The gift of a 'goat' seems to be the new sign of endearment between the middle classes. I was mistaken for one of them this Christmas. While some of my shelves lay empty of Christmas cards this year, my inbox filled up with messages from friends saying that, rather than sending a card, they had made a donation to charity instead. Buying an animal for a village, or sending a few vaccines, is the latest act of love between friends - these senders tend to be the more affluent, career focussed individuals.
This post-modern vanity is signalled by the real meaning, which is never surfaced, that the use of money to buy a card is indulgency, which the sender inadvertently implies. The 'Christian' email in question adds the extra message that their moral world is superior - donating to charity casts them in an unselfish light at the right time of year as well. This 'goat generation' is less than benign which is not evident in the first blush. It smacks of performativity and a desire to present the self in a different, especially kind light. The performativity is both the performance of sending the email coupled with such an email boosting the moral stature of the sender in the eyes of possible others. It is performative rather than honest. They could have sent a conventional card, as well as, donating to charity, separately. In making it a public fact that they are donating to charity, they use the cover of the Christian period to convey the massage that they are modern, a new caring generation. But they forget their digital world draws us further away from the real, material world where receiving a gift equates with its wonderful and memorable physicality.
The true act of Christian charity is to give quietly and seek to be anonymous. Remaining in the shadows is anathema to the psychology of this digital do-gooder. The contrary desire to make public statement is a sad, and unwelcome reflection of our need to boost the ego, promoting self-indulgence at any opportunity. In this case it involves a clear exploitation of Christian beliefs that the majority of people in the country don't subscribe to in terms of Churchgoing, but often to in daily interchanges. Modern capitalism thrives upon individualism inherent in the e-card generation, and like the ruthless corporate operator will exploit ruthlessly any space to promote the interests of that Machiavellian selfhood.
Sending an e-card is a middle class token of warmth. They seek to build their bridging social capital as the US academic Putman calls the formation of new networks, as opposed to bonding social capital where immediate relations are privileged, not more distant, 'half-friends' of the bridge builder. It is a pitiful attempt to reach out and make contact with values that have no part in the senders' everyday experience i.e. of really belonging and genuinely helping and supporting others. As our post-Thatcher lives are broken and fragmented some of us invent social systems to try and make good these losses of real social solidarity. A digital experience of 'belonging' reveals how far we have moved away from being members of a genuine and trusting community. Abstracted digital mediation of emotions highlights the degree to which we are encouraged to live by and through the machine. The e-card 'altruism' community gives us an insight into the use they make of their lives in cyberspace, a realm where a strange exploitative, paradoxical recognition is made possible by money. The mere touch of the donator's send key wins them a piece of the moral status of those who undertake genuine labour for the poor such as VSO workers who, significantly, get their hands dirty.
This deep trend towards self-promotion is a form of patronisation the other. It is our famine that is manifested as we impute famine elsewhere, into an imagined developing world which Joseph Conrad the great novelist attempted to engage with through his unfortunate imagery about a heart of darkness. We really ought to shift this implicit post-colonial prism inwards onto what some of us have become and ask questions about the way in which our values and lifestyles are designed around a complex parasitic attachment with those lives we have historically seriously damaged under the guise of a civilizing agenda. The great American sociologist Goffman talks about the presentation of self in everyday life. I doubt even he would have anticipated how this is now dominating cyberspace and leaking out and infecting our actual world.