Culture

Varieties of Online Experience

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 17 Comments

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 – 8

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 1 Comment

(Although I assume that this sort of thing goes without saying these days, I thought I should nonetheless throw out the typical reminder that linking below does not necessarily imply wholesale endorsement.)

“Loss and Gain, or the Fate of the Book”:

“Whether the book survives or not, I am firmly of the opinion that itought to survive, and nothing will convince me otherwise. The heart has its beliefs that evidence knows not of. For me, to browse in a bookshop, especially a second-hand one, will forever be superior to browsing on the internet precisely because chance plays a much larger part in it. There are few greater delights than entirely by chance to come across something not only fascinating in itself, but that establishes a quite unexpected connection with something else. The imagination is stimulated in a way that the more logical connections of the Internet cannot match; the Internet will make people literal-minded …

To refuse to use the new technology in the hope of preserving old pleasures will not work because to do so would be no more authentic or honest than Marie Antoinette playing shepherdess. The regret is genuine; the refusal is not.”

“Out of Touch: E-reading isn’t reading”:

“New research continues to emphasize the importance of mind wandering for learning. It turns out that not paying attention is one of the best ways of discovering new ideas. Reading books, whether silently or aloud, remains one of the most efficient means of enabling such errant thinking. As our bodies rest, our minds begin to work in a different way. New connections, new pathways, and sharp turns are being made as we meander our way through the book, but also away from it. There is no way to tell if anyone is actually paying attention anymore as I read, including myself. This seems to be one of the great benefits of reading aloud, that you can think of something else while you do it. We may be holding the book together, but our minds are no doubt far apart by now. The fairy tale is the first story of childhood because it tells of such leaving behind (parents and home), of entering the dreamscape of the woods—and the mind. It tells of the crooked path of change. How can one know where reading books ends and dreaming in books begins?”

“Kill the Password: Why a String of Characters Can’t Protect Us Anymore”:

“This summer, hackers destroyed my entire digital life in the span of an hour. My Apple, Twitter, and Gmail passwords were all robust—seven, 10, and 19 characters, respectively, all alphanumeric, some with symbols thrown in as well—but the three accounts were linked, so once the hackers had conned their way into one, they had them all. They really just wanted my Twitter handle: @mat. As a three-letter username, it’s considered prestigious. And to delay me from getting it back, they used my Apple account to wipe every one of my devices, my iPhone and iPad and MacBook, deleting all my messages and documents and every picture I’d ever taken of my 18-month-old daughter. Since that awful day, I’ve devoted myself to researching the world of online security. And what I have found is utterly terrifying.”

“Google Now: behind the predictive future of search”:

“In a single app, the company has combined its latest technologies: voice search that understands speech like a human brain, knowledge of real-world entities, a (somewhat creepy) understanding of who and where you are, and most of all its expertise at ranking information. Google has taken all of that and turned it into an interesting and sometimes useful feature, but if you look closely you can see that it’s more than just a feature, it’s a beta test for the future.”

“Gamer’s Paradise: Worshipping At The iOS Altar”:

“Game designer and academic Ian Bogost says the iPhone is a bit like a rosary. I have this way of refreshing my Twitter feed even when it doesn’t need reading, thumbing the touchscreen with a tactile pull-and-release, a sort of nervous lozenging that makes a popping noise when I let go.”

“How to Live Without Irony”:

“The ironic life is certainly a provisional answer to the problems of too much comfort, too much history and too many choices, but it is my firm conviction that this mode of living is not viable and conceals within it many social and political risks.”

“The Science and Art of Listening”:

“Hearing, in short, is easy. You and every other vertebrate that hasn’t suffered some genetic, developmental or environmental accident have been doing it for hundreds of millions of years. It’s your life line, your alarm system, your way to escape danger and pass on your genes. But listening, really listening, is hard when potential distractions are leaping into your ears every fifty-thousandth of a second — and pathways in your brain are just waiting to interrupt your focus to warn you of any potential dangers.

Listening is a skill that we’re in danger of losing in a world of digital distraction and information overload.”

“Axe worship”:

“Personally, I just like chopping for its own sake. There’s something warming about the ritual of it and the sense of provision. Place, stand, breathe, swing, cut. Watching the wood. Watching the radial splits out from the centre, marking the place to bring the axe down, waiting for the faint exhalation of scent from the wood as it falls. Like cooking, it provides a sense of sufficiency and delight but, unlike cooking, log-chopping has a particular rhythm to it, like a form of active meditation. You do, very literally, get into the swing of it.”

Strangers to Ourselves

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 3 Comments

For reasons that I probably do not myself fully understand, I am endlessly intrigued by discussions of the ever elusive state of being we call authenticity. At least part of the intrigue lies in how a discussion of authenticity can ensnare within itself philosophical, sociological, technological, and even religious considerations. It makes for lively and stimulating discussion in other words. Authenticity talk is intriguing as well because it may be under its guise that the ancient debate about what constitutes a good life and the venerable quest to “know thyself” survive today.

Both of these considerations also suggest a serious difficulty presented by authenticity talk: the word authenticity, as it is commonly used, masks a complex and diverse set of concepts. This complexity and diversity threatens to introduce a slippery equivocation into what might otherwise be well-intended conversations and debates. At least this has been my experience. But then again, discussing what exactly authenticity is is part of what makes such discussions lively and interesting.

My own thinking about authenticity is sporadic and owes more to serendipity than to any conscientious scholarly endeavor. For example, most recently, from no particular quarter, the following question formulated itself in my mind: What is the problem to which authenticity is the answer?

There is nothing particularly insightful about this question, but it did get me thinking about the whole set of ideas from a different angle. The meandering mental path that subsequently unfolded led me to identify this problem as some sort of psychic rupture or dissonance. We don’t think  of authenticity at all unless we think of it as a problem, and it presents itself as a problem at the very time it enters our conscious awareness. It is a problem tied to our awareness of ourselves as selves.

There are many interesting paths that unfold from that point, but I want to offer this one subsequent stab at defining what we (sometimes) mean by authenticity: Authenticity is a seamless continuity between the self, time, and place. It is a sense of complete at-homeness in the world. For this reason, then, we might see nostalgia as another manifestation of the problem of authenticity. Nostalgia — first in its literal sense as longing for spatial home, and then its more contemporary form as longing for a home in time — is a symptom of the rupture in the continuity between self, time, and place that generates an awareness of the self as a problem to be solved, an awareness that constitutes the problem of authenticity.

Framing the discussion as matter of at-homeness (or a lack thereof) recalled to my mind the work of the medical doctor turned novelist cum philosopher, Walker Percy. Percy went from being a diagnostician of physical maladies to one of existential maladies. With his acute Pascalian eye, Percy made a literary career of diagnosing the modern self’s inability to understand itself. This was the theme of his send-off of the self-help genre, Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book.

Percy chose the following passage from Nietzsche as an epigraph for Lost in the Cosmos:

“We are unknown, we knowers, to ourselves … Of necessity we remain strangers to ourselves, we understand ourselves not, in our selves we are bound to be mistaken, for each of us holds good to all eternity the motto, ‘Each is the farthest away from himself’—as far as ourselves are concerned we are not knowers.”

A little further on, in his inventory of possible “selfs” (or should that be “sevles”), Percy offered this description of the lost self:

“With the passing of the cosmological myths and the fading of Christianity as a guarantor of the identity of the self, the self becomes dislocated, … is both cut loose and imprisoned by its own freedom, yet imprisoned by a curious and paradoxical bondage like a Chinese handcuff, so that the very attempts to free itself, e.g., by ever more refined techniques for the pursuit of happiness, only tighten the bondage and distance the self ever farther from the very world it wishes to inhabit as its homeland …. Every advance in an objective understanding of the Cosmos and in its technological control further distances the self from the Cosmos precisely in the degree of the advance—so that in the end the self becomes a space-bound ghost which roams the very Cosmos it understands perfectly.”

Percy was writing in 1983. Centuries earlier, St. Augustine wrote, “I have been made a question to myself.” The problem of authenticity is much older than we sometimes realize. Perhaps we might say that it is a perpetually possible problem that is more or less actualized given certain historical or psychological conditions. Perhaps the problem of authenticity is not a problem at all, but as C.S. Lewis once wrote of nostalgia, the “truest index of our real situation.”

Conjuring Ghosts: Digital Technology and the Past

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 5 Comments

Late last month, I ran across a set of images created by Jo Teeuwisse superimposing scenes from World War II over images of those same places today. The effect has been universally described as haunting, and rightly so. The images also present a rather interesting form of augmented reality. If you’ve hung around this blog for awhile, you may have noticed that memory and place are two recurring themes. Naturally, these images caught my attention. Unfortunately, time constraints being what they are, I never did get around to writing about them.

Fortunately, Miranda Ward has. At Cyborgology, she has written a characteristically intelligent and well-crafted meditation on the images, “On Technology, Memory and Place.” She concludes on this note:

“So technology can do much to harness the power of place – to make memory increasingly social, to represent “the shared experience of bodies co-located in space” – and I think it should: I think this is part of the joy of it. But perhaps we also need to think about preserving the utterly private relationship with place – and what this preservation will look like in a “geo-optimized” world.”

Click through and read the whole.

While reading Ward’s piece, and since first seeing these images, a few related items came to mind.

Back in February, Jason Farman wrote a piece in The Atlantic that reflected on how mobile technology altered our experience of places. Farman discussed one app by the Museum of London that allowed users to see images from London’s past superimposed over the present scene in much the same manner as Teeuwisse’s photographs. Farman was optimistic about what mobile devices can do for our experience of places:

“While none of these practices may seem unique to our digital age – stories have been attached to place throughout history – the ability to connect innumerable narratives to a single site is something that other media haven’t been able to effectively accomplish.”

At the time, I wrote a post in response which leaned a good deal on Michel de Certeau’s reflections on walking the city (it’s a passage I’ve come back to again and again). De Certeau’s writing on this theme is especially pertinent to the photographs that inspired Ward’s essay. In fact, these photographs and the Museum of London app discussed by Farman might be seen as tools to materialize the invisible realities evocatively identified by de Certeau.

Here’s how I then summarized de Certeau on haunted places:

Places have a way of absorbing and bearing memories that they then relinquish, bidden or unbidden. The context of walking and moving about spaces leads de Certeau to describe memory as “a sort of anti-museum:  it is not localizable.”  Where museums gather pieces and artifacts in one location, our memories have dispersed themselves across the landscape, they colonize.  Here a memory by that tree, there a  memory in that house.  De Certeau develops a notion of a veiled remembered reality that lies beneath the visible experience of space.

Places are made up of “moving layers.”  We point, de Certeau says, here and there and say things like, “Here, there used to be a bakery” or “That’s where old lady Dupuis used to live.”  We point to a present place only to evoke an absent reality:  “the places people live in are like the presences of diverse absences.”  Only part of what we point to is there physically; but we’re pointing as well to the invisible, to what can’t be seen by anyone else, which begins to hint at a certain loneliness that attends to memory.

Reality is already augmented.  It is freighted with our memories, it comes alive with distant echoes and fleeting images.

Digitally augmented reality functions analogously to what we might call the mentally augmented reality  that de Certeau invokes. Digital augmentation also reminds us that places are haunted by memories of what happened there, sometimes to very few, but often to countless many. The digital tools Farman describes bring to light the hauntedness of places. They unveil the ghosts that linger by this place and that.

This remains, as evidenced in Ward’s post, a very useful metaphor by which to think about technologies that allow us to conjure the ghosts of the past. As to the question that Ward comes back to on more than one occasion — So what? — I’m not entirely sure. In response to Farman’s essay, I offered up this alternative de Certeau-ian perspective:

Perhaps I am guilty, as Farman puts it, of “fetishizing certain ways of gaining depth.” But I am taken by  de Certeau’s conception of walking as a kind of enunciation that artfully actualizes a multitude of possibilities in much the same way that the act of speaking actualizes the countless possibilities latent in language. Like speaking, then, walking, that is inhabiting a space is a language with its own rhetoric. Like rhetoric proper, the art of being in a place depends upon an acute attentiveness to opportunities offered by the space and a deft, improvised actualization of those possibilities. It is this art of being in a place that constitutes a meaningful and memorable augmentation of reality.

What strikes me now about this conclusion is that it distinguished between an embodied interaction with a place and a strictly mental/visual interaction. These need not be mutually exclusive, of course. But perhaps it is worth noting that by there nature, apps and photographs that bring the past into the present forefront the visual, and the visual is only one way of knowing a place.

While I have been writing this, I have had next to this tab another with the text of W.H. Auden’s “Musée Des Beaux Arts.” This has been coincidental, but now it strikes me as serendipitous. The poem  goes like this:

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or
just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the
torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Brueghel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything
turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

With this poem, Auden reflected (via Bruegel’s painting, “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus”) on how suffering often unfolded unnoticed, unremarked upon, and, we might now add, unremembered. The photographs with which we began have the effect of inverting this dynamic. Now we, the living, take note. We can see what then may have passed while someone was dully walking along. It is now we who are the unnoticed ones. The past is there present before our eyes and we can see it, but it is silent with respect to us. It now walks dully on as we make our way, looking, perhaps, to anchor our ephemeral present in its weightiness. But alas they are just ghosts, and the anchor does not hold.

“A World Full of People Just Livin’ To Be Heard”

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 5 Comments

I don’t ordinarily take my cues from John Mellencamp lyrics, but … consider:

“A million young poets
Screamin’ out their words
To a world full of people
Just livin’ to be heard”

The story of modernity could be neatly arranged around the theme of voice. As modernity unfolded, more and more people found a way to be heard; they found their voice, often at great cost and sacrifice. Protestantism gave a voice to the laity. Democratic movements gave a voice to the citizen. Labor movements gave a voice to the worker. The woman’s movement gave a voice to women. Further examples come readily to mind, but you get the point. And along the way certain technologies played a critical role in this expansion and proliferation of voice. One need only consider print’s relationship to the Reformation and the Enlightenment.

Of course, this way of telling the story will strike some as rather whiggish, and perhaps rightly so. It is simplistic, certainly. And yet it does seem plain enough that more people, and a greater diversity of people, now have not only the freedom to speak, but the means to do so as well.

Much of the rhetoric that surrounded the advent of the World Wide Web, particularly in its 2.0 iteration, triumphantly characterized the Internet as the consummation of this trajectory of empowerment. It was wildly utopian rhetoric; and although the utopian hope has not yet been realized, it is nonetheless true that blogs and social media have at least made it possible for a very great number of people to speak publicly, and sometimes with great (if ephemeral) consequence.

More significantly, it seems to me, the use of social media nurtures the impulse to speak. The platforms by their very design encourage users to speak often and continually. They feature mechanisms of response that act not unlike little Pavlovian pellets of affirmation to keep us speaking in the hopes that Likes and retweets and comments will follow.

We are all learning to “speak in memes,” as Nathan Jurgenson has recently put it. What is most significant about this may be the assumption that we will speak. We are conditioning our speech to fit the medium, but that we will speak is no longer in question.

Fine. Well and good. Speak, and speak truthfully and boldly — at least interestingly.

But what about hearing and listening? While we have been vigorously enlarging our voices, we appear to have neglected the art of listening. We want to be heard, of course, but are we as intent on listening? Do we desire to understand as ardently as we desire to be understood?

There is an art to listening, one might even say that it is a kind of virtue. At the very least it requires certain virtues. Patience certainly, and humility as well. One might even say courage, for what you learn when you listen may very well threaten beliefs and convictions that are very dear and defining. In any case, listening is not easy or even natural. It is a discipline. It must be cultivated with great care and it requires, to some degree, a willingness to still the impulse to speak.

It requires as well a wanton disregard for the pace of Internet time. Internet time demands near instantaneous responses; but listening sometimes takes more time than that afforded by the meme cycle.

Often listening depends on silence and deep, unbroken attentiveness.

Listening, honest listening happens when there is tacit permission to be silent in response. Otherwise, listening is overwhelmed by the pressure to formulate a response. And, of course, if, while I am ostensibly listening, I am only thinking about what to say in response, I’m probably not really listening — more like reloading.

“We’re living to be heard” — I suspect there is something rather profound about that observation. Perhaps Mellencamp spoke better than he knew. It seems to me though, that those who would be heard ought also to hear. We have our voices, but only if we learn to listen in equal measure will this ever mean a thing.