Twitter Time

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 4 Comments

“Twitter relies on people’s desire to be the same.” At least that’s what A. C. Goodall claims in a recent New Statesman article, “Is Twitter the Enemy of Self-Expression?”  This is, it would seem, a rather vague and unsubstantiated claim.  In his brief comments, Alan Jacobs writes that Goodall’s piece amounts to “assertions without evidence.”  Jacobs goes on to argue that it is unhelpful to make sweeping claims about something like Twitter which is “a platform and a medium,” rather than an organized, coherent unit with an integral “character.”  A medium or platform is subject to countless implementations by users, and, as the history of technology has shown, these uses are often surprising and unexpected.

On the whole I’m sympathetic to Jacobs comments.  His main point echoes Michel de Certeau’s insistence that we pay close attention to the use that consumers make of products.  In his time, the critical focus had fallen on the products and producers; consumers were tacitly assumed to be passive and docile recipients/victims of the powers of production.  De Certeau made it a point, especially in The Practice of Everyday Life, to throw light on the multifarious, and often impertinent, uses to which consumers put products.  Likewise, Jacobs is reminding us that generalizations about a medium can be misleading and unhelpful because users put any medium to widely disparate ends.

This is a fair point.  However (and if there weren’t a “however” I wouldn’t be writing this), I’m a bit of a recalcitrant McLuhanist and tend to think that the medium may have its influence regardless of the uses to which it is put.  And perhaps, I might better label myself an Aristotelian McLuhanist, which is to say that I’m tending toward localizing the impact of a medium in the realm of habit and inclination.  The use of a medium over time creates certain habits of mind and body.  These habits of mind and body together yield, in my own way of using this language, a habituated sensibility.  The difficulty this influence poses to critique is that, precisely because it is habituated, it tends to operate below the level of conscious awareness.

I don’t think the focus on use and the attention to the effects of a medium are necessarily mutually exclusive.  Habits after all are only formed through significant and repeated use.   Perhaps they are two axes of a grid on which the impact of technology may be plotted. In any case, it would help to provide an example.

Consider our experience of time.  It seems that the human experience of time, how we sense and process the passage of time, is not a fixed variable of human nature.  My sense is that we habituate ourselves to a certain experience of time and it is difficult to immediately adjust to another mode.  Consider those rare moments when we find ourselves having nothing to do.  How often do we then report that we were unable to just relax; we had the urge to do something, anything.  We were restless precisely at the moment when we could have taken a rest.   Or, at a wider scale, consider the various ways cultures approach time.  We tend to naturalize the Western habits of precise time keeping and partitioning until we enter another culture which operates by a very different set of attitudes toward time.  It would take something much longer than a blog post to explore this fully, but it would seem plausible that certain technologies — some, like the mechanical clock, very old — mold our experience of time.

Bernard Stiegler has commented along similar lines on the media environment and consequent experience of time fostered by television.  To begin with he notes, going back to the establishment of the first press agency in Paris in 1835 near a new telegraph, that the “value of information as commodity drops precipitously with time …”  He goes on to describe industrial time in the following context:

“…. an event becomes an event — it literally takes place — only in being ‘covered.’  Industrial time is always at least coproduced by the media.  ‘Coverage’ — what is to be covered — is determined by criteria oriented toward producing surplus value.  Mass broadcasting is a machine to produce ready-made ideas, ‘cliches.’  Information must be ‘fresh’ and this explains why the ideal for all news organs is the elimination of delay in transmission time.”

To be sure, more than the logic of the medium is at play here, but it may be difficult and beside the point to parse out the logic of the medium from other factors.

The ability to eliminate  of the delay between event and transmission that characterized industrial time has been radically democratized by digital media.  We are all operating under these conditions now.  You may vaguely remember, by contrast, the time that elapsed between snapping a picture, getting it developed, and finally showing it to others.  That time has been collapse, not only for large news organizations, but for anyone with an internet enabled smart phone.  In the interest of creating catchy labels, perhaps we may call this, not industrial time, but Twitter time.  “Twitter” here is just a synecdoche for the ability to immediately capture and broadcast information, an ability that is now widely available.  My guess is that this capacity, admittedly used in various ways, will affect the sensibility that we label our “experience of time.”

Stiegler continues (with my apologies for subjecting you to the rather dense prose):

“With an effect of the real (of presence) resulting from the coincidence of the event and its seizure and with the real-time or ‘live’ transmission resulting from the coincidence of the event and its reception, a new experience of time, collective as well as individual, emerges.  This new time betokens an exit from the properly historical epoch, insofar as the latter is defined by an essentially deferred time — that is, by a constitutive opposition, posited in principle, between the narrative and that which is narrated.  This is why Pierre Nora can claim that the speed of transmission of analog and digital transmissions promotes ‘the immediate to historical status’:

‘Landing on the moon was the model of the modern event.  Its condition remained live retransmission by Telstar . . . . What is proper to the modern event is that it implies an immediately public scene, always accompanied by the reporter-spectator, who sees events taking place.  This ‘voyeurism’ gives to current events both their specificity with regard to history and their already historical feel as immediately out of the past.’

There is a lot to unpack in all of that.  We are all reporter-spectators now.  Deferred time, time between event and narration, is eclipsed. Everything is immediately “out of the past,” or, at least as I understand it, the whole of the past is collapsed into a moment that is not now.  The earthquake and tsunami in Japan, just two months past, might as well have taken place five years ago.  The killing of bin Laden, likewise, will very soon appear to be buried in the indiscriminate past.

Twitter as a medium, used to the point of fostering a habituated sensibility (but regardless of particularized uses), would seem to accelerate this economy of time and expand its province into private life.  It doesn’t create this economy of time, but it does heighten and reinforce its trajectory.  In fact, the relentless flow of the Twitter “timeline” (not an insignificant designation), or better, our effort to keep up with it and make sense of it, may be an apt metaphor for our overall experience of time.

All of this to say that while a medium or platform can be used variously and flexibly, it is not infinitely malleable; a certain underlying logic is more or less fixed and this logic has its own consequences.  Of course, none of this necessarily amounts to saying Twitter is “bad”, only to note that its use can have consequences.

Speaking of habit, I’m curious if anyone felt the urge to click the “1 New Tweet” image?

 

How Not to Study the Internet; the Quantified Self; and Digitally Facilitated Quality Time

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ Leave a comment

Posting has been light of late, but will likely pick up in the coming weeks.  In the meantime, here are some items that have crossed my screen recently that might be of interest to regulars.

First, Alex Williams exams digitally enhanced family time in his NY Times piece, “Quality Time, Redefined.”  Williams explores the digitally gathered family which inhabits the same physical space while exploring individual digital spaces accessed via laptops, tablets, and smart phones.  Physically present to one another, family members are dispersed in their own activities, occasionally sharing something of interest.  According to James Gleick, who is cited by Williams,

In the near future, he said jokingly, “A new skill that will be taught by relationship counselors will be knowing when and how to interrupt one’s loved ones: Is a particular joke you’ve just read on Twitter worth her yanking out her earbuds?”

Despite the obligatory gesture toward “the critics,” Williams is sanguine.  This arrangement beats the passive absorption of television and the forced and artificial feel of planned quality time around games or meals.  It could be just me, but I can’t help but sense that such reassurances are like a tasty tonic into which a tasteless poison has been surreptitiously slipped.

At Crooked Timber, you can find an interesting post, “Against Studying the Internet,” about what is being studied, or what should be studied, when one studies “the Internet.”  Rather than focusing on the immensely large and notoriously amorphous thing we call the Internet, or even more specific things like social networking platforms, it is recommended that the object of study should be the role of causal mechanisms associated with specific technologies.  What does this mean? Read the post and, if this sort of thing interests you, the long, but substantive, comment thread.

Finally, Gary Wolf interviewed on the Quantified Self.  Wolf and Kevin Kelly, along with others, have been working on a project to make the immense amount of data collected about you in a digital environment work for you.  According to Wolf, “[Y]our data is not for your boss, your teacher, or your doctor — it’s for you.”  Sounds good.  Most obvious applications are, of course, for health care.  Other potential applications?

  • Facial tracking to improve happiness.
  • Cognition tracking to evaluate effects of simple dietary changes on brain function.
  • Food composition tracking to determine ideal protein/carb meal ratios for athletic performance.
  • Concentration tracking to determine effects of coffee on productivity.
  • Proximity tracking to assist in evaluation of mood swings.
  • Mapping of asthma incidents and correlation with humidity, pollen count, and temperature.
  • Energy use tracking to find opportunities for savings.
  • Gas mileage tracking to figure out if driving style matters.

Sounds less good somehow, but in that difficult to articulate way I tried to put some words to in my last post.

A Frictionless Life Is Also A Life Without Traction

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 7 Comments

The idea of a “frictionless” life has been on mind since March when I read (and posted) Chetan Sharma’s vision of a pervasively wired and connected world.  Speaking of the benefits he sees accruing to the realization of his vision, Sharma explains,

This is where it needs to go and will go in 10 years, making everyday experiences much better and friction free. If a person has a desire to learn or shop or engage in social interaction, it’s right there. Beyond just doing things on televisions and cell phones, you’ll be able to do these things on a wall anywhere. It’s about reducing friction. You can accomplish any given task today with 50 different steps but this future of connected devices is all about making things much easier.

Regardless of what we might think about the desirability of such a world, it did appear to me that Sharma had given us a compelling metaphor for the world we desire:  friction free.  After all, who would oppose “making things much easier.”  The question, however, may be whether “making things much easier” necessarily makes “everyday experience much better.”  As the metaphor flitted in and out of thought over the last few weeks, it eventually occurred to me that the metaphor invited a certain extension that may begin to answer that question: A frictionless life is also a life without traction.

At the expense of letting metaphors run wild, I want to pursue this formulation and suggest that not all forms of friction are undesirable.  Certain forms of friction are absolutely essential to acting and maneuvering in the world.  A frictionless world would also be one in which we would feel ourselves unanchored and afloat, perpetually propelled by forces we have no power to resist.  That seems already to describe the feel of everyday life for many.  This can be exhilarating for a time, but I suspect that eventually we desire a greater degree of stability and agency — traction.

Removing all resistance removes all traction; and if everything is easy, in the end nothing may be satisfying or meaningful.  This reminded me of philosopher of technology Albert Borgmann’s suggestion that we must make a distinction between “trouble we reject in principle and accept in practice and trouble we accept in practice and in principle.” When you begin talking about accepting trouble it becomes important to make clear distinctions.  In the former category of trouble we accept in practice but reject in principle, Borgmann has in mind troubles on the order of car accidents and cancer.  By “accepting them in practice,” Borgmann only means that at the personal level we must in our own way discover a means of coping with such tragedies.   But these are troubles that we oppose in principle and so we seek cures for cancer and improved highway safety.

Against these, Borgmann opposes troubles that we also accept in practice, but ought to accept on principle as well.  Here the examples are preparing a meal (including growing the ingredients) and hiking a mountain.  These sorts of troubles, not without their real dangers, could be opposed in principle — never prepare meals at home, never hike — but such avoidance would also prevent us from experiencing their attendant joys and satisfactions.  If we seek to remove all trouble or resistance from our lives; if we always opt for convenience, efficiency, and ease; if, in other words, we aim indiscriminately at the frictionless life; then we will simultaneously rob ourselves of the real satisfactions and pleasures that enhance and enrich our lives.

Traction implies resistance and sometimes trouble, but it also presents us with the opportunity to navigate meaningfully.  A frictionless life may promise ease and a certain security, but it also leaves us adrift, chasing one superficial pleasure after another; never satisfied, because we never experience the struggle against resistance that is essential to a sense of accomplishment.  The trajectory of our desire toward a frictionless life, then, may paradoxically leave us unable to find meaningful satisfaction or a sense of fulfillment.  Trading some friction for traction, however, may, in fact, make “everyday experience much better.”

Twitterfication: More Complicated + Less New = No Interest

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 1 Comment
Seismic Acitivty or Media Coverage

On the Media’s recent program,  Turning Away, focused on the spike in foreign news coverage following the devastation in Japan and the combat in Libya.  That spike, however, plateaued, and now foreign coverage in American journalism is again on the decline.  At least until the next crisis, of course.

This prompted some incisive, if somewhat disconcerting, observations from host Brooke Gladstone and her guests, Mark Jurkowitz and Steve Coll.  Here is Gladstone introducing the program:

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Mark Jurkowitz at the PEW Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism says that a few weeks back Libya and Japan made up more than 40 percent of the news, an extraordinary number. But now, even as fresh horrors rain down on the people of Libya and Japan, the American media look elsewhere for leads.

Perhaps, says Jurkowitz, that’s because events out there have become both more complicated and less new, a lethal combination for coverage . . .

That last line struck me as being regrettably accurate.  More Complicated + Less New = Less Coverage.  And less coverage either reflects or engenders no interest.  I’m fairly certain that this equation has summed up the way American media works for some time time now; Kierkegaard had already diagnosed the symptoms in the 19th century.  But I would also speculate that the dynamics of digital/social media have also ratcheted up the logic the equation seeks to convey, exponentially perhaps.  Consider it the Twitterfication of the news cycle.  We can’t quite do complicated and sustained very well within the constraints of social media.

The following exchange also provided a helpful schema that rang true, the 12-day disaster editorial cycle:

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Steve Coll covered his fair share of natural disaster and war in his decades as foreign correspondent at The Washington Post, and he found that there is a template for many stories, no matter how harrowing. In his experience, earthquake and disaster coverage, in general, follow a 12-day editorial cycle. He witnessed it while covering an earthquake that killed tens of thousands of people in Iran.

The first few days are spent reporting breaking news and casualties and destruction. Around day five, the late miracle story in which search teams find an improbable survivor amidst the rubble. Day seven brings the interpretation of meaning story, with religious overtones. By day 12, it’s essentially buh-bye for now.

So in your mind run through the catastrophes and crisis that have garnered significant media coverage over the last year or so and see if that does not neatly capture the way they were covered.  Wait, having a hard time remembering the catastrophes and crisis of the last year?  Were you caught off guard, as I was, when we heard that it had been a year since the BP oil spill in the gulf?  Vaguely remember something about floods in Australia? Something happened in Tunisia recently right?  It seems the logic of our media environment is precisely calibrated to induce forgetfulness.

After Coll expresses some surprise at how quickly we have lost sight of ongoing developments in Japan and Libya, Gladstone asks Coll, “Should we be worried about that?”

Coll is, perhaps justifiably, sardonic in response:

STEVE COLL: Well, we are a global power with military and diplomatic interests and deployments all over the world, and we expend tax dollars and put lives at risk all the time in complicated foreign environments, so yeah, it’s a problem. We ought to be thinking about these places on an empirical basis in greater depth than we sometimes do.

“Life without memory is no life at all”

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 5 Comments

Not too long ago I found myself unable to recall an element of a story from my past.  It was a story I have narrated many times since it occurred nearly 15 years ago.  The event was not insignificant, and what I could no longer remember were my own words.  I could picture the scene.  I could feel what I said.  The words, however, seemed slurred, as if they were on a tape that was being played too slowly.

What a curious thing memory is.  There is so much of each day that we do not remember.  But then there are these episodes that we can revisit repeatedly; many of them, in my case anyhow, so very random, of so little significance.  Yet they stick, they linger, they creep into consciousness for no obvious reason.  And then there are those memories that are like so many beads we string together on the narrative thread of our emplotted lives.  Even these, it seems, are not as durable as we might hope.

Anthony Doerr opens Memory Wall with this reflection from Luis Bunuel’s autobiography, My Last Sigh:

You have to begin to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realize that memory is what makes our lives.  Life without memory is no life at all, just as an intelligence without the possibility of expression is not really an intelligence.  Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action.  Without it, we are nothing.