In the Depths of the Digital Age

Edward Mendelson

New York Review of Books

2016-07-25

“Every technological revolution coincides with changes in what it means to be a human being, in the kinds of psychological borders that divide the inner life from the world outside.”

“The explicit common theme of these books is the newly public world in which practically everyone’s lives are newly accessible and offered for display. The less explicit theme is a newly pervasive, permeable, and transient sense of self, in which much of the experience, feeling, and emotion that used to exist within the confines of the self, in intimate relations, and in tangible unchanging objects—what William James called the “material self”—has migrated to the phone, to the digital “cloud,” and to the shape-shifting judgments of the crowd.”

“When the smartphone brings messages, alerts, and notifications that invite instant responses—and induces anxiety if those messages fail to arrive—everyone’s sense of time changes, and attention that used to be focused more or less distantly on, say, tomorrow’s mail is concentrated in the present moment.”

“In Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), an engineer named Kurt Mondaugen enunciates a law of human existence: “Personal density…is directly proportional to temporal bandwidth.” The narrator explains:

“Temporal bandwidth” is the width of your present, your now…. The more you dwell in the past and future, the thicker your bandwidth, the more solid your persona. But the narrower your sense of Now, the more tenuous you are.”

“The genius of Mondaugen’s Law is its understanding that the unmeasurable moral aspects of life are as subject to necessity as are the measurable physical ones; that unmeasurable necessity, in Wittgenstein’s phrase about ethics, is “a condition of the world, like logic.” You cannot reduce your engagement with the past and future without diminishing yourself, without becoming “more tenuous.””

“Dante, always our contemporary, portrays the circle of the Neutrals, those who used their lives neither for good nor for evil, as a crowd following a banner around the upper circle of Hell, stung by wasps and hornets. Today the Neutrals each follow a screen they hold before them, stung by buzzing notifications. In popular culture, the zombie apocalypse is now the favored fantasy of disaster in horror movies set in the near future because it has already been prefigured in reality: the undead lurch through the streets, each staring blankly at a screen.”

“Harcourt draws heavily on Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1975) in his account of today’s “expository society.” Unlike Jeremy Bentham’s never-built nineteenth-century panopticon analyzed by Foucault, where all-knowing, all-powerful jailers observed unknowing, unwilling prisoners, everyone in Harcourt’s expository society of Twitter posts and Instagram feeds can spy on everyone else and with few exceptions everyone wants to be spied on.”

“A new kind of celebrity, perceived both as enviable and appalling, comes to those whose only talent is for insistent self-exposure. Worst of all, for Harcourt, is the knowing compliance of today’s consumers with forms of censorship and control once in government hands but now, for better or worse, practiced by corporations.”

“The Apple Store, gateway for all software accessible to iPhone users, blocks apps designed specifically to display politically sensitive matter like pictures of drone strikes. “Apple, it seems, has taken on [the] state function of censorship, though its only motive seems to be profit.””

“Harcourt describes a new kind of psyche that seeks, through its exposed virtual self, satisfactions of approval and notoriety that it can never truly find. It exists in order to be observed; it must continually create itself by updating its declared “status,” by revealing itself in Facebook narratives and Instagram images, while our “conscientious ethical selves” need to be reminded—by ourselves and others—to exist at all.”

“Harcourt’s book is a despairing protest against domination; Heffernan’s is an ecstatic narrative of submission. Magic and Loss entwines her own story with that of the Internet, her escape from “our most sacred class values,” from a world where “the Atlantic and the New Yorker serve as the old guardians, policing the borders of literacy,” into a classless world of pleasure and immediacy, where videos uploaded from the smartphones on which they were made are the universal nonverbal language and all things “are worth observing for the sheer joy of it.””

“Exploring the Internet, she resisted, at first, leaving a world where flesh-and-blood writers and filmmakers wanted “to tell great stories” about people’s lives and entering a world where persons dissolved into virtuality: “I wasn’t ready yet to swap the ideal of the story for the ideal of the system.””

“The computer theorist Nicholas Negroponte had urged in Being Digital (1995) that we should (in Heffernan’s words) “embrace our status as information bits rather than atoms of matter,” and now a machine was overcoming her resistance: “This was the iPod’s magic: it transformed me and made me digital.””

“She explains her merger with the machine by citing Aquinas on “the sharing of a nature with another.””

“She writes near the start of the book that, living as we do in the joyously shifting unreality of the Internet, “we need to…scrap our old aesthetics and consider a new aesthetics and associated morality.””

“The oldest form of the crowd, Elias Canetti wrote in Crowds and Power (1960), is the “baiting crowd” that forms in order to kill someone, a crowd that today pleases itself by taking selfies while cheering a political candidate’s murderous fantasies.”

“Wendy Hui Kyong Chun’s Updating to Remain the Same, using a different vocabulary from Canetti’s, describes the ways in which the habit of making and seeking “updates” of our own and other people’s status creates a similar crowd: “Through…habits, individual actions coalesce bodies into monstrously connected chimeras.””

““To be is to be updated”: one must update in order to give “evidence of one’s ongoing existence.” Hence Chun’s subtitle: “Habitual New Media.””

“Richard Coyne, in Mood and Mobility, portrays in elegant prose a networked world more nuanced, personal, and responsive than the chimeras Chun analyzes in hip-sociologese, but Coyne acknowledges the same unpleasant truths that Chun insists upon: machines change the deepest experience of life; “space is filled with devices and technologies that really do have a role in the way moods happen,” by providing “mood-altering entertainment” that can “incite people to action, protest, and revolution”—or induce “existential vertigo…or habituation.””

“A further cause, not mentioned in these books, is suggested by research into the ways that reading on screen differs from reading on paper. Like all attempts to quantify personal experience, published studies in this field show questionable and inconsistent results, but at least one report plausibly suggests that when you read on paper you are more likely to follow the thread of a narrative or argument, whereas when you read on screen you are more likely to scan for keywords.”

“This is a variant of Virginia Heffernan’s distinction between her old ideal of “story” and her new ideal of “system.””

“The expanding “Internet of things” gives a smartphone user remote control over a home heating system hundreds of miles away. The psychological effect, for everyone I know who uses these devices, reproduces the stress felt by managers who can demand obedience from subordinates at all times: greater control over things too distant to touch brings greater anxiety about matters otherwise too distant to worry about.”

“Perhaps Philip Howard will be proved right in his forecast, in Pax Technica, that new device networks, feeding information about everything to centralized databases, will “bring about a special kind of stability in global politics, revealing a pact between big technology firms and government, and introducing a new world order.” He forecasts that the winners in the new order will be those “who can demonstrate truths through big data gathered over the internet of things and disseminate those truths over social media,” and the losers will be those “whose lies are exposed by big data.””

“But this view requires a utopian faith in the rational, autonomous judgment of everyone whose lives are shaped by firms and governments, and by the “monstrously connected chimeras” that unite them. The moral purposes of governments and tech firms are the central issue omitted from such predictions, and the book’s concluding nostrums (“Do one thing a month to improve your tech savvy”) are little help where questions of value are what matter.”

“Everyone grows up in a climate of erotic expectation and imagination shaped by their culture.”

“The Internet radically transformed that climate, so that those who went through puberty before, say, the 1990s took for granted different erotic expectations from those who went through puberty afterward.”

“A climate in which young people’s sexual imagination was largely private and secretive gave way to a climate in which everyone grew up with publicly available images of women as willingly degradable and discardable, hard and soft porn displaying bodies with improbable textures and shapes.”

“Every culture has its own special distortions of sexuality, and the distortions of the digital era are mirror opposites of (in J.H. van den Berg’s phrase in The Changing Nature of Man) “the nineteenth century’s derangement of sexuality.””

“Today, young men again report troubled, incapable relations with women entirely unlike the women in the vivid images they grew up with.”

“The supposed “empowering” effect of teasingly erotic music videos by Miley Cyrus or Beyoncé seems to have, for many viewers who are not celebrities, the same whistling-in-the-dark unreality of an earlier generation’s “self-esteem” programs.”

“The psyche has not become more fragile; instead, the pressures to which it is subjected are in many ways more forceful and obtrusive than they have been for more than a century.”

“The same public world that offers a shared community for every specialized form of hatred also, for the first time, offers a shared, sympathetic community for every variety of love.”

“As in social media and messaging, a newly open public realm also opens new avenues for private intimacy.”

“Meanwhile, the body is taught to find new extensions of itself. Apple, Samsung, and others foresee great profits in systems that use sensors in a “smart watch” or wristband to record the wearer’s physiological data for corporate processing.”

“Software can now tell you how well you slept last night, supplementing your subjective sense of yourself with reliably objective measurements, and subtly outsourcing your everyday bodily senses in a different way from, for example, an annual blood test. No one has offered a clear idea of the effects of such procedures.”

“Every technological change that seems to threaten the integrity of the self also offers new ways to strengthen it.”

“Plato warned about the act of writing—as Johannes Trithemius in the fifteenth century warned about printing—that it would shift memory and knowledge from the inward soul to mere outward markings.”

“Yet the words preserved by writing and printing revealed psychological depths that had once seemed inaccessible, created new understandings of moral and intellectual life, and opened new freedoms of personal choice.”

“Two centuries after Gutenberg, Rembrandt painted an old woman reading, her face illuminated by light shining from the Bible in her hands. Substitute a screen for the book, and that symbolic image is now literally accurate.”

“But in the twenty-first century, as in Rembrandt’s seventeenth, the illumination we receive depends on the words we choose to read and the ways we choose to read them.”


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