The Karmapa, OGYEN TRINlEY DORJE, writes about how the Internet mediates connection in the world and contemplates if it entails compassion as well. Excerpt
Social media has opened many new possibilities for forming and connecting communities. Yet the shift toward virtual communities means our connections are increasingly mediated by technology. Our online connections have an unreal quality to them, like dreams. As we saw in chapter 2 of this book, our relationships become shallower when they are so heavily mediated by electronic connections.
We create false online personas and behave in ways we would not do with people we actually saw and heard. We ourselves can end up captivated by our electronic selves. We invite people to interact with that virtual image we have created and carry out more and more of our relationships online. In the complete absence of direct sensory contact, it can be unclear whether we are connecting to a person or to a machine-or to a fantasy.
I am skeptical that virtual communities can fulfill the function of a real community. Certainly there are some positive aspects of online communities, but many of them are fundamentally commercial in nature. If nothing else, this means that they have other aims beside a purely altruistic wish to foster healthy and compassionate communities. Of course, not all online communities are created to turn a profit for their founders, but once a community forms, the temptation is there to use those connections to generate revenue or promote self-interested agendas.
Though we may be becoming too reliant on technology, investing it with too much blind faith, technology does provide us with much that is of benefit. Some years ago, a trip I had been planning was cancelled at the last moment. This was disappointing to many people, myself included. But the technology had just been put in place where I lived, in northern India, to transmit a live talk online. There continue to be many more places and far more friends than is possible for me to visit, and that became the first of what is now a standard practice of webcasting talks live. At the time of that very first webcast, I had the thought that although my body had not been able to make that trip, I could send my voice and my mind and heart over the Internet to the people I had wanted to visit. Whatever the challenges and pitfalls, technology does offer important ways to maintain a community’s connections even when there is physical distance among members.
The Internet works because many people are connecting and making distinct contributions that are distributed around the vast network. It works because of interdependence. Whenever we log on to check our email or to search for information, we may feel that we are alone in front of our screen. But in fact we are connecting to numberless other people, each in front of a screen like we are. With some creativity, we can make good use of our time online by using it to strengthen our awareness of interdependence. You could try pausing each time you are about to go online. You do not need to do anything; just pause to notice and feel that you are about to be connected with millions of people around the world. Allow yourself to acknowledge their presence at some other node in the vast shared network, wherever they are, and feel your connection to them.
Once you connect, you can find abundant opportunities to use the Internet to cultivate compassion. Everywhere online you find descriptions of tragic situations around the planet. Even if you do not know the people involved personally or have any direct connection to them, you can allow yourself to feel their need for happiness or freedom, or anything else that they lack. You can open your heart to that. Since you know that you share with them the same basic wish to be happy and to be free of suffering, and the same basic human potential, you already have a connection to them. On that basis, you can strengthen your determination to seek ways to send them care, love, or any other resources they lack.
These are some ways to mitigate the depersonalising effect of relating to others electronically. But as I have said earlier, the human warmth that is transmitted when you can see and hear one another and interact directly has a value that cannot be reproduced by cables and circuits. Communications technology breaks our friendships into bits of data, bounces them off satellites, and scatters them around. When we want to reach out to connect with a real, living person, there is literally no one there. Infusing our contact with others with the vividness of direct perceptions is important not only for building community. Sensory contact is key in ensuring that compassion and other qualities of interdependence make the transition from principle to action in the world. The suffering of others does not exist as mere images in our brains or on an electronic screen, so our compassion cannot simply take place in our heads. It needs to make the transition from head into our heart, and from there flow out through all our senses and all our pores so that we are connecting and living that connectedness fully. Our compassion must not stay trapped inside us. It must move us to action that has a real impact.
Initially the Internet linked only a limited number of computers. You could say it started as a small community. Developers learned how to create stable connections that could stay open and facilitate exchanges among all parties. From there it extended gradually, opening to include more and more people. We could do something similar in forming communities that are consciously founded in our shared interdependence. For that to work, our smaller networks have to have expandability built into them. They cannot be founded in exclusion. This is why it is so important to build our smaller communities in a way that reflects and respects the larger human community of which it is a part.
I think along with the Internet, we should develop an Innernet.
A number of techniques from the traditional Buddhist training can help us do so, by cultivating a universal sense of connectedness.
Excerpt from Interconnected: Embracing life in our Global Society by The Karmapa, Ogyen Trinley Dorje, and published by Simon and Schuster