Internet and the imagination of the trip?
On the occasion of the publication of Stéphane Hugon‘s new book, Circumnavigation, l’imaginaire du voyage dans l’expérience Internet [Circumnavigation. The Imagination of Travel in the Internet Experience, Paris, Éditions CNRS, 2010], Michel Maffesoli has invited the author and young CEAQ scholar, along with journalist Emmanuel Poncet (GQ magazine).
« Internet links up and re-enchants, liberates and multiplies, mediates and embodies the world. » This is, in a few words, the object and the issue of Stéphane Hugon’s work on the Internet phenomenon.
The experience of the Internet belongs to daily life, rather intensely so. And still, so little of it has been thought through – at least in France.
Engaging in such thinking has become urgent, for living together is increasingly going to be shaped by these new means of interactive communication. While technique had « disenchanted the world » in its totality, at the moment the digital revolution is implacably reversing the trend. In that sense, electronic « circumnavigation » may well serve as the vector for the discovery of a new world whose edges remain unknown for now.
« L’Imaginaire du voyage, » the theme proposed by Stéphane Hugon, thus draws up the lines of a map which does not omit territories in the process. New editions of several books by Gilbert Durand (Pour sortir du XXe siècle, [To Exit the Twentieth Century]) will help us become more familiar with the theoretical roots of the notion of Internet as journey.
