Tag Archives: Internet

It’s Not the Smartphone, It’s You and It’s Me

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There’s this line you’ve probably seen before, “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle.” It’s often attributed to Plato or Philo, but they almost certainly said no such thing. Nevertheless, I like the sentiment; there’s a good deal of truth to it. Sometimes, though, it is a battle to be kind. It is sometimes a battle even to be attentive to another person or to take note of them at all.

This is not a recent phenomenon. It is not caused by the Internet, social media, or mobile phones just as it was not caused by the Industrial Revolution, telephones, or books. It is the human condition. It is much easier to pay attention to our own needs and desires. We know them more intimately; they are immediately before us. No effort of the will is involved.

Being attentive to another person, however, does require an act of the will. It does not come naturally. It involves deliberate effort and sometimes the setting aside of our own desires. It may even be a kind of sacrifice to give our attention to another and to be kind an act of heroism.

I’m thinking about all of this after reading Evan Selinger’s essay in Wired about technology and etiquette. In it Selinger reminds us that “effort is the currency of care.” That is remarkably well put.

Here’s another line that I like: “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” That one is from Simone Weil. Simone Weil did not have a smartphone, they weren’t around then; yet attention was still considered rare.

But the smartphone is not altogether irrelevant, nor is any other technology to which we might lend our attention. The thing about attention is that we can only direct it toward one thing at a time. So when we are in the presence of another person, the smartphone in the pocket may make it harder to pay attention to that person. But the smartphone isn’t doing a thing. It’s just there. It’s not the smartphone, it’s you and it’s me. It’s about understanding our own proclivities. It’s about understanding how the presence of certain material realities interact with our ability to direct our intention and perception. It’s about remembering the great battle we fight simply to be decent human beings from one moment to the next and doing what we can to make it more likely that we will win rather than lose that battle.

Maybe that means putting the smartphone away or turning it off or getting rid of it altogether. Maybe it means doing the same thing with a book. But it also means recognizing that you’re doing so not because of what you know about the smartphone or the book, but because of what you know about yourself.

A Very Extended Will

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Odysseus ordered his men to tie him to the mast of his ship so that he might resist the Siren”s song. It’s an instance of what is sometimes called the extended will. So what sort of extended will is necessary to moderate your Internet time?

On his blog, Nick Carr highlights the following from an interview Evgeny Morozov gave in the Observer. It describes how Morozov goes about managing his connectivity:

“I have bought myself a type of laptop from which it was very easy to remove the Wi-Fi card – so when I go to a coffee shop or the library I have no way to get online. However, at home I have cable connection. So I bought a safe with a timed combination lock. It is basically the most useful artefact in my life. I lock my phone and my router cable in my safe so I’m completely free from any interruption and I can spend the entire day, weekend or week reading and writing. … To circumvent my safe I have to open a panel with a screwdriver, so I have to hide all my screwdrivers in the safe as well. So I would have to leave home to buy a screwdriver – the time and cost of doing this is what stops me.”

I’ll let you draw your own conclusions. Do click through to the blog post wherein you can read an enlightening exchange between Morozov and Carr.

Online/Offline/No Line

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Nicholas Carr recently initiated a second round of discussion with Nathan Jurgenson over digital dualism and the IRL Festish, both terms coined by Jurgenson. Instead of rehashing the earlier debate, I’ll simply provide the links:

The IRL Fetish — Jurgenson

The Line Between Offline and Online — Carr

In response to Jurgenson, I wrote “In Search of the Real,” which was cited by Carr in his recent post. I also discussed the piece with Jurgenson in the comments.

This second round was kicked off by Carr in a post titled “Digital dualism denialism.” Jurgenson responded here. I also suggest reading Tyler Bickford’s take on the exchange in which he explains why he thinks Jurgenson does not go far enough.

I’ll enter the fray by way of Bickford’s analysis. He reckons that Jurgenson’s concession that “the digital and physical are not the same” gives away the game. Admitting such, in Bickford’s view, means that the critique of digital dualism does not quite manage to escape digital dualism. I think Bickford is right about this. He writes,

In fact Jurgenson builds this problem in from the beginning, posing in the place of digital dualism what he calls “augmented reality.” Unfortunately, Carr has him dead to rights when he concludes his post with

An augmentation, it’s worth remembering, is both part of and separate from that which it is added to. To deny the separateness is as wrongheaded as to deny the togetherness.

Right! If you start with reality, and then you augment it, then you’ve got two distinct things that can always be distinguished. This is a dualist model! The solution here is to stop talking about “reality” altogether.

He is disappointed that Jurgenson fails to fully escape the dualist trap because he is, in fact, very sympathetic to Jurgenson’s critique.

Let me pause at this point to say that it is not clear that all the parties in this conversation, myself included, have reached what the rhetoricians call stasis — that is, it’s not evident that those involved in the debate know what exactly the debate is about. Jurgenson and Bickford both admit as much in their posts. As I was contemplating a response (indeed, even now as I write it), I was also plagued by the sense that I really didn’t have a handle on what the particular points of disagreement were in this case.

That said, here are some considerations that seem pertinent to me. I offer them in an effort to advance the discussion, certainly not as a final, conclusive word. Feedback welcome, especially if I’ve failed to understand or mischaracterized someone’s position.

First, there is the motif of boundaries and distinctions running through the discussion. Is it helpful to draw them at all? If so where ought they be drawn? I’m sympathetic to Bickford’s contention, following Evgeny Morozov, that the phenomena under consideration are too varied and complex to group neatly under categories such as online/offline, digital/physical, material/virtual, etc. I think this a reasonable point, but, of course, we can’t name every leaf, so we use categories for the sake of thought and communication. We should do so, however, with humility and circumspection. Not too long ago I attempted my own taxonomy of online experience from a phenomenological or experiential perspective: “Varieties of Online Experience.” You can judge for yourself whether or not it is helpful.

What is not helpful, in my view, is to deny all distinctions as inherently falsifying, oppressive, etc. Fuzzy and permeable boundaries do not invalidate the fact that reality is not an undifferentiated blob. Writing elsewhere about historical analogies, I made the following claim that I think applies here as well:

While it may be difficult or even impossible to pinpoint where one color turns into another on the spectrum, it is absurd to therefore maintain that red is the same as yellow, or white the same as orange. There is both continuity and discontinuity. This is true of historical change, and it is true of the categories we use to make sense of our experience.

I think this analogy applies to the online/offline debate. As concepts, the offline and the online are symbiotic. Experientially, they are often entwined and enmeshed, or however else one may put it. But under certain conditions, they are distinguishable. One may decide that neither ought to be privileged, but that is not the same thing as insisting that they are indistinguishable altogether.

Since Haraway is a key figure in this discussion, let me cite her as well. Writing in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, in which the Cyborg Manifesto is found, she says the following:

So, I think my problem and ‘our’ problem is how to have simultaneously an account of radical historical contingency for all knowledge claims and knowing subjects, a critical practice for recognizing our own ‘semiotic technologies’ for making meanings, and a no-nonsense commitment to faithful accounts of a ‘real’ world, one that can be partially shared and friendly to earth-wide projects of finite freedom, adequate material abundance, modest meaning in suffering, and limited happiness.

Now, I suppose Bickford is well within his rights to argue that, in fact, Haraway does not go far enough and that she has an IRL fetish herself (although the quotation marks may save her of that charge). It seems to me, though, that this is quite right and well put.  There are realities against which our language, concepts, and knowledge claims rub and within this reality there are distinctions. It is left to us to find the most “faithful” account.

There is little use denying that there are a set of practices, however diverse and multifarious they may be, that correspond meaningfully to the concept of being “online” and, consequently, that in the absence of these practices there is something which it is meaningful to call “offline.”

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Hypothetical question: Imagine someone dear to you — your spouse, an old friend, your brother, whoever. Now imagine that you are separated from that person for some non-trivial period of time. You are then given the choice, all things being equal, of either sending that person a letter, having a phone conversation, exchanging text messages, conversing over Skype, or meeting face-to-face. Which do you choose?

I have no interest in denying the reality of the letter, the text message, or the phone call, etc. They are real enough, but I choose the face-to-face encounter every time.

Is my preference, and I suspect your preference too, for a face-to-face meeting the product of a philosophically naive fetishizing of the offline?

Jurgenson seems to think so, if I read him fairly. He writes,

I have the audacity to suggest what people say isn’t the full story, arguing that this isn’t an infringement on the real but the creation of the myth of the virtual to simultaneously deploy “the real” that one can then have access to (and often looking down on others still caught up in the “virtual”).

Might I suggest that while such audacity is sometimes called for, it may sometimes be the expression of ideological closure. The even more audacious option may be to allow that sometimes there is no subtext.

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If I were to attempt to explain why it is that I would choose the face-to-face encounter every time, I think I would have a hard time doing so. It is self-evident and self-evident things are sometimes hard to articulate. But if pressed, I would point to the fullness of embodied presence. It is odd that to avoid digital dualism it is sometimes necessary to tacitly endorse mind/body dualism. Only if the body is ignored does it make sense to say that the distinction between online experience and offline experience matters not at all. I don’t think this is what Jurgenson is saying. It does seem be an implication of Bickford’s post, but I grant that I may not being reading him rightly.

I do agree with Bickford, though, when he suggests we take the word real off the table in these discussion. It brings more confusion than clarity.

The Lifestream Stops

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David Gelernter, 2013:

“And today, the most important function of the internet is to deliver the latest information, to tell us what’s happening right now. That’s why so many time-based structures have emerged in the cybersphere: to satisfy the need for the newest data. Whether tweet or timeline, all are time-ordered streams designed to tell you what’s new … But what happens if we merge all those blogs, feeds, chatstreams, and so forth? By adding together every timestream on the net — including the private lifestreams that are just beginning to emerge — into a single flood of data, we get the worldstream: a way to picture the cybersphere as a whole … What people really want is to tune in to information. Since many millions of separate lifestreams will exist in the cybersphere soon, our basic software will be the stream-browser: like today’s browsers, but designed to add, subtract, and navigate streams.”

E. M. Forster, 1909:

“Who is it?” she called. Her voice was irritable, for she had been interrupted often since the music began. She knew several thousand people, in certain directions human intercourse had advanced enormously.

But when she listened into the receiver, her white face wrinkled into smiles, and she said:

“Very well. Let us talk, I will isolate myself. I do not expect anything important will happen for the next five minutes-for I can give you fully five minutes …”

She touched the isolation knob, so that no one else could speak to her. Then she touched the lighting apparatus, and the little room was plunged into darkness.

“Be quick!” She called, her irritation returning. “Be quick, Kuno; here I am in the dark wasting my time.”

[Conversation ensues and comes to an abrupt close.]

Vashti’s next move was to turn off the isolation switch, and all the accumulations of the last three minutes burst upon her. The room was filled with the noise of bells, and speaking-tubes. What was the new food like? Could she recommend it? Has she had any ideas lately? Might one tell her one”s own ideas? Would she make an engagement to visit the public nurseries at an early date? – say this day month.

To most of these questions she replied with irritation – a growing quality in that accelerated age. She said that the new food was horrible. That she could not visit the public nurseries through press of engagements. That she had no ideas of her own but had just been told one-that four stars and three in the middle were like a man: she doubted there was much in it.

When I read Gelernter’s piece and his world-stream metaphor (illustration below), I was reminded of Forster’s story and the image of Vashti, sitting in her chair, immersed in cacophonic real-time stream of information. Of course, the one obvious difference between Gelernter’s and Forster’s conceptions of the relentless stream of information into which one plunges is the nature of the interface. In Forster’s story, “The Machine Stops,” the interface is anchored to a particular place. It is an armchair in a bare, dark room from which characters in his story rarely move. Gelernter assumes the mobile interfaces we’ve grown accustomed to over the last several years.

In Forster’s story, the great threat the Machine poses to its users is that of radical disembodiment. Bodies have atrophied, physicality is a burden, and all the ways in which the body comes to know the world have been overwhelmed by a perpetual feeding of the mind with ever more derivative “ideas.” This is a fascinating aspect of the story. Forster anticipates the insights of later philosophers such as Merleau-Ponty and Hubert Dreyfus as well as the many researchers helping us understand embodied cognition. Take this passage for example:

You know that we have lost the sense of space. We say “space is annihilated”, but we have annihilated not space, but the sense thereof. We have lost a part of ourselves. I determined to recover it, and I began by walking up and down the platform of the railway outside my room. Up and down, until I was tired, and so did recapture the meaning of “Near” and “Far”. “Near” is a place to which I can get quickly on my feet, not a place to which the train or the air-ship will take me quickly. “Far” is a place to which I cannot get quickly on my feet; the vomitory is “far”, though I could be there in thirty-eight seconds by summoning the train. Man is the measure. That was my first lesson. Man”s feet are the measure for distance, his hands are the measure for ownership, his body is the measure for all that is lovable and desirable and strong.

But how might Forster have conceived of his story if his interface had been mobile? Would his story still be a Cartesian nightmare? Or would he understand the danger to be posed to our sense of time rather than our sense of place? He might have worried not about the consequences of being anchored to one place, but rather being anchored to one time — a relentless, enduring present.

Were I Forster, however, I wouldn’t change his focus on the body. For isn’t our body and the physicality of lived experience that the body perceives also our most meaningful measure of time? Do not our memories etch themselves in our bodies? Does not a feel for the passing years emerge from the transformation of our bodies? Philosopher Merleau-Ponty spoke of the “time of the body.” Consider Shaun Gallagher’s exploration of Merleau-Ponty’s perspective:

“Temporality is in some way a ‘dimension of our being’ … More specifically, it is a dimension of our situated existence. Merleau-Ponty explains this along the lines of the Heideggerian analysis of being-in- the-world. It is in my everyday dealings with things that the horizon of the day gets defined: it is in ‘this moment I spend working, with, behind it, the horizon of the day that has elapsed, and in front of it, the evening and night – that I make contact with time, and learn to know its course’ …”

Gallagher goes on to cite the following passage from Merleau-Ponty:

“I do not form a mental picture of my day, it weighs upon me with all its weight, it is still there, and though I may not recall any detail of it, I have the impending power to do so, I still ‘have it in hand.’ . . . Our future is not made up exclusively of guesswork and daydreams. Ahead of what I see and perceive . . . my world is carried forward by lines of intentionality which trace out in advance at least the style of what is to come.”

Then Gallagher adds, “Thus, Merleau-Ponty suggests, I feel time on my shoulders and in my fatigued muscles; I get physically tired from my work; I see how much more I have to do. Time is measured out first of all in my embodied actions as I ‘reckon with an environment’ in which ‘I seek support in my tools, and am at my task rather than confronting it.’”

That last distinction between being at my task rather than confronting it seems particularly significant, especially as it involves the support of tools. Our sense of time, like our sense of place, is not an unchangeable given. It shifts and alters through technological mediation. Melvin Kranzberg, in the first of his six laws of technology, reminds us, “Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.” Our technological mediation of space and time is never neutral; and while it may not be “bad” or “good” in some abstract sense, it can be more or less humane, more or less conducive to our well-being. If the future of the Internet is the worldstream, we should perhaps think twice before plunging.

Worldstream Gelernter

Pensées: An Imaginative Thought Experiment

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Imagine a not too distant future in which there exists a café of the sort that you would expect to find in a trendy urban district where young professionals and aspiring artists gather to work, to socialize, and, of course, to be seen.

This café is different, though. There are no tables or couches; no bar stools or lounge chairs. There are, however, a series of numbered doors lining the interior walls. Above each door, a digital clock counts down from assorted and seemingly random times. Occasionally, a faint thumping can be heard, but it is indistinct and barely noticeable.

Customers enter the café and approach the service bar. They order a latte or an espresso or chai and they sign some papers. They pay while they wait for their drink, and, when it is ready, they take it along with a bracelet and a plastic card.

Drink in hand, they make their way to one of the numbered doors, swipe the card to unlock it, and they walk inside. Behind them the door closes and locks automatically. Outside, above the door, the digital clock above the door begins to count down from three hours. Inside, the patron sets his coffee down at a bare table and pulls out the lone chair. The acoustic foam lining the walls makes every sound palpable: the unzipping of the laptop bag; the placing, gently, of the ultra-slim computer on the table; the first few keystrokes.

A glance at the signal strength indicator confirms what has been agreed upon: no wireless signal. So too does a tug on the door handle: locked, from the outside.  And it is as quiet as promised, except for the surprisingly audible thumping of the heart.

Clever proprietors had discovered that people are now willing to pay to be kept, for a period of time, in an enforced state of un-distractedness.  Years earlier, certain applications had promised something similar. They offered Freedom from distraction by preventing a device from connecting to the Internet for a pre-determined period of time. But this extension of the will proved too easily circumvented. A more radical cure was needed.

Having signed the appropriate legal waivers, customers at Pensées were securely locked into their cells so that they may work, without interruption, on whatever task needed their undivided attention. The bracelets monitored their vital signs in the event of a medical emergency. Barring such an emergency, proprietors pledged to keep the door closed without exception. (Patrons were aware that cameras monitored the inside of each cell; only legal and legitimate work was to be done within, naturally.) It was not uncommon, then, for some patrons eventually to demand, by sometimes frantic gesticulations, that they be allowed to exit.

Such requests were always denied as a matter of course. It was for this denial of their misguided desire, after all, that they had paid their good money.

Those who came to Pensées, and to similar establishments, had discovered by then that their unaided will could not be trusted. They came to be productive: to finish their papers or work on their manuscripts and screenplays. Some came simply to sit and think. The more religious, came to pray or to meditate.

Such acts may have been possible outside the soundproof walls of Pensées’ cells, but this was merely a theoretical possibility to most. (Of course, those who ran Pensées never suggested that, even within the walls of their cells, the possibility remained thoroughly theoretical.)

Inside their cells, the experience of patrons proceeded along a surprisingly predictable path. With eager hopefulness they set up their workspace just so and launched, almost giddy, into their work. Within minutes, sometimes seconds, they would casually laugh off the urge they suddenly felt to check their smartphones for some incoming message or alert. They had no signal, they knew, but the urge persisted. They felt silly when they took out their smartphones to confirm what they already knew to be the case. Then, they put it away with a self-knowing smirk; or, rather, they set it down within view of their peripheral vision. No harm done since there was no signal, but, annoyingly, glances followed.

Between glances, eyes would flit toward that place on the screen were numbers in parenthesis would signal new items of various sorts that required attention. But there were none of these either, just as had been hoped for and paid for. But it was increasingly frustrating to catch oneself repeatedly looking anyway.

After a few minutes of this, work would resume, but in bursts punctuated by periods of wandering thoughts, random observations, and disjointed inner monologues. Perhaps decaf would be better next time. It’s hard to focus when a muscle twitches involuntarily. The inability to voluntarily direct one’s attention was bad enough; that the body would now prove equally unruly was dispiriting.

It was not unusual for some to then reach for their smartphones, almost unconsciously, and then to handle it as if it were their rosary beads.* Or they may stand up and pace about the cramped but comfortable cell, not yet anxiously, only to get the blood flowing before sitting down to work with renewed focus. And so they did, for a short while, before they began to wonder if it was not absurd to pay to be locked in a room. And how much time had gone by they wondered? The phone, at least, was still good for that – to register the fact that hardly any time at all had passed.

Some then grew anxious as they fixated on time, which advanced glacially. Silence, for which they had been willing, just minutes before, to pay, now seemed oppressive. No work was being accomplished, and most thoughts that were thought turned out to be depressingly banal; those that were not were disconcerting.

They turned to the camera and wondered just how serious the proprietors were about refusing to allow patrons to exit their cells. Quite serious, it always turned out, despite the desperate pounding of some. Anxiety attacks did not, according to the terms agreed to, constitute a medical emergency.

Some eventually fell asleep. Some went back to their desks to eek out some semblance of work so that they would have something, at least, to show for their ordeal. Others stared blankly at the door, straining to hear the gentle tone that would signal the end of their time in the cell.

When it came, some patrons exited hurriedly and others stumbled out, bewildered. A few tried to make a good show of it, walking off with whatever air of accomplishment they could feign. Most were seen eagerly staring at their smartphone waiting for it to come online. Surprisingly, every so often, there were some who walked away looking as if they’d learned something rather important. About what, exactly, it was never clear.

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*An image I owe to Ian Bogost.

Varieties of Online Experience

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In 2011, Nathan Jurgenson coined the phrase digital dualism in a post on the website Cyborgology. Here is an excerpt from the opening of that essay:

Digital dualists believe that the digital world is “virtual” and the physical world “real.” This bias motivates many of the critiques of sites like Facebook and the rest of the social web and I fundamentally think this digital dualism is a fallacy. Instead, I want to argue that the digital and physical are increasingly meshed, and want to call this opposite perspective that implodes atoms and bits rather than holding them conceptually separate augmented reality.” [Emphasis in the original.]

Since then, the critique of digital dualism has been advanced by Jurgenson and the writers associated with Cyborgology with enough consistency and regularity that I think it fair to say it characterizes what could be called the Cyborgology school of digital criticism.

In the comments section of my previous post on the integrity of online practices, while discussing the value of activities that some might understand as “offline” (but characteristically wanting to guard against digital dualism), Jurgenson suggested a distinction between being explicitly and implicitly connected as a way of getting at how the online impinges upon the offline.

I thought this useful, but as I considered the dynamic, it seemed to me that it might be better to talk about two vectors or spectrums rather than one. My initial effort to describe these two vectors yielded a spectrum of material connectivity and one of psychic connectivity.

With material connectivity I had in mind access to the more straightforward ways we might be online: on a laptop, smartphone, tablet, etc. This spectrum then would run from a situation wherein we are without device and without signal to one in which we are actively engaging a device that is connected to the Internet.

With psychic connectivity I had in mind the degree to which we are conscious of the online experience. On one end of this spectrum, we are not at all conscious of the online and on the other it is at the forefront of our thinking.

I realize this was less elegant than the implicit/explicit dichotomy, but thinking in terms of two intersecting vertices offered a little more nuance. We may, for example, at any given moment, be materially connected (i.e., with easy and present access to the Internet), but psychically disconnected (i.e., not be thinking of it at all). Conversely, we may be materially disconnected (e.g., in the woods), but psychically connected (i.e., thinking of how we’ll tweet later about the experience). The other possibilities include being both materially and psychically connected, and, most importantly for my purposes, materially and psychically disconnected.

I’ve thought a little more about this schema and what it tries to capture, and I’ve realized that there’s a little more that it needs to include. This is still a work in progress, but here, as I presently see them, are the varieties of online experience that any such schema would want to encompass (including those explained above):

Material connectivity: As described above, this refers to our tangible connection through a device to the Internet. The spectrum would range from non-access to access to engagement. This kind of connectivity is, in fact, the material base of all the other forms.

Existential connectivity: This replaces “psychic” connectivity above (I think it sounds better). It refers to our conscious awareness of online realities and how that awareness shapes our thoughts, feelings, motives, and actions. The proposed spectrum here ranges from states of being in which the Internet plays no role whatsoever to those which are preoccupied with or focused on some aspect of it. It is here that we would register the possibility that, device in hand or not, our interpretation of experience is inflected by Facebook (or Instagram, or Twitter, etc.). Think here of Jurgenson’s “Facebook Eye.”

Residual connectivity: I’m thinking here of the way in which our habits may be formed by online experience so that the consequences of being connected stay with us even when we are not connected materially or even existentially. Consider, for example, the manner in which our attention may be conditioned by Internet use yielding something like the disordered states of attention that Nicholas Carr, Katherine Hayles, and Linda Stone have, each in their own way, addressed. Or, how the immediacy, convenience, and efficiency that drives online activity may render patience increasingly difficult to cultivate.

Iconic connectivity: Terminology is getting sketchy, I know, but stay with me. This category accounts for another sense in which we might be online without being materially connected to the Internet that arises from the presence of our data online. Our online profiles have a life of their own and constitute an online presence whether or not we are ourselves materially connected or existentially connected. This manner of being online may be best illustrated by the enduring online presence of those of have passed away (or, the enduring presence of their data if you prefer). Though dead, they remain, in some sense, online. Like religious icons, they are representations of a person that both are and are not the person. The spectrum here would range from having no self-created online presence, to forgotten and unmanaged profiles, to active profiles not at the moment in use, to presently acting through an online profile. We might say that, at the latter end, the icon and the person are most closely identified. I think my Facebook as Rear Window analogy works best here.

Ambient connectivity: With this category, I’m attempting to register the manner in which we may be online through activities that did not originate with us. So, for example, I may not be materially, existentially, or iconically connected, but I may still be mentioned online by a friend who is. Or, not being connected in any way, I might ask someone who is for directions to some place across town.

More generally, we might also consider the manner in which the world we live in is transformed by online reality, with real consequences for our lives, even if we remain disconnected. This may be as simple as the local Borders that I frequented closing down due to competition from online retailers. Or, it may be a more complicated dynamic, such as the way that a person with whom I seek to have a romantic relationship has had their understanding of relationships conditioned by habits formed through online realities. These more general effects of online realities on my life may not be best treated alongside the varieties of online experience above. In other words, to call these latter realities a form of being online may be pressing the language beyond its usefulness.

So what to make of these categories together? Being now five vertices, they can no longer be neatly tied together into four quadrants of possibilities. Looking at them together it strikes me that there is a phenomenological line separating material and existential connectivity on the one hand and iconic and ambient connectivity on the other with residual connectivity somewhere in-between.

I can theoretically monitor where I am on the spectrums of the former two. (Although the act of self-monitoring, in a Heisenberg sort of way, would create an interesting paradox on the existential spectrum. Am I existentially online if I am aware of myself not being online?) But I can’t do so in the same way with iconic and ambient connectivity. I have no way of knowing where my profiles have been and I may be forever blissfully unaware that someone, somewhere has said something about me online. I’m tempted to call iconic and ambient connectivity the unconscious online.

Residual connectivity may frequently be at work on me without my awareness, but I think it possible to become aware of it. Perhaps we might call residual connectivity the ordinarily unconscious online.

As it stands, this is already an overly long blog post, so I’m going to resist the temptation to keep parsing. I’ll let these categories sit for now and welcome observations and criticisms. I don’t exactly offer this as a companion to the recent efforts by a variety of writers at Cyborgology to advance the digital dualism critique (here and here, for example), but if it is of any value in that effort, I’d be glad for it.

For Your Consideration – 3

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“Tu and Twitter: Is it the end for ‘vous’ in French?”:

“‘In the philosophy of the internet, we are among peers, equal, without social distinction, whatever your age, gender, income or status in real life,’ Besson says.

Addressing someone as ‘vous’ – or expecting to be addressed as ‘vous’ – on the other hand, implies hierarchy.”

“Can objects be evil? A review of ‘Addiction by Design’”:

“Schüll’s Addiction systematically builds on her basic argument that, ‘just as certain individuals are more vulnerable to addiction than others, it is also the case that some objects, by virtue of their unique pharmacologic or structural characteristics, are more likely than others to trigger or accelerate an addiction.’”

“Cyberasociality and the Online Sociality Divide: Third Level Digital Divide?”: Provocative working paper by sociologist Zeynep Tufekci. Well-worth the time.

“To test the idea whether the acceptance of the idea of deep bonds and real friendships being established online was mostly a cohort effect, I undertook a rolling survey of undergraduate students in a mid-sized public university in the mid-Atlantic during 2007 and 2008 …

The result, reported in Tufekci (2010) showed that there was a substantive segment of even this population, about 51 percent, who believed that an online-only deep friendship was not possible. Statistical analyses also showed that this was not a byproduct of offline sociality, i.e. some people who were sociable offline were also sociable offline and vice versa.”

“Your brain on pseudoscience: the rise of popular neurobollocks”: Neurobollocks … yes, this essay did appear in a British publication.

“In this light, one might humbly venture a preliminary diagnosis of the pop brain hacks’ chronic intellectual error. It is that they misleadingly assume we always know how to interpret such “hidden” information, and that it is always more reliably meaningful than what lies in plain view. The hucksters of neuroscientism are the conspiracy theorists of the human animal, the 9/11 Truthers of the life of the mind.”

“What Will the ‘Phone’ of 2022 Look Like?”:

“Having opened up a chasm between the informational and material, we’re rapidly trying to close it. And sitting right at the interface between the two is this object we call a phone, but that is actually the bridge between the offline and online. My guess is that however the phone looks, whoever makes it, and whatever robot army it controls, the role of the phone in 10 years will be to marry our flesh and data ever more tightly.”

“‘Symbolic efficiency,’ ‘liquid modernity’ and identity-capacity”: First line would’ve made a better title, “how ‘becoming oneself’ has turned into a crappy job.”

“There is no respite from self-construction; it’s a cathedral that can’t be completed. And the inevitable failures and shortcomings of our identity in progress, our inevitable disappointment with what we have and what we see being promised, what others seem to be allowed to enjoy, becomes our fault. Politics seems not to be a viable avenue to addressing our disgruntlement; instead soul-searching and more and more elaborate consumption, and just as important, mediated declarations of who we think we are by virtue of that consumption.”

Attentional Austerity

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A couple of weeks ago I read Cheri Lucas’ “Instapaper and My Ideal Intellectual State” with a certain empathetic resignation. Lucas was finding that a new work situation made it increasingly difficult to keep up with the daily torrent of online information coming through all the usual channels — Twitter, RSS feeds, etc. She looked to Instapaper as a way of keeping up a semblance of keeping up, but to no avail. Instapaper quickly became a repository of what might have been read in some ideal world. A site of aspirational knowledge, a kind of Pinterest for the mind (without all the graphical flair).

I get it. This is where I now live too. I haven’t posted in over two weeks. For those of you who have recently started following The Frailest Thing thanks to the whole toilet paper thing — well, first of all, welcome and thank you. Secondly, I have ordinarily kept up a better clip. Right now it seems to me that the best I’ll be able to do is something like a post each week. Perhaps as things get a bit more routinized, I’ll be able to pick up the pace.

Or maybe not. I’m beginning to think that perhaps a post per week is a pretty good pace to aim for. I’ve been impressed again by the preciousness of attention. Because I have less time to devote to the Sisyphian task of keeping up with the daily digital deluge, I’m becoming increasingly draconian in deciding what deserves my attention. I’m ruthlessly ignoring whole swaths of Twitter-time and savagely gutting my RSS feed.

(As Nick Carr pointed out some time ago, the problem isn’t filter failure. My filters work wonderfully. Everyday they collect swaths of interesting, stimulating, entertaining material. It’s just too much.)

I told some students recently that the most important skill they may ever learn is that of wisely deploying their attention. For the most part we seem to do so carelessly, hearkening every call upon our attention with Pavlovian alacrity. It’s a ruinous habit, better to be misers with our attention.

In other words, we need to impose a regime of attentional austerity to counter continuous partial attention, the default mode arising out of our media environment.

It’s sometimes assumed that in the world the Internet created, those who excel at multi-tasking and endlessly partitioning their attention will have the advantage. I’m not so sure. It rather seems like we are turning our digital devices into horcruxes of the mind. Instead, I’m betting the advantage will go to the person who is able to cancel out the noise and focus with ferocity.

What Would Thoreau Do?

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Yesterday, July 12th, was Henry David Thoreau’s 195th birthday, or 195th anniversary of his birth, or however that is best put when the person in question is no longer alive. In any case, Thoreau is best remembered for two things. The first is his experiment in living simply and in greater communion with nature in a cabin on the outskirts of Concord, Massachusetts. The cabin was situated on Walden Pond and Thoreau’s reflections on his “experiment” were later published as Walden.

Thoreau is also remembered for making a better pencil. No, seriously. It seems that Thoreau is actually not generally remembered for this, but it is true. His family owned a pencil factory at which Thoreau worked on and off throughout his life. Thanks to his study of German pencil making techniques, Thoreau helped design the best American pencil of its day. Apparently, in the early 19th century, there remained significant technical challenges to the making of a durable pencil, mostly having to do with the sturdiness of the graphite shaft and fitting it into a casing. Among Thoreau’s many accomplishments was the development of a process of manufacturing the pencil that solved these engineering problems.

I thought of Thoreau yesterday not only because it was the anniversary of his birth, but also because I had come across an article titled, “Tweets From the Trail: Technology Can Enhance Your Wilderness Experiences” (h/t to Nathan Jurgenson). The author, novelist Walter Kirn of Montana, had the temerity to suggest that maybe there is something to be gained by brining your technology out into nature with you, rather than venturing into nature in order to escape technology. As you might imagine, many of Kirn’s Montana nature-enthusiast friends were less than pleased.

Now, we should note that these distinctions we make — nature/technology, for example — are a bit complicated. To illustrate here is the opening of a recent, relevant post by Nick Carr:

A couple of cavemen are walking through the woods. One sighs happily and says to the other, “I’m telling you, there’s nothing like being out in nature.” The other pauses and says, “What’s nature?”

It’s 1972. A pair of lovers go camping in a wilderness area in a national park. They’re sitting by a campfire, taking in the evening breezes. “Honey,” says the woman, “I have to confess I really love being offline.” The guy looks at her and says, “What’s offline?”

You see the point. Our idea of “nature” owes something to the advance of technology just as our idea of “offline” necessitates the emergence of online. But back to Kirn’s article. He discovered that his writing flourished when he set up a work station on an old wooden telephone wire spool under the big, blue Montana sky with badgers and gophers scampering all about. Subsequently he made a habit of screening movies on his iPad in “natural” settings such as the seaside or the shores of a river. Finally, he confesses to the manner in which being out in the wilderness inspires fits of creativity that he feels compelled to tweet and post. And here is his eloquent conclusion:

“To sever our experience of wilderness from our use of technology now seems to me an unnatural act, shortsighted and unimaginative. No one appreciates a ringing cell phone while they float on a muddy river through western badlands or stand in the saddle between two massive mountain ranges, but short of such rude interruptions of heavenly moments, technology has a mysterious way, at times, of providing the perfect contrast, the happy counterpoint to scenes and experiences and settings that are easy to take for granted or grow numb to. Along with harmony, contrast is one of the two great rules of art. It wakes the senses, jars the tired mind, breaks up routines that threaten to grow mechanical. If you don’t believe me, try it. Travel to that secluded spot you keep returning to, the one where you go to leave the world behind, and turn on some music, play a movie, capture a passing thought and send it onward, out of the forest, out into society, and then wait, while the wind blows and the treetops sway and the clouds pile up a mile above your head, for someone, some faraway stranger, to reply. Even when we’re alone, we’re not alone, this proves, and in the deepest heart of every wilderness lurks a miracle, often, the human mind.”

I can’t help but wonder, what would Thoreau think? I can’t pretend to know Thoreau well enough to answer that question. I suspect that present day technophile’s would suggest that Thoreau ought to approve, after all he took his pencil to Walden and that was a technology. Well, yes, but he didn’t string a telegraph wire to the cabin.

I wouldn’t discount the dynamic Kirn describes, particularly since it is measured (let’s do without the ringing cell phone) and it still recognizes the contrast. The juxtaposition of unlike things can be creatively stimulating, and if that is what you are after, then Kirn’s formula may indeed yield something for you.

But what if your aims are different? What if you’re seeking only to listen and not to speak? What if your goal is not to be inspired toward yet another act of self-expression? We may carry technology with us into nature, in fact, we may carry it within us. But this does not mean that we ought always to answer to its prerogatives. Nor does it mean that we should always assume the posture toward reality that technology enables and the frame of mind that it encourages. And, of course, different technologies enable and encourage differently. It is the difference between the pencil and the telegraph and the smartphone.

I am not against human civilization (which is a silly thing to have to say), and the human mind, as Kirn puts it, is a “miracle” indeed. But the miracle of the human mind lies not only in its ability to create and to build and to express itself and impose its own symbolic order on the world. The miracle lies also in its ability to listen and to receive and to contemplate and to be itself re-ordered; to be taken in by the world as well as to take the world in. Perceiving the value of such a stance draws us into an awareness of the various ethical or philosophical frames that inform our evaluations. I cannot sort of all of those out, but I can acknowledge that for wide array of people the point would not be to speak, but to be spoken to. Or perhaps, even to find that we are not addressed at all.

An even greater array of people would likely agree that our posture toward this world ought to be more than merely instrumental. Human civilization must advance, but it does so best when it abandons Promethean aspirations and acknowledges its finitude along with its power.

I suppose all of this is a way of saying that beauty resides not only in what we make and say, but also in what we find and encounter. But shouldn’t this found beauty be shared? Maybe. But perhaps not before it has done its work on us. Perhaps not before we have allowed it to speak to us and to transform us. The space in which beauty can do its work is precious, and it would seem that the logic of our technologies would have us collapse that space in the service of sharing, commodification, self-expression, capturing, publicizing, and the like.

I don’t want to speak for Thoreau, but I would venture to guess that he might have us preserve that precious space where beauty has its way. At the very least, I would like to think that he would have taken some exception to Walden, the game (h/t to Nick Carr):

“Is the Internet Driving Us Mad?”: Attempting a Sane Response

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It’s Newsweek’s turn. Perhaps feeling a bit of title envy, the magazine has shamelessly ripped off The Atlantic’s formula with a new cover story alternatively titled “Is the Internet Driving Us Mad?” or “Is the Internet Making Us Crazy?”

You can probably guess what follows already. Start with a rather dramatic and telltale anecdote — in this case Jason Russell’s “reactive psychosis” in the wake of his “Kony 2012″ fame — and proceed to cite a number of studies and further anecdotes painting a worrisome picture that appears somehow correlated to heavy Internet use. You’re also likely to guess that Sherry Turkle is featured prominently. For the record, I intend no slight by that last observation, I rather appreciate Turkle’s work.

Before the day is out, this article will be “Liked” and tweeted thousands of times I’m sure. It will also be torn apart relentlessly and ridiculed. Unfortunately, the title will be responsible for both responses. A more measured title would likely have elicited a more sympathetic reading, but also less traffic.

There is much in the article that strikes an alarmist note and many of the anecdotes, while no doubt instances of real human suffering, seem to describe behaviors that are not characteristic of most people using the Internet. I’m also not one to go in for explanations that localize this or that behavior in this or that region of the brain. I’m not qualified to evaluate such conclusions, but they strike me as a tad reductionistic. That said, this does ring true:

“We may appear to be choosing to use this technology, but in fact we are being dragged to it by the potential of short-term rewards. Every ping could be social, sexual, or professional opportunity, and we get a mini-reward, a squirt of dopamine, for answering the bell. “These rewards serve as jolts of energy that recharge the compulsion engine, much like the frisson a gambler receives as a new card hits the table,” MIT media scholar Judith Donath recently told Scientific American. “Cumulatively, the effect is potent and hard to resist.”

Of course, it all hinges on correlation and causation. The article itself suggests as much right at the end. “So what do we do about it?” the author, Tony Dokoupil, asks. “Some would say nothing,” he continues, “since even the best research is tangled in the timeless conundrum of what comes first.” He adds:

“Does the medium break normal people with its unrelenting presence, endless distractions, and threat of public ridicule for missteps? Or does it attract broken souls?

But in a way, it doesn’t matter whether our digital intensity is causing mental illness, or simply encouraging it along, as long as people are suffering.”

Dokoupil concludes on a note of fateful optimism: “The Internet is still ours to shape. Our minds are in the balance.” In truth, whatever we make of the neuroscience involved, there is something to be said for the acknowledgement that we have choices to make about our relationship to the Internet.

After we cut through the hype and debates about causation, it would seem that there is a rather commonsensical way of approaching all of this.

If the article resonates with you because it seems to describe your experience, then it is probably worth taking it as a warning of sorts and an invitation to make some changes. So, for example, if you are sitting down to play video games for multiple hours without interruption and thus putting yourself in danger of developing a fatal blood clot … you may want to rethink your gaming habits.

If you are immediately reaching for your Internet device of choice before you have so much as opened your eyes in the morning, you may want to consider allowing yourself a little time before diving into the stream. Pour some coffee, have a nice breakfast. Give yourself a little time with your thoughts, or your loved ones. If you find that your thoughts are all incessantly begging you to get online and your loved one’s faces are turning disconcertingly into Facebook icons, then perhaps you have all the more reason to restore a little a balance to your Internet use.

If you take an honest inventory of your emotions and feelings, and you find that you’re anchoring a great deal of your self-worth on the replies you get to your status updates, tweets, or blog posts, then perhaps, just maybe, you might want to consider doing a little soul searching and re-prioritizing.

If “‘the computer is like electronic cocaine,’ fueling cycles of mania followed by depressive stretches” somehow resonates with your own experience, then it may be time to talk to your friends about getting a better grip on the way you’re ordering your life.

None of this is rocket science (or neuroscience). I’d like to think that most of us have a pretty good sense of when certain activities are tending toward the counterproductive and unhealthy end of the spectrum. There’s no need to get all apocalyptic about it, we can leave that to the media. Instead, take inventory of what is truly important — you know, the same old sappy but precious and indispensable stuff — and then ask yourself how your Internet use relates to these and take action accordingly. If you find that you are unable to implement the action you know you need to take, then certainly get some help.