gradshow24/ada/thesis.md

---
title: <?Water bodies>: A narrative exploration of
divergent digital intimacies
author: Ada

---

# <?Water bodies>: A narrative exploration of divergent digital intimacies

Water, stories, the body,
all the things we do, are
mediums
that hide and show what’s
hidden.
(Rumi, 1995 translation)

## ꙳for you

All intimacy is about bodies.
Is this true? Does it matter? I doubt it. Do you know?
Let’s find out, maybe.

Once, I thought that everything in the world was either
one or zero and that there was a harsh straight line
between them. Then I found out you could step or hop
across the line, back and forth, if others showed you
how. Today, I am no less binary, no less interested in
dichotomies, but I am willing to dance through them if
you are too. Can we dance these dichotomies together,
embracing the contradictions of the virtual and
physical, the comfortable and uncomfortable, intimate
and non-intimate? I can’t do it alone, the subject is too
heavy and the binary is too 1011000. I won’t ask you
to resolve these contradictions, I have no desire to.
Instead, I hope we can cultivate the tension and
tenderness inherent in holding together incompatible
truths because both prove necessary.

To dance through these dichotomies I will start in a
specific position, growing from Donna Haraway’s in ‘A
Cyborg Manifesto”. In her essay, Haraway explores the
concept of a cyborg as a rejection of boundaries
between humans, animals, and machines. A symbol for
a feminist posthuman theory that embraces the
plasticity of identity. Before she does all this dancing,
however, she takes a strong stance of blasphemy. She
engages seriously with traditional notions of feminism
and identity but with irony, not apostasy, which is to say without full rejection—without unbelief.
My position as I jump will be the same as hers, ironic
faith. My mocking is grave but caring and my primary
aim is for us only to spin fast enough not to see the line
anymore, while still being able to see the binaries. It
won’t be an easy dance for us but I will do my best to
keep softening for you, I promise.

I will show you a digital body, make it comfortable and
then uncomfortable, lightly intimate, and richly
intimate. I have my own story, my own digital body, of
course. This is where I take my second stance,
however. This time, the position is Lauren Berlant’s,
from ‘The Female Complaint’. The book places
individual stories as inescapable autobiographies of a
collective experience and uses the personal to explain
an intimate general experience. In our story, the
difference between my body and the collective digital
body is unimportant, I hope you see that. I will tell you
my story if you know how to look, but I will tell you
through the stories of many others who shared them
with me. I have no other choice, every time I have tried
to tell this story a chorus of voices has come out.

Some of the stories I will tell you will carry memories
of pain; physical and emotional. I will keep holding you
while you hear this, but your limbs may still feel too
heavy to dance. In that case, I give you my full
permission to skip, jump, or lay down completely. This
is not choreographed and I care deeply for you.

I love you and hope you see what I saw in these stories.

Safe dreams now, I will talk to you soon.

## 0. DIGITAL BODIES

I think the worst must be finished.
Whether I am right, don’t tell me.
Don’t tell me.
No ringlet of bruise,
no animal face, the waters salt me
and I leave it barefoot. I leave you, season
of still tongues, of roses on nightstands
beside crushed beer cans. I leave you
white sand and scraped knees. I leave
this myth in which I am pig, whose
death is empty allegory. I leave, I leave—
At the end of this story,
I walk into the sea
and it chooses
not to drown me.
(Yun, 2020)

### a. what is a digital body?

A digital body is a body on the Internet.
A body outside the internet is simply a body. On the
internet, discussions about corporeality transcend the
limitations of physicality, shaping and reshaping
narratives surrounding the self. This text explores the
intricate dynamics within these conversations, dancing
at the interplay between tangible bodies and their
digital counterparts. The construction of a digital body
is intricately intertwined with these online dialogues,
necessitating engaged reconstructions of the narratives
surrounding physical existence. Yet, the resulting
digital body is a complex and contradictory entity,
embodying the nuances of both its virtual and tangible
origins.

There is a specific metaphor that would allow us to
better carry these contradictions as we further explore
digital bodies. Do you remember that dream you had
about deep ocean pie? Allow me to remind you.

You were walking on the shore, slowly, during a
summer that happened a long time ago. Your skin was
warm and you could feel the wet cool sand sticking to
your feet. The gentle lapping of the waves washed the
sand away as you walked towards the ocean. You
stepped, stepped. Then dove. Underwater, the sea
unfolded deeper than you remembered. It was a
vibrant display of life: bright schools of small fish, and
tall colorful, waving corals. It looked like that
aquarium you saw once as a kid. Your arms moved
confusingly through the water as if you were wading through a soup or were terribly tired. On the sandy
ocean floor, you saw a dining table.
It had a floating white tablecloth, one plate, a fork, and
a pie in the center of it, on a serving dish. You sat on a
chair but could not feel it underneath you. You ate a
heaping slice of pie. It had a buttery-cooked carrots
filling. You woke up.
In the world, the sun was still timid and your bedroom
thick with sleep. What a weird dream. You rubbed your
face, sat up on your bed, and drank the glass of water
next to you. You felt full, as if you just ate a plateful of
carrot pie.

There were two bodies in this story. An awake one and
a dream one, an ocean one. In dreams, bodies have
their own set of rules, often blurring the boundaries
between waking and sleeping, wanting and fearing.
Digital bodies are very similar to dream bodies. They
exhibit a similar fluidity and abstraction, a defiance of
traditional notions of physicality. They share the
blurring and inherent potential nature of dream bodies.
They are slower, stronger, and different. They switch
and change and melt into each other, they lose and
regrow limbs, they run sluggishly and fly smoothly. If
we scream in our dreams, we sometimes wake up still
screaming. Our waking bodies react to our dream
bodies, they have the same tears, the same orgasms,
the same drives.

This is a story of two bodies, same but different,
influenced but not driven.
A tangible body, full of fluids and organs, emotions and
feelings. Cartilage, bacteria, bones, and nerve
endings. A digital body, cable-veined and loud-vented,
shiny and loading.

The digital body is ethereal and abstracted,
embarrassing, graphic, and real but not physical.

This is the beginning.

### b. body vs. computer

Framing the discourse around bodies on the internet as
a clear-cut dichotomy feels clunky in today’s internet
landscape. The web is today available by body, cyborg
dimensions of the internet of bodies, or virtual and
augmented realities, creating a complex interplay
between having a body and existing online.

As intricate as this dance is now, it certainly did not
begin that way. It started with what felt like a very
serious and tangible line drawn by very serious
tangible people; this is real life and this is virtual life.
Even people like Howard Rheingold, pioneers who
approached early virtual life with enthusiasm and care,
couldn’t escape characterizing it as a “bloodless
technological ritual” (1993). Rheingold was an early
member of The Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link (Well), a
seminal virtual community built in the 1980s that was
renowned for its impact on digital culture and played a
pivotal role in shaping what would become the
landscape of the Internet. Rheingold’s reflections on
his experience on this primordial soup of the Internet
offer insight into the initial conceptualizations of online
life by those joyfully participating.

In “The Virtual Community”, Rheingold offers a
heartfelt tribute to intimacy and affection through web-
based interactions which, at the time, were unheard of.
He struggles in his efforts to highlight the legitimacy of
his connections, finding no way to do so except by
emphasizing their tangible bodily experiences.
The community’s claim to authenticity thus had to lie in the physical experiences of its members— the visible
bodies and hearable voices, the weddings, births, and
funerals (1993). (1).

Even then, and even by people with no interest in
undermining the value of the virtual, the distinction
between physical and virtual was confusing. Rheingold
himself reinforces the boundary of body relations and
computer relations by referring to his family as a
“flesh-and-blood family’ and his close online friends as
“unfamiliar faces” (1993). Constantly interplaying
digital connections with the physical characteristics of
the kind of connections people valued before the
internet. (2)

In any case, his primary interest seemed to be to
emphasize computer relations as valid forms of
connection between bodies, not to talk of any
distinction quite yet. It’s the eighties, the internet is
still fresh and new and the possibility to form close
relations with strangers online seems fragile and
concerning yet exciting. This is the clearest the
distinction between in-real-life and online has ever
been and it’s still fuzzy and unclear.

At the same time and in the same digital space as
Rheingold, there was another man, a digital body being
formed. This is our second story, the ocean body we
dreamt of earlier is now in a digital primordial soup,
questioning itself and stuck between staying and
leaving. In this story, its name is Tom Mandel and
when he died, he did so on the Well.

Mandel was a controversial and popular figure in this
pioneering virtual community. According to many other members, 
Tom Mandel embodied the essence of the Well—its history, 
its voice, its attitude. Mandel's snarky and verbose 
provocations started heated discussions, earning him 
warnings such as "Don't Feed The Mandel!” (Leonard, 1995). 
His sharp comments often stirred emotions that reminded 
people of family arguments, fuelling an intimacy that 
was characteristic of the Well: 
both public and solitary (Hafner, 1997).

Until 1995, Mandel had done a quite rigorous job of
keeping his body separate from The Well and had
never attended any of the physical in-person meetings
from the community. His only references to being a
body had been on the “health” online conference,
where he often talked about his illnesses.
One day, after nearly a decade of daily interaction, he
posted he had got the flu and that he felt quite ill.
When people wished for him to get well soon, he
replied he had gone to get tested and was waiting for a
diagnosis. This way, when cancer was found in his
lungs, the community was first to know. In the
following six months, as his illness progressed, the
community followed closely (Hafner, 1997).
They were first to know when Nana, a community
member with whom he had had a publicly turbulent
relationship, flew to California to marry him. The
community was a witness and is now an archive of his
declining wit as cancer spread to his brain and his
famously articulate and scathing comments got
shorter, fearful, and more tender. (3)

Before he posted his final goodbye, he chose to do one
last thing. Together with another member, they
programmed a bot that posted randomly characteristic
comments from Mandel on The Well—the Mandelbot. 
In the topic he had opened to say goodbye, he posted
this message about the bot:

I had another motive in opening this topic to tell the
truth, one that winds its way through almost everything
I've done online in the five months since my cancer was
diagnosed. I figured that, like everyone else, my
physical self wasn't going to survive forever and I guess
I was going to have less time than actuarials allocateus
[actually allocated]. But if I could reach out and touch
everyone I knew on-line... I could toss out bits and
pieces of my virtual self and the memes that make up
Tom Mandel, and then when my body died, I wouldn't
really have to leave... Large chunks of me would also
be here, part of this new space.
(Hafner, 1997)

With the Mandelbot, Mandel found a way to deal with
what he later called his grieving for the community,
with which he could not play anymore once his own
body died. By doing so, he was starting to blend the
boundaries of intimacy through computers and bodies,
driven by his love and grief. (4)