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Do you ever feel as if your daily activity doesn’t really exist unless broadcast online? You didn’t really go backpacking in Europe if you haven’t updated your travel blog. I certainly didn’t go out for drinks with friends if I haven’t posted a haughty mosaic photoset of the evening on Instagram. What exactly does this evolving dependence on technology mean? It is The Age of the Internet and we are the competitors in a virtual rat race.

For decades now, the art of socialising has been descending at a steady rate. Geronimo. The world, one time our oyster, is now clammed shut. We measure each other based on the content frozen before us on a hand-held device, we are on-air and interpersonal. By informing some-hundred acquaintances of our latest meal, latest motive, and latest vague musing, we lack the means to communicate what actually matters. We scroll as we stroll, acknowledging a gratuitous snap of somebody-or-other’s new scarf and due failing to help a passer-by catch theirs racing in the breeze.

Every day, trains are running and filling with people shoulder to shoulder, tired and quiet with eyes downcast, while behind the screens our profiles, timelines and chat apps are burgeoning with deliberate vivacity. Life is communicated vicariously through gadgets. By the end of 2013, global smartphone penetration exploded from 5% of the global population in 2009, to 22%. That is in an increase of nearly 1.3 billion smartphones in four years. (Heggestuen, 2013). Through obsession with the menial, have we personified the mortal fear of becoming obsolete, or is mortality a concept too Keatsian for this era of 24 hour surveillance?

A recent documentary entitled ‘Look Up’ by writer and director Gary Turk urges us shut down our devices and start up our interactions. The irony is, this piece is communicated because it was spread virally around the internet. Although reception is shaky, the movement has proved eye-opening for millions of networkers. This recognition of cultural shift rings similar to the work of Nicolas Bourriaud, art critic, philosopher and Director of the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, an art school in Paris. In his collection of essays ‘Relational Aesthetics’ published in 2002, Bourriaud states:

“We feel meagre and helpless when faced with the electronic media, theme parks, user-friendly places, and the spread of compatible forms of sociability, like the laboratory rat doomed to an inexorable itinerary, littered with chunks of cheese…For anything that cannot be marketed will inevitably vanish…The social bond has turned into a standardised artefact.” (Bourriaud, 2002)

I believe the crux of Relational Aesthetics magnifies the ‘departure of the whole of human relations and their social context’ (Bourriaud, 2002). A field of participatory art, this social movement made a retaliatory attempt to quash social isolation, urging “interactive, user-friendly and relational concepts” in the agitated and unwelcoming atmosphere of typical museum structure, which is beginning to mirror the human world, the constitution of art and beyond.
Presently, we see that the structure of relations are flimsy, if not forgotten. The internet becomes the museum, organising our archives into systematic triviality. As long as we are profiling every little movement, we become less prolific – take a break, and look around.

Bibliography:

 Book

Bourriaud, N. (2002). Relational aesthetics. 1st ed. [Dijon]: Les Presses du réel.