The Obligations to Distant Strangers
How the Good Samaritan is Better than That Dumb Metaphor About Starfish
This is part of a continued set of reflections on obligation and the moral life. Previously, we looked at the way vocation—part of how our obligations toward God are expressed—is affected by digital life. Today, we look at the way in which digital life expands and shapes our vision of who and what we are obligated toward.
The Connections of Caring: Digital Version
The old quip about the rise of the telegraph runs something like this:
It’s great! People in New York and Minnesota can talk to each other now!
That’s fine, but what do people in New York and Minnesota have to talk to each other about?
This is, of course, The Internet—except with respect to how we learn what we should care about. As Paul Virillo describes the ascent of technology, technologies of media have generally had the effect of closing distance quickly: whether the links of semaphores over the ocean, or the telegraph, or the upgrades from 3G to 5G for mobile devices, the intent in technological communication is to as much as possible simulate physical presence. The less time lapse that we have, the more our communications can simulate physical presence. Letters or communications with lag built in have the effect of letting us rely upon memory or the idea of another person, but with digital media, so much more become immediate and immediately present to us.
As with the previous post, this combination of speed and presence isn’t somehow unique to the Internet: there are multiple precursors to this newest iteration. The telegraph was preceded by the Pony Express, which was itself an improvement upon transcontinental mail delivery, which itself was better than relying upon stage coaches ambling Westward, each stage faster than the last. The aim, again, is not just information being shared, but presence: if all I was after was news, there would be no urgency around the speed at which that information was shared. But because what we’re after is not just information-about-things, but presence-to-things, the speed matters.
Enter the Internet.
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