Proposal: National Popular Culture & American Culture Associations
Annual Conference - March 31 - April 3, 2010
How Digital Text Communication Drives Scripturience and Desire for Sensation:
Lies, Love, Vengeance & Carnal Expression at Terminal Velocity
This
paper explores how digital text communication accelerates the drive for
expression and results in a void, generating a need for intense haptic sensation
in both dyadic and one-to-many relationships. Communicating via email, texting,
and social networking sites involves elements of performance and creates the
sensation of connecting with a recipient, but the asynchronous, remote nature of
this type of communication simultaneously creates a vacuum of feeling. It fails
to satiate.
Messages become a proxy for the recipient and the increasing volume of messages
being exchanged creates the sensation that the language is the experience rather
than a vehicle for describing the experience. A text-based relationship demands
less mutual responsibility and affinity of its participants than a physical one;
as communication, digital text modes establish discontinuous discourse and
anxiety. Response times create high anticipation even with low value messages.
Recipients are compelled to adhere to fluid rules of engagement with embedded
time frames and violations leading to frustration and pathos, which also induce
a compulsion to continue the dialogue in search of genuine human connection.
This is an account of how a betrayal and deception by one woman spiraled out of her control and initiated an unlikely text-based relationship between two others culminating in an ephemeral love affair and corporeal experience contextualized by 413 emails, 1,631 texts, 55 phone calls, and 3 cross-state encounters in 45 days, and how a analogous period of significant digital communication sent the narrator freefalling back to physical reality at terminal velocity.