner argues, “the devices, techniques, and systems we adopt shed their tool-like qualities to become part of our very humanity.” The Internet is a contested battleground for political judgment and democracy in the public sphere. As Barney argues, “it is intimately bound up in the establishment and enforcement of prohibitions and permissions, the distribution of power and resources, and the structure of human practices and relationships… justice is at stake in the design, development, regulation and governance of technological devices and systems.”
“All Politics is Local” – The effect of algorithms on the IRL public sphere
Digital technology has transformed the public sphere, but it is also still material and IRL. It exists through people’s livelihoods in a concrete way, through infrastructure and services provided by the State. It continues to have a significant effect on people’s lives IRL.
As the saying goes, “All Politics is Local,” and we imbue technology with politics and in turn, it transforms our own politics. Sara Safransky looks at “algorithmic violence,” where algorithms impose collective harm on marginalized people through the process of neighbourhood assessments. Through ideologies such as the Floridean “Creative Cities” concept in recent decades, urban planners have focused on (re-)development of certain neighbourhoods, at the expense of gentrification and the relegation of marginalized people to the periphery.
Algorithms have accelerated the process in how the State assigns or withdraws economic resources, often greatly impacting marginalized communities. Code and data often contains racialized biases which further impose power imbalances. As governments and corporations continue to adopt algorithms to pursue “neutral” “evidence-based policy,” biased data against marginalized communities affect algorithms and perpetuates structural harms in policymaking – code is affecting law. Algorithms can affect us as humans in the local sphere, take away our agency – the “social mortgage” of Ursula Franklin – and centralizes power, which will further pre-existing political, economic, and social harms.
The Internet as a Contested Battleground for Governance of Digital Individuals
We are fundamentally changed by modern digital technology that traditional policy frameworks are insufficient and ineffective in preventing and mitigating individual and collective harms. Political judgment and power relationships have been synthesized in the digital dimension so that the digital public sphere is just a part of the same IRL public sphere. “Code is Law” and digital policy impacts every part of our lives – including where and how we live and how we live. The Internet and digital technology are a contested battleground for our lives, our freedom, our democracy, and our power. Thus, governance of these technologies requires a re-conceptualization of our policy frameworks to address their harms on humans – not just “users.”
Read the full piece at https://blog.angelogiomateo.ca/blog-post/who-are-we-in-the-modern-internet-age/.
Live Music as Catharsis – An Essay for 33.3 x Exclaim!
February 26, 2021
I didn’t expect that I was going to write a reflection on what it’s been like to not have live music in my life the last year and to think about the last shows I went to see before COVID-19 hit. However, here we are, a year into a crisis that has stopped us from being together – where we once shared in a collective ritual revealing emotions that can only be inspired in us by music. 33.3 poses the question of who we last saw before COVID-19, but the bigger question is the entire meaning of live music throughout our lives – a continuum that extends way past late 2019, all the way to the earliest shows you saw, maybe as a teenager in high school – as well as the memories and stories we’ve created and shared along the way.
Instagram is my diary for live music shows I’ve been to, so I spent an afternoon scrolling all the way back to when I first joined the platform, re-invigorating all of the special memories after all these years. It seems the last show I saw was La Force at The Drake Underground on 24 October 2019. Ariel Engle of La Force is also a member of Broken Social Scene, and her band members that night included other BSS members like Engle’s husband Andrew Whiteman and saxophonist David French. The show previous to that was Bon Iver featuring Jenn Wasner and S.Carey, with opener Feist (also a BSS member) on 06 October 2019 at Scotiabank Arena.
Broken Social Scene and Bon Iver were two of my favourite bands growing up. I discovered both of their music in high school when I was beginning to discover myself and my identity. Emo/pop-punk like Fall Out Boy and My Chemical Romance, or hip-hop and R&B like Kanye West and Usher will always be tied to a time in my life as a pre-teen in middle school, learning to deal with new emotions, teenage angst, and childhood crushes. But BSS and Bon Iver were my introduction to a wider world of music and sound, and how music can be deeply connected to your emotions and identity. Their records became soundtracks to my life. They’ve seen me through joy and triumph. They sat with me in the darkness that threatened to overwhelm me – when I almost chose my own exit. They’ve seen me through my graduation from high school and through the hell of the University of Toronto. They’ve been with me through love and heartbreak.
I was a seventeen-year-old Gio who thought he knew about love, listening to “Anthems for a Seventeen Year Old Girl,” hearing Emily Haines plead “Park that car, drop that phone, sleep on the floor, dream about me.” I remember sneaking out of the house through the back door, just to drive around with a girl I had a crush on, doing nothing but talking and enjoying each other’s company. It was that burning longing and teenage unrequited love.
I played and replayed and replayed “The Wolves (Act I and II),” hoping that “my pain will mark” a girl who broke my heart in first year undergrad. I was hoping she would realize “what might have been lost.”
I can’t count how many times I would take the long way home, driving late at night along Lakeshore Road, as I blasted “Late Nineties Bedroom Rock for the Missionaries” and “Shampoo Suicide.” I waited for that perfect transition from one song to the next. And as Drew whispered, but in a strained voice as if to beg, “You hate it all and you still use shampoo,” I would scream that line at the top of my lungs, breaking into tears, all alone in the darkness of my grandpa’s 1996 Honda Accord.
You see, music becomes so deeply intertwined with your life that these emotional memories are burned into your heart, screaming at you, “This is who you are! This is your story! Embrace it!”
There’s something so moving and awe-inspiring about live music – not just to listen but to literally feel the music in your heart and in your bones. You can see the artist performing their craft with skill – sometimes with grace, sometimes with the brashness that the moment calls for. To see and feel the guitars shredding or strumming, whether electric or acoustic, with effect pedals or just clean. To hear the voices of angels harmonizing, crooning that one lyric that speaks to your heart. To feel the bass and drums reverberate in your chest. To connect to the humans surrounding you, participating in this collective ritual of listening and feeling emotions. And sometimes, the mosh pit can be fun, just losing yourself in this tradition of going crazy and bouncing off of each other.
Sharing live music is one of the greatest pleasures in life – much like sharing stories over homemade food around a dinner table or chatting about life over a cup of coffee or tea. In this era where we’re starved of social interaction – where we can’t gather around a dinner table, at a coffee shop, or in a music hall full of sweaty people – we lose a part of ourselves. We miss out on those moments of empathy, where we connect with each other emotionally and you let each other know, “Hey, I understand you. I feel you. I’m here with you.” We miss out on the hugs and the kisses and the human intimacy. When we share stories, memories, and music, we are being human: letting ourselves be vulnerable and truly living life. It’s in those moments that we realize that we’re not alone in this universe and we’re all broken people trying to put together the pieces.
What I miss most about live music is its therapeutic nature – just how much it connects with our inner being and evokes the emotions we needed to feel at that particular moment. I’m not saying it replaces true psychotherapy and our own work to cope with our emotions. But there’s something about this communal thing we do, where we congregate in these rooms or in an outdoor space, and we share emotions manifested in vibrating molecules. For a few hours, we’re removed from the outside reality – yet it’s at that same time that we’re truly most connected to the world. We’re asked to leave everything behind for this moment and just to be “here”. At most BSS shows, Kevin Drew takes some time to ask everyone to scream at the top of our lungs all at the same time – to just let go of everything. Live music is catharsis. It allows us to live our lives fully – to feel in tune with ourselves and our emotions. And at the end of it all, you go and find your friends, give them sweaty hugs, grab your stuff from coat check, maybe buy merch, wait around for a paper setlist or to meet the band – and then you walk back out into the real world with these memories burned into your heart.
Read the full piece at https://blog.angelogiomateo.ca/blog-post/live-music-as-catharsis/.
I believe if there's any kind of God it wouldn't be in any of us, not you or me but just this little space in between. If there's any kind of magic in this world it must be in the attempt of understanding someone sharing something. I know, it's almost impossible to succeed but who cares really? The answer must be in the attempt. - Celine, Before Sunrise (1995)