X-Files S2E04
It was through several of Jurgenson’s essays that I was first introduced to the idea of digital dualism, a pejorative term he coined to describe reactionary trends of thought among baby boomers (Sherry Turkle et al.) against contemporary communications technology—the internet, social media, smartphones. The archetypal digital dualist sees these technologies as inhuman and unhealthy, and can often be found calling for disconnection and a return to what they see as more authentic lifestyles. Jurgenson contrasts this dualism with his theory of augmented reality, where the digital and the physical are meshed together in a reciprocal relationship and each constructs the other.
His steadfast advocacy for this position is why I was surprised by one of the first essays published in Real Life Magazine, which Jurgenson recently launched as editor-in-chief. Gemini Haptics by Michael Thomsen is an insightful and interesting piece that sets up a workable foundation for arguments of digital dualism. This is not to say that I would expect Jurgenson to be close-minded about the opportunity for conversation-it just wasn’t what I expected. The essay is quite pretty, and much smarter than I am.
The crux of the piece rests on a philosophical argument about perception—that instead of being strictly representational, our senses only exist in relation to the physical actions that they enable. As he puts it: “we see, in other words, what we can do.” Computers detach us from the physicality of our senses—the same mechanical actions on a touch screen accomplish vastly different material ends, and are distinguished only by the semiotic content of the interaction. The mental state that emerges from this Thomsen likens to the “machine zone” that slot-machine gamblers enter, a state of mind where repetitive mechanical actions produce a comforting dissociation and the illusion of control.
As a student of literature I lingered during undergrad on the early English novel as it emerged in the 18th century. It’s a fascinating time when the form was still emerging into popularity and no one really had a clue what they were doing. This is the period when the lovely experiment Tristram Shandy was written. Studying the rise of the novel, I encountered the writing of what I could playfully call “literary dualists.” These writers—typically older men—share many of the anxieties of our own digital dualists. In their words reading novels promotes narcissism, laziness, and sexual immorality; and renders their readers incapable of distinguishing between fantasy and reality.
The novel and the smartphone are obviously tremendously different mediums of communication. But I often find that a valuable response to digital dualists is to ask if anything in their argument changes if you substitute one for the other. The novel causes its reader to comfortably dissociate from their surrounding environment. A simple repertoire of repetitive mechanical gestures—scanning a line of text with the eyes, turning a page—provokes in the mind a vast range of different experiences depending on the semiotic content of the page in front of them. Reading a novel allows an individual to fit themselves within the superstructures of gender, nationhood, narrative, and molds us into individuality. Depending on who you ask, Western notions of individualism began with the novel.
I suspect it is the visible privacy with oneself that elicits the critiques of dualists. The state of absorption of the reader (whether reading a phone or a book) appears to be an uncanny kind of stasis in the eyes of a third party. The third party cannot also read the phone or book, the private space generated in the mind of the reader, so they are excluded. They feel physically disconnected from the proximate individual who is mentally connected to words that were written into another phone (or computer) somewhere far off.
Thomsen’s critiques are not of something new then, despite the fact that he speaks in terms of computers, of “a medium of dead quanta, the lifeless motion of charged particles through their semiotic cages.” He casts it as a frighteningly new thing, but as much could have been said about literacy in any period.
These screens, our new mediums for language, have brought on an intensification of mass literacy. The endless web of text that is hyperlinked to more text, along with the emerging power of hyperlinked actions where text or images can be linked to material effects, is certainly novel. Maybe the main reason why this causes so much anxiety is because we are emerging out of the age of television, when literacy took second-place to imagery. Touchscreens bring a balance between the two, and also correct for the TV’s biggest failing: in order to buy something that you had seen on TV, you had to leave the TV.