Science and Technology

The World of Tomorrow, Inc.

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ Leave a comment

“Man’s temples typify his concepts. I cherish the thought that America stands on the threshold of a great awakening. The impulse which this Phantom City will give to American culture cannot be overestimated. The fact that such a wonder could rise in our midst is proof that the spirit is with us.”

— Journalist Fredrick F. Cook, writing of the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago

Statue of Washington faces the Perisphere and Trylon, symbols of the 1939 fair.

The religion of technology was represented exceptionally well at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. In fact, in the 1939 fair with its “World of Tomorrow” theme, the techno-utopian message of the religion of technology may have found its most compelling medium. Prior to 1939, the American world’s fairs had always been characterized by what Astrid Böger aptly called a “bifocal nature,” that is they “served as patriotic commemorations of central events in American history even as they envisioned the nation’s bright future.” Janus-faced, they looked back on a glorified past and forward toward an idealized future. The fairs of the 1930’s, however, consciously focused their vision on the future. It is true that a glance was still cast backwards – the ‘39 fair for instance commemorated the 250th anniversary of George Washington’s inauguration – but the emphasis was clearly on the wonders that lay ahead.

The ’39 New York fair, in particular, was explicitly eschatological. Its most popular exhibits featured Cities of Tomorrow, Zions that were to be realized through technological expertise deployed by corporate power supported by benign government planning. And little wonder, the nation had been through a decade of economic depression and rumors of war swept across the Atlantic. “To catch the public imagination,” historian David Nye explains, “the fair had to address this uneasiness. It could not do so by mere appeals to patriotism, by displays of goods that many people had no money to buy, or by the nostalgic evocation of golden yesterdays. It had to offer temporary transcendence.” And by the late 1930s, technology appeared to be on the verge of delivering on this promise. “Earlier world’s fairs, in which science had not played so great a role, had also been conceived in utopian spirit,” noted Folke T. Kihlstedt, “but not until the 1930s did science and technology seem to possess the potential for the actualization of a utopian vision.”

While engineers had achieved a place among the clergy of the religion of technology during the late nineteenth century, by the 1930s they had been displaced by the industrial designer who, in Kihlstedt’s phrasing, “quickly became the chief promoter of a utopian future served by the products of technology.” The industrial designer “looked not with the pragmatic eye of the engineer but with the visionary gaze of the utopian.” This “visionary gaze” and the attention to the affective dimension of technology made the industrial designer the ideal prophet of the religion of technology.

The planners of the 1939 New York fair instructed the industrial designers to weave technology throughout the fabric of the whole fair. In previous expositions, science had occupied a prominent but localized place among the multiple exhibits. The 1939 fair intentionally broke with this tradition. “Instead of building a central shrine to house scientific displays,” Robert Rydell explains, “they decided to saturate the fair with the gospel of scientific idealism by highlighting the importance of industrial laboratories in exhibit buildings devoted to specific industries.”

With nearly a decade of economic depression behind them and a looming international conflagration before them, the fair planners remained committed to the religion of technology and they were intent on creating a fair that would rekindle America’s waning faith. It may not be entirely inappropriate, then, to see the 1939 New York World’s Fair as a revival meeting calling the faithful to repentance and renewed hope in the religion of technology. But the call to renewed faith in 1939 also contained variations on the theme. The presentation of the religion of technology took a liturgical turn and it was alloyed with the spirit of the American corporation.

Ritual Fairs

Historians and critics of the world’s fair have mostly focused their attention on the intention of the fair designers. They have studied the fairs as texts laid out for analysis. But its debatable whether this tells us much about the experience of fairgoers. Warren Susman, writing of 1939 New York World’s Fair, concluded:  “The Fair was not open for long,” he noted, “before the people showed both the planners and the commercial interests how perverse they could be about following the arrangements so carefully made for them.” Despite the best efforts of planners, “the people proceeded on its own way.”

Yet for all of this, the fairs were making an impression on fairgoers and Astrid Böger suggests a way of understanding that impression: “world’s fairs are performative events in that they present a vision of national culture in the form of spectacle, which visitors are invited to participate in and, thus, help create.” Writing of the Ferris Wheel at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Böger explains that it was the “striking example of the sensual – primarily visual – experience of the fair, which seems to precede both understanding of the exhibit’s technology and, more importantly, appreciation of it as an American achievement.”

What Böger hones in on in these observations is the distinction between the intellectual content of the fairs as intended by the fair planners and the actual experience of the fairs by those who attended. It is the difference between reading the fairs as a “text” with an explicit message and constructing a meaning through the experience of “taking in” the fair. The planners intended an intellectualized, chiefly cognitive experience. Fairgoers processed the fair in an embodied and mostly affective manner. It is this distinction that leads to the observation that the religion of technology, as it appeared at the fairs, was a liturgical religion. In his articulation of the religion of technology, Noble emphasized the explicit and the propositional. His focus was on belief and theology. But the fairs suggest other dimensions of the religion of technology, practice and ritual.

The particular genius of the 1939 New York World’s Fair lay in the manner in which the two most popular exhibits blended their explicit message with a ritual experience. Democracity, housed inside the Perisphere, and General Motors’ Futurama both solved the problem of the impertinent walkers by miniaturizing the idealized world and carefully controlling the fairgoer’s experience of the miniaturized environment. Earlier fairs sought to present themselves as idealized cities, but this risked the diffusion of the message as fairgoer’s crafted their own fair itineraries or otherwise remained oblivious to the implicit messages.  Democracity and the Futurama mitigated this risk by crafting not only the world, but the experience itself – by providing a liturgy for the ritual. And the ritual was decidedly aimed at the cultivation of hope in a future techno-utopian society, which is to say it gave ritual expression to the religion of technology.

Democracity, inside the PerisphereAs David Nye observed, “the most successful [exhibits] were those that took the form of dramas with covertly religious overtones.” In fact, Nye describes the fair as a whole as “a quasi-religious experience of escape into an ideal future equally accessible to all … The fair was a shrine of modernity.” Nowhere was the “quasi-religious” aspect of the fair more clearly evident than in Democracity, the miniature city of the future housed within the fair’s iconic Perisphere.

Fairgoers filed into the sphere and were able to gaze down upon the city of the future from two balconies. When the five and a half minute show began, the narrator began describing the features of this idealized landscape featuring the city of the future at its center. Emanating outward from the central city were towns and farm country. The towns would each be devoted to specific industries and they would be home to both workers and management. As the show progressed and the narrator extoled the virtues of central planning, the lighting in the sphere simulated the passage of day and night. Nye summarizes what followed:

“Once the visitors had contemplated this future world, they were presented with a powerful vision that one commentator compared to ‘a secular apocalypse.’ Now the lights of the city dimmed. To create a devotional mood, a thousand-voice choir sang on a recording that André Kostelanetz had prepared for the display. Movies projected on the upper walls of the globe showed representatives of various professions working, marching, and singing together. The authoritative voice of the radio announcer H. V. Kaltenborn announced: ‘This march of men and women, singing their triumph, is the true symbol of the World of Tomorrow.’”

What they sang was the theme song of the fair that proclaimed:

“We’re the rising tide coming from far and wide
Marching side by side on our way,
For a brave new world,
That we shall build today.”

Kihlstedt suggests Democracity’s designer, Henry Dreyfuss, modeled this culminating scene on Dutch Renaissance artist Jan Van Eyck’s Ghent Altarpiece featuring “a great multitude … of all nations and kindreds, and people” as described in the book of Revelation. “In this well-known painting,” Kihlstedt explains, “the saints converge toward the altar of the Lamb from the four corners of the world. As they reveal the unity and the ‘ultimate beatitude of all believing souls,’ these saints define by their presence a heaven on earth.” Ritual and interpretation were thus fused together in one visceral, affective liturgy. Each visitor experienced a nearly identical presentation, and many did so repeatedly. The message was both explicit and memorable.

Corporate Liturgies 

Earlier fairs were driven by a variety of ideologies. Rydell in particular has emphasized the imperial and racial ideologies driving the design of the Victorian Era fairs. These fairs also promoted political ideals and patriotism. Additionally, they sought to educate the public in the latest scientific trends (dubious as they may be in the case of Social Darwinism). But in the 1930s the emphasis shifted decidedly. Böger notes, for example, “the early American expositions have to be placed in the context of nationalism and imperialism, whereas the world’s fairs after 1915 went in the direction of globalism and the ensuing competition of opposing ideological systems rather than of individual nation states.” More specifically the fairs of the 1930s, and the 1939 fair especially, aimed to buttress the legitimacy of democracy and the free market in the face of totalitarian and socialist alternatives.

General Motors Futurama Exhibit

“From the beginning,” Rydell observes, “the century-of-progress expositions were conceived as festivals of American corporate power that would put breathtaking amounts of surplus capital to work in the field of cultural production and ideological representation.” Kihlstedt likewise notes, “whereas most nineteenth-century utopias were socialist, based on cooperative production and distribution of goods, the twentieth-century fairs suggested that utopia would be attained through corporate capitalism and the individual freedom associated with it.” He added, “the organizers of the NYWF were making quasi-propagandistic use of utopian ideas and imagery to equate utopia with capitalism.” For his part, Nye drew on Roland Marchand to connect the evolution of the world’s fairs with the development of corporate marketing strategies: “corporations first tried only to sell products, then tried to educate the public about their business, and finally turned to marketing visions of the future.” Interestingly, Nye also tied the ritual nature of the fairs with the corporate turn: “Such exhibits might be compared to the sacred places of tribal societies … Each inscribed cultural meanings in ritual … And who but the corporations took the role of the ritual elders in making possible such a reassuring future, in exchange for submission.”

In this way the religion of technology was effectively incorporated. American corporations presented themselves as the builders of the techno-utopian city. With the cooperation of government agencies, the corporations would wield the breathtaking power of technology to create a perfect, rationally planned and yet democratic consumer society. Thus was the religion of technology enlisted by the marketing departments of American corporations.

The major American world’s fairs functioned as microcosms of American society. At the fairs, the ideals of cultural, political, and economic elites are put on display. These ideals were anchored in a mythic past and projected in an equally mythic future. The fairs not only reflected the ideals of American elites, they also registered an indelible impression on the millions of Americans who attended.  The precise measure of the influence of the fairs on American society, however, remains difficult to measure. Yet, framing the 1939 New York World’s fair within the larger story of the religion of technology reveals the emergence of a powerful alliance of technology, religious aspirations, and corporate power. This alliance was certainly taking shape before 1939, but at the New York fair it announced itself in memorable and decisive fashion. Through the careful deployment of an imaginative liturgical experience, the fair instilled the virtues of this alliance in a generation of Americans. This generation would go on to build a society that, for better and for worse, reflected the triumph of the incorporated religion of technology.

The Self in the Age of Digital Reproduction

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 9 Comments

The title suggested itself to me before I had written a word. I picked up Walter Benjamin’s classic essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,”* and in my mind I heard, “The Self in the Age of Its Digital Reproducibility.” I then read through the essay once more with that title in mind to see if there might not be something to the implied analogy. I think there might be.

Of course, what follows is not intended as a strict interpretation and reapplication of the whole of Benjamin’s essay. Instead, it’s a rather liberal, maybe even playful, borrowing of certain contours and outlines of his argument. The borrowing is premised on the assumption that there is a loose analogy between the mechanical reproduction of visual works of art enabled by photography and film, and the reproduction of our personality across a variety of networks enabled by digital technology.

At one point in the essay, Benjamin noted, “commentators had earlier expended much fruitless ingenuity on the question of whether photography was an art – without asking the more fundamental question of whether the invention of photography had not transformed the entire character of art …” Just so. We might say commentators have presently expended much fruitless ingenuity asking about whether this or that digital technology achieved the status of this or that prior analog technology without asking the more fundamental question of whether the invention of digital technology had not transformed the entire character of the field in question. The important question is not, for instance, whether Facebook friendship is real friendship, but how social media has transformed the entire character of relationships. So in this fashion we take Benjamin as our guide letting his criticism suggest lines of inquiry for us.

Benjamin’s essay is best remembered for his discussion of the aura that attended an original work of art before the age of mechanical reproduction. That aura, grounded in the materiality of the work of art, was displaced by the introduction of mechanical reproduction.

“What, then, is the aura?” Benjamin asks. Answer:  “A strange tissue of space and time: the unique apparition of a distance, however near it may be …” And, he adds, “what withers in the age of the technological reproducibility of the work of art is the latter’s aura.”

Aura, to put it more plainly, is a concept that gathers together the authenticity and authority felt in the presence of a work of art. This authenticity and authority of the work of art fail to survive its mechanical (as opposed to manual) reproduction for two principal reasons:

“First, technological reproduction is more independent of the original than is manual reproduction. For example, in photography it can bring out aspects of the original that are accessible only to the lens … but not to the human eye; or it can use certain processes, such as enlargement or slow motion, to record images which escape natural optics altogether. This is the first reason. Second, technological reproduction can place the copy of the original in situations which the original itself cannot attain. Above all, it enables the original to meet the recipient halfway, whether in the form of a photograph or in that of a gramophone record.”

May we speak of the aura that attends a person in “the here and now,” as Benjamin puts it? I would think so. Benjamin himself suggests as much when he discusses the work of the film actor: “The situation can be characterized as follows: for the first time – and this is the effect of film – the human being is placed in a position where he must operate with his whole living person while forgoing its aura. For the aura is bound to his presence in the here and now. There is no facsimile of the aura.”

The analogy I’ve thus far only alluded to is this. Just as mechanical means of reproduction, such as photography, multiplied and distributed an original work or art, likewise do digital technologies, social media most explicitly, multiply and distribute the self. But in so doing they dissolve the aura that attends the person in the flesh and consequently elicit a quest for authenticity.

Consider again the two reasons Benjamin gave for the eclipse of the aura in the face of mechanical reproduction: the independence of the reproduction and its ability to “place the copy in situations which the original itself cannot attain.” The latter of these is most easily reapplied to the digital reproduction of the self. Our social media profiles, for instance, or Skype to take another example, place the self in (multiple, simultaneous) situations that our embodied self cannot attain. But it is the former that may prove most interesting.

Benjamin’s notion of the aura is intertwined with a certain irreducible distance that cannot be collapsed simply by drawing close. Remember his most straightforward definition of aura: “A strange tissue of space and time: the unique apparition of a distance, however near it may be …” The reason for this is that ordinary human vision, even in drawing close, retains an optical inability to penetrate past a certain point. It can only see what it can see, and a manual reproduction cannot improve on that. But a mechanical reproduction can; it can make visible what would remain invisible to the human eye. Imagine for instance what an extreme photographic close-up might reveal about a human face or how high-speed photography may capture a millisecond in time that ordinary human perception would blur into the larger patterns of movement that the unaided human eye is able to perceive.

“Just as the entire mode of existence of human collectives changes over long historical periods,” Benjamin observed, “so too does their mode of perception.” The point then is this: mechanical reproduction, photographs and film, enabled new forms of perception and these new forms of perception effectively neutralized the aura of the original.

Benjamin neatly summed up this dynamic with the notion of the optical unconscious:

“And just as enlargement not merely clarifies what we see indistinctly ‘in any case,’ but brings to light entirely new structures of matter, slow motion not only reveals familiar aspects of movements, but discloses quite unknown aspects within them … Clearly, it is another nature which speaks to the camera as compared to the eye. ‘Other’ above all in the sense that a space informed by human consciousness gives way to a space informed by the unconscious … it is through the camera that we first discover the optical unconscious …”

The camera, in other words, has the ability to bring to the attention of conscious perception what would ordinarily be perceived only at an unconscious level. Benjamin was explicitly pursuing an analogy to the Freudian unconscious. If you prefer to avoid that association, perhaps the term optical non-conscious would suffice. In this way this way this mode of perception may be elided to the bodily forms of intentionality discussed by Merleau-Ponty that are not quite the products of conscious attention. In any case, the capabilities of mechanical reproduction brought to conscious attention what ordinarily escaped it.

So what is the connection to digital reproductions of the self. Well, we might get at it by identifying what could be called the “social unconscious.” Just as photography and film disclosed a real but ordinarily invisible world, might we not also say that digital reproductions of the self materialize real but otherwise invisible relations and mental or emotional states? What else could be the meaning of the “Like” button or the ability to see a visualization of our history with a friend as chronicled on Facebook? Moreover, interactions that before the age of digital reproduction may have passed between two or three persons, now materialize before many more. And while most such interactions would have soon faded into oblivion when they passed out of memory, in the age of digital reproduction they achieve greater durability as well as visibility.

But what are the consequences? Benjamin can help us here as well.

“To an ever-increasing degree, the work reproduced becomes the reproduction of a work designed for reproducibility.” In an age of digital reproduction, the self we are reproducing is increasingly constructed for maximum reproducibility. We live with an eye to the reproductions we will create which we will create with an eye to their being widely reproduced (read, “shared”).

Benjamin also noted the historic tension “between two polarities within the artwork itself … These two poles are the artwork’s cult value and its exhibition value.”  When art was born in the service of magic, the importance of the figures drawn lay in their presence not necessarily their exhibition. By liberating of the work of art from the context of ritual and tradition, mechanical reproduction foregrounded exhibition. In the age of digital reproduction, mere being is incomplete without also being seen. It hasn’t happened if it’s not Facebook official. The private/public distinction is reconfigured for this very reason.

For those keen on registering economic consequences, Benjamin, speaking of the actor before the camera, offers this: “The representation of human beings by means of an apparatus has made possible a highly productive use of the human being’s self-alienation.” Now apply to the person before the apparatus of social-media.

Finally, Benjamin speaking of the human person who will be mechanically reproduced by film, writes:

“While he stands before the apparatus, he knows that in the end he is confronting the masses. It is they who will control him. Those who are not visible, not present while he executes his performance, are precisely the ones who will control it. This invisibility heightens the authority of their control.”

Apply more widely to all who are now engaged in the work of digitally reproducing themselves and cue the quest for authenticity.

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* I’m drawing on the second version of the essay composed in 1935 and published in Harvard UP’s The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media (2008). According to the editors, this version “represents the form in which Benjamin originally wished to see the work published.”

Presence Emerges: Bodies in Conversation

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 14 Comments

Sunday before last I opened up my Twitter feed to find Sherry Turkle getting pummeled for her opinion piece in the Sunday NY Times, “The Flight From Conversation.” Rarely has my feed spoken with such strident uniformity; Turkle had clearly struck a nerve. With other more pressing commitments demanding my attention, however, I bookmarked the essay and several of the responses that came in over the next few days. A little over a week later, the storm having mostly blown over, I want to throw in my belated two cents.

Critics noted that Turkle presented a false dichotomy. Conversations can still happen even in a world that includes social media and text messaging. This is true in principle, of course. And, in principle, I suspect Turkle would agree. But I’m not sure this is really the best way of approaching these sorts of concerns.

Perhaps it would be better to reframe the issue in terms of presence. Granting that, in the abstract, the use of electronic forms of communication does not necessarily preclude the possibility of conversation, and granting, of course, that not every conversation is nor ought to be of the deep and absorbing variety, it seems worthwhile to explore how actual instances of face-to-face conversation might be affected by the kinds of technology Turkle has in view.

And to narrow our focus even further, I’ll focus on the cellular phone. It is after all the cellular phone that materializes electronic communication across the whole field of our experience, and it is the materiality of the cellular phone that presents itself in the context of face-to-face conversation.

It seemed to me that Turkle’s concerns were strongest when they dealt with the manner in which technology impinges on face-to-face communication. And on this point many of her critics agreed with her concerns even while they disagreed with the manner in which they were packaged. This is also the aspect of Turkle’s work that seems to resonate most widely. After all, much to her critics bemusement, the threaded comments seemed mostly to validate Turkle’s point-of-view.

It is easy to see why. Most of us have been annoyed by someone who was unable to give another human being their undivided attention for more than seconds at a time. And perhaps more significantly, most of us have felt the pull to do same. We have struggled to keep our attention focused on the person talking to us as we know we ought to, and we know we ought to because some shred of our humanity remains intact and we know very well that the person in front of us is more significant than the text that just made our phone vibrate in our pocket. We have been on both ends of the kind of distractedness that the mere presence of a smartphone can occasion, and we are alive enough to be troubled by it. We begin to feel the force of Simone Weil’s judgment: “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”

And so Turkle’s piece, and others like it, resonate despite the theoretical shortcomings that make certain scholars cringe. After all, what difference does it make that some study showed that a statistically significant portion of the population reports feeling less lonely when using social media if I can’t get the person standing two feet away from me to treat me with the barest level of decency.

The question remains, however, “Are smartphones at fault?” This is always the question. Is Google making us stupid? Is Facebook making us lonely? Are smartphones ruining face-to-face conversation? Put that way, I might say, “No, not exactly.” That’s usually not the best way of stating the question. Rather than begin with a loaded question, perhaps it’s better simply to seek clarity and understanding. What is happening when cellular phones become part of an environment that also consists of two people engaged in conversation?

Out of the many possible approaches to this question, it is the path offered by Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the “intentional arc” that I want to take. Merleau-Ponty writes:

“The life of consciousness – cognitive life, the life of desire or perceptual life – is subtended by an ‘intentional arc’ which projects round about us our past, our future, [and] our human setting ….”

Hubert Dreyfus, a philosopher whose work has built on Merleau-Ponty’s, adds this explanatory note:

“It is crucial that the agent does not merely receive input passively and then process it. Rather, the agent is already set to respond to the solicitations of things. The agent sees things from some perspective and sees them as affording certain actions. What the affordances are depends on past experience with that sort of thing in that sort of situation.”

Here’s what all of this amounts to. The “intentional arc” describes the manner in which our experience and perception is shaped by what we intend. Intending here means something more than what we mean when we say “I intended to get up early” or “I intend to go to the store later.” Intention in this sense refers to a mostly non-conscious work of perceiving the world and how that perceiving is shaped by what we are doing or aim to do. Our perception, in other words, is always already interpreting reality rather than simply registering it as a pure fact.

This work of perception-as-interpretation builds up over time as an assortment of “I cans” carried or remembered by our bodies. This assortment becomes part of the background, or pre-understanding, that we bring to bear on new situations. And this is how our intentional arc “projects round about us our past, our future.”

What is particularly interesting for our purposes is how the insertion of a tool into our experience reconfigures the “intentional arc” that is supporting our experience. The phenomenon is neatly captured by the expression, “To a man with a hammer everything looks like a nail.” This line suggests that how we perceive our environment is shaped by the mere presence of a tool in hand. (Notice, by the way, how this “effect” is registered even before the tool is used.)

Merleau-Ponty might analyze the situation as follows: The feel of a hammer in hand, especially given prior use of a hammer, transforms how the environment presents itself to us. Aspects of the environment that would not have presented themselves as things-to-be-struck now do. Our interpretive perception interprets differently. Our seeing-as is altered. New possibilities suggest themselves. The affordances presented to us by our environment are re-ordered.

Try this at home, go pick up a hammer, or for that matter any object you can hold in hand that is weighted on one end. See what you feel. Hold it and look around you and pay really close attention to the way your perceive these objects. Actually, on second thought, don’t try this at home.

Another example, perhaps more readily apprehended (and less fraught with potential danger) is offered by the camera. With camera in hand our environment presents itself differently to us. I would go so far as to suggest that we see differently when we see with camera in hand. The concrete objectivity of the world has not changed, but the manner in which our perception interprets the world has; and this change was effected by the presence of a tool in hand (even prior to its use).

In this sense, the tool does have a certain causal force, it causes the environment to present itself differently to the user. It may not cause action, but it invites it. It causes the environment to hail the user in a new way.

Returning to the situation with which we began, we can ask again how the presence of a smartphone reconfigures face-to-face conversation. How does it alter the intentional arc that suspends the act of conversation? I first began thinking through this question by focusing on the phone itself, but this approach foreclosed itself; it wasn’t proving to be very helpful to me. But then I thought about the act of conversation itself and the question of presence. What would it mean to be fully present to one another and what difference would this make for the act of conversing?

I realized then that the really interesting dynamic involved what two people offered to one another in the act of conversing face-to-face. Presence was not a uni-directional phenomenon involving the intentionality of each partner individually. Presence was not something one person achieved. Rather presence emerged from the manner in which the act of conversation coupled the intentionality of each individual. To borrow Merleau-Ponty’s lingo (and give it my own somewhat sappy twist), two intentional arcs come together to form a circle of presence.

Merleau-Ponty spoke of our body’s natural tendency to seek an “optimal grip” on our environment. In face-to-face conversation, our bodies seek an optimal grip as well. While our conscious attention is focused on words and their meaning, our fuller perceptive capabilities are engaged in reading the whole environment. In conversation, then, each person becomes a part of a field of communication that includes, but is not limited to verbal expression. To put it another way, our intentional arc includes acts of interpretative perception of the other’s body as well as their words.

When we perceive eyes and hands, facial gestures and posture we perceive these not merely as eyes or hands but as eyes that signify, hands that mean, etc. We are attuned to much more than the words a person offers to us. Conversation involves the whole body in an act of holistic communication. And we perceive much of that communication at a non-conscious level; perceiving these dynamics becomes a part of our pre-understanding applied to the act of conversation.

But this dynamic that enriches and shapes face-to-face communication depends on each person offering themselves up to be read in certain ways. Our attention intends the other’s body as a nexus of communication, but when the other’s body is not engaged in the act of conversation, dissonance results and presence is broken.

Back to the smartphone. When the smartphone enters into the dynamic it disrupts the body’s communicative patterns. Gestures, eye contact, posture, facial expression — all of it is altered. It no longer means in the way our body is used to perceiving meaning. Perception finds it impossible to achieve an optimal grip on the embodied interaction. And because our bodies give and receive this sort of communication tacitly and often in remarkably subtle ways, we may not be conscious of this dissonance in the act of conversation. We may only register a certain feeling of being out of sync, a certain feeling that something is off. Presence fails to emerge and conversation, of the sort that Turkle champions, indeed, of the sort we all acknowledge as one of the great consolations offered to us in this world — that kind of conversation becomes more difficult to achieve. Given the bodily dimensions of face-to-face conversation, I’m not sure it could be otherwise.

It is not that “social media” in some abstract generic form or the practice of texting in general that threatens conversation. It is the concrete materiality of the device entering into the intentional arcs of our perceiving and meaning-ful bodies engaged in face-to-face communication that is troublesome.

Revisiting “The Religion of Technology”

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 7 Comments

Several months ago I wrote a short post on David Noble’s The Religion of Technology. Having recently revisited the book I thought it would be worthwhile to post about Noble’s work once again, this time with a little more detail.

Noble’s thesis offers an intriguing perspective on the relationship between religion and technology. By tracing their historical entwinement, Noble claimed to expose more than “a merely metaphorical” relationship between the two. Noble intended the designation, religion of technology, “literally and historically, to indicate that modern technology and religion have evolved together and that, as a result, the technological enterprise has been and remains suffused with religious belief.”

Noble is making an important distinction here. It is not uncommon to hear people talk metaphorically about technology in religiously inflected language or to draw analogies between religious practices and technology. As an example consider the poster below for “Login: The Conference of Future Insight” by the New! ad agency (h/t @troy_s). This poster analogically relates religion to technology by taking as its theme, “What will we worship next?” The question implies that we “worship” technology analogously to the worship of the religious believer, or that technology functions analogously to a deity in the life of the believer. This is a perfectly valid and suggestive angle of inquiry. However, it is not exactly what Noble has in mind. He unearths a concrete historical interrelationship between the Western technological project and the Christian tradition. A relationship, incidentally, which Noble hoped could be severed for the benefit of all involved.

By the New! ad agency

According to Noble, the religion of technology constitutes “an enduring ideological tradition that has defined the dynamic Western technological enterprise since its inception.” Consequently, it’s influence is evident not only upon “professed believers and those who employ explicitly religious language,” but also on many for “whom the religious compulsion is largely unconscious, obscured by a secularized vocabulary.” This influence manifests itself in the utopian hopes attached to the technological enterprise and can be traced back to the late Middle Ages. These utopian hopes include the expectation that technology would bring about the perfection of the individual and of society and serve as a vehicle of transcendence.

Statue of Roger Bacon in the Oxford University Museum of Natural History

The religion of technology emerges out of a worldview that posits an original state of perfection that, once lost, must be retrieved. Noble’s narrative traces the manner in which technology came to occupy a central place in this effort to regain the lost paradise. The medieval Christian worldview posited the requisite fallen condition: humanity had, by Adam’s sin, fallen from a state of spiritual and material perfection, and technology’s entanglement with the project of restoring the fallen order begins in an unlikely setting. Within the Benedictine monastic tradition, according to Noble’s interpretation*, work and its tools came to be seen as a means of grace enabling the recovery of mankind’s original perfection. At the dawning of the second millennium, this redemptive view of work and its tools was then joined to an eschatological fervor that anticipated the soon return of Christ and the renewal of the created order. In Noble’s narrative, this fusion was best exemplified by Roger Bacon:

“Having inherited the new medieval view of technology as a means of recovering mankind’s original perfection, Bacon now placed it in the context of millenarian prophecy, prediction, and promise. If Bacon, following Erigena and Hugh of St. Victor, perceived the advance of the arts as a means of restoring humanity’s lost divinity, he now saw it at the same time, following Joachim of Fiore, as a means of anticipating and preparing for the kingdom to come, and as a sure sign in and of itself that that kingdom was at hand.”

Noble goes on to describe the manner in which Christianity’s evangelical and missionary impulse “encouraged exploration, and thereby advanced the arts upon which such exploration depended, including geography, astronomy, and navigation, as well as shipbuilding, metallurgy, and, of course, weaponry.” Francis Bacon – who, Noble notes, “is typically revered as the greatest prophet of modern science” – is the next key figure in the evolution of the religion of technology. Noble, agrees with Lewis Mumford’s insistence that what Bacon advanced was “science as technology.” Bacon had little patience for science that did not issue in application and he suffused his advocacy of science as technology with a very specific theological aim: “the relief of man’s estate” understood as the amelioration of the material consequences of humanity’s fall. While the advent of Protestantism addressed the spiritual consequences of the fall, the scientific revolution underway in Europe was destined to address its material consequences. Both together would result in the re-establishment of the unfallen created order.

At the end of the nineteenth century, the religion of technology was alive and well in America, and it was best exemplified, according to Noble, by the techno-utopianism of Edward Bellamy whose writings “resound with the familiar refrains of redemption, of the divinely destined recovery of mankind’s lost perfection.” The historian Howard P. Segal, cited by Noble, summarizes Bellamy’s depiction of life in the year 2000 as follows:

The United States of the year 2000 is very much a technological utopia: an allegedly ideal society not simply dependent upon tools and machines, or even worshipful of them, but outright modeled after them. … The purposeful, positive use of technology – from improved factories and offices to new highways and electric lighting systems to innovative pneumatic tubes, electronic broadcasts, and credit cards – is, in fact, critical to the predicted transformation of the United States from living hell into a heaven on earth.

Following his survey of the historical origins of the religion of technology, Noble demonstrates its continuing vitality throughout the twentieth century in chapters exploring atomic weaponry, the space program, artificial intelligence, and genetic engineering. In each of these fields, Noble illustrates the enduring allure of the religiously inspired techno-utopian quest for perfection and transcendence.  In the end, Noble concludes that the religion of technology ultimately hinges on a hope of salvation that technology cannot finally provide.

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*Noble’s interpretation of the Benedictine tradition should be qualified by George Ovitt’s work on the same.

Sex Sells the Future

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ Leave a comment

The late nineteenth and early twentieth century world’s fairs were instrumental in transitioning America from an economy of production to one of consumption. Their role in bringing about this shift is fascinating. Here is but one of the more interesting dimensions of this role described by Robert Rydell in World of Fairs: The Century of Progress Expositions:

“Fundamental to this effort was an assault on remaining vestiges of values that were associated with what some historians have called a ‘culture of production.’ To hasten the dissolution of this older emphasis on restraint and inhibition, already under siege by world’s fairs at the beginning of the century and by the steady barrage of advertising that saturated the country during the 1920s, world’s fair builders injected their fantasies of progress with equally heavy doses of technological utopianism and erotic stimulation.”

We’re more familiar with the technological utopianism of the world’s fairs; the manner in which this technological utopianism was alloyed to erotic representations is less commonly noted. For example, Norman Bel Geddes, who famously designed Futurama, the fair’s most popular exhibit, also designed “Crystal Lassies,” “A Peep Show of Tomorrow.” Rydell continues:

“As if to liberate these fantasies from their Victorian moorings, exposition promoters gave increasing prominence to female striptease performances on exposition midways that, by the end of the decade, gave way to fully nude female performers in shows replete with world-of-tomorrow themes.”

Of course, this makes a great deal of sense. Chastity is to sexual desire what thrift is to economic desire. Rydell goes on:

“By suffusing the world of tomorrow with highly charged male sexual fantasies, the century-of-progress expositions not only reconfirmed the status of women as objects of desire, but represented their bodies as showcases that perfectly complemented displays of futuristic consumer durables everywhere on exhibit at the fairs.”

We know sex sells. This is a commonplace in our society. But we often think it operates by association. Pair the model with the car and somehow the attraction to the model will infuse the car. Perhaps. But some marketers appear to have understood the relationship somewhat differently. Eliminate restraint in one domain and you will eliminate it in the other as well.

E Simms Campbell in Esquire, 1939