In the Depths of the Digital Age: Edward Mendelson reviews five books on psychological life in the age of the internet / We Are Hopelessly Hooked by Jacob Weisberg
by Judy Wajcman
by Bernard E. Harcourt
by Virginia Heffernan
by Wendy Hui Kyong
Chun
by Richard Coyne
by Philip N. Howard
Whether we gain or not
by this habit of profuse communication it is not for us to say.
—Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room (1922)
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. Those changes in sensibility and consciousness never correspond
exactly with changes in technology, and many aspects of today’s digital world
were already taking shape before the age of the personal computer and the
smartphone. But the digital revolution suddenly increased the rate and scale of
change in almost everyone’s lives. Elizabeth Eisenstein’s exhilaratingly
ambitious historical study The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (1979)
may overstate its argument that the press was the initiating cause of the great
changes in culture in the early sixteenth century, but her book pointed to the
many ways in which new means of communication can amplify slow, preexisting
changes into an overwhelming, transforming wave.
In The
Changing Nature of Man (1956), the Dutch psychiatrist J.H. van den
Berg described four centuries of Western life, from Montaigne to Freud, as a
long inward journey. The inner meanings of thought and actions became
increasingly significant, while many outward acts became understood as symptoms
of inner neuroses rooted in everyone’s distant childhood past; a cigar was no
longer merely a cigar. A half-century later, at the start of the digital era in
the late twentieth century, these changes reversed direction, and life became
increasingly public, open, external, immediate, and exposed.
Virginia Woolf’s
serious joke that “on or about December 1910 human character changed” was a
hundred years premature. Human character changed on or about December 2010,
when everyone, it seemed, started carrying a smartphone. For the first time,
practically anyone could be found and intruded upon, not only at some fixed
address at home or at work, but everywhere and at all times. Before this,
everyone could expect, in the ordinary course of the day, some time at least in
which to be left alone, unobserved, unsustained and unburdened by public or
familial roles. That era now came to an end.
We Are Hopelessly Hooked by Jacob Weisberg
Is the new communication revolution degrading the quality of human relationships?
Many probing and
intelligent books have recently helped to make sense of psychological life in
the digital age. Some of these analyze the unprecedented levels of surveillance
of ordinary citizens, others the unprecedented collective choice of those
citizens, especially younger ones, to expose their lives on social media; some
explore the moods and emotions performed and observed on social networks, or
celebrate the Internet as a vast aesthetic and commercial spectacle, even as a
focus of spiritual awe, or decry the sudden expansion and acceleration of
bureaucratic control.
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.
The present discordant
and distracted twitter…—Virginia Woolf, Reviewing (1939)
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.”
Judy Wajcman, in Pressed
for Time, identifies the “acceleration of life in digital capitalism” not
as something radically new but as an extension of earlier technological
changes. “Temporal disorganization” has always put different kinds of pressure
on different social groups, and the culture of digital interruption places
different kinds of stress on the interrupted (employees, children) and the
intruders (managers, parents) leaving both unhappy, like Hegel’s mutually
constrained slaves and masters.
Wajcman is more
sanguine about relations among equals: teenagers use messaging services to open
private channels of communication after encountering one another in the shared
arena of social networks; they make a snap judgment of someone else’s online
profile, then follow it with extended online contact uninterrupted by work or
play. But Wajcman oversimplifies, for example, the benefits of using
smartphones to reschedule dinner dates at the last moment, “thereby
facilitating temporal coordination.” As Mondaugen’s Law predicts, that same
flexibility reduces (in Pynchon’s words) both “temporal bandwidth” and
“personal density” by weakening one’s commitments to the future, even trivial
ones.
Computers and
smartphones bring to daily life some of the qualities of another artifact of
the digital era: the video game in which a player sustains an anxious state of
vigilance against sudden unpredictable intrusions that must be dealt with instantly
at the risk of virtual death. This too has its benefits: drivers who grew up
playing video games are reportedly quicker than others to respond to sudden
danger, more capable of staying alive.
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…
read more:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/06/23/depths-of-the-digital-age/We Are Hopelessly Hooked by Jacob Weisberg
Is the new communication revolution degrading the quality of human relationships?
Twenty years ago, the
hottest jobs for college graduates were at Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley.
Today, students at Stanford and CalTech and Harvard aspire to work in product
management or design at social media companies. The disciplines that prepare
you for such a career are software architecture, applied psychology, and
behavioral economics—using what we know about human vulnerabilities in order to
engineer compulsion... Some of Silicon
Valley’s most successful app designers are alumni of the Persuasive Technology
Lab at Stanford, a branch of the university’s Human Sciences and Technologies
Advanced Research Institute.
The lab was founded in 1998 by B.J. Fogg, whose
graduate work “used methods from experimental psychology to demonstrate that
computers can change people’s thoughts and behaviors in predictable ways,”
according to the center’s website. Fogg teaches undergraduates and runs
“persuasion boot camps” for tech companies. He calls the field he founded
“captology,” a term derived from an acronym for “computers as persuasive
technology.” It’s an apt name for the discipline of capturing people’s
attention and making it hard for them to escape. Fogg’s behavior model involves
building habits through the use of what he calls “hot triggers,” like the links
and photos in Facebook’s newsfeed, made up largely of posts by one’s Facebook
friends... read more:
see also
Paul Mason - The end of capitalism has begun
George Monbiot - Growth: the destructive god that can never be appeased
So, Zuckerberg and Modi just came together to end net neutrality in India?
George Monbiot - Growth: the destructive god that can never be appeased
So, Zuckerberg and Modi just came together to end net neutrality in India?
