When I was about thirteen years old, I developed an interest in body modification. It started innocently enough. I used the internet to find pictures of stretched earlobes and tribal armband tattoos and imagined what they might look like on my body. Four years later, I wrote a paper for my grade 12 philosophy class entitled “The Philosophy of Extreme Body Modification,” which included discussion on everything from ritualistic body suspension to large gauge genital piercing. The penultimate moment in my journey of discovery was when I found BMEzine.com, which is the best and most comprehensive archive of body modification information in the world.
As a young teenager, I was encouraged to participate in church-sanctioned activities that in no way supported my budding interest in the fascinating subculture of body art. Tattoos and piercings were explicitly prohibited. This edict extended into my own home where my parents were less than thrilled with my new fascination.
I’ve heard a lot of casual remarks about the internet and smart phones making us anti-social techno-junkies. A recent conversation I had centred on whether or not technology is divisive and isolating. I feel that the internet is by far the most useful technology that has ever been invented, and that it’s bringing people closer together, not only in online communities but in the real world as well.
I posit that the vantage point of a person outside a window, peering in at someone glued to a computer, is the wrong angle. It’s important to look through the eyes of the person seeing the screen. In my early teens, I spent probably hundreds of hours scanning the written and pictorial archives of BMEzine.com and participating in the forums and chat rooms . These are hours that I “could have spent outside, being around real people,” as the tired argument goes. The tricky thing is that the “real people” who I had access to, given my age and limited ability to travel independently, were not the sort who shared my passion for body art. In fact, they actively discouraged the practice. Thus, my involvement with a new set of people who were only accessible to me in the virtual realm.
The question of perception and reality - is the world we create in our mind more or less “real” than the shared “reality” of people who we see and smell and touch? - is way outside the scope of a 1,000 word blog entry. Let’s just agree to accept the validity of independent realities for the duration of this essay, then go back to our business like good citizens. Right, then. By using the internet I made a new reality with people who thought that body art was a beautiful thing to be studied, admired, and questioned. Many of them were like me. They had no access to people who shared their passions and secrets in their immediate social sphere. So they, like me, made a new sphere.
It’s worth addressing the concern that this technology allows dangerous and ignorant people to populate similar spheres where their anti-social and violent ideas can go uncontested. I believe that online social networking is a sub-category of free speech and expression. We have to accept that the preponderance of good people will, for the most part, crowd out the assholes. There will always be a few that make it through; the anonymity afforded by the internet makes a lot of people sound tougher than they are. To me, this is no different than a real life social networking situation. Go to any nightclub in any city. The vast majority of people there go with good intentions, but sometimes there’s one dude who gets a knife through security. We accept the risk because it’s assumed to be small and accompanied by the promise that for every sociopath, there are thousands of wholly decent human beings. Most of the time, if we conduct ourselves civilly, we won’t be forced to confront the psychos against our will. It’s very, very easy to close a browser window.
The internet allowed me to build a passionate new interest in a safe and supportive environment. It also remade my reality outside of the virtual sphere. I wanted to make friends with similar interests. Now I knew they existed. I had in some small part entered into their discourse and I was privy to the lexicon that would identify me as a member - or at least a tourist - in that group. I started to drop in at tattoo and piercing shops to chat with the artists, and I found most to be inviting and friendly. I destroyed the last remaining shards of prejudice that had been planted in my mind about these people by well-meaning but uninformed authorities.
There are perhaps millions of people who, for whatever reason, were never part of a physical community. They logged on. They gained the ability to find others like them and to form supportive groups and to be included. Online social networks have allowed people to disclose information in open forums that would not have reached the public otherwise. These groups also provide opportunities to teach people how to seek out good sources and refine and build their ideas.
Online information is an infinite swamp of knowledge. With a quick point and click, you can find out anything about anything. Social networking connects individuals with others who can teach them to navigate in the murky waters. Individuals who were ostracized can feel included. The positive shift in perspective from beaten-down outsider to accepted member most certainly has rewarding real-world consequences, regardless of whether the new membership is with a “real” or online community.
It’s been a dozen years since I first clicked on a BMEzine link, and in that time, I’ve had six body piercings done, acquired five tattoos, and had eleven overwhelmingly positive experiences. The thought of “regretting it later” has never crossed my mind. Thanks to online body art communities, I can see the beautiful and groundbreaking work of people like Jim Ward and Fakir Musafar, now 70 and 80 years old, respectively, and realize that it’s not about how it looks when you’re old and wrinkled. It’s about the experience of receiving the pain of the art and transforming it into something beautiful in ways that are more than just aesthetic.
As a young teenager, I was encouraged to participate in church-sanctioned activities that in no way supported my budding interest in the fascinating subculture of body art. Tattoos and piercings were explicitly prohibited. This edict extended into my own home where my parents were less than thrilled with my new fascination.
I’ve heard a lot of casual remarks about the internet and smart phones making us anti-social techno-junkies. A recent conversation I had centred on whether or not technology is divisive and isolating. I feel that the internet is by far the most useful technology that has ever been invented, and that it’s bringing people closer together, not only in online communities but in the real world as well.
I posit that the vantage point of a person outside a window, peering in at someone glued to a computer, is the wrong angle. It’s important to look through the eyes of the person seeing the screen. In my early teens, I spent probably hundreds of hours scanning the written and pictorial archives of BMEzine.com and participating in the forums and chat rooms . These are hours that I “could have spent outside, being around real people,” as the tired argument goes. The tricky thing is that the “real people” who I had access to, given my age and limited ability to travel independently, were not the sort who shared my passion for body art. In fact, they actively discouraged the practice. Thus, my involvement with a new set of people who were only accessible to me in the virtual realm.
The question of perception and reality - is the world we create in our mind more or less “real” than the shared “reality” of people who we see and smell and touch? - is way outside the scope of a 1,000 word blog entry. Let’s just agree to accept the validity of independent realities for the duration of this essay, then go back to our business like good citizens. Right, then. By using the internet I made a new reality with people who thought that body art was a beautiful thing to be studied, admired, and questioned. Many of them were like me. They had no access to people who shared their passions and secrets in their immediate social sphere. So they, like me, made a new sphere.
It’s worth addressing the concern that this technology allows dangerous and ignorant people to populate similar spheres where their anti-social and violent ideas can go uncontested. I believe that online social networking is a sub-category of free speech and expression. We have to accept that the preponderance of good people will, for the most part, crowd out the assholes. There will always be a few that make it through; the anonymity afforded by the internet makes a lot of people sound tougher than they are. To me, this is no different than a real life social networking situation. Go to any nightclub in any city. The vast majority of people there go with good intentions, but sometimes there’s one dude who gets a knife through security. We accept the risk because it’s assumed to be small and accompanied by the promise that for every sociopath, there are thousands of wholly decent human beings. Most of the time, if we conduct ourselves civilly, we won’t be forced to confront the psychos against our will. It’s very, very easy to close a browser window.
The internet allowed me to build a passionate new interest in a safe and supportive environment. It also remade my reality outside of the virtual sphere. I wanted to make friends with similar interests. Now I knew they existed. I had in some small part entered into their discourse and I was privy to the lexicon that would identify me as a member - or at least a tourist - in that group. I started to drop in at tattoo and piercing shops to chat with the artists, and I found most to be inviting and friendly. I destroyed the last remaining shards of prejudice that had been planted in my mind about these people by well-meaning but uninformed authorities.
There are perhaps millions of people who, for whatever reason, were never part of a physical community. They logged on. They gained the ability to find others like them and to form supportive groups and to be included. Online social networks have allowed people to disclose information in open forums that would not have reached the public otherwise. These groups also provide opportunities to teach people how to seek out good sources and refine and build their ideas.
Online information is an infinite swamp of knowledge. With a quick point and click, you can find out anything about anything. Social networking connects individuals with others who can teach them to navigate in the murky waters. Individuals who were ostracized can feel included. The positive shift in perspective from beaten-down outsider to accepted member most certainly has rewarding real-world consequences, regardless of whether the new membership is with a “real” or online community.
It’s been a dozen years since I first clicked on a BMEzine link, and in that time, I’ve had six body piercings done, acquired five tattoos, and had eleven overwhelmingly positive experiences. The thought of “regretting it later” has never crossed my mind. Thanks to online body art communities, I can see the beautiful and groundbreaking work of people like Jim Ward and Fakir Musafar, now 70 and 80 years old, respectively, and realize that it’s not about how it looks when you’re old and wrinkled. It’s about the experience of receiving the pain of the art and transforming it into something beautiful in ways that are more than just aesthetic.
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Great read homie!!
ReplyDeleteGood read. I enjoyed this. Maybe you should be looking at writing a column in some papers.
ReplyDelete