JESTIN'

the 8:45 mark is specifically what im referring to in this post.

David Foster Wallace (here-to-fore known as "dfw") makes reference to something, I dont even know what to call it but ill steal a name and call it the "autonomous individual". Why are we motivated or encouraged to be autonomous individuals in society? Isnt this selfishness counter to the notion of the "social". Isnt autonomy counter to a notion of society? Isnt the inherent quality of the social "un-autonomous"?

Ill go ahead and do an example from my own life:

I remember a few years back talking to a girl, fixing the flat tire on her bike for her. She did not know how to fix flat tiers on bikes and I encouraged her to watch what I was doing so she could figure it out for herself next time she had a flat. She protested saying something to the effect of "Id rather have a man fix it". This notion struck me as wholly selfish and repugnant. It smacked of inequality and inequity and seemed just out and out wrong. I was insisting on her autonomy. On her isolation from everyone else (men in particular). I was reinforcing the xenophobic behavior and rhetoric of my society.

It seems to me we have had a precipitous slide to autonomy over the centuries. Previously, if we take for example the generic nuclear family of the 1950s, we see a system of people, husband, wife, child, completely leveraged against one another. No one is autonomous in the nuclear family, everyone has a place and specific duties, specific territories they must "keep up" and defend not just for their own good but for the good of the nuclear family as a whole. You might even extend this sort of structure out further into society, society was literally segregated. Black men doing some jobs the white man needed to get by. White men doing jobs black men needed to get by. A caste system almost like in india, or rome, or any one of many pre-"modern"(?) societies.

But then at some point, during the cultural revolution(?) (really a technological and scientific revolution but that aside) at some point this family and class and social system starts to (continues) to change. The father is separated from the child, the autonomous father. The husband is separated from wife. The wife takes on territories of the husband. The child takes on territories of the mother. The races intermingle. All the previous symbols or icons of society become changeable. Now the child is raised by the television, the single mother has a career, the white man works for a black woman and so on, you get the idea. All parts in this puzzle go from being leveraged upon one another, dependent on one another to autonomous. Our "autonomous individuals". You are a woman but this confers no special value and so if your tire is flat, fix it yourself, you are a autonomous individual, I am a autonomous individual, why would we interact?

I am struck by how horribly anti-social this is. Its an absurd notion, mono-social social behavior, bystander apathy, "oh I saw this guy get mugged" "what happened" "I dont know I just kept walking". All of the previous notions of personal responsibility, thrown out the window decades ago. What is the meaning of a society that does not interact socially?

This is turning into a rant though. We do interact socially, just not in ways that we once did, because, obviously, technology has changed the way we interact. Now you do not meet your friends at work or at clubs, you meet them on the internet. Your mom doesnt set you up with the woman you will marry (not that you talk to her anyway) facebook or maybe okcupid sets you up. Friendship is no longer this unexamined accident of being, its a social network, a software function, an accident of hardware or statistical error. Friendships are highly scrutinized and examined, studied and "focus group"ed. As if it where a physical property of the otherwise inert molecule known as "society".

And if technology redirects our semi-autonomous social behavior it should be no surprise. It was the thing that made the autonomy possible in the first place. Who needs suzy home-maker when you have microwave dinner and the latest copy of Final Fantasy. Some of us, old people mostly and those prone to nostalgia like myself, may decry this sort of behavior (at times), this sort of effect of technology and yet we know nothing can be done about it. Its progress and deep down we love it. It completely denatures and reconfigures the social landscape but the human mind is infinitely changeable and this progress, the cellular phones, the internet, the facebooks, they fascinate us endlessly, and this fascination supersedes the "damage" or social effect.