I was doing a connections mapping exercise tonight for my
media class, and the idea behind it is to find all the ways in which I am
connected to others. As I was doing this exercise, I realized both the ‘reality’
of interconnection and its fundamental emptiness. For instance, there are so
many ways in which we can be said be connected to others that the question
becomes one of : how to narrow down one’s ideas regarding how they are
connected? As soon as I define how ‘you’ relate to ‘me’, I am describing a kind
of connection that seems hard-lined, but actually it is a kind of mental label
which describes only one of many ways of seeing things and people.
I think it’s important to understand that even the concept
of interconnection entails a grid-relationship which doesn’t necessarily
actually exist anywhere. That is, what I consider to be ‘our’ relationship may
look very different from your side, and vice versa. This whole exercise has
lead me to wonder: could the very notion of being interconnected be a kind of
oversimplification of sorts, designed to connect what might be deeply divergent
in nature or opinion? I think the danger of being too glib about the idea of
interconnection is that it might cast a false net over everything, not
realizing that even the net is the product of one’s thinking which changes over
time and perspectives.
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