/Big Mouth/ Lonesome no more!
31/08/2007 | Filed under Discover > Big Mouth
The late Kurt Vonnegut said that we all need to be part of a community. And where else can we feel part of a community better than on the internet, home to thousands of communities?
According to the late, great US writer and satirist Kurt Vonnegut, who died in April, “life is no way to treat an animal” – and modern life is no way to treat a human being, because it makes us miserable. He believed that every one of us is genetically, chemically, socially programmed to be part of a karass, an extended family or community, and that we’re desperately unhappy if we’re not part of one.
Unfortunately for us, we live in a world of hyper-mobility, where we move to find work, where we rarely stay in the communities we grow up in, and where family and friends are scattered to the four corners of the Earth. What every human really needed, Vonnegut suggested, was to be part of a community again. We could unite under a powerful slogan: “Lonesome no more.” Our need to feel part of something bigger, to connect with other people, explains all kinds of things. It’s why teenage Goths break out the eyeliner, and why football fans proudly wear their team colours. It’s why the lure of evangelical churches is so strong, and why angry young men join the BNP. And of course, it’s why we go online and become B3tans, Farkers, Slashdotters, MeFites, Diggers or bloggers.
We go online for fun, of course, but in times of sadness, our need to connect becomes even stronger. In the aftermath of the sickening massacre in a Virginian school, shocked students turned to Facebook. There, they mourned the dead, and they tried to make sense of something that didn’t make any sense. Facebook was their karass. There are karasses for smaller sadnesses, too. Struggling with your sexuality? Trying to conceive? Drowning in debt? Fearful about the future? There’s a karass for all of these, and for anything else that may be keeping you awake at night.
Of course, it’s not all good. In real life, we have idiot brothers; online, we have idiot bloggers. In real life, we have drunken uncles; online, we have trolls. Vonnegut’s suggestion? Treat your karass as you would a real-world family. If someone’s out of line, say “screw you”. Vonnegut also knew that the price of free speech was its inevitable abuse by people with only hateful things to say. Had Tim O’Reilly and Jimmy Wales read a bit of Vonnegut before embarking on their campaign for civilised blogging, they’d have saved themselves a lot of effort. The same technology that some use to spread happiness or hope, others use to spread hate. Vonnegut suggested that our motto should be: “We are here to help each other through this thing, whatever it is.” And every day, online communities large and small do just that. Perhaps Microsoft and Mozilla could add a slogan to their browsers’ homepages, which would act as a memorial to Vonnegut and a reminder of what “this thing” is all about. “Welcome to the internet,” our browsers would say. “Lonesome no more!”
