Public and private selves (30 Sept. 2008)

In continuing to think about whether social networking is engineered to make us more narcissistic, I picked up Christopher Lasch's study The Culture of Narcissism, the dour condemnation of 1970s America that helped prompt Jimmy Carter's infamous malaise speech. Early in the first chapter, after arguing that Americans are helplessly dependent on bureaucratic institutions, he unloads with this:

Narcissism represents the psychological dimension of this dependence. Notwithstanding his occasional illusions of omnipotence, the narcissist depends on others to validate his self-esteem. He cannot live without an admiring audience. His apparent freedom from family ties and institutional constraints does not free him to stand alone or to glory in his individuality. On the contrary, it contributes to his insecurity, which he can overcome only by seeing his "grandiose self" reflected in the attentions of others, or by attaching himself to those who radiate celebrity, power, and charisma. For the narcissist, the world is a mirror, whereas the rugged individualist saw it as am empty wilderness to be shaped by his own design.

The applications of this to social networked seem pretty self-evident. The empty profile page provides the illusion of providing that "empty wilderness" to conquer, but that is just the alibi for the real function of social networks, which is to gratify our bottomless need to be validated in as close to real time as possible. Clearly Facebook and Twitter serve to meet that need, and what's more, it taps into the latent narcissism of all its users, rendering self-involvement even more socially acceptable. It's now a perfectly plausible and respectable basis for a business model.

In general, The Culture of Narcissism is a bit cranky and dated, and a bit too much of a jeremiad to be persuasive; its chief virtue is to reference Richard Sennett's far more comprehensive and convincing The Fall of Public Man, which charts the disappearance of the public sphere and speculates about what exactly caused it to vanish. The gist of Sennett's argument is that (perhaps for reasons that Habermas articulates in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere) society was once such that we maintained public and private selves: We donned a public persona, guided by rules of public conduct, when we sought to contribute to society, and in private we had an intimate self appropriate for family life. The two were only tangentially related, and neither was considered the absolutely authentic, real self. With the rules of civilization clearly in place, public discourse was civil and impersonal, and therefore far more objective and constructive, a place for "rational-critical debate" --- the sort of thing Habermas celebrates.

But thanks to the individualism fomented by the rise of capitalism prompted a growing fascination with authenticity, "realism" in the novelistic sense, depth psychology, and the all-consuming importance of an integral identity that we establish in our own minds through our deeds and public behavior. (The roots of this can be glimpsed in the 18th century cult of sensibility and then romanticism. In those movements was the advent of studied spontaneity. The 18th century had vestiges of a theatricalized public sphere that is annihilated by a new emphasis on authentic personality -- one must represent rather than present emotion, so all public behavior is at a remove from the new standard of authenticity. Anxiety, and vulnerability to marketing campaigns, ensues.) Gradually we started to conceive as the public sphere as a place to establish our identity; it became a mirror rather than a realm for discourse and the shared social construction of reality. This makes social interaction difficult, since our whole personality is at stake, at all times, with all people we encounter. Consequently, convenience becomes synonymous with avoiding interpersonal contact (self-service begins in earnest). And we fall prey to "passive participation," or the impulse to vicariousness, which allows us to partake in society, now reconceived as a kind of pageant of self, but without the vulnerability. Hence deliberation and conversation are out; marketing and celebritization are in. And the next thing you know, there are tattoo parlors on Main Street.

Facebook and Twitter would seem to complete the erosion of the wall between public and private selves, offering us the technology to broadcast every moment of our private lives as if the world was nothing but an audience waiting for updates, or a canvas onto which to paint our ever-evolving self-concept. It moves us from vicariousness to a more direct kind of self-display, because the filter of the internet shields us from the rejection incumbent with social participation (aka "social anxiety"). I imagine, though, that apologists for the technologies view the matter in precisely the opposite way, regarding the space of social networking as a rebirth of the public sphere, where no identity represented should be regarded as authentic but as evidence of free play and an experimental testing of possibilities for the purposes of our collective edification. But I don't think that holds up: Most people would regard having multiple profiles on the same social networking site as sneaky, and a fictitious profile not as a expression of creativity but a pack of lies. Social networks seem to function as a more manageable substitute for actual presence in relationships, you get the upside of validation of your "true self" without the hassle of actual reciprocity. What distinguishes social networks from the blogosphere generally is that they are defined specifically by their not being forums for the exploration and debate of ideas. The prevailing purpose is to display yourself to your best advantage and "stay in touch" with people with whom it would otherwise take effort to remain in touch with.

Indisposability (28 December 2006)

I've been reading Giles Slade's Made to Break, which explores the evolution of the concept of planned obsolescence in American industry. Slade goes into way too much detail for my taste about the nascent radio and nylon industries, but his overall account of the unstoppable rise of disposability is interesting. The story goes like this: the expansion of industry in the nineteenth century brought with it the specter of overproduction, which seemed to many to be responsible for the Depression. (Obviously these folks took no comfort in Say's law.) In order to get consumers to repeatedly purchase the same item, and thus keep workers employed in making these items, they needed to be convinced that what they already owned had become obsolete by offering a "new and improved" version. Of course, touted technological improvements were often specious, and most improvements are entirely stylistic -- as a quintessential example, Slade traces how GM pioneered styling in autos to steal market share from Ford, which stubbornly built durable cars. Slade cites Christine Fredrick, one of the pioneers of gender-targeted advertisement, as devising a list of three "telltale habits of mind" that we should be induced to cultivate, which he paraphrases as this:

(1) A state of mind which is highly suggestible and open; eager and willing to take hold of anything new either in the shape of a new invention or new designs or styles or ways of living.
(2) A readiness to 'scrap' or lay aside an article before its natural life of usefulness is completed, in order to make way for the newer and better thing.
(3) A willingness to apply a very large share of one's income, even if it pinches savings, to the acquisition of the new goods or services or way of living.

I don't think it's too cynical to say that this defines the meaning of life for those in a consumer society -- do whatever you can to remake yourself in a new and improved way with the aid of products that one can readily fantasize about and through. The degree to which you are "countercultural" is the degree to which you consciously resist these tenets. (And the degree to which we think we disobey these tenets but reveal nonetheless how deeply we have internalized them makes us faux countercultural -- makes us hipsters.)

Industrial design as an industry in its own right begins here, and the advertising industry, generally, takes off with this new mission in mind, to persuade the general public that fashion cycles must be obeyed in regard to all their material possessions, and the up-to-dateness of the stuff you have is the surest way of identifying status, rather bloodline or comportment -- this message has a democratic appeal to it, in that it seems to do away with inherited privilege in favor of what money can buy, but the relentless, ceaseless striving to be current if not novel is merely a different kind of tyranny, and one that is tremendously harmful to the environment -- Slade is especially good at illustrating the enormous amount of waste a consumer society generates by relying on unnecessary packaging (individually wrapped just for you!) and unnecessary replacement buying to connote one's personal progress. Inevitably we come to expect to throw away everything we acquire eventually; we don't saddle ourselves with the looming burden of ownership -- imagine if you were continually confronted with the possibilty of having to keep everything you got forever; think then what a borderline insult it would be to have gifty gifts foisted on you for no other reason that to make the giver feel thoughtful.

This burden of ownership, and our deeply ingrained commitment to disposability, may be why it feels so good to purge ourselves of unnecessary things. It's always a rewarding feeling when I drop off Trader Joe's bags full of junk at the Goodwill. (Though I usually end up buying more junk on the same visit.) At times I feel as though nothing is as satisfying as the experience of using things up, of finally extracting the potential of some object I've acquired and then getting rid of it. Consumer society orients us to think in these terms, of not merely using things but of using them up, of extinguishing them, of sucking them dry. The idea that something could be useful without being used up begins to seem like a dream, a scam, a lie akin to a perpetual motion machine. When I'm conscious of this, I try to resist; I begin to romanticize getting pleasure from the same thing, listening to John, Wolf King of L.A. over and over again, or glorying in playing Freecell repeatedly. I think about rereading books I love, sometimes I'll even thumb through them, suffused with warm wistfulness -- ah, that first time I read For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign....

So we glorify inexhaustible resources, but we don't trust them; they are fairy tales, mirages of nostalgia. Eventually we begin to think of other people as resources to be used up, that this is the honest and fair way of appraising them, and we attempt to extract whatever use we can out of them and then discard them, whether they are in the labor force or are our intimates -- though the "purity" of the latter may sometimes be constructed as an escape from the former, the way we feel obliged to use people in production, to manage them as disposable things. In essence we start to plan for obsolescence with regard to the people in our lives, though we regard this as something inevitable that we must "be realistic" about. (We need to expect the cheese to be moved, that sort of thing.) This leads perhaps to our wanting to compensate by prioritizing trying to be indisposable, feeling irreplaceable for some unique quality we have to offer the people who are closest to us. We love those who make us feel this way, regardless of whether the way we have become indispensable is also a way we can be any good to this world.

Robotic love (15 December 2006)

Even Sherry Turkle, a scientist who has long put forward the notion that "technology is not just tools," that technology changes the way we feel as well as the way we do things, is creeped out by this, about elderly patients in a nursing home bonding with robot babies.

How creeped out? Just look at this picture:

She says in the article that her research into objects designed to encourage us to form nurturing emotional bonds with them -- Tamogochis, dolls, etc. -- "gave me the chills." She also admits, "I have finally met technology that upsets and concerns me."

Here's why, from the MIT news office release:

One of Turkle's concerns was triggered by the effect of a sophisticated interactive doll, Hasbro's "My Real Baby," and of the Paro seals on the elderly. She left a few "My Real Baby" dolls (which were not a big retail hit with children) in a local nursing home, and when she returned later, she found that the staff had bought 25 of them because of the soothing effect on the residents.
"The only one who's not happy here is the sociologist," said Turkle, raising her hand.
That soothing response was based on a sham, she believes. "What can something that does not have a life cycle know about your death, or about your pain?"
She cited the case of a 72-year-old woman who, because she is sad, says she sees that her robotic toy is also sad. "What are we to make of this relationship when it happened between a depressed woman and a robot?" Turkle asked.

There are a lot of disturbing implications here: Human empathy is easy to simulate because it's mainly an illusion created by looking at someone with a thoughtful expression. Not only that, when we seek empathy from others, we're content with the illusion because we wouldn't be able to distinguish it from the other actually understanding us anyway. Psychics seem to work this way, bouncing back things you tell them in a way that allows you to feel as though something magical has happened, some secret insight has been revealed. Horoscopes, too -- they seem insightful because almost any generality can apply to our lives, but because we are so fixated on our singularity, the advice seems shockingly particular and oracular to us. We don't want new understanding, we want the understanding we already have made strange and confirmed simultaneously. We want to be able to project and then recognize ourselves, thereby extending our scope, universalizing how we feel.

Also, it suggests the process of nurturing is less a matter of communication then it is a technical operation, a set of objective conditions that can be met by any means, human or nonhuman. And it's not unusual to nurture something incapable of feelings. When we nurture, the object of our nurturing can be an infant, a houseplant, or book collection (which I invest with loving care by occasionally attempting to alphabetize them or group them by subject) -- anything that can elicit the appropriate forms of behavior and gestures. In other words, nurturing is a reflexive gesture rather than an altruistic one. It seems plausible that the effort our culture spends investing material goods with emotional qualities abets this process, reinforcing the idea that other people need not be present to complete circuits of emotional experience. Other people's feelings, after all are inconvenient and inefficient to deal with.

There's more on robotic love (via Mind Hacks) here, in this interview from the Boston Globe with Marvin Minsky, an AI researcher whose most recent book argues that emotions are just another way of thinking through a problem and thus can probably be emulated by machines. This also suggests that humans themselves are machines as well:

We don't like to think of ourselves as machines because this evokes an outdated image of a clunky, mechanical, lifeless thing. We prefer the idea that inside ourselves is some sort of spirit, essence, or soul that wants and feels and thinks for us. However, your laptop computer has billions of parts, and it would be ridiculous to attribute all its abilities to some spirit inside its battery. And a human brain is far more complex than is any computer today.

A fairly radical materialist viewpoint that dispenses with the mind/body problem -- mind is the product of the brain's processing power. (This, by the way, is how I think Battlestar Galactica ultimately ends; we find out eventually that the humans on the show never did reach Earth, but the Cylons did and we are their descendants.)

Minsky also suggests that love occurs through subtraction rather than addition:

There's short-term infatuation, where someone gets strongly attracted to someone else, and that's probably very often a turning-off of certain things rather than something extra: It's a mental state where you remove your criticism. So to say someone is beautiful is not necessarily positive, it may be something happening so you can't see anything wrong with this person.

So if you put that together with the elderly people and their robot babies, it seems that products could be designed (or are designed, or are advertised as such when they are made to be lovable) to induce this kind of forgetting, to propel this kind of screening, or turning-off, which makes the shortcomings of others (or things) and the outside world in general less recognizable, less present, and at the same time keeps the focus more securely on ourselves, the true object of our affections.