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What is your opinion?

And the question is: Are YOU plugged or unplugged?

You may ask yourself: am I unplugged or plugged? You may say to yourself: of course I’m plugged, since I’m reading this online! Right? Well, not exactly. The answer is much more difficult and the question essentially one that should lead to dialogue to shed light on the blank spaces on all our mental maps.

An update by Andreas Hirsch

You may ask yourself: am I unplugged or plugged? You may say to yourself: of course I’m plugged, since I’m reading this online! Right? Well, not exactly. You may even shed a thought about those unfortunate on this earth, who do not share this benefit with you. Right again? Well, probably kind and humanitarian, but maybe somehow missing the point.

The point is, that the answer is entirely relative. Relative to your viewpoint, relative to your values and cultural context, relative also to the aspect of pluggedness you have in mind and relative to the degree of a certain pluggedness that is in question. Strange as it may seem, but “unplugged” is not a binary thing, it is not a question of 1 or 0 or of On and Off. And it come even worse: you can be both plugged und unplugged at the same time.

As you read these lines on your computer screen you will be plugged into the internet, which in many parts of the world will be considered a relatively high degree of pluggedness, while on the other hand you are maybe completely unplugged from the reality in – let’s say Mali at this point in time. Ok, you can obtain information about the country or about certain groups, initiatives and cultural projects over the internet, but you cannot plug into life in Maly unless the people there let you in on their culture and tradition, unless you find ways of understanding them and their values and interests, unless you enter a common space with them where you can attempt to have a dialogue. (If you in Mali, please pick an other example, like Austria for instance.)

So, what is it about to be plugged or unplugged? There is no real sense in talking about it unless we make clear at the same moment, which existing or missing relation we are talking about and which kind of relation (or flow of information, ressources, etc.) we mean.

There is reason to believe, that the idea of “unplugged” goes back to the contexts of a plethora of movements that followed the first call “back to nature”, making it also an artefact of the romanticism in the electric era. Rock stars unplugging their electric guitars from the PA-systems made the term famous then and now it is brought up with the whole movement surrounding the wake of the internet again. But it is not a luddite point that is made at Ars Electronica, it is a brave attempt to open dialogue while aware of the difficulties and pitfalls that wait for us, from whichever side we may be approaching the topic.

As we go along, we should keep in mind, that pluggedness is not a natural thing, but a matter of social construction. It is primarily not a choice to be plugged or unplugged, it may proove difficult to unplug yourself from your culture, it will definitely be hard to plug into the information loops of the G9 if you do not belong to the club. Essentially the discussion about plugged or unplugged runs along the lines of (post)colonialism, so there is no use denying that is it a (post)colonial debate that we enter here.

All that can be done at this point is to try to shed light unto the respective blank spaces on all our mental maps of the rest of the world outside our very habitat and to enter a dialogue as open as can be. Pluggedness in a higher sense could mean the freedom of choice to plug in and out whenever and from whatever you want and not whether or when someone else wants you to. And this, of course, is a freedom that may be doubtful to possibly exist.






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