Election Day in the United States: for once, columnists and pundits are correct in reporting an undercurrent of excitement, although that may be too weak of a word--it's an overcurrent. We have survived months of nasty conspiracy-thinking mental viruses unleashed upon friends and foes alike. The only despair I have felt about the political process this year has been the awful fearfulness some of my friends now display. As Barry Glassner wrote some time ago in The Culture of Fear, we too often are afraid of things that we should not be, and are distracted entirely from those things that, though difficult and nearly intractable, require our vigilance.
The actual topic today is relevant to our elections, since it concerns the very meaning of political. For the Romans and Greeks (to generalize a bit), one's public character was everything--the idea of a separate "private" one would have made little since. The downside of such a view is its sanctioning of private horribleness--one could be a monster at home, as long as one's actions never leaked out to the public. But the strength of this view is its focus on actions for which one is accountable. Ones actions can be tallied up and tracked.
For much of recorded history, humans lived in small groupings: villages or towns where many people knew your business. Highly mobile, industrialized societies are quite recent, but supposedly such mobility has led to social disconnection and a general loss of community. I suggest that the Web and other recent developments are returning us to a permanent era of accountability, though often of the phantom sort (that is, people can know a great deal about your supposed actions, though the information may be erroneous). We will need to care about--and for--our reputations from a much earlier age. No more reinventing ourselves in high school or college or our second or third jobs. Such a change is big, but we can handle it by aiming for consistency in our actions across platforms, communities, and virtual environments.
Critics of the Internet and game technology worry that the line between reality and fantasy is being blurred. If we follow out the reasoning, however, we might conclude that one should start to act as though a virtual environment, at least when it is not an obvious game or role-playing situation, is an authentic political arena that affects our reputations, and therefore the constitution of our characters.
