Resurrecting the Cyberflaneur

In his 1927 essay “Photography,” Siegfried Kracauer describes--in a writing style meant to mimic the cinematic experience--the new and improved 20^th century flaneur, the camera-friendly and filmic flaneur, belonging to the world of moving images, who strolls the kaleidoscopic streets, mingling “with unidentified shapes and fragmentary visual complexes.”  Unlike the original urban saunterer of 19^th Century Paris, whom Baudelaire, then later Benjamin & Co., established as the prototype of European Modernism, Kracauer’s movie-age loafer experiences his surroundings “as loose throngs of sketchy, completely indeterminate figures… An incessant flow casts its spell over the flaneur, or even creates him.  The flaneur is intoxicated with life in the street—life eternally dissolving the patterns which it is about to form.”  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QeMT6TzHEGQ

Back in the early days of network culture--AKA the nineties--critics and commentators developed the idea of the cyberflaneur.  This digital version was no longer a stroller of boulevards, panoramic or otherwise; she/he was a surfer, an “explorer” and a “navigator, the connected roamer passively clicking and drifting through still-developing virtual geography. Now flash forward to 2012, the year the Twitter Era well and truly took dominion, and Evgeny Morozov, in his New York Times articles, declares “The Death of the Cyberflaneur.” He argues that the socially-networking subject doesn't just passively explore digital arcades of Geocities and EBay like she/he might have 15 years ago—she/he gets shit done: uploading, downloading, chatting, masturbating, and endlessly consuming. 

Noticing the date of the Morozov article (it was published in early 2012), I can’t help but think about the major change in social media between then and now—namely the Instagram Revolution.  From an image-based/photographic standpoint—and if we’re using cinepoetics as an analogy in our experiment, we should probably come at it from here—Instagram helped reintroduce the simple image (as opposed to the more multimodal and intertextual Facebook photo apparatus) as an online communication device.  With this in mind, as we seek a metaphysic for electracy, and if we employ Lacanian psychoanalysis as our theory model, the concept of the flaneur is pivotal and can be used to describe the egent’s drive and desire as well as the digitized Gaze she/he suffers from.  Furthermore, if we take as contrast the aesthetics of the lyric poet of ancient China, we can further develop what makes our fresh flaneur both mystical and electrate. Here, my instructions will show how to resurrect the cyberflaneur, version 2.0.