Internet

Don’t Be a Relay in the Network

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 13 Comments

Back when the Machine was the dominant technological symbol, a metaphor arose to articulate the fear that individual significance was being sacrificed to large-scale, impersonal social forces: it was the fear of becoming “a cog in the machine.”

The metaphor is in need of an update.

This train of thought (speaking of archaic metaphors) began when I read the following paragraph from Leon Wieseltier’s recent commencement address at Brandeis University:

In the digital universe, knowledge is reduced to the status of information. Who will any longer remember that knowledge is to information as art is to kitsch-–that information is the most inferior kind of knowledge, because it is the most external? A great Jewish thinker of the early Middle Ages wondered why God, if He wanted us to know the truth about everything, did not simply tell us the truth about everything. His wise answer was that if we were merely told what we need to know, we would not, strictly speaking, know it. Knowledge can be acquired only over time and only by method.

It was that last phrase that stayed with me: knowledge can only be acquired by time and method. I was already in fundamental agreement with Wieseltier’s distinction between information and knowledge, and his prescription of time and method as the path toward knowledge also seemed just about right.

It also seemed quite different than what ordinarily characterized my daily encounter with digital information. For the most part, I’m doing well if I keep on top of all that comes my way each day through a variety of digital channels and then pass along – via this blog, Twitter, FB, or now Tumblr – items that I think are, or ought to be of interest to the respective audiences on each of those platforms. Blog, reblog. Like, share. Tweet, retweet. Etc., etc., etc.

Read, then discard or pass along. Repeat. That’s my default method. It’s not, I suspect, what Wieseltier had in mind. There is, given the sheer volume of information one takes in, a veneer of learnedness to these habits. But there is, in fact, very little thought involved, or judgment. Time under these circumstances is not experienced as the pre-condition of knowledge, it is rather the enemy of relevance. The meme-cycle, like the news-cycle is unforgivingly brief. And method – understood as the deliberate, sustained, and, yes, methodical pursuit of deep understanding of a given topic – is likewise out of step with the rhythms of digital information.

Of course, there is nothing about digital technology that demands or necessitate’s this kind of relationship to information or knowledge. But while it is not demanded or necessitated, it is facilitated and encouraged. It is always easier to attune oneself to the dominant rhythms than it is to serve as the counterpoint. And what the dominant rhythm of digital culture encourages is not that we be cogs in the machine, but rather relays in the network.

We are relays in a massive network of digital information. Information comes to me and I send it out to you and you pass it along to someone else, and so on, day in and day out, moment by moment. In certain circles it might even be put this way: we are neurons within a global mind. But, of course, there is no global mind in any meaningful sense that we should care about. It is a clever, fictive metaphor bandied about by pseudo-mystical techno-utopians.

The minds that matter are yours and mine, and their health requires that we resist the imperatives of digital culture and re-inject time and method into our encounters with information. It begins, I think, with a simple “No” to the impulse to quickly skim-read and either share or discard. May be even prior to this, we must also renounce the tacit pressure to keep up with it all (as if that were possible anyway) and the fear of missing out. And this should be followed by a willingness to invest deep attentiveness, further research, and even contemplation over time to those matters that call for it. Needless to say, not all information justifies this sort of cognitive investment. But all of us should be able to transition from the nearly passive reception and transmission of information to genuine knowledge when it is warranted.

At their best, digital technologies offer tremendous resources to the life of the mind, but only if we cultivate the discipline to use these technologies against their own grain.

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

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 16 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Very Extended Will

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 5 Comments

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

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

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

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

Online/Offline/No Line

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 17 Comments

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

The IRL Fetish — Jurgenson

The Line Between Offline and Online — Carr

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Lifestream Stops

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 2 Comments

David Gelernter, 2013:

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

E. M. Forster, 1909:

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

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

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

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

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

[Conversation ensues and comes to an abrupt close.]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Worldstream Gelernter