Looking Forward

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ Leave a comment

Edward Bellamy in Equality, 1897 (cited by David Noble in The Religion of Technology):

“This craze for more and more and ever greater and wider inventions for economic purposes, coupled with apparent complete indifference as to whether mankind derived any ultimate benefit from them or not can only be understood by regarding it as one of those strange epidemics of insane excitement which have been known to affect whole populations at certain periods, especially of the middle ages. Rational explanation it has none.”

Creatures of Technological Habit

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 1 Comment

Sometimes the most obvious realities are those that slip just below our awareness of things, blending into the background of lived experience, surreptitiously shaping and forming our assumptions, intentions, and actions. These realities are in a sense too big to notice, or better, too pervasive to notice. Their very ordinariness renders them ordinarily invisible.

When we think and talk about technology, particularly digital technologies or the Internet, we tend not to think very much about our bodies. In fact, digital technologies have inspired dreams (or, nightmares) of disembodied existence and uploaded consciousness. Even if we are not quite entertaining the possibility of digital immortality, we do tend to talk about digital technology in language that obscures the body’s presence. The Cloud, the Information Age, virtual reality — each of these terms, and others beside, suggest something ethereal and abstract. In any case, they certainly do not invite us to notice the role our bodies may play in the digital order of things.

The scholars associated with the website Cyborgology have coined the phrase digital dualism to describe the tendency to abstract the virtual world of bits and data from the “real” world of atoms and stuff when we talk and think about the Internet. I’m sympathetic to their critique of digital dualism. There are different kinds of realities at play, each with their own distinguishing characteristics, but one is not less real than the other and each affects the other in very real ways. Simply put, there is only one reality with digital and material dimensions always informing one another.

But dualisms can be hard to overcome. We like to think in oppositional pairs or binaries. Interestingly, like many of our habits of thought, this may in part be linked to our experience of moving about as bodies in physical space. The world presents itself to us as either here or there, near or far, up or down. As we move about, we are faced with a choice between left and right, backward and forward. And so it may be that digital dualism is built upon a much earlier and more venerable dualism — the old fashioned mind/body variety usually associated with Descartes.

But, consider the following for a moment:

When we update our status on Facebook, we are doing something with our body.

When we send out a tweet, we are doing something with our body.

When we take a picture with our phones, we are doing something with our body.

When we enter and send a text, we are doing something with our body.

When we search the Internet, we are doing something with our body.

And on and on it goes. Our bodies are the one intractable fact that we cannot escape. The body is the ground of being. And I say this while not adhering to philosophical materialism. We may be more than our bodies, but we are certainly not less than our bodies. But we really need not get caught up in metaphysical debates here. What I’m talking about is tangible, not unlike Samuel Johnson’s stone.

Dancers, athletes, craftsmen, and members of liturgical religious communities have an intuitive grasp of the body’s often unnoticed but pervasive influence on the conduct of our everyday lives. Let me illustrate with a personal anecdote or two from the realm of athletics.

A few days ago, when I was getting ready to go running I asked my wife to toss me a shoe that was just out of reach. She did, and without thinking about it, as the shoe was coming toward me, I “trapped” it with my foot using the same gesture I would’ve used to trap a soccer ball. Now it has been a very long time since I’ve played soccer, but that gesture materialized without any conscious thought on my part. It was instinctively activated from a repertoire of possible techniques that my body knew and deployed without my conscious reflection. It became a part of this repertoire by being repeated until it became habitual.

When I played baseball I was a catcher. To this day, some years since I’ve actually caught a game, if I crouch I can feel all sorts of latent bodily “I-cans” coiling up. I can feel the movements of the arm and wrist used to receive a pitch. I can feel exactly what to do if a ball comes in the dirt or if runner breaks for second. These movements are inscribed in me as a form of bodily, non-theoretical know-how. I am told that the experience of professional dancers is similar as is that of craftsmen who have honed an intuitive feel for their work in whatever their medium of specialization. The craftsmen is an especially apt example for our purposes for the way in which tools are implicated in the craftsman’s bodily skill. Finally, consider also the religious believer shaped by a liturgy. For example, the Catholic who crosses themselves reflexively at appropriate moments.

All of this reflects what Henri Bergson called “habit memory.” The temptation may be to minimize this form of memory when compared to our explicit memory of people, events, images, etc. But, returning to my example above, I remember less and less of my soccer games in that sense, while I will never forget how to trap a soccer ball (even if my ability to actually do so wanes significantly over time).

Our ordinary experience in the world is constantly mediated by this kind of embodied, not quite conscious “know-how.” The preeminent philosopher of the body, Merleau-Ponty, called it coping. Hubert Dreyfus, building on Merleau-Ponty, has called it “intelligence without representation.” It is the way in which we are constantly and non-consciously fine-tuning our movements and actions so as to find the best “grip” on reality as we experience it.

Charles Taylor offers this illustration of Merleau-Ponty’s notion of coping, or how we make our way about the world:

“Living with things involves a certain kind of understanding, which we might also call ‘pre-understanding.’ That is, things figure for us in their meaning or relevance for our purposes, desires, activities. As I navigate my way along the path up the hill, my mind totally absorbed anticipating the difficult conversation I’m going to have at my destination, I treat the different features of the terrain as obstacles, supports, openings, invitations to tread more warily or run freely, and so on. Even when I’m not thinking of them, these things have those relevances for me; I know my way about among them.”

The best way to become aware of this dimension of our experience is to think about the moments when it breaks down. My favorite example of this is the Empty Milk Jug Effect. When you pick up an empty milk jug that you think is full, you’re caught off guard; you experience a palpable rupture between non-conscious, embodied judgments and the feedback flowing back through the embodied instantiation of those judgments. The point is that without consciously thinking about it, your body had adjusted itself to find “optimal grip” based on habit memory and when those adjustments proved inadequate you get that sudden sensation of applying way too much force. But what we need to consider is how infrequently this happens. Most of the time our bodies, the world, and our non-conscious thought processes are more or less in sync.

One more example to bring it closer to the realm of digital technology. Since I’ve become habituated to the use of my MacBook, I have an odd experience every once and awhile. Perhaps it’s just me, but I’m willing to bet it’s not. When opening a new window or tab I often begin scrolling with my fingers on the track pad simultaneously with the loading of the page. There are times, however, when there is a slight delay in the opening of the page and I experience a momentary visual disorientation as my eyes move to track with a page that isn’t moving as it should given my habit memory associated with my fingers scrolling on the track pad.

Now at one level this may seem insignificant, but it functions like the tip of an iceberg. It’s a momentary awareness of an immense but ordinarily veiled reality that structures the whole of our experience. (I could be talked down from the scope of that last statement, but I’ll let it stand for now.)

Taylor added that “our grasp of things is not something that is in us, over against the world; it lies in the way we are in contact with the world.” And this brings us to the point: we are in contact with the world through our tools. Our tools, our bodies, our brains, and the world form a circuit of pre-understanding, perception, thinking, and action. A large portion of this circuit is composed of non-conscious habit-memory, and some of that habit-memory is formed through our technologically mediated engagement with the world. The way we use our tools can form habits that sink below the level of consciousness and thereby become part of the pre-understanging through which we navigate experience. And this happens because we use our technologies with our bodies and repeated bodily actions turn into our habit-memory.

We casually (with a nervous laughter) speak of being addicted to the Internet or to Facebook or of panicking when we forget our cell phones. We feel a certain compulsion, but we tend to psychologize this compulsion, that is we render it a mental or emotion disposition. And so it may be, in part. But the compulsions of technology may be less in the mind than in the body. Or better yet, they are anchored in the mind through the body.

Moreover, because our technologies enter into the circuit comprising our engagement with the world, they change the nature of our experience. As we navigate the world, our pre-understanding does not merely recognize objects in themselves within our field of experience. Rather, we perceive objects as they are for-us and how they figure in whatever activity we are engaged in. Our tools then shape how things and experiences appear to be for-us. Having hammer in hand changes how things present themselves; it opens up new possibilities for action that were not present before. For the person with a smartphone, their grasp of things lies in all of the ways the smartphone enables contact with the world. Repeated, embodied activation of these possibilities form habit memories that are then sedimented into the pre-understandings we bring to bear upon experience.

We have formed countless habit memories with our digital technologies, especially as they have become increasingly portable and handheld. We instinctively relate to the world through the capacities and capabilities that we have learned through the embodied use of our tools.

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Two related posts:

Technology, Habit, and Being in the World 

Technology Use and the Body

The Technological Sublime, Alive and Well

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 2 Comments

Natural wonders, lightning storms, tornadoes, sunsets — we sometimes describe the experience of these sorts of natural phenomenon as experiences of the sublime. They leave us in awe and render us speechless if only for a moment. There is a long tradition of reflection about the nature of the sublime experience going back at least to the eighteenth century. Kant and Burke in particular are often taken as starting points for the discussion. The sublime in Burke’s view was tinged with a certain terror, and for Kant the ability of human reason to take in and domesticate the sublime was a testament to its power.

More recently historian David Nye has argued that it is not only nature that inspires sublime experiences, our modern technologies also have the ability to elicit similar reactions of wonder, awe, and not a little trepidation. In American Technological Sublime, Nye argued that these experiences of the technological sublime have been especially characteristic of American society and have amounted to a kind of civil religion. They have at least been an integral part of the American civil religion. These experiences were more than moments of profound personal experience. They were moments that forged the collective national character. They were rituals of solidarity.

The first railroads, the first massive industrial factories, the electrified cityscapes, the Hoover Dam, the atomic bomb — all of these and more have inspired sublime experiences in those who first witnessed their appearance. One is reminded as well of Henry Adams’ famous account of the massive Corliss engine that powered the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition in 1876 and led Adams to compare the place of the dynamo in modern society to the place of the Virgin Mary in medieval society.

In more recent history the space program has supplied most instances of the technological sublime. Nye describes rocket launches at Cape Caneveral as quasi-religious events: “the event is less a matter of spectatorship than a pilgrimage to a shrine where a technological miracle is confidently expected.” In his account of the launch of Apollo 11, Nye describes Norman Mailer’s experience of the event. Mailer came as a skeptic, bent on resisting the allure of the event. He was determined not to be caught up in the fervor and devotion of the crowd of pilgrims. And yet … When the rocket launched and the earth began to rumble and the sound caught up with the sight, Mailer found himself saying over and over again, “Oh, my God! oh my God! oh, my God! oh my God!” That is the power of the technological sublime.

I write all of this today because yesterday Americans in Florida and the Washington D. C. area got an experience of the technological sublime. The space shuttle Discovery whose launches had been occasion for numerous pilgrimages to the Cape, especially as the shuttle program wound down, took her final voyage mounted on a specially fitted 747. If you were able to catch a glimpse of the spectacle, perhaps you know experientially what Nye theorized. If you were not able to see the sight in person, you have only to read the new stories, personal accounts, and, yes, tweets to conclude that the technological sublime is alive and well, if perhaps increasingly rare.

The technological marvel, the national pride, the sense of solidarity, the awe, the pride, the wave of emotion, the patriotic fervor abetted by the military jet accompanying the shuttle on its final voyage — you can read all of it on the faces of the spectators and in the nature of the pictures that made their way around the news outlets and blogs.

In the midst of it all, however, there was a sense of nostalgia as well. Of course, part of that nostalgia arises from the fact that this was a final voyage, and as such it recalled to mind all of the previous voyages, including those that ended in tragedy. But perhaps the nostalgia also arose from a tacit realization (if such a thing is possible) of the absence of such experiences from our more common and ordinary encounters with technology. In his final chapter, Nye describes the transition to what he calls the “consumer’s sublime” typified by Las Vegas and Disneyland. “The epiphany,” Nye writes, “has been reduced to a rush of simulations, in an escape from the very work, rationality, and domination that once were embodied in the American technological sublime.”

Put that way, one wonders whether it is not on the whole better that the American technological sublime is waning. And yet when one experiences its “melancholy, long withdrawing roar,” perhaps it is only natural to feel a tinge of sadness.

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My thanks to Christopher Friend for the excellent images posted below.

You can see additional photo-documentation of the technological sublime here, here, and here.

Image courtesy of Chris Friend
Image courtesy of Chris Friend.

Facebook and Loneliness: The Better Question

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 4 Comments

In 2008, Nick Carr’s article in The Atlantic, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, touched off a lively and still ongoing debate about the relative merits of the Internet.  Of course, the title was a provocation and perhaps played a role in generating initial interest in the piece. I’ve often wondered whether that was Carr’s own choice for a title or if an editor with the magazine slapped it on as link bait. In any case, I tend to think it does the essay as a whole a disservice. It suggested a straw man to readers before they read the first word of the article. Having used the piece in a variety of classes that I’ve taught, I’m struck by how often readers respond to the title rather than Carr’s argument in the body of the essay.

In this month’s issue, The Atlantic has once again published a cover story bearing a strikingly similar title — “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?” by novelist Stephen Marche. I suppose it was too tempting to pass up.

This time around, however, the title is at best generically provocative and more like predictably lame. And, as with Carr’s piece, it threatens to obscure the argument.

Take, for example, the quite interesting response to Marche by sociologist Zeynep Tufekci. In a blog post, she takes on the article’s title more so than the contents of the article. Or so it seems to me. Tufekci emphasizes the need to rely on empirical research and she cites a number of studies that fail to find a causal correlation between social media and loneliness. In fact, studies suggest that on the whole social media users report lower rates of loneliness than non-users.

But as I read (and reread) Marche’s article, I failed to find Marche himself advocating such a causal connection. In fact, at several points Marche is quite clear in denying that social media (since Facebook, like Google in Carr’s article, stands in for a larger reality) causes loneliness. At the outset of the last main section of the article, Marche writes:

“Loneliness is certainly not something that Facebook or Twitter or any of the lesser forms of social media is doing to us. We are doing it to ourselves.”

That seems pretty straightforward to me.

In fact, Marche and Tufekci seem to be in broad agreement. Both agree that individuals have become more isolated over the course of the last few decades. Tufekci cites three studies to that effect:

“We are, on average, more isolated, at least in terms of strong ties. Three separate studies say so–and as we say in social sciences, once is a question, twice is a coincidence, thrice is a finding. (That is the General Social Survey with follow-up here, Pew Internet studieswritten up by Keith Hampton (with others) and a recent study by Matt Brashears).”

Marche makes the same point; in fact, I would suggest that Marche’s essay is really about this broad trend toward loneliness and isolation that predates the rise of social media. It is true that Marche clearly thinks Facebook is less than an ideal antidote to this loneliness and that it engenders certain problematic forms of socialization, but he does not claim that social media is making us lonely. It is the unfortunate title that suggests that.

The more interesting part of Tufekci’s response lies in her notion of cyberasociality which she defines as “the inability or unwillingness of some people to relate to others via social media as they do when physically-present.” Happily, Tufekci links to an unpublished paper in which she lays out her case for the existence of cyberasociality. She draws on an analogy to dyslexia to argue that some people may have an inherent inability to socialize via text based media. As she acknowledges, this is something she is still “working through empirically and conceptually,” but it is certainly an intriguing possibility.

Interestingly, at one point in Marche’s essay he himself appears to acknowledge as much. While discussing the work of Moira Burke — which (again) he himself notes “does not support the assertion that Facebook creates loneliness” — Marche ventures the following introspective confession: “Perhaps it says something about me that I think Facebook is primarily a platform for lonely skulking.” Perhaps. If so, Tufekci may already be working on the theory that explains why.

The real issue, it seems to me, is not whether Facebook makes us lonely, but whether Facebook is reconfiguring our notions of loneliness, sociability, and relationships. These are after all not exactly static concepts. Here is where I think Marche raises some substantial concerns that are unfortunately lost when the debate goes down the path of determining causality.

What Facebook offers is the dream of managing the social and curating the self, and we seem to obsessively take to the task. The asynchronicity of Facebook is rather safe, after all, when compared to the messy and risky dynamics of face-to-face interactions, and we naturally gravitate toward this sort of safety. I suspect this is in part also why we would sometimes rather text than call and, if we do call, why we hope to get sent to voicemail. It seems reasonable to ask whether we will be tempted to take the efficiency and smoothness of our social media interactions as the norm for all forms of social interaction.

One last thought. It seems to me that we should draw a distinction among desires that are bundled together under the notion of loneliness. There is, for example, a distinction between the desire for companionship (and distinctions among varieties of companionship) and the desire simply to be noticed or acknowledged. C. S. Lewis, eloquent as per usual, writes:

“We should hardly dare to ask that any notice be taken of ourselves. But we pine. The sense that in this universe we are treated as strangers, the longing to be acknowledged, to meet with some response, to bridge some chasm that yawns between us and reality, is part of our inconsolable secret.”

Among Facebook’s more problematic aspects, in my estimation, is the manner in which the platform exploits this desire with rather calculated ferocity. That little red notifications icon is our own version of Gatsby’s green light.

Facebook as Rear Window: What Hitchcock and Gadamer Can Teach Us About Online Profiles

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 13 Comments

In Hitchcock’s 1954 classic, Rear Window, Jimmy Stewart plays a photojournalist named Jeff who is laid up with a broken leg and passes his time observing his neighbors through his apartment’s rear window. The window looks out on a courtyard onto which the rear windows of all the other apartments in the building also open up. It’s a multiscreen gallery for Stewart’s character who reclines in the shadows and becomes engrossed in the lives of his neighbors – the attractive dancer, the lonely woman, the young pianist, the newlyweds, and, most significantly, the unhappy married couple. Increasingly playing the part of the obsessive voyeur, he becomes convinced the disgruntled husband murdered his wife. The film’s plot is driven by Jeff’s determination to prove the man’s guilt.

The film came to my attention again when I received a link to the clip below, which impressively and artfully splices all of the scenes depicting what Jeff sees out of his window. [Update: The video is no longer available.] Serendipitously, I watched the clip not long after reading some comments on Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutical aesthetics developed in Truth and Method. Naturally, I then thought of Facebook … as one does after watching Hitchcock and reading Gadamer.

Let’s start with Hitchcock. Like the windows in Hitchcock’s film, Facebook profiles offer an opening into a life and one through which others can observe without the observed knowing it. This is classic Facebook behavior. The platform has always abetted and elicited stalker-ish activity from users. This is why one of the most popular of the many spam links that circulate on the social network purports to reveal who has been looking at your profile. If ever such a capability were enabled it would likely lead to a massive reduction in page views for Facebook.

Like Jeff’s character, Facebook users look through the profiles-as-windows at the lives of their virtual neighbors. And as with Jeff, it may begin in a relatively innocent curiosity born of boredom, or it may veer into the obsessive. There is, of course, one glaring difference between the rear windows and Facebook profiles: Stewart’s neighbors were presumably unaware that they were being watched. Facebook users are not only aware they are being watched – they are counting on it.

On Facebook we’re all flâneurs, simultaneously watching and being watched. But we don’t exactly know who is doing the watching and how much watching they’re doing or to what end. The uncanny moment in Rear Window comes when the watcher becomes the watched. Needless to say, such a moment would be equally uncanny where it to unfold online. Yet it is enough that we know we are being watched in general. This alone renders the profile something other than a representation of our life. It becomes itself a presentation. And that is were Gadamer first comes in.

As he develops his hermeneutical aesthetics, Gadamer challenges the representational view of the work of art that understands the work of art as a mere re-presentation of some real thing. On this view, whatever meaning the work of art holds is derivative of the thing it re-presents. Against this view, Gadamer contends that the appearing of the work of art before the participant (for the one who takes in a work of art is never merely a passive observer) constitutes an “event of being.” Meaning inheres in the work of art in itself. It is a presentation, not a re-presentation.

Now think again about a Facebook profile. It may be tempting to understand a profile as a representation of a life or of a personality whose meaning derives from the lived experience of the user who creates the profile. But is this entirely true? It is certainly the case that the online profile is, in a certain sense, grounded in the offline experience of the user. Also, we would do well to resist a digital dualism that abstracts the “real,” offline experience from “virtual,” online experience. Offline and online experience impinge upon one another; it would be misleading to compartmentalize the two.

Yet, there are multiple ways of construing the nature of their enmeshment. One way of resisting digital dualism is to note how the possibility of self-documentation asserts itself in lived experience. I’ve discussed this here on more than a few occasions and Nathan Jurgenson’s notion of “Facebook Eye” captures this dynamic neatly. On this view online profiles impinge upon offline experience by reordering our conscious intentionality – to the person with a social media profile, experience becomes a field of potential self-documentation to be publicized through social media. To the person with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. To the person with a Facebook profile, everything looks like a potential status update. Or alternatively, to the person with a Facebook profile, the question is always “How many ‘likes’ will this get?” But Gadamer offers another complimentary construal.

It begins by noting the presentational character of the online profile. It is not a mere copy of the original life; in its appearing before a profile viewer, it appears on its own terms. It’s meaning is not merely derived from the manner in which it copies life, rather it emerges out of the dynamics of the life as it is presented in the profile. And here is why, as I see it, this does not constitute a digital dualism. Gadamer’s discussion of the work of art as an “event of being” includes what Peter Leithart has called “retroactive ontological consequences” for the thing it refers to in the “real” world.

Leithart interprets Gadamer by reference to landscape painting. When a landscape is painted by Constable, its character has been altered, it is now a “landscape-that-inspires-painting.” When person maintains an online profile, they are now a person-with-a-profile. The landscape painting, Leithart continues, is an “event of being” because it is “an enhancement of the thing itself.” Likewise the online profile, although perhaps enhancement is not necessarily the best word to use here. Moreover Leithart concludes, “every encounter with the real landscape involves a moment of interpretation that is a ‘performance’ of the thing, and after Constable (even for many who are not directly aware of Constable) the interpretive performance is inflected by Constable’s work …” Translated: every encounter with a person-with-a-profile invites acts of interpretation that are inflected by Facebook. Now back to Rear Window to illustrate.

In the film, the windows presented a slice of a life. What Jeff saw was not something other than the lived experience of the people he watched, but the windows did the work of constituting those slices of their lives as something in themselves for Jeff inviting interpretation, not unlike the way a profile presents itself as something in itself for the viewer also inviting the viewer into a work of interpretation. And as we noted, via Gadamer, as a thing in itself the window-as-presentation gives off meaning that has retroactive ontological consequences. If Jeff were to meet any of the people he watched outside of their apartments, his interactions with them would be contoured by his interpretations of their fenestrated (when would I ever have another chance of using that word) presentations.

Likewise, when Facebook users encounter one another offline, their mutual interpretations of one another are loaded with whatever interpretations their profiles have already invited.

Now one final thought. Our presentations always produce more meaning than we intend. This is another way of saying that we are not entirely in control, despite our best efforts, of the manner in which our profile presentations are interpreted. Because they are always partial re-presentations (insofar as they are alluding back to lived experience), our profiles hide while they reveal and thus invite or even demand acts of creative interpretation. These interpretative surpluses, for better or worse, are those that are then brought to bear on our face-to-face encounters.

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An expanded and revised version of this post appeared at The Medias Res.