THE INTERNET, NARRATIVE, AND SUBJECTIVITY

This work seeks to analyze phenomenologically the shifts in the structure of experience inaugurated by the advent of electronic media, especially the Internet. This analysis includes descriptions of how the Internet transforms human experience across dimensions of temporality, embodiment, spatiality, and sociality. It is argued that electronic media transforms the lived meanings of temporality and embodiment as the ground of human experience. These transformations allow us to gain instant access to a broader world of experience, but also pose unique challenges to our capacity to form community. The simultaneous availability of multiple "channels" of information from multiple sources in the electronic milieu transforms the lived meanings of temporality and embodiment that are foundational in forming the shared mythic narratives that bind us together as communities (see May, 1991). In transforming the ecstatic unity of time and displacing the centrality of the body in experience, electronic media inaugurates substantial shifts in our habitual modes of living time, embodiment, and others. Implications of these shifts for community and selfhood are explored.