For Your Consideration – 4

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ Leave a comment

“How To Kill Digital Dualism Without Erasing Differences”:

“Well, at least for a methodological purpose, we may risk, in being so concentrated in demolishing digital dualism, overestimating just how enmeshed the digital and analogue are, assuming uncritically that this dichotomy is already over. But it’s not. There are still things which are only analogue – a flower, a death, a book, a night with a friend are analogue by themselves. And there are things which are only offline: a person who’s never entered the web, or a text that has never been transmitted by the internet.”

#socialmediatheories: Astute analysis of the varieties of social media experience.

“Everyone prefers to be the added not the adder on Facebook.

To follow and not be followed back on Twitter is a mild disappointment. To have your Facebook friendship denied is a disaster.”

“Hermann Hesse on What Trees Teach Us About Belonging and Life”:

“For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche.”

While we’re on trees, you might also want to check out Alan Jacobs ongoing side project: “Gospel of Trees.” And speaking of Jacobs, I’m quite pleased to report that he is blogging once again. The link to his new blog has replaced the link to his old blog among the Sites of Note listed to the right.

“The Tyranny of Algorithms”: Evengy Morozov reviews Christopher Steiner’s Automate This: How Algorithms Came to Rule Our World.

“The real question isn’t whether to live with algorithms—the Sumerians got that much right—but how to live with them. As Vonnegut understood over a half-century ago, an uncritical embrace of automation, for all the efficiency that it offers, is just a prelude to dystopia.”

You can listen to Jerry Brito interviewing Steiner here.

Several years ago, I read Thomas de Zengotita’s Mediated and I was impressed with his analysis of our hyper-mediated identities and their discontents. The style of the writing is breezy and, after a while, it begins to grate just a tad. But the core argument remains persuasive. It may profitably be read alongside of sociologist Peter Berger’s Heretical Imperative and The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (with Thomas Luckman). Of course, assuming you don’t have time to read Mediated, much less Berger’s books, here is a short clip of de Zengotita discussing the dilemma of authenticity:

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And finally, Bourdieu, food, chart:

Mnenosyme and Lethe

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 7 Comments

In an interview with the Boston Review, writer Philip Gourevitch, who has written a book length treatment of the Rwandan genocide, reflects on memory:

“There’s a kind of fetishization of memory in our culture. Some of it comes from the experience and the memorial culture of the Holocaust—the injunction to remember. And it also comes from the strange collision of Freud and human rights thinking—the belief that anything that is not exposed and addressed and dealt with is festering and going to come back to destroy you. This is obviously not true. Memory is not such a cure-all. On the contrary, many of the great political crimes of recent history were committed in large part in the name of memory. The difference between memory and grudge is not always clean. Memories can hold you back, they can be a terrible burden, even an illness. Yes, memory—hallowed memory—can be a kind of disease. That’s one of the reasons that in every culture we have memorial structures and memorial days, whether for personal grief or for collective historical traumas. Because you need to get on with life the rest of the time and not feel the past too badly. I’m not talking about letting memory go. The thing is to contain memory, and then, on those days, or in those places, you can turn on the tap and really touch and feel it. The idea is not oblivion or even denial of memory. It’s about not poisoning ourselves with memory.”

From Technology Review’s “History, As Recorded on Twitter, Is Vanishing From The Web, Say Computer Scientists”:

“On 25 January 2011, a popular uprising began in Egypt that  led to the overthrow of the country’s brutal president and to the first truly free elections. One of the defining features of this uprising and of others in the Arab Spring was the way people used social media to organise protests and to spread news.

Several websites have since begun the task of curating this content, which is an important record of events and how they unfolded. That led Hany SalahEldeen and Michael Nelson at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, to take a deeper look at the material to see how much the shared  were still live.

What they found has serious implications. SalahEldeen and Nelson say a significant proportion of the websites that this social media points to has disappeared. And the same pattern occurs for other culturally significant events, such as the the H1N1 virus outbreak, Michael Jackson’s death and the Syrian uprising.

In other words, our history, as recorded by social media, is slowly leaking away.”

Jacques Derrida:

“They tell, and here is the enigma, that those consulting the oracle of Trophonios in Boetia found there two springs and were supposed to drink from each, from the spring of memory and from the spring of forgetting.”

Discuss.

The Waters of Lethe by the Plains of Elysium – John Spencer Stanhope

Ramblings Regarding Authenticity and Identity in an Age of Performance

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 7 Comments

What is authenticity? It is the holy grail of modern life.

Why?

Some thoughts.

Take One …

Because modernity is one long identity crisis.

In traditional societies, identity was given. It was grounded in the relative solidity of pre-modern life. Individuals inhabited an identity that was given by time, place, the structures and institutions of daily life.

In modernity, all that is solid melts … and choice is the solvent.

A multiplicity of choices arise were once there were few or none – choices regarding vocation, home, spouse, religion, and more. Consumer society is simply the apotheosis of a very long trajectory – Luther is her prophet.

Crisis of identity used to be the province of exiles and their children. Modernity generalizes the condition of exile.

Where there is choice there is freedom. There is also uncertainty, anxiety, regret, and self-consciousness.

Choice foregrounds the choosing self.

Freedom  and choice lead to performance. Choices, because they could have been otherwise, become signals to be read. They disclose and they reveal. When this dynamic is embraced, happily or despondently, identity becomes performance.

A performed identity – relative to an inhabited, given identity – feels inauthentic.

Take Two …

“The world of Homer is unbearably sad because it never transcends the immediate moment; one is happy, one is unhappy, one wins, one loses, finally one dies. That is all.” (W. H Auden)

Achilles is authentic. His identity is experienced as the fulfillment of a destiny. Further, there are no psychic gaps between circumstances and emotions and actions. Sorrow, tears, rage, murder – all follow immediately upon circumstances. Passionate intensity characterizes experience.

Self-consciousness lives in the gaps.

Once they open but a little, self-reflection and moderation emerge. Emotions are tempered and cooled.

Open them further and the space becomes a stage and performance ensues.

Performance is knowing, cool, detached, ironic. Performance feels inauthentic because it is rehearsed action.

Take Three …

“Writing heightens consciousness.” (Walter Ong)

Writing captures the mind. The diary is emblematic. Authentic self is the private self.

Images heighten self-consciousness.

Images of oneself capture the self as seen by others.

Images evoke performance.

“The medium is the message.” (Marshall McLuhan)

The medium is the message and we are both; it’s the ratio that matters.

Until recently the power to produce media has been in the hands of a relative few. Under these circumstances individuals were the medium and culture was the message. When the power to produce media is democratized the relationship is reversed. Culture becomes the medium and the self is the message.

“Any person today can lay claim to being filmed.” (Walter Benjamin)

Any person today can lay claim to being a filmmaker.

“The distinction between author and public is about to lose its axiomatic character … At any moment the reader is ready to become a writer.” (Walter Benjamin)

Digital media has democratized the production of media even further. We are not only actors, but also directors of our own lives as we perform them for an audience, imagined or real.

Authenticity, if it is taken to mean either non-performative action or immediate action that is not self-reflexive, is no longer an option. In the world created by the expansion of choices, we have no choice in the matter.

Hawthorne Against the Techno-Utopians

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 6 Comments

I’ve had occasion to mention Nathaniel Hawthorne’s writing a time or two in previous posts. In his journal, he noted the manner in which the train whistle broke into the natural idyll he was enjoying — “But, hark! there is the whistle of the locomotive” — inaugurating a long-standing literary convention which persists to this day (see Sherry Turkle).

Elsewhere, Hawthorne anticipated de Chardin and McLuhan’s metaphorical rendering of the electric age: “Is it a fact — or have I dreamt it — that, by means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time?”

Hawthorne and his generation were grappling with the consequences of industrialization. We are grappling with the consequences of digitization. These two are not necessarily analogous, but they share one variable: human nature. Hawthorne in particular had a keen sense of our faults and foibles. While his stories did not always dwell on technology explicitly, they imaginatively explored the darker proclivities that human beings bring to the techno-scientific project.

In the opening paragraph of The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne writes,

“The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison.”

This is a grim observation, but it seems incontrovertible; and it applies with equal force to all techno-utopian projects and hopes. Wherever we go, there we are and our imperfections with us.

Pascal observed that the error of Stoicism lay in believing that what can be done once can be done always. I would offer an analogous framing of the techno-utopian error: Believing the wonderful use to which a technology can be put, will be the use to which it is always put.

Better, it would seem, to go forward with a hopeful skepticism that avoids the cycloptic vision of either the techno-utopians or the techno-cynics. And reading a little Hawthorne might be a good way of nurturing that disposition.

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Over the past couple of years, the folks at The New Atlantis have been publishing a series of reflections on a handful of Hawthorne’s short stories as they bear on Science, Progress, and Human Nature. These are each thoughtful and engaging essays.  

For Your Consideration – 3

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 1 Comment

“Tu and Twitter: Is it the end for ‘vous’ in French?”:

“‘In the philosophy of the internet, we are among peers, equal, without social distinction, whatever your age, gender, income or status in real life,’ Besson says.

Addressing someone as ‘vous’ – or expecting to be addressed as ‘vous’ – on the other hand, implies hierarchy.”

“Can objects be evil? A review of ‘Addiction by Design’”:

“Schüll’s Addiction systematically builds on her basic argument that, ‘just as certain individuals are more vulnerable to addiction than others, it is also the case that some objects, by virtue of their unique pharmacologic or structural characteristics, are more likely than others to trigger or accelerate an addiction.’”

“Cyberasociality and the Online Sociality Divide: Third Level Digital Divide?”: Provocative working paper by sociologist Zeynep Tufekci. Well-worth the time.

“To test the idea whether the acceptance of the idea of deep bonds and real friendships being established online was mostly a cohort effect, I undertook a rolling survey of undergraduate students in a mid-sized public university in the mid-Atlantic during 2007 and 2008 …

The result, reported in Tufekci (2010) showed that there was a substantive segment of even this population, about 51 percent, who believed that an online-only deep friendship was not possible. Statistical analyses also showed that this was not a byproduct of offline sociality, i.e. some people who were sociable offline were also sociable offline and vice versa.”

“Your brain on pseudoscience: the rise of popular neurobollocks”: Neurobollocks … yes, this essay did appear in a British publication.

“In this light, one might humbly venture a preliminary diagnosis of the pop brain hacks’ chronic intellectual error. It is that they misleadingly assume we always know how to interpret such “hidden” information, and that it is always more reliably meaningful than what lies in plain view. The hucksters of neuroscientism are the conspiracy theorists of the human animal, the 9/11 Truthers of the life of the mind.”

“What Will the ‘Phone’ of 2022 Look Like?”:

“Having opened up a chasm between the informational and material, we’re rapidly trying to close it. And sitting right at the interface between the two is this object we call a phone, but that is actually the bridge between the offline and online. My guess is that however the phone looks, whoever makes it, and whatever robot army it controls, the role of the phone in 10 years will be to marry our flesh and data ever more tightly.”

“‘Symbolic efficiency,’ ‘liquid modernity’ and identity-capacity”: First line would’ve made a better title, “how ‘becoming oneself’ has turned into a crappy job.”

“There is no respite from self-construction; it’s a cathedral that can’t be completed. And the inevitable failures and shortcomings of our identity in progress, our inevitable disappointment with what we have and what we see being promised, what others seem to be allowed to enjoy, becomes our fault. Politics seems not to be a viable avenue to addressing our disgruntlement; instead soul-searching and more and more elaborate consumption, and just as important, mediated declarations of who we think we are by virtue of that consumption.”