Walter Benjamin, a German philosopher of the early twentieth century, wrote a seminal essay about the way photography and other reproduction technologies change our relationship to art. His observation was that the preponderance of photographs of a work of art in a mass-produced book have a strange effect on the original: While they are themselves utterly divorced from the context in which the original artwork exists, they actually make the original work more sacred. The original painting, hanging in the very cathedral for which it was painted perhaps, has what Benjamin called an “aura,” which is at least partly dependent on its context and location. A tourist, having seen its image again and again in books, might travel thousands of miles to encounter the real painting in its home setting and soak in the aura with which it is imbued.
On the other hand, the reproduction is a rather profane imitation, existing in the more abstract and commercial world of mass-produced goods and mass culture. It’s not that Benjamin despises popular culture—it’s that he sees real art and artifacts being absorbed by a bigger spectacle, and audiences losing the ability and desire to tell the difference between that spectacle and real world.
Strangely enough, as we migrate from his world of mass-produced objects to the realm of even more highly abstracted digital facsimiles, we nostalgically collect the artifacts of midcentury mass production as if they were works of art. Each Philco radio, Heywood Wakefield dresser, or Chambers stove is treasured as if it were an original. We can only wonder if cloud computing may make us nostalgic one day for having a real “file” on the hard drive of one’s own computer—or if silicon brain implants may make us wax poetic for the days when one’s computing happened on a laptop. In the march toward increasing abstraction, whatever we had previously will seem like the real thing.
By recognizing the abstracting bias of digital technologies, however, we can use it to our advantage. The same way Benjamin would have the printed art book inspire us to visit the original work in its real world context, our digital abstractions work best when they are used to give us insight into something quite real and particular.
In just one example, consider the impact of fantasy baseball on the real game. Fantasy baseball—first developed on an IBM computer in the 1960s—is a game where a participant’s roster of baseball players score points based on their statistics over a real baseball season. It’s a truly “derivative” game, in that fans create their own fantasy rosters of players, irrespective of their real teams, and in that winning and losing in the fantasy game is on a level fully abstracted from the baseball happening in the real world. Like any digital simulation, the experience of fantasy baseball is empowering to its participants. In fact, the game only became a mass phenomenon as free agenting and Major League players’ strikes soured fans on the sport. As baseball became a business, the fans took back baseball as a game—even if it had to happen on their computers.
The effects didn’t stay in the computer. Leveraging the tremendous power of digital abstraction back to the real world, Billy Bean, coach of the Oakland Athletics, applied these same sorts of statistical modeling to players for another purpose: to assemble a roster for his own Major League team. Bean didn’t have the same salary budget as his counterparts in New York or Los Angeles, and he needed to find another way to assemble a winning combination. So he abstracted and modeled available players in order to build a better team that went from the bottom to the top of its division, and undermined the way that money had come to control the game. Since that time, many fantasy baseball players and digital statisticians have been hired to run the front offices of Major League teams.[*]
So while the dangers of living and working in an inherently abstracted environment are very real, so too are the benefits. Abstraction has been around since language, perhaps even before. Money, math, theology, and games would all be impossible without abstracted symbol systems, accepted standards, and some measure of central authority. The digital realm is no different in that regard.
Yet digital abstraction does occur still one further level removed from what we think of as reality. While games and math might be abstracted representations of our world, our digital simulations are abstracted representations of those games and mathematics. In a world as filled with representations as ours, it is easy to get so entranced by signs that we lose sight of the here and now. As the postmodernists would remind us, we have stuff, we have signs for stuff, and we have symbols of signs. What these philosophers feared was that as we came to live in a world defined more by symbols, we would lose touch altogether with the real stuff; we would become entranced by our simulated reality, and disconnect from the people and places we should care about.
As we watch people wearing headphones and staring into smart phones, ensconced in their private digital bubbles as they walk down what were once public streets, it is hard not to agree with those pessimistic assessments of our procession into simulation.
What the postmodernists may have underestimated, however, was the degree to which the tools through which these symbolic worlds are created—and ways in which they might be applied—would remain accessible to all of us. And how willing we may still be to use them. Just as the framers of the Constitution and the Talmudic scribes before them understood, abstract codes of laws are fine—so long as we’re the ones writing them.
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* Hopefully, my former New School media studies student Jake Kalos will write a book on this, the subject of his excellent unpublished paper.
VI. IDENTITY
Be Yourself
Our digital experiences are out-of-body. This biases us toward depersonalized behavior in an environment where one’s identity can be a liability. But the more anonymously we engage with others, the less we experience the human repercussions of what we say and do. By resisting the temptation to engage from the apparent safety of anonymity, we remain accountable and present—and much more likely to bring our humanity with us into the digital realm.
When signing onto the WELL, an early, dial-in digital bulletin board based in the Bay Area, participants were welcomed with the statement: You Own Your Own Words. To most people, this meant a confirmation of copyright—that everything we posted on the bulletin boards belonged to us, and couldn’t be published by someone else without permission. To others, including me, You Own Your Own Words served as an ethical foundation: You, the human being on the other side of the modem, are responsible for what you say and do here. You are accountable.
Given that the WELL was developed by farsighted cultural pioneers such as Stewart Brand, Larry Brilliant, Kevin Kelly, and Howard Rheingold, we shouldn’t be surprised that they sought to compensate for some of the disconnection online between people and their words. And that’s why, from the very beginning, I decided to be myself online. I’ve only used one name on the Internet: Rushkoff. I figured the only real danger was from government, corporations, or some other “big brother” out there using what I posted against me in some future McCarthy hearings. Even if that was the case, if a whole lot of us got in the habit of standing behind everything we said, it would be hard for anyone to get prosecuted or persecuted for what they said or believed. This is America, after all.
Turns out my staunch approach to identity online hadn’t made me vulnerable to the authorities so much as to the anonymous—or, as they like to call themselves, Anonymous.
Just last year, I wrote an article defending the existence of a notorious bulletin board where young hackers often congregated and organized against companies and organizations they believed were preventing free speech online—or were simply being evil in one way or another. Sometimes they did creative pranks, like replacing video footage, and other times they simply crashed websites by creating programs that overtaxed the enemies’ servers. After a misunderstanding with their own Internet provider, the site was shut down for a short time. An online war ensued, and many authorities and journalists called for the BBS to be shut down. I lurked on the site for a month or so, ended up seeing some pa
rticularly raunchy and even illegal stuff, but wrote a piece defending its existence. They are an unwieldy bunch, but sometimes it’s reassuring to know that there’s still a wild, uncontrollable side to the Internet.
Well, the online magazine for which I wrote the piece framed it a bit too sensationally (another product of digital biases and the desperate quest for “page views”), and the kids on the BBS decided I had written a hit piece. Minutes after my piece was posted, they decided I needed to be taken down. It was as if I had poked at a hornets’ nest: It didn’t matter what my intentions were, the hive had been provoked. And so dozens of anonymous young hackers went at me—posting every personal fact they could find, crashing my website and the website of the online magazine, making automated phone calls to phone numbers associated with me, and so on. Although most of the information, photos, and phone numbers they posted were inaccurate, a whole lot of people ended up having photos of their homes and private numbers posted online. It wasn’t pretty. The anonymous attackers demanded the piece be removed. Not that this would end their assault, but it might turn their main attention elsewhere.
How could a group purportedly dedicated to free speech online end up forcibly censoring an essay defending their free speech in the first place? By operating anonymously.
In a hostile, depersonalized net environment, identity is one’s liability. What were the kids’ weapons against me? My name, my address, my home. What does putting a picture of someone’s house online really imply, after all? We know where you live. We can get you, the real you—while you have no idea who we are.
But more than simply protecting them from retribution, the anonymous status of people in an online group engenders crowd behavior. They have nothing to fear as individuals, and get used to taking actions from a distance and from secrecy. As a result, they exacerbate digital technology’s most dehumanizing tendencies, and end up behaving angrily, destructively, and automatically. They go from being people to being a mob.
The way to dampen the effects of this problem is not to retreat into anonymity ourselves, but to make being real and identifiable the norm. As in the real world, the fewer people who know each other, the more dangerous the neighborhood.
Of course we should all keep our bank accounts and personal information private; but our posts, our participation, and socializing? That really should be coming from us, ourselves. The less we take responsibility for what we say and do online, the more likely we are to behave in ways that reflect our worst natures—or even the worst natures of others. Because digital technology is biased toward depersonalization, we must make an effort not to operate anonymously, unless absolutely necessary. We must be ourselves.
There are certainly instances where anonymity should be maintained. Dissidents in Iran, for example, can be killed for what they say. While posting anonymously confirms the apparent authority of the government to censor through execution, it can also help keep an activist alive. But of course there is also great political power in standing up for what one believes in and hoping many others join in. Every openly gay person makes it easier for the rest of us to be open about our sexuality as well—to be more who we are, not less. Likewise, the millions of people protesting peacefully in the streets of Eastern European dictatorships were masses of individuals, not anonymous mobs. Their identities and collective personhood were their power.
Digital technology allows for similar collective activity—but it is not biased that way. Our digital activity occurs out of body. Whether sending an email, typing a comment to a blog post, or controlling an avatar in a video game, we are not in the computer, at a discussion, or in the fantasy world with our friends. We are at home or the office, behind a computer terminal or game console. We are operating out of our bodies and free of our identities.
This can promote an illusion that we may act without personal consequences. If we choose to maintain our anonymity as well, we are more likely to lash out from the seeming safety of obscurity. As website moderators well understand by now, the more anonymously people are allowed to post to a forum, the more quickly conversations will devolve into “flame wars” or just plain abuse. Requiring that people register to make comments invariably raises the level of conversation as well as the level of civility.
This isn’t just because being identifiable means the user can be traced and caught. While the notion of repercussions may dampen the most aberrant or illegal behavior, it alone isn’t enough to explain how differently people act when they have an identity. In fact, the civilizing effect is nearly as powerful even when the identity of the user has been created for the specific online environment. For instance, when a gamer has been working with the same character over a period of months, he comes to care about that character as an extension of himself. Even if his real world identity has never been associated with the character, his real world time has been invested in making the character a member of the community. The player has something at stake. Similarly, many bulletin boards award reputation points to users whose posts have been deemed valuable by other members. These points can take years to acquire. Like an eBay “seller rating,” the more time it has taken to acquire a reputation in an online environment, the more it matters—even when it is entirely out of body.
Of course, the original hope of virtual community enthusiasts was that the disembodied nature of online interaction might help people overcome long-held prejudices. People couldn’t actually see one another, so they often made assumptions about the race, age, gender, and education of other participants. Professors got into extended dialogues with strangers online—who turned out to be laypeople or teenagers, while people of color were treated as equals in business communities for the first time. Such anecdotes are encouraging, for sure, but they may represent less a triumph over prejudice than a detour around it. We are treating the stranger as an equal because we have made the false assumption she is just like us. It’s not that we see through our prejudices; we simply don’t see the person.
Our experience online is less that of the unprejudiced intellectual than that of the autistic living with Asperger’s syndrome. While a lot has been argued back and forth about whether computer use or gaming might cause spectrum disorders, direct observation alone has revealed that our digital behaviors closely mirror those of Asperger’s sufferers: a dependence on the verbal over the visual, low pickup on social cues and facial expressions, apparent lack of empathy, and the inability to make eye contact. This describes any of us online, typing to one another, commonly misunderstanding each other’s messages, insulting one another unintentionally, or seeking fruitlessly to interpret someone’s real meaning by parsing his words repeatedly.
According to best estimates,[4] only 7 percent of human communication occurs on the verbal level. Pitch, volume, and other vocal tone account for 38 percent, and body movements such as gestures and facial expression account for a whopping 55 percent. As we have all experienced, the way a person makes eye contact can mean a whole lot more to us than whatever he is saying.
But online, we are depending entirely on that tiny 7 percent of what we use in the real world. Absent the cues on which we usually depend to feel safe, establish rapport, or show agreement, we are left to wonder what the person on the other end really means or really thinks of us. Our mirror neurons—the parts of our brains that enjoy and are reinforced by seeing someone nod or smile while we are sharing something—remain mute. The dopamine we expect to be released when someone agrees with us doesn’t flow. We remain in the suspicious, protective crouch, even when the situation would warrant otherwise—if only we were actually there. Imagine living in a world where you were deaf, dumb, and blind, and had to rely on the text coming at you in order to figure out what people meant and how they felt about you. Then, to this add not knowing who any of the other people really are.
Living in a 7 percent social reality has real effects. As MIT researcher Sherry Turkle has discovered,[5] teens online rarely if ever apologize to one another. When they are ca
ught having wronged someone, they confess—but they never say they’re sorry. It’s as if the factual statement of guilt matters more than having any feeling about it. Sorrow goes out with the other 93 percent.
As if desensitized by all this disembodiment, young people also exhibit an almost compensatory exhibitionism. Kids on social networking sites and video channels share explicit photos of themselves, not just for money or items on their “wish lists” but simply to get noticed. They seem not to know—or to care—that everything they post remains permanent, ready to haunt them as they seek jobs or spouses in the future. We might find some solace in the sensibility of the net’s most techno-progressive young people, who tend to believe that the loss of privacy and collapse of identity they’re currently wrestling with online is preparation—a trial run—for a human future in which people enjoy full telepathic powers. They believe that they are getting a taste of what it is like to see inside other people’s heads now in order to be able to handle the full sharing of all thought in some evolutionary future. We’ll see about that. Less speculatively, all this over-sharing online is also a predictable reaction to spending so much time in a disembodied realm where nothing seems to stick, and nothing registers on a fully felt level. The easiest response is to pump up the volume and intensity.
Sadly for young people, the digital realm is permanent. This robs from them the free experimentation that defines one’s adolescence. While parents might not relish pondering what happens between teens in the back seats of their cars or behind the bleachers on a Friday night, this experimentation isn’t being recorded in a database likely to outlast whatever was chiseled onto the walls of the Parthenon.
Program or Be Programmed Page 6
