Author: L. M. Sacasas

Postman On Media, Politics, and Childhood

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 1 Comment

In The Disappearance of Childhood, first published in 1982, Neil Postman writes the following:

Without a clear concept of what it means to be an adult, there can be no clear concept of what it means to be a child. Thus, the idea … that our electric information environment is ‘disappearing’ childhood … can also be expressed by saying that our electric information environment is disappearing adulthood.

How so, you ask?

[A]dulthood is largely a product of the printing press. Almost all of the characteristics we associate with adulthood are those that are (and were) either generated or amplified by the requirements of a fully literate culture: the capacity for self-restraint, a tolerance for delayed gratification, a sophisticated ability to think conceptually and sequentially, a preoccupation with both historical continuity and the future, a high valuation of reason and hierarchical order. As electric media move literacy to the periphery of culture and take its place at the center, different attitudes and character traits come to be valued and a new diminished definition of adulthood begins to emerge.

To be clear, Postman is obviously not talking about the number of years one has been alive. Rather he is talking about a social reality — the idea of adulthood, a particular model of what constitutes adulthood — not a biologically given reality.

Postman chooses to begin elaborating this claim with a discussion of “political consciousness and judgment in a society in which television carries the major burden of communicating political information,” about which he has the following to say:

In the television age, political judgment is transformed from an intellectual assessment of propositions to an intuitive and emotional response to the totality of an image. In the television, people do not so much agree or disagree with politicians as like or dislike them. Television redefines what is meant by ‘sound political judgment’ by making it into an aesthetic rather than a logical matter.

How might we update this discussion of television to account for digital media, especially social media? There’s a hint in the way we refer to the people who engage with each. We tend to talk about television’s audience or its viewers and of social media users. Social media users, in other words, are not merely passive consumers of media. By drawing us in as active participants, social media weaponizes the superficiality engendered by television. We might also say that “sound political judgment” becomes a matter not only of the candidate’s aesthetic but of our own aesthetic as well.

Finally, here’s a passage from Rudolph Arnheim quoted by Postman:

We must not forget in the past the inability to transport immediate experience and to convey it to others made the use of language necessary and thus compelled the human mind to develop concepts. For in order to describe things one must draw the general from the specific; one must select, compare, think. When communication can be achieved by pointing with the finger, however, the mouth grows silent, the writing hand stops, and the mind shrinks.

That’s a strong claim right there at the end. It was made in 1935. Maybe we should hesitate to put the matter quite so starkly. Perhaps we can simply say not that the mind shrinks, but that certain habits of thought atrophy or are left underdeveloped. In any case, I was struck by this paragraph because it seemed a useful way of characterizing online arguments conducted with memes. Replace “pointing a finger” with “posting a meme.” Of course, the point is that calling these arguments is all wrong. Posting a meme to make a point is like shouting QED without ever having presented your proofs. The argument, such as it is, is implicit and it is taken in at a glance, it is grasped intuitively. There’s very little room for persuasion in this sort of exchange.

Being A Parent In The Digital Age

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 3 Comments

My first child is approaching two years of age, my second two months. I just turned forty. I have no idea what it would have been like to be a father when I was in my twenties or early thirties. More energy, less wisdom perhaps? Of the former, I’m fairly certain; about the latter, less so. The one discernible consequence, as far as I can tell, is that I frequently find myself in a reflective mood. Not surprisingly, those reflections frequently drift toward technology’s role in mediating my experience of fatherhood.

Obviously, there are lots of people writing about parenting and technology, but, it seems to me, having made just a cursory survey of the multitude of books and articles, that most of this writing has focused on the safety, good health, and privacy of the child. How much screen time should I allow my toddler? Should I post pictures of my children on social media? Etc. Of course, these are important considerations, but there’s more to be said, isn’t there?

Mostly I’m interested in something closer to the visceral, existential experience of being a father in our digital context. For example, knowing that one of the most important features of technology is its power to mediate our perception, I wonder how monitoring and documenting technologies cause a child to appear before us and the world to appear before them. I wonder also about the effect of technologies that cast the whole task of being a parent in a technocratic light, rendering parenting a problem to be solved by the application of the right techniques. Additionally, I wonder how the blessing of an overabundance of online information about pregnancy and child-rearing has also become a burden, one that has displaced communal wisdom in the face of uncertainty with the ideal of total knowledge. These are just a few of the questions I’ve been thinking about.

Children and parents there have always been, of course, but what it has meant to be a parent or a child and how it has felt, this has not been constant throughout history and across cultures. And often it has been the material/technological culture surrounding and supporting the parent/child relationship that has contributed to these shifts in meaning and experience.

Neil Postman argues along these lines in The Disappearance of Childhood. He goes so far to suggest that the idea of childhood is a consequence of the culture of print and that it was disappearing in the culture of electronic media. Writing in the early 1980s, he had television primarily in mind. This is a pretty strong version of the claim that technology shapes the meaning of being a parent or a child. I am inclined to agree with Postman most of the time, yet I’ve approached this particular book rather skeptically. But even if we don’t agree with all of what Postman has to say, there’s a lot from which we might learn and an approach to the question of technology and childhood that leads us beyond merely pragmatic questions. I’ll have more to say about Postman’s argument in the future. The point right now is simply that technology is not neutral with respect to the experience of having a child and being a child.

Recalling Mel Kranzberg’s First Law, to say that technology is not neutral does not mean that it is either “good” or “bad.” As I’ve thought about these matters, and as I will explore them in forthcoming posts, my point will not be to conclude this or that technology is bad or good with respect to the experience of being a parent. Of course, that conclusion may sometimes be warranted. Nonetheless, I want to think primarily about questions of meaning and experience.

Behind all of this, I should add, is the question of wonder. I keep coming back to this. How can I help preserve my child’s wonder at the world and my own wonder at my child?

I’ll write about this in short bursts, meditations almost, rather than in long posts. I welcome your feedback along the way, of course. For future reference, I’ll group these posts together with the tag “Parents in the Digital Age.”

 

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Notes Toward Understanding Our Technologically Enchanted World

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 3 Comments

Three years ago, reflecting on developments in the realm of “smart” technology, I suggested that it might be best to understand modernity not as a disenchanted realm but rather as an alternatively enchanted realm. I’ve continued to think on and off about this claim since then, and I remain convinced of its usefulness. I’ll be posting about it occasionally in the coming weeks, sometimes just to present a few relevant excerpts or notes on the topic. Below are some selections from Lee Worth Bailey’s The Enchantments of Technology. Bailey develops the idea of enchantment in a way that is useful, although I’ll ultimately take the term in slightly different directions. For Bailey, technologies are enchanted insomuch as they cannot be understood apart from acknowledged and unacknowledged human desires, passions, aspirations, etc.

“Enchantments,” in Bailey’s understanding, “are common, ever-present factors of consciousness, whether mild or strong, denied or obvious, positive or negative.” He goes on to add, “Enchantments introduce certain meanings into cultural life that take on a serious, rational tone but have a deep undercurrent of emotional and imaginative power.”

“Just below the surface, apparently ‘pure’ rationality is in bed with enchantments.”

“When we examine enchantments we go deeper still, into the unconscious depths that shape our motives, values, and decisions in the dark basement of the soul. Then we see that our machinery is not only a utilitarian necessity, or an autonomous realm of deterministic forces, but rather enchanted technologies designed to slake our endless thirst for speed, comfort, pleasure, power, and even transcendence.”

Max Weber, quoted by Bailey: “The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the ‘disenchantment of the world.’ Precisely the ultimate and most sublime values have retreated from public life either into the transcendental realm or mystic life or into the brotherliness of direct and personal human relation.” Note that Weber does not here characterize disenchantment merely as a matter of subtraction or deletion. Rather, it is a matter of retreat or migration, specifically out of the public realm into varieties private experience.

Apparent disenchantment “is a strong surface phenomenon, and many valuable benefits have come out of it. But underneath surges a vast sea of unacknowledged, influential desires, passions, and quests for spirituality.”

“Technology does not inhabit a neutral world of pure space, time, causation, and reason. Rather, technology’s lifeworld is imbued with imagination, purpose, ethics, motivation, and meaning.”

“How many soldiers using gunpowder against opponents with spears resisted the desire to feel absolutely powerful?”

Next in the series: Technological Enchantments and the End of Modernity and Notes Toward An Understanding of Our Technologically Enchanted World, 2.

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The Technological Origins of Protestantism, or the Martin Luther Tech Myth

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 7 Comments

[Caveat lector: the first part of the title is a bit too grandiose for what follows. Also, this post addresses the relationship between technology and religion, more specifically, the relationship between technology and Protestant Christianity. This may narrow the audience, but I suspect there is something of interest here for most readers. Finally, big generalizations ahead. Carry on.]

This year marks the 500th anniversary of the start of the Protestant Reformation. The traditional date marking the beginning of the Reformation is October 31, 1517. It was on that day, All Hallow’s (or Saints) Eve, that Martin Luther posted his famous Ninety-five Theses on a church door in Wittenberg. It is fair to say that no one then present, including Luther, had any idea the magnitude of what was to follow.

Owing to the anniversary, you might encounter a slew of new books about Luther, the Reformation(s), and its consequences. You might stumble across a commemorative Martin Luther Playmobil set. You might even learn about a church in Wittenberg which has deployed a robot named … wait for it … BlessU-2 to dispense blessings and Bible verses to visitors (free of charge, Luther would have been glad to know).

Then, of course, there are the essays and articles in popular journals and websites, and, inevitably, the clever takes that link Luther to contemporary events. Take, for example, this piece in Foreign Policy arguing that Luther was the Donald Trump of 1517. The subtitle goes on to claim that “if the leader of the reformation could have tweeted the 95 theses, he would have.” I’ll get back to the subtitle in just a moment, but, let’s be clear, the comparison is ultimately absurd. Sure, there are some very superficial parallels one might draw, but even the author of the article understands their superficiality. Throughout the essay, he walks back and qualifies his claims. “But in the end Luther was a man of conscience,” he concedes, and that pretty much undermines the whole case.

But back to that line about tweeting the 95 theses. It is perhaps the most plausible claim in the whole piece, but, oddly, the author never elaborates further. I say that it is plausible not only because the theses are relatively short statements – roughly half of them or so could actually be tweeted (in their English translation, anyway) – and one might say that in their day they went viral, but also because it trades on an influential myth that continues to inform how many Protestants view technology.

The myth, briefly stated in intentionally anachronistic terms, runs something like this. Marin Luther’s success was owed to his visionary embrace of a cutting edge media technology, the printing press. While the Catholic church reacted with a moral panic about the religious and social consequences of easily accessible information and their inability to control it, Luther and his followers understood that information wanted to be free and institutions needed to be disrupted. And history testifies to the rightness of Luther’s attitude toward new technology.

In calling this story a myth, I don’t mean to suggest that it is altogether untrue. While the full account is more complicated, it is nonetheless true that Luther did embrace printing and appears to have understood its power. Indeed, under Luther’s auspices Wittenberg, an otherwise unremarkable university town, became one of the leading centers of printing in Europe. A good account of these matters can be found in Andrew Pettegree’s Brand Luther. “After Luther, print and public communication would never be the same again,” Pettegree rightly concludes. And it is probably safe to also conclude that apart from printing the Reformation does not happen.

Instead, I use the word myth to mean a story, particularly of a story of origins, which takes on a powerful explanatory and normative role in the life of a tradition or community. It is in this sense that we might speak of the Luther Tech Myth.

The problem with this myth is simple: it sanctions, indeed it encourages uncritical and unreflective adoption of technology. I might add that it also heightens the plausibility of Borg Complex claims: “churches* that do not adapt and adopt to new media will not survive,” etc.

For those who subscribe to the myth, intentionally or tacitly, this is not really a problem because the myth sustains and is sustained by certain unspoken premises regarding the nature of technology, particularly media technology: chiefly, that it is fundamentally neutral. They imagine that new media merely propagate the same message only more effectively. It rarely occurs to them that new media may transform the message in a subtle but not inconsequential manner and that new media may smuggle another sort of message (or, effect) with it, and that these may reconfigure the nature of the community, the practices of piety, and the content of the faith in ways they did not anticipate.

Let’s get back to Luther for a moment and take a closer look at the relationship between printing and Protestantism.

In The Reformation: A History, Oxford historian Diarmaid MacCulloch makes some instructive observations about printing. What is most notable about MacCulloch’s discussion is that it deals with the preparatory effect of printing in the years leading up to 1517. For example, citing historian Bernard Cottret, MacCulloch speaks of “the increase in Bibles [in the half century prior to 1517] created the Reformation rather than being created by it.” A thesis that will certainly surprise many Protestants today, if there are any left. (More on that last, seemingly absurd clause shortly.)

A little further on, MacCulloch correctly observes that the “effect of printing was more profound than simply making more books available more quickly.” For one thing, it “affected western Europe’s assumptions about knowledge and originality of thought.” Manuscript culture is “conscious of the fragility knowledge, and the need to preserve it,” fostering “an attitude that guards rather than spreads knowledge.” Manuscript culture is thus cautious, conservative, and pessimistic. On the other hand, the propensity toward decay is “much less obvious in the print medium: Optimism may be the mood rather than pessimism.” (A point on which MacCulloch cites the pioneering work of Elizabeth Eisenstein.) In other words, printing fostered a more daring cultural spirit that was conducive to the outbreak of a revolutionary movement of reform.

Finally, printing had already made it possible for reading to become “a more prominent part of religion for the laity.” Again, MacCulloch is not talking about the consequences of the Reformation; he is talking about the half century or so leading up to Luther’s break with Rome. Where reading became a more prominent feature of personal piety, “a more inward-looking, personalized devotion,” which is to say, anachronistically, a more characteristically Protestant devotion, emerged. “For someone who really delighted in reading,” MacCulloch adds, “religion might retreat out of the sphere of public ritual into the world of the mind and the imagination.”

“So,” MacCulloch concludes, “without any hint of doctrinal deviation, a new style of piety arose in that increasingly large section of society that valued book learning for both profit and pleasure.” This increasingly large section of the population “would form a ready audience for the Protestant message, with its contempt for so much of the old ritual of worship and devotion.”

All of this, then, is to say that Protestantism is as much an effect of the technology of printing as it is a movement that seized upon the new technology to spread its message. (I suspect, as an aside, that this story, which is obviously more complicated than the sketch I’m providing here would be an important element in Alan Jacobs’ project of uncovering the technological history of modernity.)

A few more thoughts before we wrap up, bear with me. Let’s consider the idea of “a new style of piety,” which preceded and sustained momentous doctrinal and ecclesial developments. This phrase is useful in so much as it is pairs nicely with the old maxim: Lex orandi, lex credendi (the law of prayer is the law belief). The idea is that as the church worships so it believes, or that in some sense worship precedes and constitutes belief. To put it another way, we might say that the worship of the church constitutes the plausibility structures of its faith. To speak of a “new style of piety,” then, is to speak of a set practices for worship, both in its communal forms and in its private forms. These new practices are, accordingly, a new form of worship that may potentially re-configure the church’s faith. This is important to our discussion insofar as practices of worship have a critical material/technological dimension. Bottom line: shifts in the material/technological artifacts and conditions of worship potentially restructure the form and practices of worship, which in turn may potentially reconfigure what is believed.

Of course, it is not only a matter of how print prepares the ground for Protestantism, it is also a matter of how Protestantism evolves in tandem with print. Protestantism is a religion of the book. Its piety is centered on the book; the sacred text, of course, but also the tide of books that become aides to spirituality, displacing icons, crucifixes, statues, relics, and the panoply of ritual gestures that enlisted the body in the service of spiritual formation. The pastor-scholar becomes the model minister. Faith becomes both a more individual affair and a more private matter. On the whole, it takes on a more intellectualist cast. Its devotion is centered more on correct belief rather than veneration. Its instruction is traditionally catechetical. Etc.

This brings us back to the Luther Tech Myth and whether or not there are any Protestants left. The myth is misleading because it oversimplifies a more complicated history, and the oversimplification obscures the degree to which new media technology is not neutral but rather formative.

Henry Jenkins has made an observation that I come back to frequently: “I often tell students that the history of new media has been shaped again and again by four key innovative groups — evangelists, pornographers, advertisers, and politicians, each of whom is constantly looking for new ways to interface with their public.”

The evangelists Jenkins refers to are evangelical Christians in the United States, who are descended from Luther and his fellow reformers. Jenkins is right. Evangelicals have been, as a rule, quick to adopt and adapt new media technologies to spread their message. In doing so, however, they have also been transformed by the tools they have implemented and deployed, from radio to television to the Internet. The reason for this is simple: new styles of piety that arise from new media generate new assumptions about community and authority and charisma (in the theological and sociological sense), and they alter the status and content of belief.

And for this reason traditional Protestantism is an endangered species. Even within theologically conservative branches of American Protestantism, it is rare to find the practice of traditional forms of Protestant piety. Naturally, this should not necessarily be read as a lament. It is, rather, an argument about the consequences of technological change and an encouragement to think more carefully about the adoption and implementation of new technology.

 

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*  I hesitate to add mosques and synagogues only because I do not believe myself to be sufficiently informed to do so and also because they are obviously not within the traditions shaped by the life and work of Martin Luther. Jewish and Muslim readers, please feel free to add your perspectives about attitudes to technology in your communities in the comments below.

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Circles of Relation

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 9 Comments

1. Imagine if you will a series of concentric circles. At the center there is a small circle, which represents you. The circle just outside of this small circle represents people who are very much like you and with whom you agree on most things. Beyond this circle there is another circle representing those with whom you agree on most things and rather like, all things considered. Outside of this circle there is one which represents those who are not very much like you and with whom you tend to disagree on a number of things, although you still judge them to be reasonable and decent human beings. This circle is encompassed by another, smaller perhaps, representing those who are quite different from you and with whom you may find yourself in passionate disagreement. But these people you respect because they make their case honestly and they are decent, principled people. As we approach the outer edge of the concentric circles there is yet another that represents those with whom you disagree strongly, find rather unreasonable, and yet manage to tolerate. These several circles encompass most people we might encounter. Beyond this, as we approach the periphery, there is a thinner circle representing those with whom you vehemently disagree, find utterly unreasonable, and morally objectionable; these, you suspect, are best ignored. Beyond this are those that you can only judge to be morally reprehensible and intellectually bankrupt, to these you do not give your time except to oppose them when necessary. Finally, at the farthest edge, a circle represents those for whom there is no recourse but to vigilantly oppose and silence.

2. Now imagine another set of concentric circles. This time there are but three. The smallest circle in the center once again represents you. The circle beyond it, not much larger, represents those who are very much like you and with whom you agree on almost everything. The outer circle, quite large and encompassing everyone else, represents those whom you find to be stupid, wicked, and utterly undeserving of even the barest measure of respect that one might accord another human being.

The first set of circles is what we might hope for in a well-functioning society.

The second set of circles is the world we appear to be stuck with.

(a) Is this the world that digital tools of communication created? Or, (b) is this the world digital media revealed?

If (a), how do social media’s (often perverse) psychological incentive structures contribute to this phenomenon?

Or, more hopefully, (c) is this the world only as it appears to those who engage it primarily through digital media?

If (c), is this because we forget that whatever particular, platform-specific filters we choose for our online signals, whatever efforts we make to avoid “filter bubbles,” social media itself is a powerful filter acting on the totality of reality.

And/or because

(i) the virtues conducive to living well in a pluralistic and democratic society are not default settings and must be learned through practice, and

(ii) social media does not encourage such practices, indeed actively cultivates practices that are antithetical to these virtues.

(iii) While the more finely our experience is tuned to our affinities, the less likely we will encounter those whose views differ markedly from ours except as subjects to be rhetorically DESTROYED! by our favorite celebrity defenders of the obvious and plain truths we and all sane people hold? Which is to say, as caricatures of persons.

Thoughts?

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