Lyric versus audit in the virtual society

This article relates properties of lyric (immediacy, longing) to similar properties in our behaviour as influenced by the internet or virtuality. It diagnoses two key effects: the internet alters our experience of sociability and that of our bodies. Marilyn Strathern's differentiation of audit cultures from ethnography reads virtuality as abstraction: the virtual is communication and information reified from social relations and is therefore structurally analogous to economic activity. A reading of Chris Goode's writings via the queer phenomenology of Sara Ahmed offers a critique of the internet's refusal of distance (its myth of immediacy), of disorientation (its straightening and bureaucratization of our lives), and of syntax (memory).