The virtual and its effect on social relations/ The impact of hyperconnectivity on sociality:
An exploration of social isolation and the collective experience of music IRL.
(working title)
This blog forms part of the visual and inventive research for my MA Visual Sociology dissertation, which I am planning to hand in in autumn 2020. Due to the current Coronavirus pandemic and the ensuing lockdowns, we are forced to stay indoors all over the world; and, as such, my research will have to be carried out here, online, rather than IRL [In Real Life]. I will be sharing the inspirations I discover for my topic, which has changed a little bit during the outbreak of the virus. In order to prevent self-plagiarism, I will try to only share pictures and quotes from relevant research and not much written text. The written text will be my dissertation, which will come after the online research process. This blog facilitates the archiving of what inspires the topic on a daily basis. Additionally, its online format allows me to get in touch with possible participants without leaving the house, thus practicing social distancing. I, in no way, expect readers to read all of what is on here, as it would be an endless scroll. This in itself becomes a way to address the endless scroll some of us partake in for so many hours of our days on our ‘social’ media pages or other sites online.
Keywords: face-to-face, social, smartphone, anxiety, isolation, body, music, singing, ecstatic, ecstasy
[I would recommend using the search function on your keyboard, shift/ caps lock + cmd + F, to click yourself through this body of text via the listed keywords.]
Prior to the outbreak of the virus, my dissertation was going to be entitled, “The virtual and its effect on our social relations: In what ways are smartphone users in Western Europe disconnected from their bodies?” The visual and inventive method I was going to use to explore the feeling of social isolation (and ultimately transform it into an empowering feeling of community) was the embodied operatic, collective experience of singing in a choir.
Now, in the midst of the virus and the attempts to contain it, I aim to rethink title and topic with the newly introduced expressions self-isolation and social distancing in mind.
The main focus of my research is on the increased use of smartphones, and other smart devices, as the main cause for social isolation. Often smartphones function as substitutes for face-to-face encounters. My thesis is that the more we use smartphones, instead of being with other people IRL, the more alienated and isolated we get from each other.
Before the endless scroll of collected quotes and other relevant media begins and swallows you whole, just the remark that the direction and, thus, wording of the title might change throughout the research process. With this blog I will be examining how my dissertation topic might change in the light of the virus enforcing isolation and, inevitably, shifting work, entertainment and socials from IRL (from the real) to the virtual.
“One consequence of communicating via text online, therefore, is that it can reduce people’s understanding of others’ thoughts and feelings (compared to communicating in speech offline), provoking possible miscommunication. Another consequence is that losing access to vocal paralinguistic cues can reduce feelings of social connection.” (Lieberman and Schroeder, 2020: 17)
“Online environments—which cater to anonymity and weakened social norms—may serve as a breeding ground for such behaviors [14,15]. Indeed, recent research suggests that social media can serve as a catalyst for moral outrage and social conflict [16, 17].” (Ibid.)
“Connecting with someone online (e.g. following or friending a celebrity) provides fertile ground to form para social relationships (one-sided psychological relationships).” (Ibid., 18)
“Despite the many differences in the structure and psychology of online and offline communication, these interactions often bleed into one another. A person may interact with a friend via social media one minute and then see her in person the next. We document ways in which online interaction can (1) disrupt or (2) enhance offline interaction.” (Ibid.)
“The mere presence of having one’s smartphone is distracting (e.g. [40]) and can reduce the effectiveness of offline connection. Phone use during social interaction can reduce feelings of social connection [41,42,43,44], the perceived quality of the interaction [45,46], enjoyment gained from the interaction [47], and even frequency of smiling at others [48].” (Ibid.)
“As another example, individuals assigned to navigate to a new location using their smartphone (versus no phone) were able to find the location more easily but also felt less socially connected [42]. Further, feeling snubbed as a result of someone else using a phone during a face-to-face interaction (‘phubbed’) can lead to feelings of social exclusion and increase motivation to seek out social connection other ways, such as online [41].” (Ibid.)
“Other forms of online engagement, such as taking photos, can impact offline experiences as well. Specifically, when taking photos increases experiential engagement, it can enhance enjoyment [49], but taking photos with the intention of sharing them can increase self-presentation concerns and thus decrease experiential engagement and subsequent enjoyment [50]. Digital technology can also disrupt social connection depending on the way it is used. Online interaction can harm well-being and reduce sociality if it displaces in-person connections [51,52,53,54]. Further, the passive use of social media, in particular (e.g. lurking behaviors; scrolling through others’ feeds without actually engaging), has been associated with increased loneliness and lowered well-being [51,52,53,54,55].” (Ibid.)
“The recent shift from offline to online interactions has fundamentally changed the way humans socialize and communicate, creating controversy about the impact of digital technology on well-being [63,64,65]. This paper provides a new framework for organizing the extant literature. The consequences of digital technology can be categorized based on the structural differences between online (versus offline) platforms—fewer nonverbal cues, more anonymity, more flexible network selection, and wider audience—and the ways in which technologies harm or enhance offline connection.“ (Ibid.)
“Our framework also identifies many remaining research questions. Here we highlight some of the most ambitious questions that future work could pursue. First, if online interactions increase misunderstanding and dehumanization (because they lack nonverbal cues), how might different communication technologies reduce civility and increase conflict more broadly?” (Ibid.)
“Online gamers will soon be able to select customizable voices, allowing them to choose how they sound while maintaining their own vocal inflection, simultaneously increasing both realism and anonymity [66].“ (Ibid.)
“The future of human sociality lies in understanding, and consequently shaping, online interaction. It is more important than ever for science to maintain pace with this social evolution.” (Ibid., 19)
REFERENCE: Lieberman, A. and Schroeder, J. (2020). Two social lives: How differences between online and offline interaction influence social outcomes. Current Opinion in Psychology, 31, 16-21. Available at: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352250X1930065X [Accessed 18 March 2020].
“Technology is seductive when what it offers meets our human vulnerabilities. And as it turns out, we are very vulnerable indeed. We are lonely but fearful of intimacy. Digital connections offer the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship.” (Turkle, 2011: 1)
REFERENCE: Turkle, S. (2011). Alone together: Why We Expect More From Technology And Less From Each Other, New York: Basic Books.
“Why do so many of us prefer simulated relationships to real ones? Is reliance on technology altering what it means to be human?“ (Behr, 2011)
“The test is one of many cited by Sherry Turkle in Alone Together as evidence that humanity is nearing a “robotic moment”. We already filter companionship through machines; the next stage, she says, is to accept machines as companions. Soon, robots will be employed in “caring” roles, entertaining children or nursing the elderly, filling gaps in the social fabric left where the threads of community have frayed. Meanwhile, real-world interactions are becoming onerous. Flesh-and-blood people with their untidy impulses are unreliable, a source of stress, best organised through digital interfaces – BlackBerries, iPads, Facebook. […] Turkle has interviewed people of all ages and from a wide range of social backgrounds and finds identical patterns of compulsive behaviour. We start with the illusion that technology will give us control and end up controlled. We get Blackberries to better manage our email, but find ourselves cradling them in bed first thing in the morning and last thing at night.” (Ibid.)
“Turkle interviews teenagers who are morbidly afraid of the telephone. They find its immediacy and unpredictability upsetting. A phone call in “real time” requires spontaneous performance; it is “live”. Text messages and Facebook posts can be honed to create the illusion of spontaneity.” (Ibid.)
“This digital generation also expects everything to be recorded. In any social situation, there are phones with cameras that relay personal triumphs and humiliations straight to the web. Turkle’s interviews debunk the myth that web-savvy kids don’t care about privacy. Rather, they see it as a lost cause. The social obligation to be part of the network is too strong even for those who resent the endless exposure. Teenagers perform on the digital stage, suppressing anxiety about who is lurking in the audience.” (Ibid.)
“From that anxiety flows ever greater reliance on technology to mediate human relations. Human beings can be needy, capricious, threatening, but at least calls can be diverted, emails blocked, Facebook friends “unfriended”. Turkle sees this too as a symptom of incipient roboticism. The network encourages narcissism, teaching us to think of other people as a problem to be managed or a resource to be exploited.” (Ibid.)
REFERENCE: Behr, R. (2011). Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other by Sherry Turkle – review. The Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/jan/30/alone-together-sherry-turkle-review (Acccessed: 18February2020)
“Consider the apparently benign game Pokémon Go, both a ridiculous and a transparent example of the link between behavioural surplus [The totality of information about our every thought, word and deed, which could be traded for profit in new markets based on predicting our every need – or producing it.] and physical control. While its initial players lauded the game for its incitement to head outside into the “real world”, they in fact stumbled straight into an entirely fabricated reality, one based on years of conditioning human motivation through reward systems, and designed to herd its users towards commercial opportunities. Within days of the game’s launch in 2016, its creators revealed that attractive virtual locations were for sale to the highest bidder, inking profitable deals with McDonald’s, Starbucks and others to direct Pokémon hunters to their front doors. The players think they are playing one game – collecting Pokémon – while they are in fact playing an entirely different one, in which the board is invisible but they are the pawns. And Pokémon Go is but one tiny probe extending out from Google and others’ vast capabilities to tune and manipulate human action at scale: a global means of behaviour modification entirely owned and operated by private enterprise.” (Bridle, 2019).
REFERENCE: Bridle, J. (2019). The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff review – we are the pawns. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/feb/02/age-of-surveillance-capitalism-shoshana-zuboff-review [Accessed 24 January 2020].
“Preoccupation with our cellphones has irrevocably changed how we interact with others. Despite many advantages of smartphones, they may undermine both our in-person relationships and our well-being. As the first to investigate the impact of phubbing (phone-snubbing), the present research contributes to our nascent understanding of the role of smartphones in consumer behavior and well-being. We demonstrate the harmful effects of phubbing, revealing that phubbed individuals experience a sense of social exclusion, which leads to a heightened need for attention and results in individuals attaching to social media in hopes of regaining a sense of inclusion. Although the stated purpose of technology like smartphones is to help us connect with others, in this particular instance, it does not. Ironically, the very technology that was designed to bring humans closer together has isolated us from these very same people.
Our preoccupation with technology, smartphones in particular, has irrevocably changed how we interact with others. Despite the many advantages afforded by the portability and multifunctionality of the modern smartphone, our current obsession with smartphones comes at a cost to our real, in-person relationships. Several researchers (Mick and Fournier 1998; Lang and Jarvenpaa 2005; Turkle 2011) have observed that the near-universal availability and ever- expanding capabilities of the smartphone have led to two paradoxes: (1) the present-absent paradox (alone together) and the (2) freeing-enslaving paradox. Both of these paradoxes address how we communicate and relate with others.” (David and Roberts, 2017: 155)
“In the present-absent paradox, we are physically present for others but are really absent, preoccupied with our smartphones.” (Ibid.)
“In the freeing-enslaving paradox, smartphones allow us the freedom to communicate with others, be entertained, work from remote locations, and access information in ways undreamed of a mere 20 years ago. This freedom, however, comes at a cost. Being always on and constantly available brings with it a sense of responsibility, or even obligation, to respond in a timely fashion to our technology. We live in a world of constant distraction. The present research investigates how such distraction caused by our smartphones can negatively affect others. Specifically, our study focuses on “phone snubbing” and its impact on consumers.“ (Ibid.)
“Phubbing is a portmanteau of the words “phone” and “snubbing.” To be phubbed is “to be snubbed by someone using their cellphone when in your company.” (Roberts and David, 2016: 134).
“The omnipresent nature of smartphones makes phubbing an inevitable occurrence.” (Ibid.)
REFERENCE: Roberts, J. and David, M. E. (2016). My life has become a major distraction from my cell phone: Partner phubbing and relationship satisfaction among romantic partners. Computers in Human Behavior, 54, 134-141.
All of this research, mostly derived from the field of Psychology, so far confirms that there is a link between smartphone use and social isolation. I am interested in this topic because I, myself, am at times avoiding face-to-face encounters. I prefer the control I have in a conversation online; I find it hard to undo this reflex and I was thinking of ways to “re-teach” collectivism and “re-teach” community. One method I came up with is the collective experience of music. In fact, the paraphrasing of Nietzsche by Bettany Hughes on BBC has inspired me the most. Here are some notes I took while watching the documentary:
Wagner’s theory where art could transform society.
Visceral stories of human suffering in greek stories. Dancing, wildness, the visceral feelings. Tragedy. Dionysus.
Nietzsche says that the individual somehow lost themselves in the collective, and found in a group experience an ecstatic transformational experience. He saw it in Wagner’s music and in the tragedy, so that somehow the suffering that was everybody’s condition was transformed through this ecstatic experience into an affirmation of life, this life, here and now. Like a rock concert! Lose yourself in this great ecstatic, collective experience.
So, my aim was to not only make research about social isolation and internet use, but to research ways in which the body can become the centre of our activities again rather than the mind.
The materialist turn in social sciences: This turn to materiality is rooted in a critique of the privileging of mind over matter. “This turn to matter, marked by a spate of attention to physical materiality within the humanities, opens doors for new types of interdisciplinarity and new resources for knowing our nature-cultural worlds, to borrow Haraway’s (2003) influential turn of phrase (Mamo and Fishman 2013; Papoulias and Callard 2010). In so doing, it promises to inaugurate a radical paradigm shift in how we understand the social.” (Willey, Pollock and Subramaniam, 2016: 993)
REFERENCE: Willey, A., Pollock, A., and Subramaniam, B. (2016). A World of Materialisms: Postcolonial Feminist Science Studies and the New Natural. Science, Technology, & Human Values,41(6), 991-1014.
“As information becomes the fundamental commodity of this new economy, physical activity is being elbowed out of our work lives.” (Cregan-Reid, 2019)
TRIGGER WARNING: The following quote might be distressing for those who are, in this vulnerable time, worried about what self-isolation might do to their health. It describes the impact of staying indoors and the use of technology on the human body. Still, staying indoors and using technology are the only two things most of us do in this time. Not to forget that health is a major global concern; we are afraid of contracting the deadly new coronavirus and of infecting others.
“And so the tectonic creep of technology, which brings with it more indoor habits, is changing our bodies, too. Indoor time, which provides poor quality light with no opportunity for our skin to make vitamin D, is also strongly associated with the global epidemic of myopia. It’s currently estimated that if nothing is done to curb the trend, half the world’s population will be shortsighted by 2050 – and about 2.5 per cent of people with high myopia go blind in older age. ‘The English Disease’ is making a comeback, and vitamin D deficiency has also been linked with the steep rise in food and nut allergy.” (Ibid.)
“Modern life is driving too many of our pathologies to list, and they are not rare. Everything from asthma and ADHD to flat feet and types 1 and 2 diabetes are among them. The number one cause of global disability is back pain; it is strongly associated with sedentary life. And as information technology extends our working days and stresses us out, the masseter muscles that grind our teeth in our sleep widen our jaw as they get their nightly workout.” (Ibid.)
“Inactivity, driven especially by chair use and technology, plays a role in tens of millions of global deaths each year. Seven of ten of the World Health Organization’s biggest killers are associated with inactivity. The top two are heart disease and stroke and, claiming 17 million lives each year, these alone outnumber the other eight in the list.The world of work has changed so many times, and with it, so have our bodies. The internet has remodelled us by changing the ways that we work. Over time, the variety of work has homogenised so completely that the physical labour performed by an investment banker turning over multi-milliondollar deals is indistinguishable from that of a child doing homework.”(Ibid.)
REFERENCE: Cregan-Reid, V. (2019). What is the internet doing to our bodies? Available at: http://sites.barbican.org.uk/liferewired-vybarrcreganreid/ [Accessed 20 March 20].
Above you can read what the use of smartphones actually does to our bodies. New expressions, such as HOLS (Hunched Over Laptop Syndrome) and “iPad Neck” explain new ailments caused by looking at screens all day – at work and at home. Mark Fisher speaks of students [at Goldsmiths College] that “will be found slumped on desk, talking almost constantly, snacking incessantly (or even, on occasions, eating full meals). (Fisher, 2008: 23). “What we are facing here is not just time-honored teenage torpor, but the mismatch between a post-literate ‘New Flesh’ that is ‘too wired to concentrate’ and the confining conceptual logics of decaying disciplinary systems. To be bored simply means to be removed from the communicative sensation-stimulus matrix of texting, YouTube and fast food; to be denied, for a moment, the constant flow of sugary gratification on demand. […] pop is experienced not as something which could have impacts upon public space, but as a retreat into private ‘OedIpod’ consumer bliss, a walling up against the social.” (Ibid., 24) This was in 2008. Instagram was founded 2 years later.
REFERENCE: Fisher, M. (2009). Capitalist realism is there no alternative? Winchester: O Books.
“BY FALL 2019 I came to understand Instagram dwellers as broken people — my people. If I was getting depressed, so was everyone else. The algorithm’s hall-of-mirrors effect seemed to be at work again: more and more people were posting about staying in, struggling with their mental health, and finding a community of fellow sufferers on the platform. But it wasn’t just me and my algorithm. Other people were growing disenchanted and reclusive, and think pieces confirmed the trend. Tavi Gevinson published a New York magazine cover story chronicling her ambivalence about growing up on Instagram. The Atlantic claimed “The New Instagram It Girl Spends All Her Time Alone” and described how influencers were staging more selfies at home to appear relatable to their followers. Home-delivery services, loungewear brands, and weighted-blanket manufacturers were all well poised to capitalize.” (Tortorici, 2020)
REFERENCE: Tortorici, D. (2020). My instagram. We all die immediately of a Brazilian Butt Lift. nplusonemag.com. Available at: https://nplusonemag.com/issue-36/essays/my-instagram/ [Accessed 18 March 2020].
“Contradictory consciousness-management has superseded social anxiety about Bad Faith. This has long been the thesis of Slavoj Žižek. Let’s work on this thesis and take seriously the cynical statement “They know what they do, but they do it anyway” and apply this to social media. There is no longer a need to investigate the potential of “new media” and deconstruct their intentions. The internet has reached its hegemonic stage. In previous decades it was premature to associate intensive 24/7 usage by millions with deep structures such as the (sub)conscious. Now that we live fully in social media times, it has become pertinent to do precisely that: link techne with psyche.” (Lovink, 2016)
“Under this spell of desire for the social, led by the views and opinions of our immediate social circle, our daily routines are as follows: view recent stories first, fine-tune filter preferences, jump to first unread, update your life with events, clear and refresh all, not now, save links to read for later, see full conversation, mute your ex, set up a secret board, run a poll, comment through the social plug-in, add video to your profile, choose between love, haha, wow, sad, and angry, engage with those who mention you while tracking the changes in relationship status of others, follow a key opinion leader, receive notifications, create a photo spread that links to your avatar, repost a photo, get lost in the double-barrel river of your timeline, prevent friends from seeing updates, check out something based on a recommendation, customize cover images, create “must-click” headlines, chat with a friend while noticing that “1,326,595 people like this topic.” (Ibid.)
“Academic internet studies circles have shifted their attention from utopian promises, impulses, and critiques to “mapping” the network’s impact. From digital humanities to data science we see a shift in network-oriented inquiry from Whether and Why, What and Who, to (merely) How. From a sociality of causes to a sociality of net effects.” (Ibid.)
“We have long come to terms with the actual and virtual nature of the social, as its potential for play and manipulation seems increasingly in abeyance. Social media demand from us that we perform in a never-ending show. We keep coming back, always remaining logged in, until the #DigitalDetox sets in and we’re called to different realms.” (Ibid.)
“We all remain stuck in the social media mud, and it’s time to ask why.” (Ibid.)
“Why is updating such a seductive yet boring habit?” (Ibid.)
“What remains particularly unexplained is the apparent paradox between the hyper-individualized subject and the herd mentality of the social. What’s wrong with the social? What’s right with it?” (Ibid.)
“When it comes to social media we have an “enlightened false consciousness” in which we know very well what we are doing when we are fully sucked in, but we do it anyway.” (Ibid.)
“We’re all aware of the algorithmic manipulations of Facebook’s news feed, the filter-bubble effect in apps, and the persuasive presence of personalized advertisement. We pull in updates, 24/7, in a real-time global economy of interdependencies, having been taught to read news feeds as interpersonal indicators of the planetary condition.” (Ibid.)
“It’s definitely harder to avoid social media than it is to give into it. Most people tend to give into it, because its easier” (Adele).” (Ibid.)
“In an age of installed, micro-perceptual effects and streamed programming, ideology does not merely refer to an abstract sphere where the battle of ideas is being fought. Think more in line with a Spinozan sense of embodiment—from the repetitive strains of Tinder swiping, to text neck, to the hunched-over-laptop syndrome.” (Ibid.)
“”What are you doing?” said Twitter’s original phrase. The question marks the material roots of social media. Social media platforms have never asked “What are you thinking?” Or dreaming, for that matter. Twentieth-century libraries are full of novels, diaries, comic strips, and films in which people expressed what they were thinking. In the age of social media we seem to confess less what we think. It’s considered too risky, too private. We share what we do, and see, in a staged manner. Yes, we share judgments and opinions, but no thoughts. Our Self is too busy for that, always on the move, flexible, open, sporty, sexy, and always ready to connect and express.” (Ibid.)
“With 24/7 social visibility, apparatus and application become one in the body. This is a reversal of Marshall McLuhan’s Extensions of Man—we are now witnessing an Inversion of Man. Once technology entangles our senses and gets under our skin, distance collapses and we no longer have any sense that we are bridging distances. With Jean Baudrillard we could speak of an implosion of the social into the hand-held device in which an unprecedented accumulation of storage capacity, computational power, software, and social capital is crystallized. Things get right in our face, our ears, steered by our autonomous finger tips. This is what Michel Serres admires so much in the navigational plasticity of the mobile generation, the smoothness of its gestures, symbolized in the speed of the thumb, sending updates in seconds, mastering mini-conversations, grasping the mood of a global tribe in an instant. To stay within the French realm of references: social media as the apparatus of sexy and sporty “active acting” makes it a perfect vehicle for the literature of despair epitomized by Michel Houellebecq’s messy body(-politics).” (Ibid.)
“The illusion with which the user surrounds him- or herself while swiping and tapping through social media updates feels natural and self-evident for the very first time. There is no steep learning curve or rite of passage; we need not shed blood, sweat, and tears to fight our way into the social hierarchy. From day one the network configuration makes us feel at home, as if WhatsApp, QQ, and Telegram have always existed. Down the line, however, this immediate familiarity becomes the main source of discontent. We’re no longer playing, like in the good old days of LamdaMOO and Second Life. Intuitively, we sense that social media constitute an arena of struggle where we display our “experientialism” (James Wallman), where hierarchy is a given, and profile details such as gender, race, age, and class are not merely “data” but decisive measures in the social stratification ladder.” (Ibid.)
“Social media’s imaginary community that we stumble into (and leave behind the moment we log out) is not fake. The platform is not a simulacrum of the social. Social media do not “mask” the real. Neither the software nor the interface of social media are ironic, multilayered, or complex. In that sense, social media are no longer (or not yet) postmodern. The paradoxes at work here are not playful. The applications do not appear to us as absurd, let alone Dada. They are self-evident, functional, even slightly boring. What attracts us is the social, the never-ending flow, and not the performativity of the interfaces themselves. (Performativity seems to be the main draw of virtual reality, now in its second hype cycle, twenty-five years after its first).” (Ibid.)
“Let’s appraise the bots and the like economy for what they are: key features of platform capitalism aimed at capturing value behind the backs of their users. Social media are a matter of neither taste nor lifestyle, in the sense of “consumer choice.” They are our technological mode of the social.””(Ibid.)
REFERENCE: Lovink, G. (2016). On the Social Media Ideology. Journal #75. e-flux. Available at: https://www.e-flux.com/journal/75/67166/on-the-social-media-ideology/ [Accessed 18 March 2020].
“Julie Cohen (2012), for instance, criticises the poststructuralist notion of the disembodied multiple self in cyberspace. The conception of cyberspace as a separate, alternative world is blind to material inequalities and their digital continuations. Instead, Cohen claims, digital space is intertwined with analogue space. Both are perceptible only through the organic body. Jessica Brophy (Brophy, 2010, p.932) adds that online communication is based on material prerequisites: the body, its physical and cognitive capabilities, the material infrastructure (hardware), and financial resources (digital divide). By adding perspectives from cognitive science (positivist inspirations) to ideas of discursive and performative creation of space (poststructuralist inspirations), Cohen explains space as the result of embodied perception. Images, sound, and smell are ordered in relation to the specific location of the individual subject. Cognition, and thus the knowledge of space, is radically relational. It is perceived differently from each perspective and through each body.” (Asenbaum, 2019: 13)
“Technological change, Cohen goes on to argue, alters embodied perceptions of reality. Just as the use of automobiles alters the relations of time and space, so does digital communication. These new perspectives affect not just the perception of reality online, but also the perception of reality in analogue society at large. The digital subject thus does not consist merely of a digital body, but also of the reconfigured physical body, which it perceives differently through the digital. This is even more true in the age of the Internet of Things, in which digital communication is mediated not only through single, immobile computer screens but through numerous mobile devices, multiplying interfaces around the subject: Data flows escape the obvious bounds of the networked computer and cross into and out of homes, cars, personal accessories, and public spaces by many avenues… Networked space is neither empty nor abstract, and is certainly not separate; it is a network of connections wrapped around every artefact and human being. (Cohen, 2012, p.46).” (Ibid., 14)
“Today’s discussions incorporate new technological developments such as the Internet of Things and broadband connections, which are identified as the prime reason for the emergence of new digital corporealities (Daniels, 2009; Gies, 2008).” (Ibid.)
“If we understand ourselves as assemblages of agentic things that relate our physical bodies including their bloodstreams, hormones, bones, sex organs, and skin pigmentations to culturally-coded objects such as makeup, clothing, and hairstyle and to the discursive identity concepts of class, race, and gender, then we can see how digital objects entering these assemblages reconfigure our selves. The early cyborgian theories of Haraway and Turkle are actualized by considering how digital objects of self-representation become part of human identity assemblages. Thus, not only do humans create computers, but computers and their algorithmic logics co-create us.” (Ibid., 20).
REFERENCE: Asenbaum, H. (2019). Rethinking Digital Democracy: From the Disembodied Discursive Self to New Materialist Corporealities. Available at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/337490063_Rethinking_Digital_Democracy_From_the_Disembodied_Discursive_Self_to_New_Materialist_Corporealities [Accessed 18 February 2020].
To bring the body back into our lives, despite of living in the digital era, and to examine how this can be done, was the aim of my visual sociology project. I was interested in the collective, ecstatic experience of the operatic choir or the chorus of the tragedy.
Now, a global tragedy has occurred, that has transformed all of our lives dramatically. All over the world, people are at risk for contracting the deadly new Coronavirus. There is no cure and there are only limited hospital beds in each country. The only way to deal with this pandemic right now is for everyone to stay indoors, to self-isolate and to practice social distancing to prevent more infections. In a world, where the governments strongly advice their citizens to stay apart from each other, a sociology project about reconnecting to one’s body and being with other people IRL is hard to pursue. However, this crisis can remind us of how precious the body and community are. It already reminds us of the vulnerability of our bodies, of our mortality and thus of the importance of living the life we have in and with our bodies and not like zombies glued to our phones.
Meanwhile on Italy’s balconies, operatic voices join into a chorus, bridging distances and reaching neighbours, to overcome feelings of longing and isolation.
“[…] a chorus of people who have been transformed, who have completely forgotten their past as citizens, their social position: they have become the timeless servants of their god, living outside all spheres of society. […] Following this insight, we must understand Greek tragedy as the Dionysian chorus which again and again discharges itself in an Apollonian world of images. So those chorus parts which are interwoven through tragedy are to a certain extent the maternal womb of the whole so-called dialogue, that is, of the whole world of the stage, of the real drama. In several successive discharges, this original ground of tragedy radiates that vision of drama: which is thoroughly dream-phenomenon and to that extent of an epic nature, but on the other hand, as objectivation of a Dionysian state, represents not the Apollonian redemption in appearance, but on the contrary the shattering of the individual and his union with the original being.” (Nietzsche, 2008: 50 f)
“This view of ours offers a full explanation of the chrous of Greek tragedy, the symbol of the whole mass in Dionysian arousal. While we, accustomed to the place of the chorus on the modern stage, and especially of the opera chorus, could not understand how the Greek tragic chorus should be older, more original, even more important than the real ‘action’ – as this was yet so clearly transmitted by the tradition – while we in turn could not reconcile that great importance and originality as outlined in the tradition with the fact that the chorus was composed exclusively of lowly servant beings, even, in the first place, of goat-like-satyrs, while the orchestra in front of the stage remained a constant enigma to us, we arrived at the insight that the stage together with the action was basically and originally conceived only as a vision, that the sole ‘reality’ is precisely the chorus, which produces the vision from itself and speaks of it with the whole symbolism of dance, music, and word.” (Ibid., 51)
“[…] the chorus is the highest, indeed Dionysian expression, of nature and speaks therefore, like nature, oracular words of wisdom in a state of enthusiastic excitement: as the compassionate chorus, it is at the same time the wise chorus, proclaiming the truth from the heart of the world.” (Ibid.)
REFERENCE: Nietzsche, F., and Smith, D. (2008). The birth of tragedy (Oxford world’s classics (Oxford University Press)). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
“Classical Greek Tragedy.
Ancient Greece invented drama. Drama grew out of festivals honoring Dionysus—included performances by choruses (troupes of dancers who would chant and sing).” (Leeke, 2017)
“Greek Theater. The Greek theater is the predecessor of the current day “amphitheater.” Built in the open, usually on the side of a hill. Large, could usually accommodate as many as 15,000 spectators basic shape was circular.” (Ibid.)
“Greek Tragedy Best definition was by Aristotle in Poetics.
Downfall of a character who is neither completely good nor completely bad. Fall brought about by a tragic flaw. Witnessing the downfall of basically good people evoked emotions of pity and fear in the audience. Audience then experiences a catharsis or some sort of emotional cleansing.” (Ibid.)
“8 Characteristics of Tragedy
1. The hero (protagonist) is a person of high estate who must be good and have good intentions. The hero must also be true to life. 2. The hero has a hamartia, fatal or tragic flaw, an error or frailty; usually hubris— excessive human pride, arrogance. 3. The hero suffers a reversal of fortunes. 4. No universal questions are raised; fate is accepted as inevitable when it becomes apparent; no debate is held with the gods. 5. The gods are capricious; often enemies of the hero and are never loving or righteous. No justice can be expected from the gods. 6. A full chorus is present and gives advice. The chorus reflects opinions of the townspeople. 7. A complicated plot is present along with cataclysmic events; however, all violent actions take place off stage and are reported to the audience by witnesses. 8. Hero suffers a great and permanent fall with no hope. The story ends in despair and evokes both pity and fear in the audience.” (Ibid.)
“Function of the Chorus. 1. Represents members of population or townspeople and converses with or gives advice to characters. The chorus is involved in or affected by the action of the play. 2. Serves as commentators on events, interprets events, and gives background of preceding events. 3. Chants odes between episodes of play. Often the singing is accompanied by stately dance movements to the left and to the right which contributed beauty to the play. 4. Relieves tension Examples: Mamma Mia! and Hercules.” (Ibid.)
REFERENCE: Leeke, A. (2017). Classical Greek Tragedy. Available at: https://slideplayer.com/slide/4155606/ [Accessed 1 April 2020].
I walked to the park today to get some fresh air – with my mouth covered and disinfectant wipes in my bag. When I got to the park, I saw something I never normally see (partly because on Sundays I stay indoors and watch Netflix): it was packed with people of all ages (mostly in their twenties), who were actively engaging with their physical surroundings, who were physically and mentally in the same place, connecting to nature and the world around them. They didn’t look on their phones or rushed through, but sat down and breathed in the fresh air, read a book or walked around and inspected what the park had to offer (ducks, descriptions of plants, etc.) – all in save distance to others. It was a new vision and a somber mood.
Although we are told to stay at home, going to the park seems like an acceptable thing to do, considering being outside strengthens one’s immune system and the two metre distance rule can be abided. It might be the only chance for a walk outside before the UK, like Italy, France and Spain, is under complete lockdown. What I am trying to say is that many of us were distant before the pandemic, many of us stayed indoors before the pandemic and many of us did not look at their surroundings before the pandemic. It seems that what it takes to have people connect IRL, is the prohibition from going outside and meeting friends. The saying applies here: It’s only when you lose something, that you realise how much you miss it.
For the time being, phones and laptops are the only devices one has while self-isolating to get into contact with others without leaving the house. (I realise that this is coming from a privileged place.) It is lonely, but weren’t we lonely before? Now, at least, we know that everyone has to be alone at home and it’s the same rule for everyone. So, although we now have to be physically apart there is a feeling of togetherness.
Imagining a post-Covid-19 world together.” Available at: https://www.instagram.com/self_isolation_residency/?hl=de.
I will continue this blog with uploading currently circulating pictures and articles that I came across on social media and the online news in the endless scroll of trying to gather information from my bedroom about the pandemic outside.
As Italy is hit the worst after China by Covid-19, the country, especially the north of the country has been under lockdown for some time now, with the number of deaths rising daily. There have been videos and pictures of Italians singing and making music from their balconies to communicate with each other despite of being physically apart. People did so to support each other and remind each other that they were not alone and that they were in this together. [If any Italians (who are under lockdown at the moment or otherwise) want to comment on this, please do so.] Seeing those videos touched a lot of people around the world.
“In a world dominated by the visual, could contemporary resistances be auditory?”
REFERENCE: description of LaBelle’s “Sonic Agency” (2018). Available at: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/sonic-agency [Accessed 19 March 2020].
Now that the visual (of people, movement, life) is removed from the public , the audio (singing and making music together) has become a way of coping with being physically apart from each other. It’s an emotional act of yearning to go back to normal, to be together without risking lives and a reminder that we are all in this together. Despite of the previously lived desire for individualism, we have a mob mentality online; we are online to connect with others. Some might have substituted their real life connections with “connections” online. Now that being online is one of the only (safe) ways to be with others, we might miss meeting each other IRL. It is the choice to go out and meet other people that we no longer have. We might have spent most of our time alone and in our flats before, but we still had the choice to go out. To do a research project about social isolation caused partly by smartphone use with the aim to teach us to refrain from using smartphones to connect and instead connect in person, seems contradictory to the fact that the internet is one of the only ways we can get “in touch” with each other. Not to forget that the internet enables people to connect and share information globally, past closed borders. The Italians who are in quarantine are teaching us that singing and making music from balconies together is another way to connect with each other. That way even allows us to be fully present, with our mind and our body.
“Our research contributes to the extant literature by identifying and testing one path through which individuals become attached, if not addicted, to social media. It may not be out of boredom or a desire to be entertained that so many people spend so much time on Facebook or other social media; instead, it may be that the time spent on social media is a pointed attempt to (re)gain community in a world that, paradoxically, is becoming increasingly alienated (Putnam 2000).” (David and Roberts, 2017: 156)
“Being a part of social groups is an innate desire of humans (Baumeister and Tice 1990; Mead et al. 2011; Lee and Shrum 2012), and such a desire will lead “phubbed” individuals to search elsewhere for a sense of belonging (Han, Min, and Lee 2015). In an increasingly technology-driven society, it is critical that investigation continue into how the use of such technology is affecting how we relate to one another. Indeed, and consistent with the present-absent paradox discussed above, it may be that attachment to social media and connectedness with our phones is slowly deteriorating real in-person connections.” (Ibid., 159)
“Upon social exclusion, our desire to rebalance a sense of inclusion is immediately activated.” (Ibid.)
“Research has found that a Facebook “Like,” posting a photo or comment, or the familiar ring of a notification releases dopamine similar to the rush we might get from an in-person hug or smile (Soat 2015).” (Ibid.)
“Individuals from all age groups are spending an increasing amount of time interacting with their cell phones and less and less time interacting with their fellow humans (Pew Internet 2014; Wall Street Journal 2015). Although cell phones provide tremendous opportunities for connectivity with others, recent research suggests that increased connectivity with cell phones may occur at the detriment of human interaction (McDaniel and Coyne 2014; Roberts and David 2016).” (Ibid., 160)
REFERENCE: David E. Meredith and Roberts, J. A. (2017). Phubbed and Alone: Phone Snubbing, Social Exclusion, and Attachment to Social Media. Journal of the Association for Consumer Research, vol. 2, issue 2, 155-163.
“A major paradox arises about digitally mediated social connection; we need solitude in order to connect, or we need to (temporarily) neglect those physically around us to offer our attention to those absent. Turkle notes that, “being alone can start to seem like a precondition for being together because it is easier to communicate if you can focus, without interruption, on your screen.” She asks, “What is a place if those who are physically present have their attention on the absent?”” (Genner, 2017: 71)
What is a place if those who are physically present have their attention on the presence?
I really recommend Sarah Genner’s empirical work on hyperconnectivity from 2017, which was accepted as a PhD thesis by the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Zurich in the spring semester 2016.. It’s a very detailed work on the risks and rewards of the “anytime-anywhere internet”, hence it’s 197 pages. If you are interested it might give you something to do in your self-isolation (I am not through yet, so it’s definitely on my to do list). I’m inserting the table of contents below for you to get a taste of the range of topics that can be discussed in studies of the internet:
“Douglas Rushkoff argues that with real-time technologies such as Twitter and email, we have arrived in the age of the “present shock.” Rushkoff describes the Internet as an instantaneous network where time and space get compressed. He argues that there is a
dissonance between our digital selves and our analog bodies, which has thrown us into a new state of anxiety. (Rushkoff, 2013)“. (Genner, 2017: 25)
REFERENCE: Genner, Sarah. (2017). ON |OFF : Risks and rewards of the anytime-anywhere internet. Available at: https://digitalcollection.zhaw.ch/handle/11475/1857 [Accessed 19 March 2020].
The above quotes confirm that the online/offline dualism can cause anxiety. This project is looking for participants who relate to this statement. As part of my methodology, I will create pictures with fictive texts, known as vignettes, that will help me find participants. Below is some information on vignettes as a methodology:
“Vignettes can be useful in exploring potentially sensitive topics that participants might otherwise find difficult to discuss (Neale 1999). As commenting on a story is less personal than talking about direct experience, it is often viewed by participants as being less threatening. Vignettes also provide the opportunity for participants to have greater control over the interaction by enabling them to determine at what stage, if at all, they introduce their own experiences to illuminate their abstract responses.” (Barter and Renold, 1999)
“For many researchers the indeterminate relationship between beliefs and actions is the biggest danger in using this technique in isolation (West 1982, cited in Finch 1987; Faia 1979). If the aim of the research centres on the meanings people ascribe to specific contexts, without making any association with actions, this danger can be avoided. However, researchers often wish to make links between beliefs and actions. Some studies have concluded that responses to vignettes will reflect how individuals actually respond in reality. For example, Rahman’s (1996) study of female carers’ coping strategies found that, both in their responses to vignettes, and in their recollections of how they had acted in the past, carers dealt ineffectively with conflict. In contrast, Carlson (1996), using vignettes depicting domestic violence, found that most participants replied that they would leave the violent relationship and seek help, although we know from other studies that this is frequently not how victims of domestic violence respond. Hughes (1998:384) concludes that “we do not know enough about the relationship between vignettes and real life responses to be able to draw parallels between the two”. The recent inclusion of vignettes in multi-method approaches may clarify some of these methodological issues by helping to understand the extent to which abstract responses relate to actions in everyday life.” (Ibid.)
Barter, C. and Renold, E. (1999). The Use of Vignettes in Qualitative Research. University of Surrey, Social Research Update 25-25.
The bit “danger in using this technique in isolation” is ironic in self-isolation. I will use these vignettes as a recruitment method for finding participants. It will be for those who want to, once the quarantine and the real threat of contagion are over, connect more IRL and not just online. It will be for those who are tired of only using their minds (and their hands); who want to use all of their body and be present in the places that they go to. I have not decided yet, which method to use after the first step of using vignettes. It will probably be anonymous surveys with questions regarding internet use and its impact on face-to-face encounters. For the next step, I was going to meet IRL and in-person with those interested and sing together or experience music otherwise. After these workshops, I was planning to do another survey with questions regarding the experience. This multi-method approach, online and offline, might be disrupted by Coronavirus and the on-going rule of social distancing. Before coronavirus and self-isolation became acute, I was already looking at virtual choirs. I watched a video of the virtual choir by Eric Whitacre.
This is what it says on Eric Whitacre’s virtual choir’s website:
“The Virtual Choir is a global phenomenon, creating a user-generated choir that brings together singers from around the world and their love of music in a new way through the use of technology. Singers record and upload their videos from locations all over the world. Each one of the videos is then synchronised and combined into one single performance to create the Virtual Choir.”
I was amazed by it. But a virtual choir went against the aim of my project. My focus was going to be on the physical experience of singing in an actual choir. Watching this, nevertheless, felt like an ecstatic, collective experience. But where is the body in this experiment? The body remains slumped and hunched over the device that allows the participation in this virtual choir (and for me, watching this). The present-absent-paradox applies here, because the singer’s bodies are present, but absent in the places they are singing from.
When speaking to friends about this project, they told me about a virtual choir, that was part of the exhibition “24/7 – A Wake Up Call For Our Non-Stop World” here in London, which finished on 23 February 2020 at Somerset House. I have inserted information on the work below from Somerset House website:
“Through the power of humming Melissa Mongiat, co-founder of Daily Tous Les Jours, highlights a metaphysical connection through music.”
REFERENCE: Somerset House Website. Available at: https://www.somersethouse.org.uk/whats-on/247 [Accessed 19 March 2020].
“Melissa Mongiat, co-founder of Daily Tous Les Jours presents I Heard There Was a Secret Chord, a participatory humming channel that reveals an invisible connection uniting those people around the world listening to Leonard Cohen’s song Hallelujah. Real time user data representing the number of these listeners is transformed into a virtual choir – each online listener represented by a humming voice in the space. These sounds are transformed into low frequency vibrations as you start humming along, allowing you to feel a collective resonance. The work is both a scientific and a spiritual experiment, highlighting the metaphysical connection between people on a common wavelength.”
REFERENCE: Audioboom Website. Available at: https://audioboom.com/posts/7471146-artificial-birdsong-and-a-virtual-choir-24-7?fbclid=IwAR13CaGceILMR_HDNHqRyX6qkgl7_LKhiqMTn0uw42CkHzyPFPm5E0m-z5Q [Accessed 19 March 2020].
You can give the virtual humming of Leonard Cohen’s “I heard there was a secret chord” a go here: https://www.dailytouslesjours.com/en/work/i-heard-there-was-a-secret-chord. I would be more than delighted if you wanted to get in touch afterwards to share your experience of virtual humming. Here’s what it says on the website:
“At any given moment, hundreds of people are listening to Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah at the same time. I Heard There Was a Secret Chord creates a metaphysical connection between them through a sensory experience, in an attempt to demystify this universal hymn.”
“Sensory connections: Singing in a group brings about visceral universal emotions, humming, on the other hand, creates a musical vibration inside the body. I Heard There Was a Secret Chord merges the two sensations and provides the public a moment of communal contemplation on the universal, quasi-mystical quality of Hallelujah.”
“The project: The piece consists of a room and a website. Both continuously broadcast Hallelujah’s melody, hummed by a virtual choir. This choir of humming voices is directly impacted by the visitors. Whether they are listening online or in-situ, the number of voices heard increases and decreases as a result of their presence. The fluctuating number is displayed in real time.”
“The website: The website operates like a single-song radio station, fluctuating with the amount of listeners. Anybody can join the choir of I Heard There Was a Secret Chord and feel the universal magic of Hallelujah wherever they are.”
REFERENCE: Daily Tous Les Jours’ website. Available at: https://www.dailytouslesjours.com/en/work/i-heard-there-was-a-secret-chord [Accessed 19 March 2020].
On review, this immersive choir experience differs from Eric Whitacre’s virtual choir in the way that it does involve the body, and it takes place offline, only aided by the online recorded choir of hummers’. Technology serves as an aid to create a metaphysical experience of collective humming, but does not require users to be alone or causes them to have an absent body (Leder, 1990) while making use of it. On the contrary, the body is very much central to this choir-technology experience.
REFERENCE: Leder, D. (1990). The absent body. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Another project I came across, which is also by Daily Tous Les Jours, is called “Giant Sing Along – Outdoor collective Karaoke.”
Here’s what it says on the website:
“Singing in harmony with others–whether in a stadium, around a campfire or in a choir–is the expression of a common emotion. Beyond beautiful voices, the pleasure comes from singing together. Giant Sing Along invites people of all ages and backgrounds to sing their hearts out, karaoke style, sharing in a collective musical experience.”
“The Project: The fun of karaoke is that it doesn’t require skill. This is why Giant Sing Along integrates a sound processing system that lightly auto-tunes the voices, creating a “quasi-professional” choir. (You’re welcome!) The songs featured at each Giant Sing Along event are chosen online by the public. This process involves the local community in the project and guarantees the success of the party.”
“More Together Than Alone: Collective experiences have the power to transform our relationship with public spaces. Beyond its festive nature, Giant Sing Along is an artwork that fosters feelings of belonging to a community through moments of spontaneous, simple joy.”
This second project by Daily Tous Les Jours, too, shows that there are attempts made to create offline, collective, musical experiences. These are designed with the help of immersive technology (here users online choose the songs for offline users) and with the aim to foster feelings of community and simple joy. This shows that there is a demand for or, hence, a lack of collective, offline experiences.
“Finally, future research can also explore whether engaging with online technology changes people’s opportunities to engage in the socioemotional processes that define sociability, such as empathy and perspective taking. In her 2015 book, Reclaiming Conversation, Sherry Turkle (2015) suggested that increased engagement with technology may lead people to immerse themselves in idealized online identities that help them to avoid those in-person and in-depth conversations in which we “allow ourselves to be fully present and vulnerable . . . where empathy and intimacy flourish and social action gains strength” (p. 20). Future research can explore whether online technology alters not only people’s capacity for sociability but also their selection of situations in which they might employ this capacity.” (Waytz and Gray, 2018: 485)
“Technology can help us be more angelic, providing a low-cost way to reach out to others and lift them up. However, by distancing us from tangible emotional signals of others’ suffering, it can also unleash the worst of our demons. Although online technology allows us to help and harm others, it is not inherently good or evil; instead it is likely to reinforce people’s preexisting prosociality and antisociality. Research suggests that technology can supplement sociability in offline interactions—as long as it does not replace face-to-face interaction.” (Ibid., f)
“Online technology is still in its infancy. But as famed futurist Ray Kurzweil (2003) writes, we may soon have “full-immersion visual-auditory environments” and “will be able to enter [them] . . . either by ourselves or with other ‘real’ people” (para. 9). Will these powerful online environments enable us to be more or less in tune with other people’s emotions? Our review suggests that the impact of online technology on sociability may depend on whether online technology enables altruism or spite and whether the interactions it affords enable or disable deeper interactions with others. But most of all, this review suggests that more conclusive research is needed to truly reveal whether online technology makes us kind or cruel.” (Ibid., 486)
This is what I set out to do: a conclusive research that reveals the impact of online technologies on our sociability, and ways to reconnect to our bodies.
In Turin people in self-isolation are sharing a euphoric, musical moment with each other from their balconies:
Transcript:
“Could this reshape the way we interact with each other?”(Asthana, 2020)
“It will reshape our notion of our responsibilities to each other, both kind of really intimate family responsibilities but also responsibilities to your neighbours and your friends. And in the very first instance, even before we talk about rebuilding social connections in a practical way, it just reminds you how much you love them all. And so I think that will be a change and I think, I’ve gotta be honest, I don’t want to make this into a political point but if you look at what first and second world wars did, to our notion of society and what it meant we did the most radical good in history after those wars because we all sustained losses, we all sustained anxiety, and we kind of remembered what mattered. And it was out of that spirit, that we built the NHS and the largest program of social housing we’ve ever conceived. So, I think there is something about a reset in this, there is something just about kind of remembering what matters, remembering what doesn’t matter that makes social ambition hugely possible. […] ” (Williams, 2020)
REFERENCE: Asthana, A. (presenter) in conversation with Williams, Z. (20 March 2020). Today in Focus: Social distancing: learning to cope with a new normal. (00.20.46 until 00:22:05).Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/news/audio/2020/mar/20/coronavirus-learning-to-cope-with-a-new-normal [Accessed 20 March 2020).
REFERENCE: Gill, E. and Randall, L. (20 March 2020). Coronavirus: Hundreds of children sing to self-isolating older residents near school. Available at: https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/coronavirus-hundreds-children-sing-self-21728150 [Accessed 20 March 2020].
REFERENCE: Scully, E. (20 March 2020). Touching moment primary school pupils sing Something Inside So Strong to elderly people isolating in sheltered housing opposite their playground. Available at: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-8134807/Primary-school-pupils-sing-elderly-flats-opposite-playground.html [Accessed 20 March 2020].
” […] Even the language has changed with astonishing speed. “Social distancing”, “self-isolation” and “WFH” [Work From Home] entered near-universal usage in a matter of days, matching the velocity with which personal behaviour had to change. It began with the awkwardness of the rejected handshake, an elbow-bump offered in its place, a practice which seemed novel a mere fortnight ago – and it ends with people sharing a pint by each drinking alone in their homes, but doing it on a screen via FaceTime, Skype or Zoom.” (Freedland, 2020)
“In this new landscape, the only meeting places are virtual, with social media the obvious forum.“ (Ibid.)
REFERENCE: Freedland, J. (20 March 2020). As fearful Britain shuts down, coronavirus has transformed everything. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/20/as-fearful-britain-shuts-down-coronavirus-has-transformed-everything [Accessed 20 March 2020].
“So viel Miteinander war nie. Das Virus bringt uns auseinander und gleichzeitig enger zusammen.” [There has never been as much community as now. The virus keeps us apart and simultaneously closer together.] (Peitz, 15 March 2020).
“Vor allem die Macht der Musik bricht sich Bahn. Krise, Ausnahmezustand, Isolation? Es ist der Gesang, diese alterierte Form des Sprechens und der Kommunikation, auf den viele in dieser besonderen Situation zurückgreifen, ein fast archaischer Akt.” [First and foremost, it’s the power of music that can be witnessed. Crisis, state of emergency, isolation? It is the singing, the altered version of speaking and of communication, many make use of now: It is almost an archaic act.] (Ibid.)
REFERENCE: Peitz, C. (15 March 2020). Singen gegen die Quarantäne. Available at: https://www.tagesspiegel.de/kultur/solidaritaet-in-zeiten-des-coronavirus-singen-gegen-die-quarantaene/25644758.html# [Accessed 20 March 2020].
With events cancelled, organisers offer virtual concerts and operas online. Nietzsche had an ecstatic, collective experience in one of Wagner’s operas. It was from then on that he was not as pessimistic about life anymore as he was before. He found that the experience that makes life bearable is an operatic moment of ecstasy. Although we can’t physically go to the opera at the moment (and maybe couldn’t feel like we could before for financial or other reasons), we can livestream operas for the time being on the following:
https://www.digitalconcerthall.com/de/home
https://www.staatsoper.de/stream/
The Royal Opera House in London is showing online: Peter and the Wolf, The Royal Ballet, 2010 – 27 March 2020, 7pm GMT, Acis and Galatea, The Royal Opera, 2009 – 3 April 2020, 7pm BST, Così fan tutte, The Royal Opera, 2010 – 10 April 2020, 7pm BST and The Metamorphosis, The Royal Ballet, 2013 – 17 April 2020, 7pm BST.
I reckon that streaming an opera online will not come close to what Nietzsche experienced at the opera IRL. Feel free to send me a message about your experience of watching one of the free operas on one of the links or we can try and watch together on with the app Zoom. It should be noted that Nietzsche was not singing himself, he was just watching and experiencing the operatic singing and the acting in front of a stage set. So, we have singing and sound. I will continue this research with quotes on “sound’s invisible, disruptive, and affective qualities” (@The MIT Press. Available at: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/sonic-agency) examined by Brandon LaBelle in his book “Sonic Agency” (2018):
“Are there modalities of a sounded subjectivity that can support new formations of coming together and in support of emancipatory practices? Sonic Agency sets out to engage the contemporary conditions of social and political crisis by way of sonic thought and imagination. Through the positing of what the author terms “sonic agency,” sound and listening are brought forward as capacities by which gestures of speaking out and coming together are extended.” (LaBelle, 2018)
“Is there a potential embedded in sonic thought that may lend itself to contemporary struggles? What particular ethical and agentive positions or tactics may be adopted from the experiences we have of listening and being heard? Might the knowledges nurtured by a culture of sounding practices support us in approaching the conditions of personal and political crisis?” (Ibid.)
“The gestures that bring us into the world, making us seen and heard, felt and witnessed by others, carry with them an intrinsic forcefulness; we gesture, we move, we impinge onto our surroundings and others. These are embodied actions by which subjectivity gains definition and which produce effects and meanings from their intensities – they make impressions from which certain consequences are generated. These actions, and their repercussions, are formed by and through the interactions and reactions between oneself and others – I am only myself in so far as others shape me, and through which I in turn shape others. The deep and defining relationality of being a subject in the world, however, is in constant tension with given social institutions, with the processes of language and the limits of speech, and through one’s access to support structures, including the extremely important and highly varied relationships of which one is a part. We are not only relating body to body, subject to subject, but equally according to the institutional frameworks that enable or limit contact, movement, and responsiveness. I feel myself with and through others, as well as by entering or exiting the institutions and offices of society – by scraping across the limits and structures of the social order and the permissible.” (Ibid.)
“Relationships, in this way, mostly extend from the personal to the institutional, creating a more entangled and experiential way of being in the world in which moments of exchange, sharing, and feeling are shaped by particular frameworks. In turn, one contributes to those frameworks, demanding entry and participating in their activities, bending the languages and the practices that perpetuate particular institutional orders. From such perspectives, the sensual nuances of feeling and of being felt, of wanting and needing, greatly inflect the actions and gestures that make one seen and heard in public life, and that inform how such visibility and audibility lead to or hinder positions of social and political participation.” (Ibid.)
“Audre Lorde, in her essay on “the erotic,” suggests that it is by way of the sharing of joy that the productive conditions for mutuality and empowerment may be nurtured. As she describes: “The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference.”i Lorde furthers this thinking by arguing for a richer integration of joy and pleasure – our excitements and our vitalities – within the institutional constructs of family relations, community work, and public life. The sharing of joy thus acts as a highly charged foundation from which forms of co-habitation, interpersonal exchange, and mutuality may emerge. Importantly, Lorde poses the erotic as that which acts to bridge the “spiritual” and the “political.” From such a condition, she writes, “we begin to feel deeply all aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of.”ii” (Ibid.)
“The erotic, the sensual, and the joyful come to act as an empowering basis for putting into practice the intensities central to being a thinking and creative body, specifically by supporting our inherent desire to “share” in such intensities: the erotic is first and foremost a generative project, born from touching and being touched, by the depths of a sensuality that also, importantly, forces us into a state of vulnerability and interdependency. Lorde’s “erotic subjectivity” is one that situates the affective and sensual state of personhood in and around the political, and is thus the beginning of confronting all that oppresses or dominates – that thwarts the full blossoming of life’s vitality – whether in the form of institutional systems or through the internalized fears and anxieties that keep one locked within limited conceptions of oneself and others. The joyfulness of erotic becoming, as the bristling of life with others, ultimately leads to a “visibility which makes us most vulnerable” and yet which is also “the source of our greatest strength.”iii” (Ibid.)
“The experiences of joyful sharing, of the fullness of agency and actions – the activeness of the breathing and feeling body that is ourselves and that flows from us and along with others – such a position supplants theories that would separate politics and the personal and, by extension, the public and the private. In contrast, for Lorde, and for others, in particular bell hooks, whose ideas continually seek to bridge life lived and the formations of public representation (political and other), spaces of political visibility are greatly influenced by the psychological, emotional, and relational passions by which one experiences and desires from the world and others. From such a position, is not the political a space of relations and mutuality served not solely through reasonable deliberation or strategic alliance, but one equally shaped and instituted by what moves this body? By the intimate relationships and emotional knowledges that often sustain communities, and that become central in times of conflict?” (Ibid.)
“bell hooks captures the question of “passionate politics” by arguing for a mode of coming together “in that site of desire and longing” which may act as “a potential place of community-building.”iv hooks is dedicated to steering questions of politics according to the affective lessons of desire and longing, as well as through an ethos of loving relations.” (Ibid.)
“[…] Weakness is not only articulated through abusive forces that may fix one within a system of dominance; rather, it is equally an essential human condition, articulated in moments of crisis, fragility, and loss as well as through “joyful sharing” and the simple instances of feeling oneself touched by another; a vulnerability central to being human. These conditions and experiences may additionally act as the basis for countering systems of domination; following Lorde and hooks, weakness may articulate a performative impasse in which powers of dominance stagger, and from which forms of self-determination and shared resistances may find traction. To let oneself go within the fervor of joyful contact, or to grow limp in the arms of another, a friend or even a police officer when refusing to vacate – this body carried off – or to resist through silently standing still, or holding firm together, these expressions find their strength not only through political conviction, but through a deep appeal to moral conscience.” (Ibid.)
“[…], the counter-culture was a movement in how bodies feel, perceive, and act together. This would give way to understanding how political subjectivity is expressed not solely in gestures of speaking up, or in rational collective assembly, but equally in “arational” formations of energetic attunement, ecstatic togetherness, and affective intervention – formations in which the personal is deeply political and the political is something to be lived and shared.” (Ibid.)
Sharing is a big part of social media. Here are some memes [Meme = A cultural item in the form of an image, video, phrase, etc., that is spread via the Internet and often altered in a creative or humorous way. Definition taken from dictionary.com.] that are being shared at the moment in relation to the coronavirus. Some translate self-isolation into the medium of the image:
In her book “The Lonely City” (2016), Olivia Laing writes:
“As the Whitney curator Carter Foster observes in Hopper’s Drawings, Hopper routinely reproduces in his paintings ‘certain kinds of spaces and spatial experiences common in New York that result from being physically close to others but separated from them by a variety of factors, including movement, structures, windows, walls and light or darkness’.” (Laing, 2016: 17)
On the back of the book, it reads: “What does it mean to be lonely? How do we live, if we’re not intimately engaged with another human being? How do we connect with other people? Does technology draw us closer together or trap us behind screens?”
REFERENCE: Laing, O. (2016). The Lonely City – Adventures in The Art of Being Alone.
I just came across this article when I was looking for information on Hopper’s lifetime to compare it to ours:
“Hopper tapped into the collective consciousness of his time, but inadvertently, he also captured the spirit of 2020 amid a global pandemic […]” (Figes, 2020)
“[…] as one 21st-century Instagram user @alexandraroach1, wrote: “This could be me in the painting, but I would add a phone into her hand…”” (Ibid.)
“The more often it is shared on social media, the more quickly we remember that everyone else is in the same boat. Or in a similar room, somewhere in the UK [or anywhere else], scrolling anxiously through their feed, or pondering the future of human existence.” (Ibid.)
“Let’s be totally honest, loneliness is an unavoidable characteristic of contemporary life, especially when individuals live in large cities. This is why we all have intense addictions to social media – a virtual façade to mask the underlying angst [One may be reminded of Olga Mikh Fedorova’s print on canvas further up on this blog of a boy looking on his phone with the relating title “Protection”.] and another way to find social connection with strangers making witty one-liners on Twitter.” (Ibid.)
REFERENCE: Figes, L. (20 March 2020). How artist Edward Hopper became the poster boy of quarantine culture. Available at: https://www.dazeddigital.com/art-photography/article/48442/1/how-artist-edward-hopper-became-the-poster-boy-of-quarantine-culture [Accessed 23 March 2020].
Edward Hopper’s paintings from the 20th century serve as a visualisation of people in self-isolation and quarantine today. They render visible people in the privacy of their rooms. Social media and posting selfies from our homes have long blurred the lines between public and private. However, these paintings are not from the perspective of the subject in the room, but by someone (or something) from the outside, as if the walls consist of glass. The loneliness is exposed. In the current pandemic, everyone is alone in their homes, but, everyone knows that everyone else is alone and separated from friends and other members of the family. So, while people are waiting in their homes, until further notice from their governments regarding rules of self-isolation, they know that others are in exactly the same position, which creates a feeling of solidarity and togetherness. The popularity of the many shared Hopper memes testifies for that.
The public, on the other hand, is (mostly) devoid of people. In a world where we are not allowed outside with the aim to prevent infection and contagion, (not just technology but also) sound is a way of getting in “touch”. Sound can be shared by people from inside their homes, by opening windows, stepping on balconies and seeing each other over the road, just as the world first saw it in Italy.
“Balcony singing in solidarity has been a growing reaction to the coronavirus lockdown in Italy this weekend.” (Thorpe, 2020)
“From the southern cities of Salerno and Naples, and the Sicilian capital Palermo to Turin in the north, residents of apartment buildings and tower blocks are continuing to sing or play instruments, or to offer DJ sets, from their balconies in a trend that is spreading from Italy across Europe to Spain and even to Sweden.” (Ibid.)
“The Italian tune from the 1990s, Grazie Roma, with the lyric, “Tell me what it is which makes us feel like we’re together, even when we’re apart” is also popular online.” (Ibid.)
REFERENCE: Thorpe, V. (14 March 2020). Balcony singing in solidarity spreads across Italy during lockdown. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/14/solidarity-balcony-singing-spreads-across-italy-during-lockdown [Accessed 23 March 2020).
“In what way might social transformation be directed through expressions of ecstatic being and holistic communing? Might weakness lead us to the limits of a certain political arena, exposed not so much by bodies in movement, but by those standing still, or by those chanting collectively?” (LaBelle, 2018)
“These are protests and projects aimed not solely at renewing political life, but further, in support of the desires and longings for joyful sharing.” (Ibid.)
“Powerlessness is therefore often gaining strength through the production and sharing of cultural expressions, which is first and foremost the articulation of an erotic force –life as it lived in contact with others.” (Ibid.)
“Listening is never purely passive, rather it performs as an affective and intelligent labor by which recognition is nurtured and relations are continually remodeled. For Bickford, the importance of listening is found in its capacity to potentially “break up linguistic conventions and create a public realm where a plurality of voices, faces, and languages can be heard and seen and spoken.”xxxvii” (Ibid.)
“[…] And in speaking, I search for a logic that may equally move others, to craft a narrative from which agency may be nurtured, even inspired to go beyond the current state of affairs. Voice and listening, in other words, are also shaped by passions, by desires and longings, by rage and frustration, which fill our words and our listening with intensity.” (Ibid.)
“It is precisely this intensity that Nick Couldry searches for when he calls for a renewal of “spaces of politics” within neoliberal society, and which I detect in counter-cultural subjectivity and resistances from below.xxxviii Yet, I would also supplement Couldry’s call by not only emphasizing “the political,” but equally, what Havel terms “the pre-political.”xxxix For Havel, the pre-political may guide us according to the essential needs and desires of the human condition, to redirect constructs of power through moral urgency and responsibility.” (Ibid.)
“If one is able to recognize the inherent precarity of one’s own life, and if one may then recognize the degree to which one’s life is dependent upon others, might this shift the conditions that make possible extreme practices of abuse, intolerance, violence, and war?” (Ibid.)
“In the future, when we’re physically able to be with each other again, we’ll want an archive of this era, this strange societal and cultural reset, that tells of community, hopefulness, and creativity – so here it is. We are alone, but we’re together.” (Cafolla and Gorton, 2020)
REFERENCE: Cafolla, A. and Gorton, T. (21 March 2020). Welcome to #AloneTogether: a creative community in times of crisis. Available at: https://www.dazeddigital.com/life-culture/article/48466/1/alone-together-a-creative-community-in-times-of-coronavirus-crisis [Accessed 24 March 2020].
“Following Butler’s deeply engaged work, and Bickford’s reflections on listening, precarity functions as the basis for shared responsibility and moral compassion, which not so much lessens the possibility of standing up or attacking systems of violence, but rather supports bodies in movement and those that aim for resistance by way of loving relations. In other words, our weaknesses may be mobilized as potent weapons – what James C. Scott succinctly terms “weapons of the weak.”xliv One such weapon of weakness may be found in the time and space of listening, and nurtured through the diffusiveness and potency of silent actions, collective vibrations, and the co- soundings of shared passions.” (LaBelle, 2018)
“[…] forming a weapon of the weak, and reminding of the ways in which weakness […] may deliver a deeply moving and effective articulation, giving suggestion to what Asef Bayat terms a “revolution without movement.”xlv” (Ibid.)
“From a series of investigations and reflections on practices of social resistance, Bayat considers the ways in which “revolutionary projects” at times are shaped and initiated not through actions of “frontal attack,” but rather through daily practices, gestures of co-operative assistance between neighbors, and the consolidation of resources within a community.” (Ibid.)
“The social transformations generated by the emergence of digital technologies and their incorporation into the private sphere over the last twenty-five years have clearly altered relations between the private and public spheres. With the incorporation of practices of work and the “productive” activities of public positions into the domestic environment, the traditional distinctions of private and public have been reoriented to produce new forms of livelihood, family structures, and professional identities – we are less and less distinguishing between work and family life, for example. From these new configurations, the experiences of the private sphere of home-life, as being tied to acts of caring and nurturing, of reproduction, is no longer separated from the productive actions of public work and exchange. Accordingly, the interweaving of reproduction, and of building home, with that of worldly production, of labor and business, effectively shifts the nature of political behavior.” (Ibid.)
“The shift in private and public relations, in short, ignites new understandings in what it means to act politically, and what we may expect from those that come to represent our personal concerns.” (Ibid.)
“[…] in what way acts of care-taking, family work, and home- building may come to form the basis for politics today, one that extends the reproductive labors of the home as the foundation for an ethos of nurturing empathy and generosity onto the world.” (Ibid.)
“What types of “public spheres” emerge from these transformations of political behavior, which demand or inspire an ethos of loving relations? Might the new languages attached to the public imagination today, by interweaving the reproductions of home life with the productions of worldliness, support sensibilities of care and intensities of compassion? And by extension, that may nurture community-building, cooperation, and publicness that is equally about home, family, care-taking, and well- being?” (Ibid.)
“Although the political is generally understood not to be the time and space for nurturing intimacy and erotic subjectivity, it may in fact be what is needed in today’s environment; as the dynamics of governing power reach into the essential conditions and experiences of what it means to act within the world, shaping bodies and lives, livelihoods and future hopes, practices of political life that engage an ethics beyond the purely political seem necessary.” (Ibid.)
“It is precisely this question that Havel answered by way of what he calls the “pre-political,” which he understands as the fundamental moral responsibility of life lived that over-ride party politics.” (Ibid.)
“Merkel made no specific announcements and called for no nationwide curfews or additional closures. Yet what gave her address its force was her tone, which was direct, honest, and searingly empathic.” (Davidson, 2020)
“Without accusations, boasts, hedges, obfuscations, dubious claims, or apocalyptic metaphors she did what a leader is supposed to do: explain the gravity of the situation and promise that the government’s help would flow to everyone who needed it. She gave full-throated thanks to front-line medical workers, assured Germans that there is no need to hoard, and paused to offer gratitude to a group of workers who rarely get recognized by heads of state on national TV: “Those who sit at supermarket cash registers or restock shelves are doing one of the hardest jobs there is right now.” (Ibid.)
“She asked for the sacrifice of discipline, for heroic acts of kindness.” (Ibid.)
“She acknowledged the paradox in calling for solidarity and apartness at the same time.” (Ibid.)
“She understood how painful it is that just when people desperately want to come together, families and friends have to endure separation.” (Ibid.)
“No German could listen to her calls for self-policing without recalling that she grew up in East Germany under the eye of the Stasi. “For someone like myself, for whom freedom of travel and movement were hard-won rights,” she said, “such restrictions can only be justified when they are absolutely necessary.”” (Ibid.)
REFERENCE: Davidson, J. (18 March 2020). The Leader of the Free World Gives a Speech, and She Nails It. Available at: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/03/angela-merkel-nails-coronavirus-speech-unlike-trump.html [Accessed 24 March 2020].
“Weakness is an occasion of being overwhelmed; it reveals us in instances of collapse and deflation, a condition of loss or surrender that equally reveals our interdependencies – our essential bonds. It reveals us at our most vulnerable, a body without and in need. In relating to the fundamental condition of weakness, I’ve sought to question how political behavior may lead to a more sensible relation with others, a sensibility of deep recognition and moral compassion equally grounded in the passions of living life with others. In bridging the spiritual and the political, might new expressions of protest and resistance turn us toward arenas of public discourse and community-building from which politics and an ethos of loving relations may work side by side? Weakness – as that shuddering of erotic subjectivity, a precarity that requests of the other a deeper listening, a more considered touch – is cast as a powerful axis around which “sites of longing and desire” are formed; in being weak, one is in need of others.” (LaBelle, 2018)
“[…] emancipatory struggles often find support through affective and lyrical practices, the creative modulations of shouting, singing, and speaking up, and embodied expressions of moral compassion.” (Ibid.)
“[…] a new ontology of the social in which listening and being heard contend with an intensity of noise, an otherness always closer than imagined.” (Ibid.)
“The new spirit of political engagement finds momentum through constructs of self-organization and participatory work, civic generosity, non-movements and quotidian encroachments, queer discourses, and practices of radical care, which give way to expressions of critical and creative togetherness.” (Ibid.)
“[…] the question of listening acting as a potential form of interruption – an activism enacted through audition – and how collective listening, in particular, may give challenge to existing demarcations or structures of domination.” (Ibid.)
“[…] listening may additionally aid in discovering and nurturing new formations of solidarity by explicitly relating us to things beyond the voice. For instance, the silences of still bodies, the vibrational intensities of collective acts, the tonalities disturbed by cacophonic volumes, the co-soundings and echoes of earthly presences – these equally define how we understand the public sphere and expressions of political desire. To enact one’s freedom of listening is to necessarily aim for a broader and richer engagement with the range of voices and sounds to be heard.” (Ibid.)
“Listening activism, as I begin to understand it, is potently expressed through people listening together; people that may gather to bring together their listening, directing it to particular sites for instance, or around situations of conflict. In these situations, listening expresses indignation and concern by bringing attention to that which is equally said as well as unsaid. The gathering of listeners, in the squares for instance, or within any number of sites, performs to create a gap within the public realm, detouring the flows of normative actions with a quiet and persistent intensity; and through its production of deep attention it may also create an image: the image of the listener as one who pays attention and in doing so creates the conditions for greater engagement.” (Ibid.)
“The act of collective listening, as I’m describing, arises as a social “non- movement,” setting the scene for dwelling within the present with others – for this sound we hear is already the production of a shared world, this sound that animates a space between. In doing so, listening is the expression of an “art of presence,” crafting from the body and its place in the world and with others new formations of social becoming.vii” (Ibid.)
“If sound is a force that continually stirs the surroundings, driving forward an array of vibrations and reverberations, echoing across borders and rippling relations between interiorities and exteriorities, the inner depths with surfaces, and beyond, collecting singularities into a collective body, it does so in such a way as to potentialize the inherent flux of things – to bolster the animate conditions of life in the making.” (Ibid.)
“[…] to stage our weaknesses as the basis for a greater strength, the strength found in erotic knowledge and shared vulnerability.” (Ibid.)
“These are positions and practices, capacities and imaginaries given traction by the freedom of listening, by listening to oneself in order to deepen one’s conscience and consciousness, and from which to hear others, as they resound with particular indignation or hope. From such instances, one may begin to truly sense the interdependencies of which one is always a part, and which may encourage a collective making of this life lived…” (Ibid.)
REFERENCE: LaBelle, B. (2018). Sonic agency: Sound and emergent forms of resistance. London: Goldsmiths Press. ed., Goldsmiths Press sonics series.
“[…] this explains its resonance in 2019. We have no shortage of things to be furious about. After years of fragmentation and polarisation, the joyful militancy of early rave feels poignant; the kind of unified response to political strife that this era is yet to produce.” (Harrison, 2019)
“Yet the potential for this kind of unity feels stifled by changes that can never be reversed. There is a moment in Deller’s film when one student has a realisation. “There’s no technology or nothing,” she says. “So everyone’s just in their own space.” This speaks to a modern fear concerning a loss of freedom, in the context of both state surveillance (pertinent given the regularity with which original rave culture involved breaking the law) and a more personal issue related to the self-curation of social media.” (Ibid.)
“[…] I think we are entering a period of backlash against this isolation and being in your own bubble.”” (Ibid.)
REFERENCE: Harrison, P. (26 November 2019). Saatchi exhibits and BBC Four docs: why is 2019 so nostalgic for 80s rave? Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2019/nov/26/saatchi-exhibits-and-bbc-four-docs-why-is-2019-so-nostalgic-for-80s-rave [Accessed 24 March 2020].
“We will be surprised that our social distancing rarely led to a feeling of isolation. On the contrary, after an initial paralysing shock, many of us were relieved that the constant racing, talking, communicating on a multitude of channels suddenly came to a halt. Distancing does not necessarily mean loss, but can open up new possibilities. Some have already experienced this, for example trying interval fasting — and suddenly enjoyed food again.” (Horx, 2020).
“Paradoxically, the physical distance that the virus forced upon us also created new closeness.” (Ibid.)
“We met people who we would never have met otherwise. We contacted old friends more often, strengthened ties that had become loose. Families, neighbours, friends, have become closer and sometimes even solved hidden conflicts.” (Ibid.)
“The social courtesy that we previously increasingly missed, increased.” (Ibid.)
“At the same time, apparently outdated cultural techniques experienced a renaissance. Suddenly you got not only the answering machine when you called, but real people. The virus spawned a new culture of long phone calls without people juggling a second screen. The „messages“ themselves suddenly took on a new meaning. You really communicated again. Nobody was kept waiting anymore. Nobody was stalled. This created a new culture of accessibility, of commitment.” (Ibid.)
“People who never came to rest due to the hectic rush, including YOUNG people, suddenly went for long walks (an activity formerly unknown to them). Reading books suddenly became a cult.” (Ibid.)
“We will be surprised that drugs were developed in the summer that increased the survival rate. This lowered the death rate and made Corona a virus that we have to deal with — much like the flu and many other diseases. Medical progress helped. But we also learned that it was not so much technology, but a crucial change in social behaviour. The decisive factor was that people could have solidarity and be constructive despite radical restrictions. Human-social intelligence has helped. The much-vaunted artificial intelligence, which promised to solve everything, has only had a limited effect on Corona.” (Ibid.)
“This has shifted the relationship between technology and culture. Before the crisis, technology seemed to be the panacea, the bearer of all utopias. No one — or only a few hard-boiled people — still believe in the great digital redemption today. The big technology hype is over. We are again turning our attention to the humane questions: What is mankind? What do we mean to each other?” (Ibid.)
“We are astonished to see how much humour and humanity actually emerged in the days of the virus.” (Ibid.)
“Surprisingly, many experience exactly this in the Corona crisis. A massive loss of control suddenly turns into a veritable intoxication of the positive. After a period of bewilderment and fear, an inner strength arises.The world „ends“, but with the experience that we are still there, a kind of new being arises from inside us.
In the middle of civilisation’s shutdown, we run through forests or parks, or across almost empty spaces. This is not an apocalypse, but a new beginning.” (Ibid.)
“Politics — in its original sense as the formation of social responsibilities — received new credibility through this crisis, a new legitimacy. Precisely because it had to act in an ”authoritarian“ manner, politics created trust in society.” (Ibid.)
“”Through Corona we will adapt our entire attitude towards life — in the sense of our existence as living beings in the midst of other forms of life.“
Slavoj Zizek at the height of the corona crisis in mid-March” (Ibid.)
“Every deep crisis leaves a story, a narrative that points far into the future. One of the strongest images left by the coronavirus is of the Italians making music on the balconies.” (Ibid.)
“The second image was sent to us by satellite images that suddenly showed the industrial areas of China and Italy free of smog. In 2020, human CO2 emissions will drop for the first time. That very fact will do something to us.” (Ibid.)
REFERENCE: Horx, M. (2020). A Backwards Corona Forecast:
Or how we will be surprised when the crisis is „over“. Available at: https://www.horx.com/en/post.php/?page_id=5423 [Accessed 24 March 2020].
“If we want to answer the question of what the “social” in today’s “social media” really means, a starting point could be the notion of the disappearance of the social as described by Jean Baudrillard, the French sociologist who theorized the changing role of the subject as consumer. According to Baudrillard, at some point the social lost its historical role and imploded into the media.” (Lovink, 2012)
“We can put such considerations into a larger, strategic context that the “social media question” poses. Do all these neatly administrated contacts and address books at some point spill over and leave the virtual realm, as the popularity of dating sites seems to suggest? Do we only share information, experiences, and emotions, or do we also conspire, as “social swarms,” to raid reality in order to create so-called real-world events? Will contacts mutate into comrades? It seems that social media solves the organizational problems that the suburban baby-boom generation faced fifty years ago: boredom, isolation, depression, and desire.” (Ibid.)
“How do we come together, right now? Do we unconsciously fear (or long for) the day when our vital infrastructure breaks down and we really need each other?” (Ibid.)
“Or should we read this Simulacrum of the Social as an organized agony over the loss of community after the fragmentation of family, marriage, and friendship? Why do we assemble these ever-growing collections of contacts? Is the Other, relabeled as “friend,” nothing more than a future customer or business partner? What new forms of social imaginary exist? At what point does the administration of others mutate into something different altogether? Will “friending” disappear overnight, like so many new media-related practices that vanished in the digital nirvana?” (Ibid.)
“The container concept “social media,” describing a fuzzy collection of websites like Facebook, Digg, YouTube, Twitter, and Wikipedia, is not a nostalgic project aimed at reviving the once dangerous potential of “the social,” like an angry mob that demands the end of economic inequality. Instead, the social—to remain inside Baudrillard’s vocabulary—is reanimated as a simulacrum of its own ability to create meaningful and lasting social relations. Roaming around in virtual global networks, we believe that we are less and less committed to our roles in traditional community formations such as the family, church, and neighborhood. Historical subjects, once defined as citizens or members of a class possessing certain rights, have been transformed into subjects with agency, dynamic actors called “users,” customers who complain, and “prosumers.”“ (Ibid.)
“Social media fulfill the promise of communication as an exchange; instead of forbidding responses, they demand replies. Similar to an early writing of Baudrillard’s, social media can be understood as “reciprocal spaces of speech and response” that lure users to say something, anything.2” (Ibid.)
“Concerning the role of communication, they [Hardt and Negri, 2012] conclude that “nothing can beat the being together of bodies and the corporeal communication that is the basis of collective political intelligence and action.” (Ibid.)
“As Johan Sjerpstra puts it: Welcome to the social abyss. We can no longer close our eyes for the real existing stupidity out there. We’re in it all together. Pierre Levy, please help us out: where is the collective intelligence now that we need it?” (Ibid.).
“The social is not merely the (digital) awareness of the Other, even though the importance of “direct contact” should not be underestimated. There needs to be actual, real, existing interaction.” (Ibid.)
“Instead of merely experiencing our personal history as something that we reconcile with and feel the need to overcome (think of family ties, the village or suburb, school and college, church and colleagues from work), the social is seen as something that we are proud of, that we love to represent and show off. Social networking is experienced in terms of an actual potentiality: I could contact this or that person (but I won’t). From now on I will indicate my preferred brand (even without being asked). The social is the collective ability to imagine the connected subjects as a temporary unity. The power of connection is felt by many, and the simulations of the social on websites and in graphs are not so much secondary experiences or representations of something real; they are probes into a post-literate world ruled by images.” (Ibid.)
“Martin Heidegger’s dictum “We don’t call, we are being called” runs empty here.10 On the internet, bots will contact you regardless, and the status updates of others, relevant or not, will pass before your eyes anyway. The filter failure is real. Once inside the busy flow of social media, the Call to Being comes from software and invites you to reply.” […] It is meaningless not to bother—we are not friends anyway.” (Ibid.)
“The social media system no longer “plunges us into a state of stupor,” as Baudrillard said of media experience decades ago. Instead, it shows us the way to cooler apps and other products that elegantly make us forget yesterday’s flavor of the day. We simply click, tap, and drag the platform away, finding something else to distract us. This is how we treat online services: we leave them behind, if possible on abandoned hardware. Within weeks we have forgotten the icon, bookmark, or password.” (Ibid.)
“book your offline holiday” (Ibid.)
“Thanks to Facebook’s simplicity, the online experience is a deeply human experience: the aim is to find the Other, not information. Ideally, the Other is online, right now. Communication works best if it is 24/7, global, mobile, fast, and short. Most appreciated is instantaneous exchange with “friended” users at chat-mode speed. This is social media at its best. We are invited to “burp out the thought you have right now—regardless of its quality, regardless of how it connects to your other thoughts.”14” (Ibid.)
“As Andrew Keen indicates in Digital Vertigo (2012), the social in social media is first and foremost an empty container; he adduces the exemplary hollow platitude that says the internet is “becoming the connective tissue of twenty-first century life.” According to Keen, the social is becoming a tidal wave that is flattening everything in its path.” (Ibid.)
“Keen warns that we will end up in an anti-social future, characterized by the “loneliness of the isolated man in the connected crowd.”16”
Anti Social Social Club was selling masks before Covid-19. In March 2020, the masks may stand for both; the effect of smartphone and internet use on sociability and social distancing. With everyone being quarantined right now, which in some countries makes citizens come closer together (e.g. collective singing from balconies in Italy), we are all in an anti social social club. We are anti social, which is represented by having to stay physically apart from each other, but social because we reach out to each other to help each other through this. Additionally, staying apart and at home during a pandemic becomes a social act, because it impacts on other people’s lives (e.g. it becomes an act of caring for other members of society).
“Confined inside the software cages of Facebook, Google, and their clones, users are encouraged to reduce their social life to “sharing” information. The self-mediating citizen constantly broadcasts his or her state of being to an amorphous, numb group of “friends.”” (Ibid.)
“Keen is part of a growing number of (mainly) US critics warning us of the side effects of extensive social media use. From Sherry Turkle’s rant on loneliness, Nicholas Carr’s warnings on the loss of brain power and the ability to concentrate, to Evgeny Morozov’s critique of the utopian NGO world, to Jaron Lanier’s concern over the loss of creativity, what unites these commentators is their avoidance of what the social could alternatively be, were it not defined by Facebook and Twitter.” (Ibid.)
REFERENCE: Lovink, G. (2012). What is the Social in Social Media? Available at: https://www.e-flux.com/journal/40/60272/what-is-the-social-in-social-media/ [Accessed 24 March 2020].
“There is a sense of everything being slightly unreal; that you fight a war that seems to cost you nothing and it has no consequences at home; that money seems to grow on trees; that goods come from China and don’t seem to cost you anything; that phones make you feel liberated but that maybe they’re manipulating you but you’re not quite sure. It’s all slightly odd and slightly corrupt.” (Curtis, 2018)
“What no one saw coming was the effect of individualism on politics. It’s our fault. We all want to be individuals and we don’t want to see ourselves as parts of trade unions, political parties or religious groups. We want to be individuals who express ourselves and are in control of our own destiny. With the rise of that hyper-individualism in society, politics got screwed. That sense of being part of a movement that could challenge power and change the world began to die away and was replaced by a technocratic management system.” (Ibid.)
“That’s the thing that I’m really fascinated by. I think the old mass democracies sort of died in the early 90s and have been replaced by a system that manages us as individuals. Because the fundamental problem is that politicians can’t manage individuals, they need us to join parties and support them and let them represent us as a group identified with them. What modern management systems worked out, especially when computer networks came into being, was that you could actually manage people as groups by using data to understand how they were behaving in the mass, but you could create a system that allowed them to keep on thinking that they were individuals.” (Ibid.)
“This is the genius of what happened with computer networks. Using feedback loops, pattern matching and pattern recognition, those systems can understand us quite simply. That we are far more similar to each other than we might think, that my desire for an iPhone as a way of expressing my identity is mirrored by millions of other people who feel exactly the same. We’re not actually that individualistic. We’re very similar to each other and computers know that dirty secret. But because we feel like we’re in control when we hold the magic screen, it allows us to feel like we’re still individuals. And that’s a wonderful way of managing the world. (Ibid.)
“Its downside is that it’s a static world. It doesn’t have any vision of the future because the way it works is by constantly monitoring what you did yesterday and the day before, and the day before that. And monitoring what I did yesterday and the day before and the day before that and doing the same to billions of other people. And then looking at patterns and then saying: “If you liked that, you’ll like this”.” (Ibid.)
“They’re constantly playing back to you the ghosts of your own behaviour. We live in a modern ghost story. We are haunted by our past behaviour played back to us through the machines in its comparison to millions of other people’s behaviour. We are guided and nudged and shaped by that. It’s benign in a way and it’s an alternative to the old kind of politics. But it locks us into a static world because it’s always looking to the past. It can never imagine something new. It can’t imagine a future that hasn’t already existed. And it’s led to a sense of atrophy and repetition. It’s “Groundhog Day”. And because it doesn’t allow mass politics to challenge power, it has allowed corruption to carry on without it really being challenged properly.” (Ibid.)
“If you look at what happened in 2008, both the governments in Britain and America had the power to sign a massive cheque to rescue the banks and they did it. That’s enormous power. You’re right, people are frightened of instability. But the job of a good politician is to give them a story that says, “Yes this is risky, but it’s also thrilling and it might lead to something extraordinary”. […] People ask why they can’t have a better standard of living, but they also have this thing in their heads asking what it’s all about. One of the reasons we have politics is because it gives answers to those sorts of questions. In Britain, for example, the Labour Party was born out of religion because it will give you a sense of being part of something that will go on past your own existence. If you live in a world driven by individualism, what it doesn’t answer is what goes on when you die.“ (Ibid.)
“The central thing in politics is emotion. It really is. It’s about saying: “We are together in this existence, in this moment, in the country, in this society, and we’re going to build something that will go on past us.”” (Ibid.)
“I think there’s going to be a resurgence of religion.” (Ibid.)
“I’m not religious but I don’t share the liberal dislike of religion because I think its fundamental point is to reassure us in the face of our own death. That’s what religion does, it gives you a sense that you’re part of something that’s moving onwards. It reassures people. Death is frightening and for a generation who believe that they are alone and were liberated by that idea and had a really good time, to be alone in the face of death is very frightening. So I have a funny feeling that religion might come back.” (Curtis, 2018)
“There’s a sense of repetition and that repetition works very well for some people but not for others. But I have a sense that there’s a romantic age coming. I see it in the music that I like. I can see it in the weird industrial music that I find myself listening to. You can see people taking noise and turning it into big, romantic, sweeping things. It gives you a sense of dynamism and nothing is dynamic at the moment.” (Ibid.)
“What I’m asking for is a system that acts dynamically, which is what politics should do. It should look at the situation, like a good journalist does, and realise that people feel that it isn’t working because you and I know that’s true. We can argue over whether it’s working technically or not, but people feel like it isn’t. And when politicians are faced by that, there’s no way back. So that may open the door to what I see as the real role of politics, a dynamic responsive way.” (Ibid.)
“In an age of individualism, it’s very difficult to get people to surrender some of themselves to an ideal that’s bigger than them. But if you do want to change the world, you’re going to have to do that, to be honest. I don’t like the word “leader,” but I do think that what we’re looking for are people who inspire us to think beyond the world we have at the moment.” (Ibid.)
“We’re all waiting for somebody else to give us something to hope for. We’re all waiting for a white knight.“ (The Economist with Curtis, 2018)
“At the moment, there are all sorts of things that we’re not allowed to talk about because they’re absolutely verboten online. Things like loneliness, sadness and separation.” (Curtis, 2018)
REFERENCE: Curtis, A. and The Economist. (Interview from 6 December 2018). The antidote to civilisational collapse. Available at: https://www.economist.com/open-future/2018/12/06/the-antidote-to-civilisational-collapse [Accessed 25 March 2020].
Both, the quotes by documentary maker Adam Curtis and the following ones, are about society in Western Europe and North America before Covid-19 and reasons for social isolation.
“Ten years ago, management thinkers James H. Gilmore and B. Joseph Pine II launched the concept of the experience economy with their book The Experience Economy: Work is Theatre and Every Business a Stage. Here they describe an economy in which experience is a new source of profit to be obtained through the staging of the memorable. What is being produced is the experience of the audience, and the experience is generated by means of what may be termed “authenticity effects.” In the experience economy it is often art and its markers of authenticity—creativity, innovation, provocation, and the like—that ensure economic status to experience.” (Larsen, 2010)
“Gilmore and Pine advise manufacturers to tailor their products to maximize customer experience […] Gilmore and Pine’s mission is to highlight the profitability of producing simulated situations. Their arguments will not be subverted by simply pointing out this fact: the experience economy is beyond all ideology inasmuch as it is their declared intention to fake it better and more convincingly.” (Ibid.)
“It is difficult not to see the consequences of the experience economy as the dismantling of not only artistic and institutional signification but also of social connections.” (Ibid.)
“[…] consumers within an experience economy function as “hyper-consumers free of earlier social ties, always hunting for emotional intensity,” […]” (Ibid.)
“Cultural critic Diedrich Diederichsen calls such self-consume Eigenblutdoping, blood doping. Just as cyclists dope themselves using their own blood, cultural consumers seek to augment their self-identity by consuming the products of their own subjectivity. According to Diederichsen, this phenomenon is a “solipsistic and asocial horror,” which reduces life to a loop we can move in and out of without actually participating in any processes.31” (Ibid.)
REFERENCE: Larsen, L. B. (2010). Zombies of Immaterial Labour: The Modern Monster and the Death of Death. Available at: https://www.e-flux.com/journal/15/61295/zombies-of-immaterial-labor-the-modern-monster-and-the-death-of-death/ [Accessed 26 March 2020].
The following quotes by Diedrich Diederichsen describe contemporary social situations:
“1. Classical Music vs. Free Jazz: […] when we go out, we switch into an entirely different mode of experience.” (Diederichsen, 2010)
“Now “going out” can mean all sorts of things: an art opening followed by dinner with the artist or artists and a visit to a club, or a certain constellation of bars and clubs where we are sure to meet acquaintances. Or we go to a specific club straight away, one that offers everything in a single package. But really, the distances we cover, the outside world fading in and out of the theater of our increasingly inebriated perceptions, the glistening pavement, diffuse light, car doors slamming, unexpected music in the cab: these are all part of it, the whole program.” (Ibid.)
“The first variant, dinner with friends, is not necessarily any shorter or more sober. This sort of night among friends can be no less long—and no less boozy. Here, however, we get intoxicated not in order to enable ourselves to react more smoothly to new stimuli, but so we can bear the social density and concentration.” (Ibid.)
“The night out is different. Here, casual sensation is always preferable to precise observation. A permanent state of distraction is desired. In conversation, our eyes permanently wander just past our interlocutor.” (Ibid.)
“[…] any overly targeted attempt at picking someone up would disrupt its magnificent potentiality. The promise we sense, and the risk we feel, is more important than really having something to fear or to hope for. We need to realize, and commit to, only as much as is absolutely necessary for maintaining this diffuse mood. The important thing is to enter into brief and dense contact with as many people as possible, people who are as different and distant from one another as possible; realizing in each instance a maximum degree of commitment for a brief moment—and this moment had better be as brief as possible to keep the number of encounters high. In this way we playfully learn what the Nietzsche economy calls networking.1” (Ibid.)
“We keep the number of encounters high, while perceiving each one as less binding, entailing less commitment, because this strategy maintains the sense of freedom and potential whose fundamental message is that we are all interconnected to each other, or at least to those present. In encounters that entail commitment—whatever that means—I must act as a responsible and self-aware I; in the dense but noncommittal encounters that make up a hyperactive social—and sometimes sexual—promiscuity, I can shed my self-awareness and step outside myself.” (Ibid.)
“It is only when I am ecstatic, outside of myself, that I can be with everyone, that I can float in a sense of potential.” (Ibid.)
“A networker must always be ecstatic, must maintain a slightly exaggerated enthusiasm, must get high on the potential of so many contacts that can never be realized or translated into actual collaboration, using this high in turn to leap to the next encounter.” (Ibid.)
“The word we use to describe the past six or eight hours is: intense. Now that was a pretty intense night. […] We may dispute what the word “intensity” means. We might argue, for instance, that the focused self-examination of a circle of friends, the refined micro-debates over micro-problems or the molecular shifts in articulating grand and tenacious problems that mar familiar vitae—that is to say, all that we experience when meeting friends—could also be called intense; whereas the openness and potentiality of a night out fail to fit the term. If I nonetheless call the experience of a night out intense, it is for two reasons. One is a matter of musical aesthetics: both types of experience can be compared to certain aesthetic experiences.
- The dinner with friends corresponds to the focused attention to a piece of classical music that has long been familiar or at least potentially familiar. The point is not what the next note will be, but rather how it arrives—how, within a set of elements defined with regard to instrumentation, timbre, sound, and so forth, everything is decided by subtle shifts and small movements. The key term here would be focus.
- The night out, by contrast, corresponds to the aesthetic experience offered by free jazz and certain excessive styles of rock or electronic pop music: what matters is density proffered with a grand gesture, backed not necessarily by musical substance but, more often, by its social content.
Physical exertion to the point of exhaustion tends to trigger euphoria…
…or aggression: elevated registers of emotion, in every possible direction on the scale. Writers and critics who have followed the phenomenon, but also the musicians themselves, have always spoken of intensity in this context, down to a very technical use of the term in describing music: “And then he played an intense solo on the tenor sax”—that is to say, he used certain overblowing techniques, the solo had a certain minimum duration, and so forth.” (Ibid.)
REFERENCE: Diederichsen, D. (2010). People of Intensity, People of Power: The Nietzsche Economy. Available at: https://www.e-flux.com/journal/19/67482/people-of-intensity-people-of-power-the-nietzsche-economy/ [Accessed 26 March 2020].
The following quotes are to shine light on Nietzsche and his philosophy of ecstasy:
“”What is the significance of the tragic myth among the Greeks of the best, the strongest, the most courageous period? And the tremendous phenomenon of the Dionysian – and, born from it, tragedy? What might they signify?” So asks Friedrich Nietzsche in the Preface to the new edition (1886) of his The Birth of Tragedy (1872).1 In many respects this tremendous phenomenon, the Dionysian, forms the groundwork of Nietzsche’s whole philosophic enterprise, as he himself frequently insisted.” (Luyster, 2001)
“It is well known that Nietzsche as a young man read and was strongly attracted to the pessimistic worldview of Schopenhauer. But the attraction was perhaps in some sense too strong, for eventually he seems to have felt compelled to find some stratagem by which to avoid the life-denying consequences of Schopenhauer’s conclusions and discover some means to embrace life and living.” (Ibid.)
“But upon what basis? Two solutions appear to have presented themselves immediately to the young professor of classics, and those from his own field of specialization. The orgiasticism of the ancient Dionysian festival and the contemplation of the sublime artistic achievement of classical Greece: that is, the ways of the ecstatic and the aesthetic, or, as he was initially to classify them; Dionysus and Apollo.” (Ibid.)
“[…] he explores each of these possible avenues of life-affirmation […]” (Ibid.)
“In BT [The Birth of Tragedy] Nietzsche describes the duality and incessant struggle between two “artistic energies which burst forth from nature itself,” whose name he derives from gods of the Greek pantheon, the Apollonian and the Dionysian.” (Ibid.)
“In order to introduce the two principles, Nietzsche suggests that each may be understood with reference to certain archetypal forms of human experience: dreaming and intoxication (or ecstasy: Rausch).” (Ibid.)
“In the images experienced in dreams we find the prerequisite stuff of all plastic art, of which Apollo is the sponsor and epitome. But Apollo presides not only over all individual forms, but over the very principal of individuation as such, Nietzsche maintains: he is the divine expression and apotheosis of the principium individuationis.” (Ibid.)
“The BT is replete with poignant references to the “Dionysian suffering” that inheres in existence and claims reliable knowledge about “this foundation of all suffering” – the Dionysian basic ground of the world (BT 143)”” (Ibid.)
“What is of special interest to Nietzsche is the fact that even though the ancient Greeks “knew and felt the terror and horror of existence” (BT 42), they did not succumb to it, to “pessimism,” as it were. In fact, Nietzsche contends, so profound was the Greeks’ sensitivity to life’s suffering that it was precisely in order to survive that their correspondingly intense impulse toward beauty arose.” (Ibid.)
“Apollo, the representative of the “primordial pleasure of mere appearance” (BT 49), is regarded by him as the divine sponsor of the “beautiful illusion” that makes life worth living. “The Olympian divine order of joy gradually evolved through the Apollonian impulse toward beauty, just as roses burst from thorny bushes” (BT 42-43). Speaking for himself, furthermore, Nietzsche apparently approves and endorses their aesthetic strategy: “I feel myself impelled to the metaphysical assumption that the truly existent primal unity, eternally suffering and contradictory, needs the rapturous vision, the pleasurable illusion, for its continuous redemption” (BT 45)” (Ibid.)
“The Ecstatic: […] We are really for a brief moment primordial being itself, one with the infinite primordial joy in existence. In spite of fear and pity, we are the happy living beings, not as individuals, but as the one living being, with whose creative joy we are united” (BT 104-5)” (Ibid.)
“Nietzsche’s earlier “metaphysical assumption that the truly existent primal unity [is] eternally suffering and contradictory” here seems to have been turned on its head, for he now seems inclined to a quite contrary metaphysical assumption: that the primal state of all existing beings is not suffering at all but ecstasy. By means of Dionysian art (most particularly music, especially Wagnerian music), we are enabled to gain access to this aboriginal ecstasy of existence; via its rituals we are enabled to go behind phenomena, to have direct access to their – to our own – metaphysical source. “In [Dionysian] song and dance man . . . feels himself a god, he himself now walks about enchanted, in ecstasy” (BT 37).” (Ibid.)
“[…] Nietzsche founds his analysis of the Dionysian upon the experience of intoxication, for if we examine ‘the blissful ecstasy that wells from the innermost depths of man, indeed of nature, at this collapse of the principium individuationis, we steal a glimpse into the nature of the Dionysian, which is brought home to us most intimately by the analogy of intoxication. Either under the influence of the narcotic draught, of which the songs of all primitive men and peoples speak, or with the potent coming of spring that penetrates all nature with joy, these Dionysian emotions awake, and as they grow in intensity everything subjective vanishes into complete self-forgetfulness.’ (BT 36)” (Ibid.)
“All too often it is apparent that in Nietzsche’s thinking the principle of individuation actually does collapse under the appropriate stimulus, that ecstasy is an authentic revelation of our innermost metaphysical depths. Dionysian ecstasy cannot be dismissed as merely phenomenal; Nietzsche is repeatedly insistent on the point that it reveals primal being as it is in itself, prior to individuation, behind individuation. All too briefly – but as a fact nonetheless, it seems – we become one with the One and are able to participate in its narcissistic, self-absorbed bliss.” (Ibid.)
“[…] the mystical intoxication of the Dionysian points toward a paradise of social and natural equality and harmony: Under the charm of the Dionysian not only is the union between man and man reaffirmed, but nature which has become alienated, hostile, or subjugated, celebrates once more her reconciliation with her lost son, man… Now the slave is a free man; now all the rigid hostile barriers that necessity, caprice, or have fixed between man and man are broken. Now, with the gospel of universal harmony, each one feels himself not only united, reconciled, and fused with his neighbour, but as one with him, as if the veil of maya had been torn aside… before the mysterious primordial unity. (BT 37)” (Ibid.)
“Gradually, however, in Nietzsche’s discussion, this earliest cultic brother hood of ecstatic revelers resolves into the satyr chorus, and it is at this second, more complex level of Dionysian ritual that Nietzsche offers an analysis more germane to his theme regarding the evolution of Greek tragedy. The birth of tragedy as an art form derived from the rituals of Dionysus and the stages of that derivation, point by point, from various known aspects of the cult constitute the most memorable novelty of Nietzsche’s essay.” (Ibid.)
“[…] it is sufficient merely to verify that the underlying thrust of Nietzsche’s interpretation is in accord with the ecstatic character of the Dionysian that we have thus far been concerned to examine. As an illustration of its implications for tragedy, we may take the following as characteristic: The Greek man of culture felt himself nullified in the presence of the satyric chorus; and this is the most immediate effect of the Dionysian tragedy, that the state and society and, quite generally, the gulfs between man and man give way to an overwhelming feeling of unity leading back to the very heart of nature. The metaphysical comfort – with which, I am suggesting even now, every true tragedy leaves us – that life is at the bottom of things, despite all the changes of appearances, indestructibly powerful and pleasurable – this comfort appears in incarnate clarity in the chorus of satyrs. (BT 59)” (Ibid.)
“[…] the I “succumbed to the self-oblivion of the Dionysian states” (BT 46) and “experienced the joy involved in the annihilation of the individual” (BT 104)” (Ibid.)
“As over against naive, bourgeois “cheerfulness” and simplistic affirmation of life, he was often in full agreement with his philosophical inspiration, Schopenhauer (as well as his admired father-figure, Richard Wagner, also inspired by Schopenhauer), that being was fundamentally a state of misery, from which art alone could distract – though not deliver – us.” (Ibid.)
“[…] On the other hand, […] – the Dionysian worldview – that was in every sense the denial, possibly even the overcoming, of Schopenhauer’s pessimism.” (Ibid.)
“In the later Preface to BT, he quotes Schopenhauer’s remark that “the world, that life, can never give real satisfaction and hence is not worthy of our affection: this constitutes the tragic spirit – it leads to resignation.” To which he responds, “How differently Dionysus spoke to me!” (BT 24).” (Ibid.)
“What the cult of Dionysus did reveal to Nietzsche and what is therefore starkly original in BT is his intuition – at least in those sections of BT analyzing the Dionysian – that Schopenhauer’s pessimistic analysis may finally apply only to our experience as phenomenal, separate, and thereby conflicting individuals, alienated from each other and our own “innermost depths.” Thus while conceding to Schopenhauer “the terror and horror of existence” as conventionally lived, therefore, he nevertheless for the first time envisions a path not merely of aesthetic anesthesis, but of metaphysical release from existential suffering. For in the phenomenology of the cult of Dionysus he seemed to have found concrete evidence that the choice between the sufferings of this world or the pleasurable illusions of art regarding another need not be humanity’s final and only option. Through scholarly consideration of the Dionysian festival he had been led to a quite opposite and vastly more positive assessment of “the primal unity” than Schopenhauer: the Dionysian ecstatic becomes “primordial being itself, one with the infinite primordial joy.” In the light of this datum perhaps not conflict and pain, but joy lies at the deepest foundation of being, beneath and behind all phenomenal suffer ing. In the ecstasy of intoxicated revelry many experience their deepest taste of it, and in the Dionysian cultus that experience is broadened and enhanced.” (Ibid.)
“Written in the mid-1880s, Nietzsche has done his best in Z [Zarathustra] to re-create the values of the antique god [Dionysus]: the prophet seeks to affirm life, the earth, and the passions of the body in the most classically accurate sense of the cultic Dionysus, god of nature’s fertility and bounty.” (Ibid.)
“”Life is a fountain of delight” (Z 223)” (Ibid.)
“For one who affirms life, furthermore, “all instincts are holy” (Z 102), and sensual pleasure is “free to free hearts, the earth’s garden-joy, an overflowing of thanks,” the “wine of wines” (Z 207). An initiate, therefore, “laughs at all tragedies” (Z 68); […]” (Ibid.)
“The implication of this ecstatic joy in the natural world is that humanity is no longer in need of “metaphysical comfort” in the form of the beautiful illusions of art in order to distract them from nature’s nightmare. On the contrary, the gospel of Zarathustra is that the world just as it exists is “perfect,” and we are encouraged to embrace it with the intensity of the sun; when experienced through the senses it is properly an occasion for dancing, singing, laughter, loving.” (Ibid.)
“[…] Dionysian joy was only available “at the bottom of things,” “behind phenomena,” in nature’s “inner depths” to which we must “fly back,” “not as individuals.”” (Ibid.)
“The first, Dionysus as representative of immediate and sensuous embrace of and joy in the flux of phenomena, which we termed the ecstatic Dionysian, is properly Dionysian in the Greek-historical sense, and may in that sense with the most justice be called Dionysian.” (Ibid.)
“Perhaps the most sophisticated effort to identify and plumb the deepest source of these fault-lines in Nietzsche’s philosophy may be found in Henry Staten’s Nietzsche’s Voice. Staten treats with special interest and acuity the strange dissociation between the outrageous cruelty so prominent in the later texts and the early Dionysian quest for ecstatic fusion with others (see especially his discussion in chapter 5, “Power and Pleasure”). Convincingly and with considerable textual support, he traces back the various strands of the Dionysian to their origins within the tectonic pressures of Nietzsche’s own personal being, some of which we noted above, concluding that “as Nietzsche recoils from the expansiveness of the Dionysian his pity becomes nausea, fear of contamination and violation of his being by the touch of those same masses of humanity whose suffering he feels so deeply; and he seeks to fortify himself by an affirmation of ascendant life that tends to become a celebration of isolation, cruelty, and appropriativeness.”2” (Ibid.)
“As Nietzsche/Dionysus himself stumbled, fell, and his mind was torn asunder on the dark streets of Turin in January 1889, did his mad faith – “Dionysus cut to pieces is a promise of life: it will . . . return again from destruction” (June 1888: WP 543) – inwardly require it as the precondition for his own subsequent rebirth in glory?” (Ibid.)
REFERENCE: Luyster, R. (2001). Nietzsche/Dionysus: Ecstasy, Heroism, and the Monstrous. Journal of Nietzsche Studies, (21), 1-26.
“Rootlessness, violence, the shattering and loss of all traditions, loneliness, mental decay, and illness—this is the inheritance from modernity in the West and in Westernized territories throughout the globe.” (Emmelhainz, 2020)
“Modernity also means the replacement of “society” and “community” by “mass society.” For Arendt, mass society is characterized by isolation and a lack of normal social relationships; as a result, consciousness of a common interest is absent.” (Ibid.)
“Under globalization, absolute capitalism, and the digitalization of communication, the lack of a world in common has led to the pervasive feeling, as Franco “Bifo” Berardi recently wrote, that entropy is expanding, vision is blurring, and private meaning is clouding and obstructing any possible path of escape from the current crisis of relationality, debt, automation, mental illness, and environmental devastation.4” (Ibid.)
“It is only now becoming evident that the systematic undoing of the social foundations of human relationships (or the world in common) occurs in parallel with the degradation of nervous cells, and that the destruction of the social tissue is inseparable from environmental damage. Climate change is in fact intimately tied to collective psychic collapse.” (Ibid.)
“For Hannah Arendt, the expansion of authoritarianism in Europe in the twentieth century stemmed from the alienation and loneliness brought about by the degradation of the world in common. In the twenty-first century, the continuing loss of a world in common and the crisis of relationality help explain the resurgence of fascisms and fundamentalisms across the world.” (Ibid.)
“For each user/citizen/consumer, the digital neoliberal capitalist order offers an individualized, tailor-made reality. This process occurs and repeats to the point that our “normal” now consists of living in a world in which we all have the right to retreat to our own private worlds of meaning, tailored by the algorithms of digital interfaces that constantly adapt to each user’s individual needs. The possibility of a world in common has been replaced by myriad niches for the private consumption of digitalized content.” (Ibid.)
“Clearly, representation—the dispositif that, via speech and action, enables appearance in the world in common, and also the human capacity for the creation and dissemination of shared meaning and traditions—has been hijacked by capitalism, authoritarianism, democracy, the internet, and spectacle.“ (Ibid.)
“An emphasis on the relational rather than on the moral would enable transformative encounters defined by exposure, availability, and vulnerability. Relationality and reciprocity also mean acknowledging that our medium-term survival depends not on the help of strangers or “foreign aid,” but on mutual aid. This means rejecting individual self-interest for an enlarged concern with the well-being of a community, including one’s territorial or nonhuman connections. We must embrace our duty to look after each other and ourselves.” (Ibid.)
“Instead of waiting for capitalism to fall apart around us, and in spite of us, we need to begin to act, taking our existence in our hands, inhabiting territories autonomously, but most of all: giving primacy to the power of togetherness. In this sense, we do not know yet what art made within a relational life-frame would look like: it has yet to be invented.” (Ibid.)
REFERENCE: Emmelhainz, I. (February 2020). Can We Share a World Beyond Representation? Available at: https://www.e-flux.com/journal/106/314167/can-we-share-a-world-beyond-representation/ [Accessed 26 March 2020].
ENGLISH TRANSLATION: “The sociologist Hartmut Rosa comments on Covid-19: “The virus is the most radical decelerator of our time”. The uncontrollable coronavirus unsettles humans all over the world, says the sociologist Hartmut Rosa. Yet, this crisis holds a chance. An interview. BY ELENA MATERA”
“Hartmut Rosa ist einer der führenden deutschen Soziologen und Zeitforscher. Er wurde bekannt mit seiner Theorie der modernen Beschleunigung.” (Matera, 2020)/ Hartmut Rosa is one of Germany’s leading sociologists and chronologists. He became known through his Theory of modern Acceleration.
“Das Virus ist der radikalste Entschleuniger, den wir in den letzten 200 Jahren erlebt haben. Es gab immer mal wieder solche Momente, etwa nach dem 11. September oder nach dem Vulkanausbruch in Island. Da wurde vorübergehend der Luftverkehr eingestellt. Das waren partielle Entschleunigungen, das öffentliche Leben war nicht betroffen.” (Ibid.)/ The virus is the most radical decelerator that we have witnessed in the past 200 years. There have been similar moments, for example the volcanic eruption in Island after 9/11. As a consequence, the local air traffic was cancelled for a short amount of time. However, those were times of partial deceleration, public life was not affected.
“Jetzt gibt es diese Ungewissheit, dass der Laden vielleicht morgen zu hat. Wir machen die Erfahrung, dass eben nicht alles verfügbar ist und wir müssen jetzt lernen, damit umzugehen. Aber wir sind zurzeit immer noch in dem Modus, den wir gewohnt sind.” (Ibid.)/ Now there is this uncertainty that tomorrow the shops may be closed. We are experiencing that everything is not always available and we have to learn how to deal with that. However, we are still in the mode that we are used to at the moment.
“Man könnte es als Hamsterradmodus bezeichnen, in dem wir immerzu die To-Do-Listen abarbeiten müssen. Und dieser Habitus mit „Ich muss nochmal schnell dahin, ich muss nochmal schnell dorthin“, den können wir in dieser Krise physisch nicht mehr ausleben, digital aber schon. Wir sagen: Ich muss hier was posten und dort, was sagen eigentlich die Nachrichten, die Statistiken. Wir beschleunigen weiter in der digitalen Welt, sogar verstärkt.” (Ibid.)/ One can call it the mode of being in a hamster wheel, in which we constantly have to tick off things on our to-do lists. These habits of spontaneously and quickly going somewhere can’t be realised anymore. However, digitally they can be. We say: I have to post something, what do the news say, what the statistics. We keep accelerating in the digital world, even increasingly so.
“Wie wirkt sich diese Verschiebung der Beschleunigung in die digitale Welt aus? Fehlt auf Dauer nicht der Kontakt zu anderen Menschen?
Das würde ich schon sagen. Die große Frage ist: Können Videokonferenzen oder soziale Medien reale Kontakte ersetzen? Ich glaube, es ist wichtig, solche Möglichkeiten zu haben. Aber diese Art der Kommunikation scheint nicht die gleiche Qualität zu haben wie physische Kontakte.” (Ibid.)/ What impact does the shift of acceleration towards the digital world have? Will the contact to other humans not be missed? I would say it will be. The question is: Can video conferences or social media replace real contacts? I believe it is important to have these possibilities. However, this way of communication does not seem to have the same quality as physical contacts.
“Es gibt zwei Möglichkeiten. Die eine ist: Alles wieder in Kontrolle zu bringen, in alle sozialen Medien flüchten. Hier was posten und dort was posten. Das ist das, was wir normalerweise tun: kontrollieren, verfügen, optimieren. Der zweite Modus ist, dass wir wieder auf uns und auf die Welt hören.” (Ibid.)/ There are two possibilities. One is to bring everything back under control, to take refuge in social media, to upload something. That’s what we normally do: control, have at demand, optimise. The second mode is, that we listen to ourselves and the world again.
“Ich glaube, wir sollten individuell und kollektiv versuchen, in diesen zweiten Modus zu kommen. […]Es kann eine Chance sein, dass dadurch neue Muster des Zusammenseins entstehen. Ein Beispiel ist das Musizieren auf den Balkonen, wie es in Italien stattfindet. Wir finden eine neue Weise des In-der-Welt-Seins. In der gesellschaftlichen Krisensituation liegt daher vielleicht auch eine Chance.” (Ibid.)/ I believe we should individually and collectively try and get into the second mode. […]It can be a chance for new ways of togetherness. One example is making music on balconies as it is happening in Italy. We are finding a new way of being in the world. This societal crisis may offer a chance.
“Plötzlich guckt man intensiv aus dem Fenster und sieht die ersten Blüten oder man nimmt die Nachbarn wieder intensiv wahr. Ich nenne das Resonanz, ein Modus des Hörens und Antwortens. Meine Hoffnung, dass es vielleicht auch ein Moment des kollektiven Innehaltens sein kann und wir jetzt über die Art und Weise nachdenken, wie wir uns in der Welt bewegen.” (Ibid.)/ Suddenly people are looking out their windows, they are watching flowers blossoming or are noticing their neighbours. I call it resonance, a mode of listening and responding. My hope is that this may be a moment of collective pause and that we think about how we move in this world.
REFERENCE: Rosa, H. (24 March 2020). “Das Virus ist der radikalste Entschleuniger unserer Zeit”. Available at: https://www.tagesspiegel.de/politik/soziologe-hartmut-rosa-ueber-covid-19-das-virus-ist-der-radikalste-entschleuniger-unserer-zeit/25672128.html [Accessed 27 March 2020].
The question is: Can video conferences and social media replace real contacts? This shall be the question of this dissertation. Video calls are the prime way of getting in contact with others in times of social distancing and isolation. How are they experienced? How do they differ from face-to-face encounters? Can the virtual replace the real? If so, how? If not, why not? What is lacking to simulate real life encounters?
Is there a disconnect between virtuality and corpo-reality? If so, what makes the disconnect?
“[…]Thus, there is a tension between our material, physical, corporeal mode of existence—which is temporary and subjected to time—and our inscription into cultural archives that are, even if they are also material, much more stable than our own bodies.” (Groys, 2013)
“Indeed, the internet has transformed the museum in the same way that photography and cinema transformed painting and sculpture. Photography made the mimetic function of the traditional arts obsolete, and thus pushed these arts in a different—actually opposite—direction. Instead of reproducing and representing images of nature, art came to dissolve, deconstruct, and transform these images. The attention thus shifted from the image itself to the analysis of image production and presentation. Similarly, the internet made the museum’s function of representing art history obsolete. Of course, in the case of the internet, spectators lose direct access to the original artworks—and thus the aura of authenticity gets lost. And so museum visitors are invited to undertake a pilgrimage to art museums in search of the Holy Grail of originality and authenticity.” (Ibid.)
Can the notion of aura be captured in virtual space?
“At this point, however, one has to be reminded that according to Walter Benjamin, who originally introduced the notion of aura, artworks lost their aura precisely through their museumification. The museum already removes art objects from their original sites of inscription in the historical here and now. Thus for Benjamin, artworks that are exhibited in museums are already copies of themselves—devoid of their original aura of authenticity. In this sense, the internet, and its art-specialized websites, merely continue the process of the de-auratization of art started by art museums. Many cultural critics have therefore expected—and still expect—that public art museums will ultimately disappear, unable to compete economically with private collectors operating on the increasingly expensive art market, and be replaced by much cheaper, more accessible virtual, digitized archives.” (Ibid.)
What if public art museums will disappear and are replaced by virtual museums? For what reasons do you visit public art museums? Will you visit museums virtually? Are you visiting museums and exhibitions virtually at the moment? Are these virtual museum visits really more accessible? They surely are for some who have otherwise been neglected by society (those who have physical disabilities and those who weren’t able to afford entrance fees or were intimidated by that very aura of an art or cultural institution). However, these virtual services are not accessible from every phone. Even with one of the newest iPhones, some virtual reality experiences cannot be accessed.
“The moods of quarantine are fickle, as we’re all learning. One minute you might be longing to galavant in the great outdoors, and the next, you’re wondering when you’ll be able to return to the crowded halls of a great museum. And if you’re one of those art-worlders who never miss a gala, let alone an opening, the next few weeks may feel nothing short of deflating.” (White, 2020)
“Thankfully, digital art experiences—from Google’s dazzling Arts & Culture platform to 360-degree displays of gallery exhibitions—can carry us away from our humble abodes (which may feel increasingly claustrophobic) and out into the wider world.” (Ibid.)
Where is the body in a virtual experience? Are these experiences really experiences when the body stays on the same spot and in the same position while on these “trips”?
“You can choose between a two-hour video recording, accompanied by Buddhist chants and flickering candlelight, or a self-guided virtual tour of the space, where you can take time to learn about the individual objects inside.” (Ibid.)
“Bust out a bottle of wine, video chat some friends, and head out on a simulated gallery crawl of New York, London, or Berlin, via the Artland or Eazel platforms, which offer 3D tours of gallery exhibitions. If you’re feeling ambitious, why not tour the galleries of a city you’ve never visited? Copenhagen and Seoul both have lots of offerings.” (Ibid.)
“Though it may be a while before any of us can see Italy’s many famed cultural sites in person, for now, we can visit them on our laptops. In the north of Italy, several museums have undertaken bold online initiatives. Turin’s Castello di Rivoli has released digital tours and related videos for three just-opened (then abruptly closed) exhibitions. Similarly, the contemporary art hub Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo has undertaken a series of new online tours and social-media initiatives.” (Ibid.)
“And in Rome, the seriousness of the lockdown was underscored by the Vatican’s announcement that Easter mass would be celebrated by the pontiff—but without a public audience. For those longing to see the rich treasures of the Holy See, the Vatican Museum offers virtual tours, and this may be your one shot for an uncrowded peek at the Sistine Ceiling.” (Ibid.)
“The Louvre has three of its own virtual tours, including one of the remains of the museum’s moat (from the era of Louvre’s former life as a fortress), a tour of the Galerie d’Apollon, and as well as a “walkable” scroll through the Ancient Egyptian wing, where you can stop and marvel at sphinxes and mummies.” (Ibid.)
REFERENCE: White, K. (23 March 2020). 9 Dazzling Virtual Art Experiences You Can Have From the Comfort of Your Home, Including a Memorable Trip to the Sistine Chapel. Available at: https://news.artnet.com/art-world/virtual-art-experiences-1809261 [Accessed 27 March 2020].
“Nowadays, one speaks time and again about the theatralization of the museum. Indeed, in our time people come to exhibition openings in the same way as they went to opera and theater premieres in the past. This theatralization of the museum is often criticized because it might be seen as a sign of the museum’s involvement in the contemporary entertainment industry. However, there is a crucial difference between the installation space and the theatrical space. In the theater, spectators remain in an outside position vis-à-vis the stage, but in the museum they enter the stage, and find themselves inside the spectacle.” (Groys, 2013)
“Thus, the contemporary museum realizes the modernist dream that the theater itself was never able to fully realize—of a theater in which there is no clear boundary between the stage and the space of the audience. Even if Wagner speaks about the Gesamtkunstwerk as an event that erases the border between stage and audience, the Festspielhaus in Bayreuth that was built under the direction of Wagner did not erase this border but, rather, radicalized it. Contemporary theater, including Bayreuth, uses more and more art, especially contemporary art, on stage—but it still does not erase the difference between stage and audience.” (Ibid.)
Can virtual space erase the border between audience and stage, that exists for example in theatres? Does the borderless immateriality of the internet offer inclusive new experiences of performance?
“The same can be said about mass entertainment. A pop concert or a film screening creates communities among those in attendance. However, mass culture itself cannot make these communities self-reflective—cannot thematize the event of building these transitory, precarious, contingent communities. The perspective of the audience during a pop concert or movie screening is too forward-directed—to the stage or screen—for them to adequately perceive and reflect upon the space in which they find themselves, or the communities to which they temporarily belong.” (Ibid.)
“To borrow Marshall McLuhan’s vocabulary, the medium of installation is a cool medium—unlike the internet, which is obviously a hot medium, because it requires users to be spatially separated and to concentrate their attention on a screen. By cooling down all other media, contemporary art installation offers visitors the possibility of self-reflection—and of reflection upon the immediate event of their coexistence with other visitors and exhibited objects—that other media are unable to offer to the same degree. Here, individual human beings are confronted with their common fate—with the radically contingent, transitory, precarious conditions of their existence.” (Ibid.)
“Traditionally, the artist produced an artwork in his or her studio, hidden from public view, and then exhibited a result, a product—an artwork that accumulated and recuperated the time of absence. This time of temporary absence is constitutive for what we call the creative process—in fact, it is precisely what we call the creative process.” (Ibid.)
With the global omnipresence of smart devices used for documentation (/self-surveillance) and sharing, can time ever be absent? The absence of time is what enables ecstasy to befall us. Can we ever lose ourselves in a feeling of collective ecstasy with the internet existing and reminding us of the past, present and future at once and always?
“However, the internet and the computer in general are collective, observable, surveillable working places. We tend to speak about the internet in terms of an infinite data flow that transcends the limits of our control. But, in fact, the internet is a machine to stop and reverse data flow. […]The internet is, in its essence, a machine of surveillance. It divides the flow of data into small, traceable, and reversible operations, thus exposing every user to surveillance—real or potential. The internet creates a field of total visibility, accessibility, and transparency.” (Ibid.)
“If the public follows my activity all the time, then I do not need to present it with any product. The process is already the product.” (Ibid.)
“[…] if the internet takes over the role of the museum as the place of memory—because the internet records and documents the activities of the artist even before his or her work is brought into the museum—what is the goal of the museum today?” (Ibid.)
“The documentation of an event always produces nostalgia for a missed presence, a missed opportunity. It does not erase the difference between past and present, as reproduction tends to; instead, it makes the gap between past and present obvious […]” (Ibid.)
“However, when the museum begins to function as a chain of events, the configuration of gazes changes. The visitor loses his or her sovereignty in a very obvious way. The visitor is placed inside an event and cannot meet the gaze of a camera that documents this event—nor the secondary gaze of the editor that does the postproduction work on this document, nor the gaze of a later spectator of this document. That is why, by visiting contemporary museum exhibitions, we are confronted with the irreversibility of time—we know that these exhibitions are merely temporary. If we visit the same museum after a certain amount of time, the only things that will remain will be documents: a catalogue, or a film, or a website. But what these things offer us is necessarily incommensurable with our own experience because our perspective, our gaze is asymmetrical with the gaze of a camera—and these gazes cannot coincide, as they could in the case of documenting an opera or a ballet.” (Ibid.)
REFERENCE: Groys, B. (2013). Entering the Flow: Museum between Archive and Gesamtkunstwerk. Available at: https://www.e-flux.com/journal/50/59974/entering-the-flow-museum-between-archive-and-gesamtkunstwerk/ [Accessed 27 March 2020].
But, where is the body?
Virtual museum visits are not just documentations of past or present events. They are designed to be “active”, paradoxically real-time, but pre-recorded experiences of physical places that are out of reach or elsewhere than the body. Is our gaze the same as when we visit the museum physically? What else is there apart from the gaze? The other senses like smell, touch, feel and taste are neglected. How can virtuality be asymmetrical with reality? Can it ever?
Brief Introduction of Virtual Reality & its Challenges by Sharmistha Mandal (2013)
“Abstract— Virtual reality (VR) is a technology which allows a user to interact with a computer-simulated environment, whether that environment is a simulation of the real world or an imaginary world. It is the key to experiencing, feeling and touching the past, present and the future. It is the medium of creating our own world, our own customized reality. It could range from creating a video game to having a virtual stroll around the universe, from walking through our own dream house to experiencing a walk on an alien planet. With virtual reality, we can experience the most intimidating and gruelling situations by playing safe and with a learning perspective. Very few people, however, really know what VR is, what its basic principles and its open problems are.” (Mandal, 2013)
“[…] It allows to see the surrounding world in other dimension and to experience things that are not accessible in real life or even not yet created.”
“Most virtual reality environments are primarily visual experiences, displayed either on a computer screen or through special stereoscopic displays. Virtual reality may also include au- ditory stimulation through speakers or headphones. Users can interact with the virtual environment through the use of de- vices such as a keyboard, a mouse, or a wired glove.” (Ibid.)
“The majority of historical examples are visual and to a lesser extent, auditory. This is because of all the human senses, vision provides by far the most information followed by hearing. Probably 90 per cent of our perception of the world is visual or auditory.” (Ibid.)
“The main difference between VR systems and traditional media (such as radio, television) lies in three dimensionality of Virtual Reality structure. Immersion, presence and interactivity are peculiar features of Virtual reality that draw it away from other representational technologies. Virtual reality does not imitate real reality, nor does it have a representational function.” (Ibid.)
“Virtual Reality (VR) and Virtual Environments (VE) are used in computer community interchangeably. These terms are the most popular and most often used, but there are many other […]:
• “Real-time interactive graphics with three-dimensional models, combined with a display technology that gives the user the immersion in the model world and direct manipulation, we call virtual environments.” [Fuch92] […]
• “The illusion of participation in a synthetic environment rather than external observation of such an environment. VR relies on a three-dimensional, stereoscopic head-tracker displays, hand/body tracking and binaural sound. VR is an immersive, multi-sensory experience.” [Giga93a]
• “Computer simulations that use 3D graphics and devices such as the DataGlove to allow the user to interact with the simulation.” [Jarg95]
• “Virtual reality refers to immersive, interactive, multi-sensory, viewer-centered, three dimensional computer generated environments and the combination of technologies required to build these environments.” [Cruz93a]
• “Virtual reality lets you navigate and view a world of three dimensions in real time, with six degrees of freedom. (…) In essence, virtual reality is clone of physical reality.” [Schw95]” (Ibid.)
“In a virtual environment system a computer generates sensory impressions that are delivered to the human senses. The type and the quality of these impressions determine the level of immersion and the feeling of presence in VR. Ideally the high-resolution, high-quality and consistent over all the displays, information should be presented to all of the user’s senses [Slat94].” (Ibid.)
“Many applications stimulate only one or a few of the senses, very often with low-quality and unsynchronized information.” (Ibid.)
REFERENCE: Mandal, S. (2013). Brief Introduction of Virtual Reality & its Challenges. Available at: https://www.ijser.org/researchpaper/Brief-Introduction-of-Virtual-Reality-its-Challenges.pdf [Accessed 27 March 2020].
definition of “virtual” by Cambridge Dictionary: “Something that is virtual can be done or seen using a computer and therefore without going anywhere or talking to anyone: e.g. virtual shopping. Almost, but not exactly or in every way. [Before noun] almost complete. Internet, IT: used to describe something that can be done or seen using computers or the internet instead of going to a place, meeting people in person.”
REFERENCE: Cambridge Dictionary. Available at: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/virtual [Accessed 27 March 2020].
definition of “social” by Cambridge Dictionary: “[…] relating to activities in which you meet and spend time with other people and that happen during the time when you are not working. Social people like to meet and spend time with other people. social (adjective) Society: relating to society and living together in an organized way. An occasion when the members of a group or organization meet informally to enjoy themselves. Related to meeting and spending time with other people for pleasure. Relating to activities in which you meet and spend time with other people and to your ability to be friendly with others. An event where people can meet and enjoy themselves.“
REFERENCE: Cambridge Dictionary. Available at: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/social [Accessed 27 March 2020].
After the Cambridge Dictionary, “virtual” before a noun means “almost complete”. So, can a virtual reality; an almost complete reality, really replace reality? Can a virtual social replace the real, in person social? Which aspects make in person activities real? What gives reality quality? Its unpredictability? It’s potentiality? Its potential for the extremes? Himmelhoch jauchzend or zum Tode betrübt? Is reality on a scale between the uncontrollable potential of ecstasy and tragedy and is the sensation of that scale the preferred way of life? A Nietzschean way, or virtually never reaching either, but always living in the potential of their reach? Although, we can of course experience ecstasy and tragedy online.
“Beyond digital dualism: In the context of computer and Internet technology, “online” and “offline” have specific meanings: “online” indicates a state of connectivity, while “offline” is a disconnected state. Online versus offline has become contentious. A “disconnectionist movement” has formed, encouraging Internet users to regularly “go offline,” “unplug,” and “disconnect to reconnect.” Meanwhile, privacy experts point out that it has become almost impossible to go offline in the strict sense of the term, and in the academic discourse, the term “digital dualism” criticizes the assumption that the Internet is a virtual space separate and opposed to the physical and face-to-face.” (Genner, 2017: 178)
“1. Is Being Offline More Real?” (Ibid., 178)
“”I am saturated in digital life and I want to return to the actual world again.”812 Sullivan implies in his statement that “the actual world” is more real than his “digital life.” To describe this kind of thinking, Internet scholar Nathan Jurgenson coined the term “digital dualism” in a number of publications, one of which is called The IRL Fetish.813 IRL refers to the common abbreviation for “in real life” when referring to “off the Internet” or “offline.” In later publications, Jurgenson considers “online” and “IRL” a false dichotomy. He writes, “Digital dualism is forgetting how real, embodied, and material digitality is as well as forgetting how virtual and technologically mediated bodies, materiality, and the rest of reality always are. None of this is to say, e.g., gchatting and meeting at a coffee shop are the same thing; that is the most common and unimpressive misunderstanding of this critique.”814″ (Ibid., f)
“Jurgenson argues against the glorification of the offline that underlies the rhetoric of many “disconnectionists” and those who use their philosophy for promotion and advertising reasons,816 such as digital detox retreats that advertise with claims such as “Life is what’s happening when you put your phone away.”817 Jurgenson calls out “disconnectionists” on their conflation of “the unreal” and “the real” with the use of the Internet or lack thereof respectively, and refers to research on performance and performativity by sociologist Erving Goffman in the 1950s and philosopher Judith Butler in the 1990s. Goffman and Butler, among other scholars, argued for an understanding of the self as “performed” and “constructed” as opposed to the traditional discourse about a “natural” and “real” self. If we “perform” in our everyday life, and we do so online as well, the distinction between online versus offline identities becomes itself somewhat constructed.818 Jurgenson eloquently describes the blurring boundaries between online and offline and the problem with the terms themselves: “Any zero-sum ‘on’ and ‘offline’ digital dualism betrays the reality of devices and bodies working together, always intersecting and overlapping, to construct, maintain, and destroy intimacy, pleasure, and other social bonds.”819″ (Ibid., 179)
“In his critique of the “disconnectionst movement,” Jurgenson does not take into account that encouraging temporary “unplugging” at night or on the weekend does not necessarily mean that advocates claim that people are more “real” and “authentic” when they are “off.” The rea- sons why people go online and offline are so intertwined in intention and situation that focusing solely or primarily on technology fails to acknowledge the context of connectivity or other under- lying issues. Seeing the personal value in being disconnected from work-related email for a week- end or a vacation (and calling this “going offline”) does not mean that one finds digital navigation, private messages, or online news to be inherently harmful or taboo, or that someone con- siders themselves “more real” because they are disconnected from their emails or social media accounts. Additionally, the idea that the offline is more authentic is not without any support: for example, face-to-face communication generally provides more contextual non-verbal and paraverbal aspects than digital communication, which possibly increases the authentic feel.” (Ibid.)
“MIT professor Turkle states in Alone Together how hard it was for today’s youth to learn social and emotional skills if hyper-connectivity gets in the way with stillness and time to discover their feelings. She says, “Today’s adolescents have no less need than those of previous genera- tions to learn empathetic skills, to think about their values and identity, and to manage and ex- press feelings. They need time to discover themselves, time to think. But technology, put in the service of always-on communication and telegraphic speed and brevity, has changed the rules of engagement with all of this. When is downtime, when is stillness? The text-driven world of rapid response does not make self-reflection impossible but it does little to cultivate it.”780 By favoring offline self-reflection over online self-reflection, Turkle may have fallen prey to the common assumption of digital dualism (chapter Beyond Digital Dualism). No current research shows that highly connected youth are per se negatively influenced in their identity development and social skills. ON/OFF expert Silvia Kölliker maintains that it is not necessarily about unplugging, it is generally about a more careful relationship with oneself: “Mindfulness is getting more attention. […]” (Ibid., 169)
“Mediatization theories claim that the possibility of being always on leads to significant cultural and social changes. A major concern regarding hyper-connectivity is the impact on social relationships.271” (Ibid., 68)
REFERENCE: Genner, Sarah. (2017). ON |OFF : Risks and rewards of the anytime-anywhere internet. Available at: https://digitalcollection.zhaw.ch/handle/11475/1857 [Accessed 19 March 2020].
“1. A pandemic isn’t a collection of viruses, but is a social relation among people, mediated by viruses.
Nothing is inevitable, inescapable, or immutable about the coronavirus pandemic unfolding everywhere around us, simply because the pandemic is social. The endless posts and announcements marshalling us to help “flatten the curve” are at least enough to make clear that the historical consequences and human costs of the pandemic entirely depend on the ways we collectively choose to live in relation to it. Because the pandemic doesn’t simply happen to us but is instead something we partake in, a first step forward in these times is to refuse to curtail our thinking to how each of our individual lives may be particularly impacted by the virus and to begin to contemplate the potential we collectively share to change the course of the pandemic as well as to shape the new society that emerges from it.“ (Paul, 2020)
“5. Our networks of care and solidarity necessarily must begin from the specificities and immediacies of the situations we live within, but rapidly must multiply their bonds with diffuse and diverse communities.
No life ever lives truly alone, and no act of individuation or privation can ever alter the fact that every life constitutively depends upon innumerable other lives. As such, truly caring for ourselves and for those with whom we share intimate ties effectively necessitates implementing care for everyone. Over the next months, we should inventively and imaginatively practice social distancing in ways that cultivate and proliferate, not diminish, social solidarity. If we must practically begin by organizing care for those who are already proximate and intimate—for ourselves, our families, friends, neighbors, and loved ones—then part of that effort necessarily implies continuously expanding the organization and coordination of care to whatever scales are required. These inclusive and open modes of care must escape the logic of the state and the market by constituting themselves on the basis of diverse yet common precarities and interdependencies.” (Ibid.)
REFERENCE: Paul, I. A. (2020). Ten Premises for a Pandemic. Available at: https://www.ianalanpaul.com/ten-premises-for-a-pandemic/ Translations: Português (Link) Italiano (Link) Ελληνικά (Link). [Accessed 30 March 2020].
“Why is social distancing so hard for some people to come to terms with? The answer lies in the first part of that now-ubiquitous phrase, said Liz Higgins, a family therapist and founder of Millennial Life Counseling in Dallas. “We are social beings. We’re made to connect,” she said. “It is a physiological experience for us to want and crave interaction with others. What we are being asked to do during this time, in essence, goes against our entire makeup: Certainly, digital connecting can meet some of this need, but not completely.”” […] Find ways to maintain a sense of normalcy by using technology, including video conferencing apps. The New York Times reported that nearly 600,000 people downloaded Zoom on Sunday alone.” (Wong, 2020)
REFERENCE: Wong, B. (21 March 2020). Why You Shouldn’t Go To Your Friend’s House While Social Distancing. Available at: https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/dont-visit-friends-social-distancing_l_5e7539b1c5b6eab77948423b [Accessed 30 March 2020].
“Isolated Together
Right now, except for health care providers and other essential workers, we need to be keeping apart to starve the virus of new hosts. That act of “social distancing” is the most basic act of social solidarity. As even the first real week of attempted mass self-isolation in New York shows, this is hard. Humans are naturally gregarious animals; we define ourselves by our social interactions. It is not for nothing that “solitary confinement” is considered a particularly cruel form of punishment.” (Davis, 2020)
“The Technology of Isolation
When the “social distancing” edict arrived, I’m sure that I am not the only one who was comforted by the first, naïve thought: well, this won’t be that different than my ordinary life.
How much time do I already spend reading on the web or otherwise, or streaming TV, or playing video games? How much of my knowledge of my peer group is filtered through social media? How much of my work as a writer can be done from home? A lot!
The “digital divide” in internet access is very real, and more cruelly felt than ever right now. Still, the culture industries have been preparing its core consumers for our new shut-in life for some time. Americans had already been going out less. They had also been spending staggering amounts of time with screens—about half the waking day. Young people are going out to date less, going to parties less, having sex less, drinking less—pretty much everything less except spending time with screens.” (Ibid.)
“Anti-Social Media
What kind of culture makes us feel sustained and whole, rather than furthering feelings of isolation and angst?
That’s actually a non-trivial question right now, because so much depends on pulling off the trick of sustaining lots of people through an extended period of being cut off from their communities.
If the mandatory “social distancing” regime appears likely to dramatically extend the pre-existing trend of cultural life migrating into mediated spaces, it will also be felt as a dramatic ratification of another trend: the so-called “loneliness epidemic,” with more and more people saying that they feel left out and alienated.
Just how much of the recent (pre-corona) spike in depression and anxiety is directly attributable to technology, and how much to the hyper-competitive and unstable capitalist world that technology is embedded in, is worth debating. What’s clear, however, is that the tools that make social connection and diversion easier can also make people feel more disconnected and alienated.” (Ibid.)
“Binge watching and video gaming offer ready worlds to vanish into. Apart from serving as entertainment, such immersion in media can be a form of coping, a way to block out thoughts of outside reality.
Yet precisely because streaming TV or video games can be so absorbing, both have the potential to foster a sense of being cut off from others as well, if consumed to excess. In both cases, researchers talk seriously of potential addiction, which both thrives in people who are isolated and further intensifies feelings of isolation, in a spiral—a real danger, one would think, right now.“ (Ibid.)
“Why, I ask myself, do I find most of the virtual museum tours available online so disheartening? I roam the halls of the virtual Uffizi or the virtual Met in the Google Art Project and find it good for a few clicks worth of novelty and not much more. I find it hard to imagine such experiences giving anyone much lasting comfort, unless they are studying for a test.
I find they make me feel a lack instead of filling a lack.
We tend to think of the ideal imaginary type of museum experience as solitary—the solo pilgrim going to be inspired by art. Yet in this period of enforced solitude, the paradox is that this way of valuing art is probably the least likely to lend itself to remote simulation.
Leaving your everyday space and going somewhere special is part of the point of that kind of experience (and one we’ll probably all appreciate more when we are through this).” (Ibid.)
“The more common reason people visit a museum is social, as a prop for being together, as a sort of puzzle to figure out with friends or companions. Art is, at its most stripped down level, something that people like to talk about—a kind of symbolic currency people pass between one another, a bank of images to give a shape to shared meaning.
And while we can’t literally be together just now, our hyper-mediated tools do offer ways to tap into these social parts of art experience.
For culture to do its most nourishing work in helping us through this difficult time, we need to shake the idea that it is about the isolated consumption of images. Consuming culture passively mirrors a sense of helplessness and atomization.
Maybe realizing that mission looks as simple as the example of all the virtual discussion groups, virtual study sessions, virtual film clubs that are springing up now, where you can turn isolated experiences into more shared ones about how it feels to try and make sense of the world right now, amid a plague.” (Ibid.)
REFERENCE: Davis, B. (23 March 2020). How We Should Reimagine Art’s Mission in the Time of ‘Social Distancing’. Available at: https://news.artnet.com/opinion/social-distancing-art-1810029 [Accessed 30 March 2020].
“”Houseparty is uncanny to the act of going to an art opening,” said James Michael Cardoso Shaeffer, the director of Greene Naftali, the Chelsea gallery. “Out of curiosity, or necessity, you open the app much like you may begrudgingly, or out of habit, go to an art opening. Once ‘in,’ you are immediately confronted with nonconsensual interactions you may or may not want to engage with. The social anxiety is the same, the platform is different. Amazing that technology offers us continued practice on how to cleverly leave a conversation.”” (Freeman, 2020)
“”I kind of love and hate Houseparty,” said the art advisor Daniel Oglander. “It affords one the ability to stay in contact with colleagues and friends, but always reminds me of what I’m missing after the call is over.” “Human contact is irreplaceable,” he added. “And I miss hugs, damn it.”” (Ibid.)
REFERENCE: Freeman, N. (25 March 2020). Zoom Is for Normies. Here’s Why the Whole Art World Is Getting Together on the Chaotic, Anything-Goes Video Chat App Houseparty. Available at: https://news.artnet.com/art-world/houseparty-app-1814391 [Accessed 30 March 2020].
“Between the fever and the anxiety, I thought to myself that the parameters of organized social behavior had changed forever and could no longer be modified. I felt that with such conviction that it pierced my chest, even as my breathing became easier. Everything will forever retain the new shape that things had taken. From now on, we would have access to ever more excessive forms of digital consumption, but our bodies, our physical organisms, would be deprived of all contact and of all vitality. The mutation would manifest as a crystallization of organic life, as a digitization of work and consumption and as a dematerialization of desire.” (Preciado, 2020)
REFERENCE: Preciado, P. B. (26 March 2020). The Losers Conspiracy. Available at: https://www.artforum.com/slant/the-losers-conspiracy-82586?dm_i=56G9,6LDS,1BOD6L,OWE8,1 [Accessed 30 March 2020].
PRE-CORONA: A LOT OF PEOPLE REPLACE PHYSICAL CONNECTION WITH VIRTUAL CONNECTION.
PERI-CORONA: A LOT OF PEOPLE REPLACE PHYSICAL CONNECTION WITH VIRTUAL CONNECTION.
POST-CORONA: A LOT OF PEOPLE REPLACE VIRTUAL CONNECTION WITH PHYSICAL CONNECTION?
“[…] a generation shaped by the smartphone and by the concomitant rise of social media. I call them iGen. Born between 1995 and 2012, members of this generation are growing up with smartphones, have an Instagram account before they start high school, and do not remember a time before the internet. The Millennials grew up with the web as well, but it wasn’t ever-present in their lives, at hand at all times, day and night. iGen’s oldest members were early adolescents when the iPhone was introduced, in 2007, and high-school students when the iPad entered the scene, in 2010. A 2017 survey of more than 5,000 American teens found that three out of four owned an iPhone.” (Twenge, 2017)
“The advent of the smartphone and its cousin the tablet was followed quickly by hand-wringing about the deleterious effects of “screen time.” But the impact of these devices has not been fully appreciated, and goes far beyond the usual concerns about curtailed attention spans. The arrival of the smartphone has radically changed every aspect of teenagers’ lives, from the nature of their social interactions to their mental health. These changes have affected young people in every corner of the nation and in every type of household. The trends appear among teens poor and rich; of every ethnic background; in cities, suburbs, and small towns. Where there are cell towers, there are teens living their lives on their smartphone.” (Ibid.)
“It’s not an exaggeration to describe iGen as being on the brink of the worst mental-health crisis in decades. Much of this deterioration can be traced to their phones.” (Ibid.)
“[…] the twin rise of the smartphone and social media has caused an earthquake of a magnitude we’ve not seen in a very long time, if ever. There is compelling evidence that the devices we’ve placed in young people’s hands are having profound effects on their lives—and making them seriously unhappy.” (Ibid.)
“Today’s teens are also less likely to date. The initial stage of courtship, which Gen Xers called “liking” (as in “Ooh, he likes you!”), kids now call “talking”—an ironic choice for a generation that prefers texting to actual conversation. After two teens have “talked” for a while, they might start dating. But only about 56 percent of high-school seniors in 2015 went out on dates; for Boomers and Gen Xers, the number was about 85 percent.” (Ibid.)
“[…] their social life is lived on their phone. They don’t need to leave home to spend time with their friends.” (Ibid.)
“[…] iGen teens have more leisure time than Gen X teens did, not less. So what are they doing with all that time? They are on their phone, in their room, alone and often distressed.” (Ibid.)
“[…] She spent much of her summer keeping up with friends, but nearly all of it was over text or Snapchat. “I’ve been on my phone more than I’ve been with actual people,” she said. “My bed has, like, an imprint of my body.”” (Ibid.)
“The number of teens who get together with their friends nearly every day dropped by more than 40 percent from 2000 to 2015; the decline has been especially steep recently. […] they’ve [teens at parties] all been replaced by virtual spaces accessed through apps and the web.” (Ibid.)
“You might expect that teens spend so much time in these new spaces because it makes them happy, but most data suggest that it does not. The Monitoring the Future survey, funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse and designed to be nationally representative, has asked 12th-graders more than 1,000 questions every year since 1975 and queried eighth- and 10th-graders since 1991. The survey asks teens how happy they are and also how much of their leisure time they spend on various activities, including nonscreen activities such as in-person social interaction and exercise, and, in recent years, screen activities such as using social media, texting, and browsing the web. The results could not be clearer: Teens who spend more time than average on screen activities are more likely to be unhappy, and those who spend more time than average on nonscreen activities are more likely to be happy.” (Ibid.)
“There’s not a single exception. All screen activities are linked to less happiness, and all nonscreen activities are linked to more happiness. […] But those who spend six to nine hours a week on social media are still 47 percent more likely to say they are unhappy than those who use social media even less. The opposite is true of in-person interactions. Those who spend an above-average amount of time with their friends in person are 20 percent less likely to say they’re unhappy than those who hang out for a below-average amount of time.” (Ibid.)
“If you were going to give advice for a happy adolescence based on this survey, it would be straightforward: Put down the phone, turn off the laptop, and do something—anything—that does not involve a screen. Of course, these analyses don’t unequivocally prove that screen time causes unhappiness; it’s possible that unhappy teens spend more time online. But recent research suggests that screen time, in particular social-media use, does indeed cause unhappiness.” (Ibid.)
“Social-networking sites like Facebook promise to connect us to friends. But the portrait of iGen teens emerging from the data is one of a lonely, dislocated generation. Teens who visit social-networking sites every day but see their friends in person less frequently are the most likely to agree with the statements “A lot of times I feel lonely,” “I often feel left out of things,” and “I often wish I had more good friends.” Teens’ feelings of loneliness spiked in 2013 and have remained high since.” (Ibid.)
“This doesn’t always mean that, on an individual level, kids who spend more time online are lonelier than kids who spend less time online. […] But at the generational level, when teens spend more time on smartphones and less time on in-person social interactions, loneliness is more common.” (Ibid.)
“Once again, the effect of screen activities is unmistakable: The more time teens spend looking at screens, the more likely they are to report symptoms of depression. Eighth-graders who are heavy users of social media increase their risk of depression by 27 percent, while those who play sports, go to religious services, or even do homework more than the average teen cut their risk significantly.” (Ibid.)
“What’s the connection between smartphones and the apparent psychological distress this generation is experiencing? For all their power to link kids day and night, social media also exacerbate the age-old teen concern about being left out. Today’s teens may go to fewer parties and spend less time together in person, but when they do congregate, they document their hangouts relentlessly—on Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook. Those not invited to come along are keenly aware of it. Accordingly, the number of teens who feel left out has reached all-time highs across age groups. Like the increase in loneliness, the upswing in feeling left out has been swift and significant.” (Ibid.)
“This trend has been especially steep among girls. Forty-eight percent more girls said they often felt left out in 2015 than in 2010, compared with 27 percent more boys. Girls use social media more often, giving them additional opportunities to feel excluded and lonely when they see their friends or classmates getting together without them. Social media levy a psychic tax on the teen doing the posting as well, as she anxiously awaits the affirmation of comments and likes.” (Ibid.)
“They checked social media right before they went to sleep, and reached for their phone as soon as they woke up in the morning (they had to—all of them used it as their alarm clock). Their phone was the last thing they saw before they went to sleep and the first thing they saw when they woke up. If they woke in the middle of the night, they often ended up looking at their phone. Some used the language of addiction. “I know I shouldn’t, but I just can’t help it,” one said about looking at her phone while in bed. Others saw their phone as an extension of their body—or even like a lover: “Having my phone closer to me while I’m sleeping is a comfort.”” (Ibid.)
“Adolescence is a key time for developing social skills; as teens spend less time with their friends face-to-face, they have fewer opportunities to practice them. In the next decade, we may see more adults who know just the right emoji for a situation, but not the right facial expression.” (Ibid.)
“In my conversations with teens, I saw hopeful signs that kids themselves are beginning to link some of their troubles to their ever-present phone. Athena told me that when she does spend time with her friends in person, they are often looking at their device instead of at her. “I’m trying to talk to them about something, and they don’t actually look at my face,” she said. “They’re looking at their phone, or they’re looking at their Apple Watch.” “What does that feel like, when you’re trying to talk to somebody face-to-face and they’re not looking at you?,” I asked. “It kind of hurts,” she said. “It hurts. I know my parents’ generation didn’t do that. I could be talking about something super important to me, and they wouldn’t even be listening.”” (Ibid.)
REFERENCE: Twenge, J.M. (September 2017). Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation? Available at: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/has-the-smartphone-destroyed-a-generation/534198/ [Accessed 31 March 2020].
On social isolation and loneliness:
unnecessary pressure on hard-pressed statutory services. […] Loneliness was viewed as an issue
“Loneliness is viewed as a serious and urgent public issue, which is a common experience in the UK. […] It’s quite clear that loneliness and social isolation is a crisis we cannot ignore, causing untold misery and, ultimately, unnecessary pressure on hard-pressed statutory services. […] Loneliness was viewed as an issue of public interest and the research found loneliness was a surprisingly common issue experienced by adults in the public. Yet, the public perceptions of who experiences loneliness is out of sync with the reality, with more people mistakenly perceiving it as an issue faced either solely or predominately by older people. […] The context of one’s community also contributed to feelings of disconnection – fewer social activities available, the disappearance of social spaces (community centres, city squares where people tend to congregate), difficulty accessing statutory services and support, inadequate transport infrastructure, and neighbourhood safety. […] Although age is well-documented in current literature as a risk factor to experiencing loneliness, this research confirmed that people experiencing life events which can disrupt existing connections are also at risk. […] Those experiencing loneliness can view connection with others as a daunting experience, and this can result in questions around self-worth. Chronic loneliness can therefore develop within the context of a newly emerging identity which can in turn lead to difficulties re-connecting and the potential for reduced self-worth. At worst, people experiencing loneliness felt they had little to offer society and described suicidal thoughts. […] Loneliness can have serious consequences and negative impacts at both a personal and community level. Loneliness can cause and, at times, worsen existing personal problems (psychological, social, and behavioural) and community level issues (fewer social connections, lack of confidence to leave the home). Loneliness also has serious consequences for isolated individuals including increased morbidity, lower life satisfaction, and a predisposition towards low mental and physical health. It can affect all aspects of their life, including an impact on other social relationships and behaviours. […] Face-to-face services and support are preferred with those experiencing loneliness, including a mix of more intense ‘one-on-one services’ and ‘interest-led, peer-to-peer interaction’. While digital services and support are important for certain groups who may be restricted by mobility or health, they are seen more as supplementing or as a facilitator of face-to-face connection rather than a substitute. Overwhelmingly, people in this research have shown that face-to-face interaction is preferred.” (British Red Cross and The Co-op, 2016)
REFERENCE: British Red Cross and The Co-op. (2016). Trapped in a bubble. An investigation into triggers for loneliness in the UK. Available at: https://assets.ctfassets.net/5ywmq66472jr/5tKumBSlO0suKwiWO6KmaM/230366b0171541781a0cd98fa80fdc6e/Coop_Trapped_in_a_bubble_report.pdf [Accessed 31 March 2020]. More here: redcross.org.uk/lonely and coop.co.uk/loneliness.
“Are you mentally equipped for self-isolation? Can you manage loneliness? Is loneliness of some kind or another an inevitable feature of the contemporary world?” (Taylor, 2020)
“Rather than viewing loneliness as a single thing, we need to view it as a cluster of emotions which range from hope to sadness, to anger, to fear.” (Alberti, 2020)
“My study of English text shows that the word loneliness only really comes into being in common usage from around about 1800s. […] The shift towards the emergence of loneliness from around 1800 comes about because of different changes in society, different ways of viewing the individual, industrialisation, urbanisation, a philosophy of the self, which is about the self as opposed to others and the decline of religion.” (Ibid.)
“This decline of god in terms of the availability of other cultural references, other ways of explaining the world. And once we have scientific ways of explaining the world, and the death of a sort of paternalistic deity who’s going to look after you no matter what, there’s necessarily a sense of being alone in the world.” (Ibid.)
“[…] emotions become brain-centred activities. So, we have this separation of mind and body that’s still with us. And at the same time the idea of the individual self as being isolated from others […] and we lose the embodiment aspect of it, whereas the physicality of loneliness and all emotions is very important.” (Ibid.)
REFERENCE: Taylor, T. and Alberti, F. B. (4 March 2020). Thinking Allowed – Loneliness. Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000fvzf. [Accessed 31 March 2020].
““GOD IS DEAD.”” (Nietzsche, 1882)
REFERENCE: Nietzsche, F. (1882). The Gay Science.
“What Nietzsche was referring to by “God is dead” is the general decline of Christianity that was taking place (and is still taking place, depending on who you ask) in the Western world. He explains “God is dead” later on in The Gay Science: “the belief in the Christian God has become unbelievable.”” (Lattier, 2016)
“Nietzsche’s exasperation, expressed in the form of the madman, was directed at people’s ignorance at the loss of a ground of morality—indeed, as he says, the “collapse” of “our entire European morality.” With the “death” of the Christian God, Nietzsche believed that the Western world’s foundation for morality had been destroyed. It’s just that the people in the West hadn’t realized it, yet. The madman who tried to make them realize it had “come too early.”” (Ibid.)
REFERENCE: Lattier, D. (12 April 2016). What Did Nietzsche Mean by ‘God is Dead’? Available at: https://www.intellectualtakeout.org/blog/what-did-nietzsche-mean-god-dead/. [Accessed 31 March 2020].
“The Corona Reboot” (Paul, 2020)
“The bodies that had been endlessly propelled through cities on metros, buses, bicycles, and freeways now sit in self-imposed isolation at home, the international flights that had been relentlessly criss-crossing continents now are increasingly grounded, and the container ships that had been churning steadily back and forth across oceans now drift idly beside coastal ports, buoyed by their lack of cargo. Chinese factories lay serenely still without their workers as if they were relics of a bygone industrial era, while environmentalists post online about the substantial reduction in global carbon dioxide emissions. The relentlessly accelerating velocities of capitalism appear, quite unexpectedly and abruptly, to be grinding, lumbering, and lurching into a languid slumber.” (Ibid.)
“The fragility, vulnerability, and interdependency of life come to be more intensely felt and drawn more acutely into focus as the virus spreads, opening the way for new intimacies, solidarities, and creativities. Even when surrounded by crisis and fear, fragile but utopian moments nonetheless find life.” (Ibid.)
“This text is ultimately an attempt to think through the possibility that the shutting down and subsequent rebooting of the planet presently underway may not in fact be a collection of ad-hoc measures that will fade as the contagion does, but that the coronavirus may come to serve as the catalyst for a new kind of society built upon the forms of digitized subjectivity that are forged within the unique historical circumstances of the pandemic.” (Ibid.)
“At the very minimum, in this moment we must all struggle to understand the rapid transformations of social life, of work, and of politics presently underway not only in the interest of surviving this together and defending our common humanity, but also in hopes of establishing a different kind of society than the one presently imagined by power. If this planetary reboot takes form as a total recalibration of social, economic, and political life in the interest of preserving the continuity of the social, political, and economic order of capitalism, how might we begin to imagine social life differently in this trying moment?” (Ibid.)
“On the one hand, we have the domesticated/connected subject, who in being confined to their home is pushed to invent new ways to reconnect to and participate in a virtualized economy. On the other hand, we have the mobile/disposable subject that serves as the circulatory system of the pandemic, a subject that becomes increasingly vulnerable and precarious as it is compelled to move at ever greater velocities. In order for domesticated/connected subjects to materially sustain themselves, they must be coupled with the mobile/disposable subject that fulfills the minimum material needs of society while ensuring the social possibility of isolated yet networked domestic life.” (Ibid.)
“The domesticated/connected subject is horrifically cut off from social life in their home yet is intimately plugged into an increasingly networked economy. They are as docile as they are productive, integrated with society but integrated only as separate. Office workers, university professors, programmers, reporters, and cultural workers, among others, are all ordered to stay home, but to stay logged on. Video streaming platforms struggle to handle the new volumes of traffic while raking in profits, and everyone undergoes online training so they can continue to collaborate and work on a domesticated network. The isolation of the home corresponds with its degree of connectivity. The domesticated/connected subject can avoid the risk of being proximate and promiscuous with other possibly-infected bodies by simply connecting to the office meeting on Zoom, streaming culture on Netflix, ordering food on Postmates, venting on Facebook, and purchasing more hand sanitizer on Amazon, while Trump has announced that if you do end up with symptoms of the coronavirus all you must do is visit a site designed by Google to schedule a remote test. As the mobility of bodies becomes restricted to domestic spaces, computer keyboards dance with frenzied kinetic activity in service of slowing the contagion and keeping the economy stumbling along through waves of turbulent market volatility.” (Ibid.)
“Emerging as a refrain to the domesticated/connected subject, the mobile/disposable subject moves at ever greater speeds and at ever greater risk so no one else has to. The interruption of public life is overrun by the feverishly accelerated mobile/disposable subject that is connected and subservient to the same informatic networks that connect domesticated/connected subjects to planetary economies. Commanded by smartphone apps delivering endless streams of pings and alerts that steer them from one gig to the next through nearly vacant streets, migrant workers on electric bikes have never been in higher demand, carrying food boxes from restaurants, bags of groceries from supermarkets, and miscellany from pharmacies, bodegas, and liquor stores to all of the salaried domesticated/connected workers who, now confined at home, create vast deluges of online orders. Amazon truck drivers speed across neighborhoods, always over capacity and behind impossible-to-meet computationally-generated schedules, carrying boxes filled with diapers, batteries, bleach wipes, laptops, and breathing masks. Ambulance drivers are asked to simply never stop driving, while garbage workers haul larger and larger bags of trash filled with larger and larger volumes of domestic refuse. All of these workers are expected to go increasingly fast to keep up with increasing demand, and thus increasingly expose themselves to the contagion and other forms of risk associated with their embodied acceleration. The massive containment and isolation of the domesticated/connected subject has as its twin the mobile/disposable subject that constitutes the system of distribution for a new pandemic economy.” (Ibid.)
“Both the domesticated/connected subjects working from home and the mobile/disposable subjects racing through the streets are ultimately brought together not only by the immense interconnected apparatuses of the digital economy but also by the blanket waves of social abandonment that now affect all life. When bodies of all kinds can be connected as isolated nodes on a network, remaining deeply reliant upon and subject to shifting algorithmic command and demand structures, the value of any single body approaches zero as every node on the network can be algorithmically swapped out and replaced with any other.” (Ibid.)
“The massive deterritorialization of labor spurred on by the pandemic response has allowed for the implementation of a newly flexible organization of work that frees capitalism and the capitalist state of any responsibility for life in general as long as the economy survives. Providing adequate testing for the virus, guaranteeing universal access to healthcare, and ensuring monetary relief to newly impoverished populations are seen as unnecessary as long as everyone remains willing to connect, log on, and answer the relentless call of capitalism’s networks.” (Ibid.)
“In the interlude of the pandemic there is an opportunity to refuse the imposition of digitized commands and coercive connections while defending and cultivating different kinds of human relation and interdependency. There is a chance now for all of us to consider how we might restart society differently rather than allow the logic of capital to unthinkingly do it for us. We’ll likely be in these pandemic circumstances for many months, so let’s use this time to disconnect from the pressures, exigencies, and demands of the economy and to reconnect with others in ways that do not conform or submit to the new kinds of acceleration and abandonment that are already being implemented everywhere around us.” (Ibid.)
“The coronavirus pandemic marks the first time in our history that a planetary disruption of this kind and scale has occurred in a networked society such as ours, but that does not mean that we have to let the logic of capitalist networks be what ultimately reorganizes our ways of life. Already, we see mutual aid networks being constituted, new forms of digital labor being subverted, carceral structures being dismantled, and market logics being refused. We must think of this as just a beginning. How freely, wildly, and courageously will we allow ourselves to dream in this moment? What new practices of living and relationalities will we dare to put into practice? How can we overcome the domestic paranoia that sends people sprinting to supermarkets, the fear that keeps us away from neighbors, the depression that follows from reading the news, while also keeping one another safe and caring for one another as the virus spreads? How can we begin to find one another to act compassionately and collectively together in a struggle to arrive on the other side of this pandemic in a world not structured by abandonment, isolation, and acceleration but by the inextinguishable dignity and value of life itself? Each of us must dedicate ourselves to begin not only articulating but living answers to these questions in all of the varied situations we find ourselves living within.” (Ibid.)
REFERENCE: Paul, I. A. (2020). The Corona Reboot. Available at: https://www.ianalanpaul.com/the-corona-reboot/ Translations: Español (Link) Italiano (Link) Ελληνικά (Link) Português: (Link). [Accessed 31 March 2020].
“”The problem is no longer getting people to express themselves, but providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say. Repressive forces don’t stop people from expressing themselves, but rather force them to express themselves. What a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, or ever rarer, the thing that might be worth saying.” -Gilles Deleuze” (Paul, 2017)
REFERENCE: Paul, I. A. (2017). Antisocial Media. Available at: https://www.ianalanpaul.com/antisocial-media/ [Accessed 31 March 2020].
“A group of German media and communication scholars have collected additional hypotheses of how hyper-connectivity (mainly through messengers and social media) is about to change social relationships:
- Connectivity replaces spatial proximity
- Superficial instead of deep conversations
- Networks replace friends
- Decreasing willingness to commit
- Social control instead of trust
- Attention replaces appreciation
- Live-coverage instead of narration” (Genner, 2017: 69)
“Need to be Alone in Order to be Together. Pictures from decades ago of people in the subway being absorbed by newspapers much in the same way people now are absorbed by their phones are being widely shared on social media in an attempt to combat negative predictions about hyper-connected individuals becoming ever more socially awkward.” (Ibid., 70)
“In 2012, an Internet phenomenon occurred. A campaign called “Stop Phubbing” went viral. Phubbing (phone + snubbing) means “the act of snubbing someone in a social situation by look- ing at a phone instead of paying attention.” Social media users around the globe spread the message to stop looking at your phone instead of paying attention to the person next to you. The term phubbing appeared in mass media around the world.” (Ibid.)
“There is evidence that the campaign hit a nerve and that it was no coincidence that the “stop phubbing” message was shared millions of times online. A large number of smartphone users in the U.S. report using their phones to avoid others around them. [One may, again, be reminded of Olga Mikh Fedorova’s print on canvas further up on this blog of a boy looking on his phone with the relating title “Protection”.] The younger the more likely users tend to “phub” (47% of smartphone-owning 18 to 29-year-olds, 32% of 30 to 49-year-olds, and 15% of smartphone owners older than 50).284″ (Ibid., 71)
“2 What Do We Get Out of Digital Social Connections? Questions about why users turn to media, and what kind of media fulfills what type of need, have been at the center of media research applying the Uses and Gratifications Approach. According to this approach, users actively turn to media in order to satisfy their needs such as enhancing knowledge, mood management, relaxation, social interactions, or escape. ON/OFF expert and pediatrician Claire McCarthy says regarding the social rewards of connectivity, “For a lot of youth, the possibility of connection with community, especially for youth who are otherwise isolated for physical or social reasons, that can be a great thing.”290” (Ibid., 72)
“Louis Leung’s study examined the roles played by seeking gratifications in content generation on social media. He found that generating content on social media was satisfying five psychosocial needs: showing affection, venting negative feelings, gaining recognition, getting entertainment, and fulfilling cognitive needs. The study revealed that depending on expected gratifications, users turn to various kinds of digital media for content creation online: people who used social media to meet their social needs and their need for affection tend to use Facebook and blogs, users wanting to air out discontent often turn to online forums. No generational differences were found in using Facebook and blogs as a means to satisfy social needs or the need for affection.292” (Ibid., 72)
“Much has been written about how social media platforms (such as Facebook, Twitter, or Insta- gram) may cause feelings of envy or even depression because when browsing social media news- feeds, we tend to compare our life with other people’s posts.294 Probably the best theory to ex- plain this social and psychological phenomenon is Leon Festinger’s Social Comparison Theory. It describes “the process through which people come to know themselves by evaluating their own attitudes, abilities and beliefs in comparison with others.“295” (Ibid., 73)
“Should Facebook be renamed Fakebook? The recent debate pointed out that posts on social media have a strong positive bias and misrepresent users’ authentic selves. People post about their happy rather than their unhappy moments in a strategic act of self-representation, a study shows.296 Among teen social media users in the U.S., four in ten report feeling pressure to post only content that makes them look good to others.297” (Ibid.)
“Roman, 18 years old, admits that he uses his phone while driving because, “If I get a Facebook message or something posted on my wall … I have to see it. I have to.“313 What Roman experiences has been named “fear of missing out” (FoMO). Psychologists have defined it as the “pervasive apprehension that others might be having rewarding experiences from which one is absent, FoMO is characterized by the desire to stay continually connected with what others are doing.”314 FoMO probably is an important driver for hyper-connectivity behavior: a desire to be connected with what friends are doing, and ultimately the very human wish to belong.” (Ibid., 76)
“In the ON/OFF student survey, I used two FoMO items: “I get nervous if I don’t know what my friends are up to.” / “Sometimes I wonder if I spend too much time thinking about what is going on.” […] Conclusively, the ON/OFF data indicates that individual resilience to social pressure and temptations decreases the feelings of distraction and overload caused by hyper-connectivity. Al- so, using a cellphone messenger like WhatsApp increases the level of FoMO.” (Ibid., 76)
“It is a paradox that the more connected we are, the more social pressure arises from being connected.” (Ibid.)
“”Phantom ringing” or “phantom vibration” is a phenomenon related to one’s mobile de- vice ringing or vibrating when in fact it is not. […] Individuals who are more susceptible to social pressure (those who experience elevated levels of FoMO and find it hard to say no) also tend to have a more compulsive connectivity behavior (checking messages immediately or in situations they are not supposed to do so). As a consequence they tend to feel more distracted and worry more about information overload.” (Ibid., 77)
“In 2014, the new German Secretary of Labor, Andrea Nahles, even called for an “anti-stress law” in Germany explaining, “There is no doubt that there is a link between constant connectivity and the rise in mental illnesses.”398” (Ibid., 94)
“A German health insurance company launched a debate with key words such as “Social Müdia” (a pun on “müde,” German for tired) and “Social Media Burnout.”403” (Ibid., 95)
“Technostress and Digital Overload. Technostress is defined as the negative effects of new technology on psychological well-being.” (Ibid., 97)
“In the United States, the National Day of Unplugging was based on the Sabbath Manifesto, which was created by a nonprofit Jewish community called Reboot. They based the idea on the Sabbath in the literal sense (“On the seventh day though shalt rest”) applying it to “the fast-paced and technology-obsessed present society.” The Sabbath Manifesto consists of ten principles:
- Avoid technology,
- Connect with loved ones,
- Nurture your health,
- Get outside,
- Avoid commerce,
- Light candles,
- Drink wine,
- Eat bread,
- Find silence,
- Give back.” (Ibid., 173)
“In Italy, a café had a sign that said, “Qui non c’è wifi, parlate tra di voi.” (There is no Wi-Fi, talk to each other.) […] Some cafés state that cell- phones slow down the ordering process; restaurant owners were quoted that some of their guests were “so engrossed in their phones that they don’t seem to be enjoying their meals or their companions.”798″ (Ibid., 174 f)
“The most frequently mentioned diagnostic criteria in scientific literature on digital media addiction and applied by practitioners (digital media addiction specialists) are the following according to an ON/OFF supervised study (in order):472 Social withdrawal and negative social consequences: more time spent alone in order to spend more time online; conflict with family, friends, employer, and teachers due to Internet use and resulting neglect of tasks and duties
⎯ Performance drop: decreasing performance at work or at school
⎯ Loss of control: more and more time spent online, loss of control over time of use, unsuccessful attempts to limit time spent online
⎯ Development of tolerance: more frequent or intense use necessary to get the same rewards
⎯ Physical consequences: lack of sleep, malnutrition, loss in weight or overweight, posture
⎯ Withdrawal symptoms: restlessness, tension, craving
⎯ Limitations in behavior and thinking: larger part of the day spent using the Internet at the expense of other activities, cognitive obsession with online activities even when not online
⎯ Lies: real amount of time spent online obscured in front of family and friends.” (Ibid., 108)
REFERENCE: Genner, Sarah. (2017). ON |OFF : Risks and rewards of the anytime-anywhere internet. Available at: https://digitalcollection.zhaw.ch/handle/11475/1857 [Accessed 19 March 2020].
“Walking is very calming. One step after another, one foot moving into the future and one in the
past. Did you ever think about that? Our bodies are caught in the middle. The hard part is staying in the present. Really being here.” (Cardiff, 2004: Her Long Black Hair)
REFERENCE: Cardiff, J. (2004). Her Long Black Hair. Available at: https://www.cardiffmiller.com/artworks/walks/longhair.html [Accessed 2 April 2020].
What we can’t do in a virtual experience, such as a virtual party, is, lose ourselves. We have to click to get where we want to go, when we need to use the bathroom we have to leave the small environment in which the party exclusively takes place, when it’s over we have to log out, we have to be careful not to spill our drink on the keyboard, and throughout it all we can constantly see ourselves in a little square on our computer, as filmed by our web cams and as seen by others in the call. (But really aren’t most of the participants in a video call looking at themselves?) How can we lose ourselves if we can see ourselves in a virtual encounter? Isn’t this getting lost, this collapse of the principium individuationis (Luyster, 2001), this becoming one with the crowd and dissolving as solipsistic being, the ideal that one strives for when going out? As Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy puts it: “[…] emotions awake, and as they grow in intensity everything subjective vanishes into complete self-forgetfulness.” (Ibid.) Can ecstasy be reached or not be reached in a virtual experience of the real?
“This article explores the ontology of participation in performances where physical performers have been eliminated, leaving behind their mediat(iz)ed ‘traces’.” (Nedelkopoulou, 2011: 117)
“Drawing on Drew Leder’s theory of the absent body (1990), the article negotiates the concept of ‘participation’ as a case of ‘ecstasis’: a mode of embodiment where participants ‘stand out’ of themselves to become involved in a performance event where the physical performer has already escaped.1 Technological corporeality in place of a physical performer has been a common ground for many theatre and performance multimedia practices from The Wooster Group’s representation of performers who could not be physically present on stage [such as Brace Up! (1999)] to Blast Theory’s game performances where performers and spectators appear as avatars [such as Can You See Me Now? (2005)].” (Ibid.)
“1 Etymologically, the term ‘ecstasis’ refers to the idea of ‘standing out’ (from the Greek ‘ek-stasis’, which literally means ‘standing outside oneself’).” (Ibid.)
“Focusing mainly on the lived experience of the audience’s bodily involvement in two of Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s walks, Her Long Black Hair (2004) and Ghost Machine (2005), this article suggests that we identify spectatorial participation as
a ‘chiasmic’ process, a shared experience in which the spectator confronts and is confronted by audiovisual material. In other words, I want to argue that participation is a corporeal experience during which bodies stand out of themselves to enter into communality with the rest of the world.” (Ibid.)
“In these audio and video walks, the material is recorded and played back on a headset and digital camera at the same location, giving the impression to the audience that the recorded events are taking place live. For instance, the sound of people’s footsteps mixed with incidental noises from the different locations indicates a physical presence which is not there.” (Ibid.)
“Both projects negotiate issues of altered perceptions and create an experience of physical immediacy and viscerality through the use of audio and visual material: an experience
in which the participants find themselves surrounded by a multilayered, open-ended reality which connects the present with both the past and the future. The distinction between self and other is blurred. Throughout the walk, listeners might find themselves relating Cardiff’s experience and thoughts to their own.” (Ibid., 119 f)
“In this article, I want to suggest that the idea of losing oneself in an alternate mixed-media world resonates with the notion of ecstasis. As a disappearing mode of embodiment, ecstasis stresses audience participation in audio-video walks where physical performers are absent, but also the way in which their mediated bodily traces are left on location. In particular, I propose that a triple corporeal schema takes place in Her Long Black Hair and Ghost Machine which is defined by the act of mediati(zati)on, understood as an instance of ‘ecstasis’, or an act which triggers the ‘ecstatic’ modality of the spectatorial body, which is then enabled to project outwards in experience.” (Ibid., 120)
“Martin Heidegger uses the notion of ecstasis in Being and Time to describe the nature of temporality (1990: 34). In this text, Heidegger also introduces his concept of Dasein: the condition of being-in-the-world, which, he argues, is synonymous with being in time. As part of Dasein, ecstasis primarily refers to the future. Yet, in fact, the notion of ecstasis defines the distinction and transition between past, present and future; ecstasis signifies the ‘standing out’ of each temporal dimension from the others (Heidegger 1962: 377).” (Ibid.)
“In his book The Absent Body (1990), Drew Leder stresses the essential role of the lived body in ecstasis […] According to Leder, the lived body stands out from itself, when involved in any kind of activity, intellectual or physical. The ecstatic nature of the lived body signifies its connection with the outside world. Reading a book, watching a performance and interacting with others are examples from everyday life that indicate the way in which people’s involvement in various activities can result in their corporeal absence. Importantly, however, ecstasis does not connote a void, but a different kind of presence in the world. Hence, when audiences are immersed into a theatrical world, they do not really think about their bodies – for instance, about the eyes with which they are seeing the show – unless they are in pain (dys-appearance). The ecstatic body is a forgetful body that finds interest in something outside itself.” Resonating with Leder’s view that ‘[t]he from- to movement of the ecstatic body opens us to reciprocal exchange’ (1990: 34), I want to suggest that ecstasis facilitates immersion in mixed- media milieus at the point where the physical confronts the mediat(iz)ed, bridging the gap between the there and then of mediat(izat)ion and the here and now of live performance. As such, ecstasis must be understood as a subjective experience, based on the participant’s embodied reaction to the mixed-media event.“ (Ibid., 120)
“Ecstatic participation, then, is not simply a process of standing outside one’s body, but a complex reciprocal exchange between bodies and the world. […] The audience’s participation in both walks is not simply an instance of seeing, listening and strolling around the space, but an embodied experience that enwraps both the perceiving and the perceived; a holistic process of embodied absence.” (Ibid., 122)
“[…] a phenomenological theorization of participation in the video and audio walks highlights the reciprocal exchange between bodies and technology that maintains both their ‘in-between’ connection and difference without implying their ‘in-between’ isolation and disconnection.” (Ibid., 123)
“In conclusion, this article proposes that participation in Cardiff and Miller’s walks is expressed through different modes of ecstasis; that is, through a corporeal intertwining between the perceptual and the perceptible.” (Ibid.)
“These phenomenological projects foreground both absent and present corporealities to redefine the role of the spectator as co-participant and eventually, as performer. The participants secede from their bodies to join a complex mixed-reality world, which challenges their intuition and enhances their visual perception.” (Ibid.)
REFERENCE: Nedelkopoulou, E. (2011). Walking Out on Our Bodies. Participation as ecstasis in Janet Cardiff’s Walks. Performance Research: On Participation,16(4), 117-123.
“What we’re watching happen with COVID-19 is what happens when care insists on itself, when the care of others becomes mandatory, when it takes up space and money and labor and energy. See how hard it is to do? The world isn’t built to give care freely and abundantly. It’s trying now, but look how alien a concept this is, how hard it is to make happen. It will take all of us—it will take all of us operating on the principle that if only some of us are well, none of us are. And that’s exactly why it’s revolutionary. Because care demands that we live as though we are all interconnected—which we are—it invalidates the myth of the individual’s autonomy. In care, we know our limits because they are the places where we meet each other. My limit is where you meet me, yours is where I find you, and, at this meeting place, we are linked, made of the same stuff, transforming into one because of the other.” (Hedva, 2020)
REFERENCE: Hedva, J. (2020). A text by Johanna Hedva. Available at: http://getwellsoon.labr.io/?dm_i=56G9,6O2S,1BOD6L,P9HJ,1 [Accessed 2 April 2020].
“For Baudrillard, the shift from the real to the hyperreal occurs when representation gives way to simulation. One could argue that we are standing at the brink of such a moment, marked primarily by the emerging presence of a virtual world.” (Nunes, 1995)
“One does not “go” somewhere when picking up the telephone. But when the computer couples with these same telephone lines, suddenly spatial and kinetic metaphors begin to proliferate. The information superhighway depends upon a more subtle metaphorical figuration, a virtual topography in which speed, motion, and direction become possible. Internet becomes a simulated territory we traverse via computer-modem roadster in which the computer screen replaces the windscreen. Baudrillard, following Roland Barthes, notes how easily motion can transform into a visual experience in which the driver-viewer interacts with images, rather than with the physical world (Ecstasy 13).” (Ibid.)
“A virtual potential space replaces real kinetic space, or, rather, “real” potential translates metaphorically into a virtual “kinetic” energy. […] This perspective on the current media images of Internet suggests that the conceptual model of a cybernetic “space” does not augment the world; it abandons the world for one that can be fully realized and fully encompassed: a world of transparency and immediacy.” (Ibid.)
“The technology that aims at containing distance eventually creates a virtual world that destroys the conceptual possibility of distance.” (Ibid.)
“In this vertiginous moment of physical stasis and virtual travel, the “Voyeur-Voyager” experiences an immediacy that dissolves space and time: “a perpetually repeated hijacking of the subject from any spatial-temporal context” (Virilio, Aesthetics 101). Baudrillard sees the world as entering an orbital era: “the perpetual tourism of people who no longer undertake voyages in the true sense, but simply go round and round in circles within their circumscribed territory” (Transparency 29). From this critical perspective, then, Internet collapses space into one “hyperpotential point,” which implodes all concept of distance, spacing, and separation.” (Ibid.)
“[…] the “Telecomputer Man” experiences “a very special kind of distance which can only be described as unbridgeable by the body…. The screen is merely virtual–and hence unbridgeable” (Transparency 55). Although he cannot cross his screen, he can “circulate” himself through the media. The implosion of real distance creates the need for a strategy of deterrence: a simulation of space and distance that the body cannot breech but that a simulated self (complete with computer prostheses) can travel.” (Ibid.)
“As Internet moves closer to its dream of total connectivity, one might imagine with Baudrillard that moment of closure when this metaphorical “cyberspace” becomes the hyperreal, more important than the real space it once simulated: “As soon as behavior is focused on certain operational screens or terminals, the rest appears only as some vast, useless body, which has been both abandoned and condemned. The real itself appears as a large, futile body” (Ecstasy 18). No longer does technology encompass the world; now it replaces it with a “more real than real” simulation.” (Ibid.)
“These virtual spaces provide opportunities for individuals to gather for any number of reasons, from professional conferences and business meetings to virtual sex.” (Ibid.)
“But alongside these more academic and artistic endeavors, it is just as common to encounter, when “wandering” from virtual room to virtual room, two players discussing last night’s television shows (perhaps MTV’s The Real World?) or this coming weekend’s entertainment plans. At the center of this prototype for a “global village,” the fascinating and the banal overtake one another. Paradoxically, the first-hand experience of the “ecstasy of communication” is hardly noticeable and ultimately quite “ordinary” since this highly mediated form of interaction simulates unmediated communication.” (Ibid.)
“I am gone and there at the same time. I am present and absent, distant and near.” (Ibid.)
“Through Internet, distance becomes transparent, making room for a virtual space, an experience quite different from other forms of telecommunication. On the telephone I revel in how close a voice sounds. I gain comfort in knowing that I am overcoming distance. In the MOO, I no longer overcome distance because the screen does not bridge space; it replaces space with a simulation of the world on the surface of my screen.” (Ibid.)
“Depthless and infinite, Baudrillard’s screen appears as the “superficial abyss,” a hypnotic transparency that simulates and denies space at the same time: “an aesthetics of the hyperreal, a thrill of vertiginous and phony exactitude, a thrill of alienation and magnification, of distortion in scale, of excessive transparency all at the same time” (Simulations 50).” (Ibid.)
“This inability to “self-transcend” is what separates communication from community and society in Baudrillard’s work: “Communication is more social than the social itself: it is the hyperrelational, sociality overactivated by social techniques…. Communication, by banalizing the interface, plunges the social into an undifferentiated state” (Transparency 12).” (Ibid.)
“More precisely, community can only exist in a mediated society via the medium because no other “real” exists. Baudrillard argues that “the compulsion of the virtual is the compulsion to exist in potential on all screens” and that this community of circulating, simulated selves results in the disappearance of “real” self and “real” community through a proliferation of these signs (Transparency 57). […] The fascination of the depthless screen–“the superficial abyss”–keeps us firmly rooted. With a wealth of information, we have no time to realize that we have nothing to learn.” (Ibid.)
“Although his critique of hyperreality calls attention to Internet’s metaphorical existence as a virtual “world,” placing Baudrillard in cyberspace may also lead to the question, Can Internet produce a locus of challenge or seduction, “a locus of that which eludes you, and whereby you elude yourself and your own truth” (Ecstasy 66)? Can the screen gain depth? In light of the fascinating transparency of the media, can this “virtual realm” do other than endlessly repeat its own model?” (Ibid.)
“Rheingold notes that although virtual interfacing facilitates community by obscuring many social barriers (age, race, and sex, in particular), this same interface allows for deception and artifice, leaving virtual citizens vulnerable to “electronic impostors” (164).” (Ibid.)
“[…] the virtual body sets us astray from our assumptions about what it means to have a “real” body. In the virtuality of Internet, our words are our bodies, an aporetic copula that forces a reexamination of “the body” as both physiological (noumenal) entity and phenomenological experience. In each instance, Internet provides the medium for disrupting models rather than confirming them. Following this other heading, Internet might present a seduction rather than a subduction: a challenge to modernity’s assumptions of self and body, of individual and community.” (Ibid.)
“Internet, rather than presenting a simulation of totality, might provide a space of play. Rather than pursuing ends through this technology, one might instead turn oneself over to the drift and derive of “cyberspace.” Baudrillard’s fatal vision shimmers on the surface of our computer screens. His vision, however, also challenges us to find a depth to the screen, to find–or, rather, lose–ourselves on a different heading, off our familiar paths.” (Ibid.)
REFERENCE: Nunes, M. (1995). Jean Baudrillard in Cyberspace: Internet, Virtuality, and Postmodernity. Style, 29(2), 314-327.
“[…] as the dialectic of inside and outside collapsed, so did the distinctions between private and public. Baudrillard’s characterization of this as an ‘ecstasy of communication’ was no doubt ironic – it recalled not so much the intense exhilaration of the rave drug ‘Ecstasy’ as the bland negation of complexity and personality effected by the contentment drug ‘Soma’ in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1931). Note the repetitive, monotonous description of the nature of ecstasy and obscenity in this quote,
“We are no longer part of the drama of alienation; we live in the ecstasy of communication. And this ecstasy is obscene … It is no longer the traditional obscenity of what is hidden, repressed, forbidden or obscure; on the contrary, it is the obscenity of the visible, of the all-too-visible, of the more visible than visible. It is the obscenity of what no longer has a secret, of what dissolves completely in information and communication.” (Skinner, 2014)
“Through an exploration of screens in the various ways I have outlined here, Hiller and Lowe activate a space outside the screen. A space that is impossible to represent, and difficult to hold in the mind for long, but is perhaps our bulwark against the ecstasy of communication… This ‘other’ spatiality, where desire ceaselessly transcribes itself, announces the dissolution of the boundaries that define the subject … At the limit of the representable is the lightness of thought before it knows of itself as thought, a joyous liberation of desire into a space of pure production – the tracings and retracings, resonant with the carnivalesque humour, passion, horror, and ecstasy of an itinerant and heterogeneous self in the process of continuously making and remaking itself.49” (Ibid.)
REFERENCE: Skinner, K. (2004). The self as a screen: Jean Baudrillard’s ‘Ecstasy of Communication’, Susan Hiller’s photomat portraits and the videos of Rachel Lowe. Journal of Visual Art Practice, 3(1), 7-25.
“I think the idea of being connected to each other in other ways than social media, or instant online connection, clearly touched something in people.” (Rönkkö, 2019)
“The internet only just turned 30 and think about what it’s done to us in such a short time. I’m not saying it’s good or bad, but it has totally challenged what it means to be human, how we function in society, the way we connect to each other and how we perceive ourselves.” (Ibid.)
“It is also way more exciting to receive and open a letter. I think sometimes it’s good to wait for gratification. With the internet and online messaging you get immediate dopamine hits. That’s why we keep refreshing.” (Ibid.)
REFERENCE: Rönkkö, N. (2019). Six Months Without The Internet. Available at: https://www.somersethouse.org.uk/blog/six-months-without-internet. [Accessed 3 April 2020].
“Internet and sociability. Social scientists are concerned with how the internet contributes to the individualization of leisure time and how it reduces the time spent socializing with friends and family members (Franzen, 2003; Bargh and McKenna, 2004). Two broad but conflicting views on the relationship between the internet and sociability are discerned.” (Peng and Zhu, 2010: 569)
“The first general view is pessimistic. Internet pessimists fear the creation, or the accentuation, of a Kafkaesque postmodern world plagued with anomie, neurosis, loneliness and many other social evils (Coget et al., 2002). Two heavily cited empirical studies on the relationship between internet use and sociability support this pessimistic view: the HomeNet project by Kraut et al. (1998) and the large-scale survey reported by Nie and Erbring (2000). Moreover, scholars who have explored the characteristics of online relationships have argued that virtual relationships are not sufficiently rich and strong (Putnam, 2000), that they are less substantial and less sustaining (Kraut et al., 1998), and that virtual ties are weaker, superficial and have easily broken bonds (Hlebec et al., 2006). As a consequence, the internet cannot take the place of traditional face-to- face social networking (Putnam, 2000).“ (Ibid.)
“Internet optimists, on the other hand, have argued that the internet allows everybody to stay connected with their families and friends through email, chat, web- cam technology, and other yet-to-be-developed technologies that will make individuals’ experience in online communication more similar to what they experience in offline communication. The internet has also provided new opportunities to meet people, and has increased the efficiency and speed of transactions so that time can be saved for other activities – including face-to-face interaction (Coget et al., 2002).” (Ibid.)
“In sum, there are no simple, one-sided conclusions about the internet’s impact on social relationships. The internet itself might not automatically bring changes to people’s social networks, but the nature of individuals’ usage will determine its impact on their socialization.” (Ibid.)
REFERENCE: Peng, T.-Q. and Zhu, J. J. H. (2011). A game of win-win or win-lose? Revisiting the internet’s influence on sociability and use of traditional media. Journal: New Media & Society.
“For many people there will be a tough, but necessary period of social isolation. Many of us will miss seeing family and friends and taking part in our usual hobbies, interests and activities. It shows how important friendship and connection are in our lives, and how difficult it can be when they’re missing. This reminds us that for too many people their lives are often quite a lot like this.” (Campaign to end loneliness, 2020)
“Technology can’t replace the feeling of communicating in person, but there are ways of staying connected in isolation that can help.” (Ibid.)
REFERENCE: Campaign to End Loneliness. (2020). Coronavirus and social isolation. Available at: https://www.campaigntoendloneliness.org/blog/coronavirus-and-social-isolation/ [Accessed 2 April 2020].
“Today in Focus: From Houseparty to Zoom: our digital lives in lockdown. The lockdown across the world has led people to desperately seek out new tools for maintaining their work and social lives online. But UK technology editor Alex Hern argues he’s been living this way for years.” (Asthana, 2020)
Transcript: “Today from video work meetings to virtual pub quizzes and livestream fitness practice. How we are adjusting to a new socially distant life.” (Ibid.)
“How the coronavirus crisis is driving a revolution in technology. […] We’re all turning to technology to cope with this new quarantine.” (Ibid.)
“People are replacing going outside with the internet essentially, which is, for me, not unusual. That’s basically my life since I was about 12 years old, but everyone else is rapidly learning what you can do if you’re a massive nerd these days. You can do fitness programs from YouTube livestreams, you can take virtual lessons in Cocktail-making or Crocheting, […] or you could just hang out with people. Something that I think none of us really thought we’d see is a bunch of us and our friends sat in front of our webcam with a drink in our hand, talking about how the day went. Getting some of that human contact is so important and it turns out that we’ve had all this technology for years and we have, partially out of an ingrained belief that in person is better, refused to use it as much as we’re now all being forced to.” (Hern, 2020)
“Coronavirus has stopped us seeing friends and family and it’s cut off many of us from other communities, too. How is technology helping to bridge the gap?” (Asthana, 2020)
“Everyone is trying to replicate as much of their old lives as possible. […] Religious authorities have been trying to work out how to do without in person services. […] “I’m exchanging the pulpit for Facebook and I’m exchanging the communion table for my kitchen table.”” (Hern, 2020)
“In a weird way this terrible crisis is kind of unifying people.” (Asthana, 2020)
“I think there’s definitely a blitz spirit right. We are all in this together, we will get through it and it really helps to know that the hardships that you’re suffering are the same as the hardships that everyone else is suffering. […] For social media, in some ways tonally, this has taken us back a decade, to a world where everyone on social media is on social media all the time, jokes and memes are spreading and evolving faster than they ever have before and they’re going more mainstream at the same time.” (Hern, 2020)
“Let me ask you about FoMo – Fear of Missing Out. Do you think that now there’s nowhere for any of us to go, FoMo is a thing of the past?” (Asthana, 2020)
“JoMo is the Joy of Missing Out.” (Hern, 2020)
“I can’t imagine that virtual happy hours will really stick around. They are fine, but they feel a bit forced. […]” (Ibid.)
REFERENCE: Asthana, A. (presenter) in conversation with Hern, A. (1 April 2020). Today in Focus: From Houseparty to Zoom: our digital lives in lockdown. (00.20.46 until 00:22:05). Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/news/audio/2020/apr/01/from-houseparty-to-zoom-our-digital-lives-in-lockdown [Accessed 3 April 2020].
“As culture adapts to the limitations imposed by the Covid-19 outbreak there has been myriad new material online, from viral pop parody videos and impromptu classical concerts to TikTok dance-offs and marathon DJ sets.” (Bakare, 2020)
REFERENCE: Bakare, L. (1 April 2020). A-listers lend talents to bedtime story initiative during lockdown. The Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/01/a-listers-natalie-portman-lend-talents-to-bedtime-story-instagram-live-initiative-during-covid-lockdown [Accessed 3 April 2020].
What I am interested in is, whether emotions, as felt in real life, can be translated with the same intensity into the virtual sphere, via webcams and the use of video apps which are used to share emotional moments together.
“Emotions are quite sociable. We are moved after all by the proximity of others. We feel with and for others. Sociability can even be a feeling: when you feel sociable you want to be with others. Sociability implies not only the existence of proximate others, but also the enjoyment of proximity. The sociable person likes the company of others. In this paper, I want to consider happiness as a form of sociability rather than the happiness of sociability. It is a truism that happiness is happiest when it is shared with others. And yet does happiness simply bring us together? A social bond might be created if the same things make us happy. In turn, those who are not made happy by the same things might threaten our happiness. If emotions are sociable, then sociability might need to be theorised in terms of the restriction as well as enjoyment of company. Happiness might generate the very company we like as a company of likes.” (Ahmed, 2008: 10)
“I begin with the messiness of the experiential, the unfolding of bodies into the world, and what I have called ‘the drama of contingency’, how we are touched by what is near (Ahmed, 2006: 124). It is useful to note that the etymology of ‘happiness’ relates precisely to the question of contingency: it is from the Middle English ‘hap’, suggesting chance. One of the early meanings of happiness in English relates to the idea of being lucky, or favoured by fortune, or being fortunate. Happiness would be about what happens, where ‘the what’ is something good. This meaning may now seem archaic: we may be more used to thinking of happiness as an effect of what you do rather, as a reward for hard work, rather than as what happens to you. But I find this original meaning useful, as it focuses our attention on the ‘worldly’ question of happenings. What is the relation between the ‘what’ in ‘what happens’ and the ‘what’ that makes us happy? Empiricism provides us with a useful way of addressing this question, given its concern with ‘what’s what’. Take the work of John Locke. He argues that what is good is what is ‘apt to cause or increase pleasure, or diminish pain in us’ (Locke, 1997: 216). So we judge something to be good or bad according to how it affects us, whether it gives us pleasure or pain. Locke suggests that ‘he loves grapes it is no more, but that the taste of the grapes delights him’ (1997: 216). So we could say that an object becomes happy if it affects us in a good way. For Locke, we place our happiness in different things (246), which means different things become good for us. We turn towards those things that make us happy. When things make us happy, they become part of our lived horizon. The bodily horizon can thus be thought of as a horizon of likes.” (Ibid.)
“We move towards and away from objects through how we are affected by them. This does not mean there is always a correspondence between objects and feelings. We have all probably experienced what I call ‘unattributed happiness’; you feel happy, not quite knowing why, and the feeling can be catchy, as a kind of brimming over that exceeds what you encounter. The feeling can lift or elevate any proximate object, which is not to say that the feeling will survive an encounter with anything. It has always interested me that when we become conscious of feeling happy (when the feeling becomes an object of thought), happiness can often recede or become anxious. Happiness can arrive in a moment, and be lost by virtue of its recognition.” (Ibid., 11)
“Happiness is often described as ‘what’ we aim for, as an end-point, or even an end-in-itself. Classically, happiness has been considered as an end rather than as a means. In Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle (1998: 1) describes happiness as the Chief Good, as ‘that which all things aim at’. Happiness is what we ‘choose always for its own sake’ (8). […] If happiness is the end of all ends, then all other things become means to happiness. As Aristotle describes, we choose other things ‘with a view to happiness, conceiving that through their instrumentality we shall be happy’ (8). Things become good, or acquire their value as goods, insofar as they point towards happiness. If objects provide a means for making us happy, then in directing ourselves towards this or that object, we are aiming somewhere else: towards a happiness that is presumed to follow. The temporality of this following does matter. Happiness is what would come after. Given this, happiness is directed towards certain objects, which point towards that which is not yet present. Happiness does not reside in objects; it is promised through proximity to certain objects. So the promise of happiness – if you do this, then happiness is what follows – is what makes things seem ‘promising’, which means that the promise of happiness is not in the thing itself.” (Ibid.)
“What makes this argument different to John Locke’s account of loving grapes because they taste delightful, is that I am suggesting that the judgment that certain objects are ‘happy’ is already made, before they are even encoun- tered. Certain objects are attributed as the conditions for happiness so that we arrive ‘at’ them with an expectation of how we will be affected by them, which affects how they affect us, even in the moment they fail to live up to our expectations. Happiness is an expectation of what follows. […] So when we find happy objects, we do not just find them anywhere. The promise of happiness directs life in some ways rather than others. To share in the happiness of others is how we come to share a certain direction. We could even say that groups cohere around a shared orientation towards some things as being good, treating some things and not others as the cause of happi- ness. The fan club or hobby group make explicit what is implicit about social life: that we tend to like those who like the things we like. The social bond is thus rather sensational. If the same objects make us happy – which means investing in the same objects ‘as if’ they make us happy – then we would be directed or orientated in the same way.” (Ibid.)
“Is happiness itself transmitted through such objects? If we were to answer this question with a ‘yes’, then we might suggest that happiness is contagious. David Hume’s approach to moral emotions in the eighteenth century rested precisely on a contagious model of happiness. He suggests that ‘others enter into the same humour and catch the sentiment, by a contagion or natural sympathy’ and that cheerfulness is the most communicative of emotions: ‘the flame spreads through the whole circle; and the most sullenly and remorse are often caught by it’ (Hume, 1975: 250–251, see also Blackman, 2008). A number of scholars have recently taken up the idea of affects as contagious, drawing primarily on the work of the psychologist of affect Silvan Tomkins (Brennan, 2004; Gibbs, 2001; Kosofsky, 2003; Probyn, 2005). As Anna Gibbs describes: ‘Bodies can catch feelings as easily as catch fire: affect leaps from one body to another (2001: 1).” (Ibid.)
Bodies can catch feelings as easily as catch a virus: affect leaps from one body to another. Can affect leap from one body to the other if bodies have to stay physically distant from each other? What does it take for bodies to catch feelings? Which senses are needed for catching feelings? Just the eyes and the ears, while the rest of the body is hunched over a device? Currently, bodies have to stay apart so that they don’t catch the new Coronavirus. If we compare a virus to feelings, can bodies catch feelings in the current pandemic? Can bodies catch feelings as well as when they are in physical proximity to another?
“Thinking of affects as contagious helps challenge the idea that affect resides within an individual body, by showing how bodies are affected by what is around them. A question remains: how are we affected by what comes near? The model of affective contagion tends to treat affect as something that is transmitted smoothly from body to body, sustaining integrity in being passed around. I want to explore how we are affected differently by the things we come into contact with, which might include other bodies. To be affected by another does not mean being affected in the same way as another, or that an affect is simply transmitted, creating a shared feeling or atmosphere.” (Ibid.)
“Consider the opening sentence of Teresa Brennan’s The Transmission of Affect: ‘Is there anyone who has not, at least once, walked into a room and ‘‘felt the atmosphere’’’ (2004: 1). Brennan writes very beautifully about the atmosphere ‘getting into the individual’, using what I have called an ‘outside in’ model, very much part of the intellectual history of crowd psychology and the sociology of emotion (Ahmed, 2004: 9).” (Ibid., 11)
Is there anyone who has, at least once, “walked” into a chatroom and “felt the atmosphere”? Can “atmosphere” or “aura” be translated into the virtual space? Can these invisible energies be uploaded onto the cloud and accessed per mouse click?
“However, later in the introduction she makes an observation, which involves a quite different model. Brennan suggests that: ‘if I feel anxiety when I enter the room, then that will influence what I perceive or receive by way of an ‘‘impression’’’. I agree. Anxiety is sticky: rather like Velcro, it tends to pick up whatever comes near. Anxiety gives us a certain kind of angle on what comes near. Of course, anxiety is one feeling state amongst others. If bodies do not arrive in neutral, if we are always in some way or another moody, then what we will receive as an impression will always depend on our affective situation. This second argument suggests that how we arrive, how we enter this room or that room, will affect what impressions we receive. After all, to receive is to act. To receive an impression is to make an impression.” (Ibid.)
“Think about experiences of alienation.” (Ibid.)
“I have suggested that happiness is attributed to certain objects that circulate as social goods. When we feel pleasure from such objects, we are aligned; we are facing the right way. We become alienated – out of line with an affective community – when we do not experience pleasure from proximity to objects that are attributed as being good. The gap between the affective value of an object and how we experience an object can involve a range of affects, which are directed by the modes of explanation we offer to fill this gap. If we are disappointed by something, we generate explanations of why that thing is disappointing. Such explanations can involve an anxious narrative of self-doubt (why I am not made happy by this, what is wrong with me?) or a narrative of rage, where the object that is ‘supposed’ to make us happy is attributed as the cause of disappointment, which can lead to a rage directed towards those that promised us happiness through the elevation of such objects as good. We might even become strangers, or affect aliens, at such moments.” (Ibid.)
“We can also feel alienated in rooms when the affective gestures of the room do not correspond to our feeling states. Take the example of laughter in the cinema. How many times have I sunk desperately into my chair when that laughter has been expressed at points I find far from amusing! We do not always notice when others sink. One can feel unjustly interpellated on such occasions: the gestures of discomfort and alienation do not register; they do not affect the collective impression made by the laughter. To an outsider, it may simply appear that the audience shared an orientation towards the film as being funny, and that the laughter was contagious, affecting everybody.” (Ibid., 11 f)
Where are gestures online? Do they exist? Do we un-learn reading gestures and their meanings IRL when primarily communicating online?
REFERENCE: Ahmed, S. (2008). Sociable Happiness. Emotion, Space and Society, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 10–13.
The question is: Is happiness contagious online?
“Is happiness contagious online? To answer this question, this paper investigates the posting behavior of users on Twitter.com, a popular online service for sharing short messages. Specifically, we use automated sentiment analysis to study a large sample of over 46,000 Twitter messages that reference the 2010 Winter Olympics. We determined that there are more positive messages than negative, and that positive messages are more likely to be forwarded than negative messages.” (Gruzd, Doiron and Mai, 2011: 1)
“Is happiness contagious? Can it spread from person to person? If we are talking about a network of locally bounded individuals with many face-to-face interactions consisting of “strong” ties, the answer is a definite “yes”, according to Fowler and Christakis [7]. However, it is still unclear if the same can be said for online social networks consisting of people who live in far flung places with few or even no face-to-face interactions and where the majority of ties are considered to be “weak”.” (Ibid.)
“To shed some light on the latter question, this paper investigates posting behavior of users on Twitter.com, a popular online service for sharing short messages called “tweets”. Twitter makes an ideal case to determine whether happiness is contagious online because of the instantaneous broadcast-ability of the messages and the built-in inter- connectivity of its membership base.” (Ibid.)
“As part of their now famous Framingham Heart study, Fowler and Christakis followed 4,739 people and observed their levels of happiness over the course of 20 years. To determine levels of happiness, they relied on a commonly used scale called the Center for Epidemiological Studies Depression scale (CES-D) developed by the United States National Institute of Mental Health. This scale works by comparing each participant’s varying levels of happiness with respect to the different types of social relationships in their lives.” (Ibid.)
“From their study, the researchers were able to determine that the place occupied by the participants within their social network played a significant part in their level of happiness; more specifically, “people at the core of their local networks seem more likely to be happy, while those on the periphery seem more likely to be unhappy” (p. 6) [7]. In addition, the researchers were able to determine that the level of happiness of the participants’ close relationships had a direct influence on their own overall level of happiness; in fact, the results showed that clusters of happiness can and do form within real-world, face-to-face social networks, and that happiness spreads from person to person within these networks and that the happiness extends up to three degrees of separation.“ (Ibid.)
“The question at hand is whether or not happiness can also spread within online social networks in a similar way.” (Ibid.)
“2.1. Happiness in online communities. With the growing number of social networks now being created on the internet, the definition of social network and of community is rapidly changing. There are now countless places on the internet where individuals can go to interact with each other. Such internet spaces include chat rooms, social networking sites, online support groups, blog spots, and other online communities that bring together people who share common interests. As Easter argues, these online spaces fulfill the basic need for a “third place” for people to spend their time outside of their home and work environments [6]. Before the existence of the internet, this concept of a ‘third place’ would have been anything from a coffee shop to a book store; now, with the internet being widespread and relatively accessible, more and more individuals are turning to the internet as a ‘third place’ to spend their time. Some individuals seek internet communities as a leisure activity, as is the case in Easter’s work; others turn to the internet in the hopes of finding support groups to help them with difficult life situations, or to find new ways of establishing relationships and connecting with loved ones.” (Ibid., 2)
“Many researchers in recent years have tried to determine the driving forces behind the growing number of online communities; in looking at factors that motivate people to turn to online communities, researchers have found that one of the strongest motivators was the positive emotions that these communities foster. Many results show that participating in online communities can reduce feelings of isolation and increase levels of happiness of the participants. For example, in the study conducted by Sum et. al., the results showed that internet use increases the well being of older adults by reducing the isolation and boredom that results from a lack of meaningful friendships [17]. It was found that internet use by older adults is effective in keeping them connected to loved ones when limited mobility becomes a factor in their lives. The authors explain that “travel through cyberspace does not require physical movement, so even elders with disabilities can contact with social networks from their home” (p.1). This study also found that the internet can “reinforce people’s connection with their surrounding social world [and] possibly reduce the onset of depression” (p. 3).” (Ibid.)
There are travel bans in a lot of countries at the moment to reduce the contagion of Covid-19. However, one can travel online. As long as the body stays in the same spot, or at least indoors, travelling is allowed. Where is Google going to take you today? Will the travels be the same as visiting a country physically?
“As family and community structures are collapsing in western societies, the internet offers alternative ways of connecting with one another in a world where individuals are becoming increasingly independent and socially isolated [6].” (Ibid.)
“These studies clearly demonstrate that happiness and well-being can be generated by the participation in online communities and social networks; however, what these studies do not identify is whether or not happiness can be spread via online social networks in the same way as it does in face-to-face networks as shown by Fowler and Christakis’ study.” (Ibid.)
“Several of the studies on internet use and happiness have alluded to the fact that the participation in an online social network generates happiness in ways that are similar to that of face-to-face interactions; however, there is little research into whether or not happiness can spread like a biological contagion within online social networks.” (Ibid.)
inspiration for my method:
“One of the most common approaches used by researchers to measure happiness on the internet is to use a survey instrument. […] The study by Sum et. al. on the participation of older adults on the internet utilized a survey to measure the following: intensity and history of internet use, internet breadth scale, changes in life satisfaction, and community scale [17]. By measuring these components, the researchers were able to determine whether or not the internet was increasing the well-being of the participants.” (Ibid., f)
“The results shed light on how the emotional tone and content of online messages may influence users’ online interactions and the formation of social connections on the internet. […] From a practical perspective, the results of this study point to the fact that if you want your messages to be forwarded and to reach more people, you need to make sure that both the tone and content of your online messages are positive overall. The results of this study show that even subtle nuances in the emotional content of a message can have a major impact on the receiver, and on the degree to which a message will be retweeted. Thus, even in the age of Twitter, the old adage about attracting more bees with honey than vinegar still holds true.” (Ibid., 7)
REFERENCE: Gruzd, A., Doiron, S., and Mai, P. (2011). Is Happiness Contagious Online? A Case of Twitter and the 2010 Winter Olympics. 2011 44th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 1-9.
“Happiness is an achievement, and one which you do not have to suffer in isolation or silence. There is a whole consumer industry to support and encourage such endeavours; ranging from a burgeoning popular psychological literature offering the tools of happiness from the people who ‘know’; through to the practices and techniques to achieve happiness which can be imparted through the growing services offered by life coaches and motivational speakers. Happiness takes form as a set of practices of the self-oriented towards particular goals: aligned with success and satisfaction in the work place; romantic relationships (particularly the art of dating and seduction); physical and mental health and well being; and the maximisation and optimisation of leisure and recreation time through the establishment of happy life-skills. These practices are epistemological, cognitive, corporeal and affectual, organised through a distinction made between motivation and habit.” (Blackman, 2008)
“[…] in the psychological literature there are a range of studies claiming to demonstrate that people can ‘catch’ emotions through other peoples’ ‘facial expressions, vocalizations, postures, or movements’.3 […] The establishment of unintentional bodily communication engenders a mimetic conception of affect which has a long history within studies of hypnotic trance, psychoanalysis and studies of non-verbal communication. […] The literature, particularly on hypnosis and psychoanalysis,6 is structured by an oscillation between the idea that subjects are suggestible, through to attempts to resolve this by claiming that normative communication is characterised by forms of sympathetic identification that are cognitive, conscious and perceptual.7 […] What are fore-grounded in attempts to understand the significance of suggestion are bodily matters that disrupt and disturb the fictional unity of the autonomous subject. This includes renewed attention to non-intentional communication, automaticity, bodily affectivity and permeability.” (Ibid.)
“This concern with how rhythmic repetitions of gesticulation, bodily movements and motor co-ordinations might intensify the spread of feelings between people was considered a source of danger or bemusement. This was marked in some cases by ‘boisterous laughter, frenzied abjurations and frantic cheers’ (Social Psychology, p46). These could, according to Ross, paralyse reason, bombarding the senses with numerous impressions. The result of this spreading might compel people to imitate with intensities that would cross and mix the individual’s bodily state with what was considered a pathological expression of the social body.” (Ibid.)
“This introduced into social psychology a way of thinking the relationship between touch and communication that was based upon subtle, energetic connections or attunements between subjects that lay beyond conscious awareness. […] Interestingly the Latin root of the term contagion is kanta’jan which means ‘and from touch’.28 This model of affect as a form of ‘mental touch’ was considered a powerful mechanism of suggestion. It derived its intelligibility from a widespread concern by many social scientists and philosophers with psychical research (and particularly mediumistic phenomenon); spiritualism, and particularly the idea of the ‘spiritual telegraph’ that posits the possibility of energetic connection between distant souls.29” (Ibid.)
“Durham Peters suggests that this more mimetic conception of communication assumed that affects, feelings, beliefs and so forth would spread through a kind of bodily affectivity. This belief was intimately linked to the emergence of nineteenth century media technologies, such as radio and the telegraph. The reception of these technologies was framed through the idea of energetic connection; thus radio was seen to act at a distance through ‘immaterial mental contact’.30 Although communication was seen primarily to register in bodily affectivity, expressed through a kinaesthetic sense of feeling, it was seen to flow and transmit through an ‘ethereal mode of thought transference’ (Speaking into the Air, p64). This conception of media technologies and their communicative capacities was linked to spiritualist conceptions of communication. These emphasised the ability of individuals to influence each other through ‘sympathetic transmission’ (Speaking into the Air, p78). This notion of sympathy was derived from a more energetic mode of relating, which was not cognitive, semiotic or performative, but rather enacted through the mechanism of vibrational energy.” (Ibid.)
“One key aspect of this vibrational mode of relating was its deep disrespect for the separation of the individual from nature and society, and for the notion of strict boundaries between the-me and the not-me. As I have already stated, this conception of communication also derived in part from studies of hypnotic trance, where key turn of the century philosophers and social scientists, including William James and Gabriel Tarde, foregrounded studies of ordinary suggestibility as a key foundation for studying sociality itself.” (Ibid.)
I had to look up the definition of suggestibility. In psychology: a state, esp under hypnosis, in which a person will accept the suggestions of another person and act accordingly. (Collins Dictionary) After the Cambridge dictionary, a person is ‘suggestible’ when they are easily influenced by other people’s opinions.
“[…] the problem of communication through what Ruth Leys has termed the ‘problem of mimetic desire’.22 This problem took form within a hypnotic paradigm which saw suggestibility as a key register through which affect would flow across and between bodies; human and non-human. […] This concern with how rhythmic repetitions of gesticulation, bodily movements and motor co-ordinations might intensify the spread of feelings between people was considered a source of danger or bemusement. This was marked in some cases by ‘boisterous laughter, frenzied abjurations and frantic cheers’ (Social Psychology, p46). These could, according to Ross, paralyse reason, bombarding the senses with numerous impressions. The result of this spreading might compel people to imitate with intensities that would cross and mix the individual’s bodily state with what was considered a pathological expression of the social body. […] contagious communication […] He aligned the social transmission of ideas, beliefs, affects and feelings with the action of suggestion that disclosed the permeability of the boundaries between subjects.” (Ibid.)
“Interestingly the Latin root of the term contagion is kanta’jan which means ‘and from touch’.28” (Ibid.)
“Although we can see the echoes of ‘mental touch’ as a mechanism through which the media registers its effects, the object of much of cultural theory is focused upon finding, documenting and analysing those interpretive resources of audiences that allow them to exercise conscious deliberation and resist media influence.31 Connolly’s attempt to reframe brain-body-culture relationships in light of this foregrounds the role of non-conscious perception and affect. He argues that a suggestive realm is ‘Organized and deployed collectively’ within media technologies and practices of everyday life (Neuropolitics, p20). However, what has entered media and cultural theory as an authorised version of ‘mental touch’ is one that is refigured as abnormal suggestibility.” (Ibid.)
“The ‘habit of happy thought’ (Self-Help, p339) is a maxim that we might recognise in the present. […] the invitation to approach happiness as a future project of mental application and physical steadfastness that exalts itself in the present, […] ‘triumph over tragedy'” (Ibid.)
“Allport mobilised this notion of suggestibility defined as a sympathetic reaction brought about by conditioning, to explain the popularity of spiritualism between the two world wars in Britain: Persons deprived of loved ones by the late war have developed an attitude of yearning expectancy concerning some future contact with the souls of the dead. Spiritualistic mediums and Ouija boards have provided suggestions for the release of these tendencies, and an international craze for things ‘psychic’ has been the result. Yawning when others yawn is not sheer imitation. It occurs principally when we are tired and on the point of yawning ourselves (Social Psychology, p246). The affective intensity of such responses was linked to the action of the central nervous system. Prepotent responses, although learnt and acquired, were, for Allport, accompanied by the preparatory setting of the synapses which would be augmented, intensified and discharged by certain forms of social facilitation and stimulus. Thus, the experience of being had by affect was one which could be explained through the action of the CNS which would produce ‘bodily changes’. These changes were distributed to muscles, the senses and other parts of the nervous system creating a felt sense of affective intensity. With this move from ordinary suggestibility (as a form of invisible mental touch), to the examination of suggestibility within a singular body, habit becomes the location for automaticity, non-intentional communication and bodily affectivity.” (Ibid.)
“[…] what might happen if we foreground instead spiritual communication as a figuration which does not simply point towards invisible energies, but also to connections between the self and other, human and non-human and physical and ethereal, which can only be spoken and felt by some people and not others, or at other times may not be spoken at all. In other words relational connections, which circulate and position people but that are usually occluded and covered over. These are connections which are felt affectively, and which circulate between the self and other, the human and the non- human, the physical and the ethereal and which make it difficult to establish borders and boundaries.” (Ibid.)
“One could also be impressed or moved by the sounds emitted by everyday domestic furniture. One such object, which became an emblematic figure of such lowly perturbations, was the table. As Cottom amusingly recounts: Soon after modern spiritualism announced itself with the ‘Rochester knockings’ of 1848, tables took on a new and controversial life. No longer were they content to live out their day’s impassively upholding dishes and glasses and silverware, vases, papers and books, bibelots, elbows, or weary heads. They were changed: they began to move. Tables all over the United States and then in England, France, and other countries commenced rapping, knocking, tilting, turning, tipping, dancing, levitating, and even ‘thrilling’ – though this last was uncommon (On the Dignity of Tables’, p765).” (Ibid.)
“Contagion within this account aligns both connection and disconnection exploring both the movement of affect, as well as detailing the myriad of ways in which subjects become-stuck. If we accept this rather different model of relationality, affective transmission is never simply something one ‘catches’ but rather a process that one is ‘caught up’ in. Its complexity is revealed through the linkages and connections of the body to other practices, techniques, bodies (human and non-human), energies, judgements, inscriptions and so forth that are relationally embodied. Happiness is never therefore singular (a property of the individual), or a contagious force which you might catch in a particular spatial and temporal location. This problem of communication is revealed by attempts to produce happiness, which either reify emotionality as a set of practices of the self or are directed to moments of happiness which just seem to arrive. Rather, happiness discloses the wonder, ambiguity, mystery and inexplicability that our attempts to know fail to catch and bring to life. Perhaps the question of happiness should be directed to the question of how to live with the unknown, the unresolved, and the limits of autonomy as a performative ideal.” (Ibid.)
REFERENCE: Blackman, L. (2008). Is Happiness Contagious? New Formations, 63, 15-32.
The impact of hyper connectivity on sociality: Are we more connected or more divided through the always-there internet? When I googled the definition of the word ‘sociality’ just now, this came up:
Under conditions of obligatory isolation and social distancing, common people invented new kinds of sociality […].
“Amid the bewildering figures and contradictory political narratives, it is important to recall that numbers and governments are abstractions – whereas people actually live with and through disease. By fixating on the former, we risk losing sight of the human dimensions of epidemic life. As a scholar researching the cultural aspects of the 2003 SARS epidemic, I too initially focused on geopolitics and biosecurity. But what I discovered in addition – rarely discussed but vitally humanizing – were the vibrant forms of everyday communal life generated by SARS at its very epicenters.” (Kong, 2020)
“Under conditions of obligatory isolation and social distancing, common people invented new kinds of sociality and new genres of epidemic expressions. With COVID-19 now even more than SARS, the Chinese internet and social media offer a cornucopia of examples of epidemic communities brought together by heart, humor and creativity.” (Ibid.)
“Pandemic solidarity.
One early set of viral videos surfaced in Wuhan just five days into the city’s lockdown. On the night of Jan. 27, residents shouted “jiayou” – literally “add oil,” meaning “hang in there” or “don’t give up” – out their apartment windows, in a spontaneous burst of solidarity. It was a demonstration of collective strength and defiance, of people’s refusal to be quelled by the virus and the quarantine, and their desire to cheer each other on.” (Ibid.)
“Pandemic care.
[…] Another unexpected focal point for communal care is the face mask. Across China, masks have become a powerful vehicle for enacting goodwill, generosity and fellowship during the epidemic. […] This video in turn inspired the Hong Kong-based singer G.E.M. (Gloria Tang/Deng Ziqi) to compose “Angels,” a song that garnered nearly 600,000 hits within the first day of its upload. A tribute to ordinary people’s small acts of fortitude and kindness during the outbreak, the music video opens with the Anhui clip and then splices together other moving scenes, including a train employee gifting a mask to an elderly woman passenger and a man distributing free masks to travelers in an airport abroad.” (Ibid.)
“Pandemic humour.
This creative energy has also spurred China’s folk humor culture. In locked-down sites across the country, social media is spawning a new genre of quarantine humor. On Weibo, WeChat and Douyin, memes of quarantine boredom and stir-craziness proliferate.” (Ibid.)
“[…] the very sharing of these memes is a constructive and healing social act. In times of high stress and distress, to sustain these virtual communities is to deliver shared recognition, concern and laughter.” (Ibid.)
“This is not to say that China’s epidemic experience is solely lighthearted or affirming. Yet neither does life at epicenters have to be apocalyptic, defined by epic heroes and villains or horror scenarios of collapse and conflict.” (Ibid.)
“Indeed, in other countries that have since become COVID-19 epicenters, social media offer similarly inspiring examples. Frontline health workers in Iran dance in hospital hallways to buoy their patients as well as themselves, and Italians in lockdown sing from their balconies to boost each other’s morale – in turn prompting a string of “Italy jiayou” videos from Chinese netizens.” (Ibid.)
“Collectively, these chronicles attest to the idea of pandemic resilience – the possibility that disease outbreaks can be lived through with empathy, ingenuity and sheer human ordinariness.” (Ibid.)
REFERENCE: Kong, B. (18 March 2020). How Chinese people came when separated by quarantine, creating hope, humor and art. Available at: https://theconversation.com/how-chinese-people-came-together-when-separated-by-quarantine-creating-hope-humor-and-art-133423 [Accessed 8 April 2020].
“Digital communication appears to give us time through the promise of greater efficiency, but it also takes time from us with its constant demands on our attention. Are we so obsessed with our mobile devices that we must ‘feel the relief of clicking’? Do we suffer a painful performance anxiety when communicating via a plethora of social media networks? Are our mobile phones ‘electro-libidinal parasites’?” (Rubery and Fisher, 2011)
“‘What I’ve noticed over the last few months is a growing sense of a kind of digital communicative malaise; a sense that we’re deep into this stuff and that we didn’t necessarily know what we were getting into. It’s like we’re the subject of an experiment which no-one is consciously really conducting,’ says Fisher.” (Ibid.)
“Looking back ten or 15 years ago, who cared about constant communication apart from teenagers? Who has got control of time, and how have they got control of it? Fisher believes that our mobile phones are ‘communicational parasites with a very low-level jouissance’; they are capable of tainting all other levels of enjoyment with their constant pull on our attention. ‘Why are we so ready to accept the story that technology delivers modernity, when actually… it’s pretty clear from the last decade alone that changes in technology aren’t enough on their own to deliver new culture?’ he asks.” (Ibid.)
“Fisher argues that contemporary culture is, in fact, a rehashing of what’s gone before; there is an emphasis on pastiche and retrospection: ‘At a time when all certainties collapse at an economic and political level, you reach for older forms of culture as a form of reassurance; but there are also cognitive difficulties [with this],’ he says. The alternatives of the nineties have faded, and the ‘dark capitalism’ predicted by Nick Land, is nowhere to be seen – instead we have a ‘banal capitalism’ dominated by the ‘neuroticising mechanisms of social media’. In the past, people expected to keep the same job for 40 years, but this has collapsed into a world of ‘precarity’, with short-term contracts and virtual workplaces created by sophisticated mobile technology.” (Ibid.)
“Fisher speculates that following the collapse of neoliberalism in 2008, we have not found a new ideology to take its place; we are living in an ideological vacuum and in a state of ‘atemporality’.” (Ibid.)
“‘The challenge for us, at this time, is to come up with [an] alternative, but I think it will have to be via precarity. Who wants to go back to working in a factory for 40 years? ‘ he says. The other obstacle is articulating these ideas in a way that is not technologically reactionary. ‘Of course there are other uses of digital technology available apart from communicative uses,’ he concludes, ‘and maybe we can look towards a digital psychedelia that would involve a dilation of time, instead of this constantly harried sense of time in which we seemed to be required to live at the moment.’” (Ibid.)
REFERENCE: Fisher, M. (2011). No time. Virtual Futures. Available at: http://www.virtualfutures.co.uk/discover/no-time/ [Accessed 8 April 2020]
“The architecture of the Lockdown has increased our dependence on virtuality. It has altered the way we interact with each other by intensifying the use of the keyboard for ie. online streaming, internet subscriptions, shopping, museum tours, concerts, video conferences, online education, and even sexuality. This has alienated us from the corporeality of our bodies, (fear of the virus) as well as the social bodies at large (our communities). In addition, many are experiencing the virus itself. This is a reminder that we are mortal and that our very lives are at stake. We must consider the value of our lives. What can be said about mutual aid, solidarity, empathy, love, introspection, spirituality, beauty, truth, pleasure, solitude, and dignity? After all, when this is ‘over’, the new normal will come with baggage carrying the most profound existential and metaphysical affairs. What are we then going to do?” (Spring Break, 2020)
REFERENCE: Spring Break (2020). Available at: https://fallsemester.org/ctsb2020. [Accessed 11 April 2020].
“In an article in El País, the German-Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han writes that Chinese people have a totally different approach to big data collection and ensuing forms of control.[3] They seem not so worried by this techno-control, and have a different approach to its collective dimension—let’s say that their culture has always been amenable to the swarm prevailing over the individual.” (Berardi, 2020)
“The global revolt that erupted in the last months of 2019 was a sort of convulsion of the worldwide social body. These different rebellions were not able to find a common strategy—for now, at least. So, the convulsion resulted in a collapse. But, now we are in a something like a paralysis that follows collapse. What we are feeling now is the fear of contagion, of boredom, and of the world that we’ll find when we’ll be allowed to go out again. However, fear can be a condition for catalyzing the change that we need. Boredom can be turned into creative desire for action, curiosity for something surprising, the expectation of the unexpected.” (Ibid.)
“For decades, we have been obliged to work in dangerous conditions. Climate change and the degradation of the environment have not been stopped by protests and widespread awareness. Capitalism does not give a damn about protests and people’s awareness. But now it’s different: the living body of the humanity (and the interactive mind) have been somewhat paralyzed by the presentiment of the end: in short, a global trauma. Yesterday, the conditions for revolution were present: the sinking of democracy, the arrogance of the powerful, rampant poverty, violent exploitation, ecological devastation, and widely accessible information about what is going on. But, to quote the Invisible Committee: “reasons do not make revolutions, bodies do.” Now something new has happened: bodies are obliged to stop their economic frenzy. Only trauma can provoke this sudden stop and this unavoidable change of direction. And the pandemic is the trauma that we needed. But, trauma is not enough. Trauma may also lead (and it generally does) to very bad choices—for instance the establishment of a techno-totalitarian system for the greater control of society, in this case. So, what is needed now is a period of active imagination to re-program that which may follow the halt, the big reset of the global machine.” (Ibid.)
“On a Salvage podcast I listened to recently, I remember one of the panelists pointing out the need to reconsider and create new rituals after capitalism’s hollowing of ritual (like weddings, funerals, the gift). Death, and our reaction to it, are of course part of this matrix of hollowed rituals. I imagine much of the re-programming that you refer to should happen in the creating of new collective and shared rituals.” (Petrossiants, 2020)
“Rebelling against extinction is obviously a paradoxical idea. Typically, I like paradoxes of this kind because they can help us understand difficult ideas. But, no, extinction is not to be, and cannot be rejected. Rather, the fear of our impending extinction must be transformed into a condition for changing life. I think that Western culture became sick when it became unable to face death as the inevitable horizon of life. With this mindset, death turned into a condition to deny, to geo-engineer against, to techno-engineer ourselves out of—it also became the punishment for our sins. Well, the pandemic is also an opportunity for a new collective reflection about mortality, about the relation of organic life with time.” (Berardi, 2020)
“[…]“political consciousness” because there is no longer any shared struggle—the years of lead have given way to a nascent neoliberal biopolitics, with its incumbent insistence on individualized, alientated existence.” (Petrossiants, 2020)
“I don’t think in terms of “the left.” The left is a concept linked to past politics, and does not apply today. I prefer to think in terms of human evolution, and of the possibility of a social revolution as the only way to reactivate evolution as a progressive movement, rather than as one descending into darkness due to the mass fear of extinction, and reactionary responses to dealing with it—most of which just continue racialized violence, extraction, capitalist growth. The political games of the past, based on the right-left opposition are over.” (Berardi, 2020)
“In your diary, you write: “A semiotic virus in the psychosphere has blocked the abstract functioning of the system, by removing bodies.” What is left now that these bodies are shuttered away from what’s left of public space? What do we do with our bodies at home?” (Petrossiants, 2020)
“I would say that all stuck at home should try to transform this period into a voluntary period of psychoanalytic therapy. I think that this is already happening, at least for some part of the secluded population. Many more people are questioning the social rule that has destroyed the public system, and are imagining a totally different organization of social activity. Some of my friends say that in these days they feel sort of relieved. They enjoy a long vacation for the first time in ten years. This is clearly the end, even if temporary, of capitalist acceleration, and people can finally spend their time caring about their selves and imagining their own future.” (Berardi, 2020)
“But, there is another side to the present condition that is enormously interesting to me: what has this done to our view of the shift toward the condition of connectivity through communications systems. Throughout the last decades, we have undergone a mutation from a conjunctive form of bodily communication (physical contact in public space) to the connective form of purely operational communication facilitated by the internet. As you know, the pandemic has created a social environment in which all conjunction is forbidden: social distancing is the new law. What will be the effect of this obligation? One may think that the conjunctive mode will be practically abolished, forgotten, and social activities (teaching, learning, working, and so on) will shift to the digital, connective modes. But, this is not certain. On the contrary, I think that in the end, people (or some part of them) will identify online connectivity with sickness. Maybe people will associate sickness with the illusions of digital connectivity, and instead crave experiences that are haptic, shared, void of digital mediation. We must consciously act on this: the obligation, the alternative, the probability, and the possibility. All is there for us.” (Ibid.)
REFERENCE: Berardi, F. “Bifo” and Petrossiants, A. (2020). Social Distancing and the Global Reset to Follow. Available at: https://fallsemester.org/2020-1/2020/4/8/franco-berardi-andreas-petrossiants-social-distancing-and-the-global-reset-to-follow [Accessed 11 April 2020].
“I feel like we’ve realised in these last few weeks both how precious the physical, real, embodied world is and how many of the things that we might have thought essential can be done virtually.” (Laing, 2020)
“I hope too that we can find a way to be more present in and appreciative of our own local environments – bookshops, cinemas, parks, hospitals, libraries, farms – without becoming xenophobic or reinforcing national and tribal boundaries.” (Ibid.)
REFERENCE: Laing, O. (2020) via Sadie Coles HQ. Available at: https://www.instagram.com/p/B-zlp65ghIx/ [Accessed 12 April 2020].
Could it be possible that, if we are privileged enough, we might actually be enjoying the temporary but significant halt from the ever-demanding engine of capitalism caused by Covid-19? For some it’s a break like never before. Maybe we enjoy not feeling that constant pressure to always be available, connected, up to date, productive, and present at all events. Essentially, for many of us, lockdown is a welcome break from the conditions of neoliberalism.
It seems that now that we are released from the pressure to be always on, we can act naturally on our needs. One need that crystallises itself now is the need for human contact. Now that we are deprived of it, the embodied social experience of being in a group is what we can again crave.
“With the ever-growing availability, mobility, and use of the Internet for social engagements, Problematic Internet Use (PIU; Siciliano et al., 2015) has become an evident issue among adolescents. Using the Internet merits several benefits as adolescents may use social media tools to stay connected to get information about what is happening in their friends’ lives. Social media may also be useful in getting support from their friends, family, and broader social networks. However, some scholars have expressed their concerns regarding these technology-enabled activities, arguing that they can become addictive, disruptive, time consuming, and may lead to several psychiatric symptoms in adolescents, and low life satisfaction (Cheung & Wong, 2011; Alt, 2015).” (Alt and Boniel-Nissim, 2018: 3392)
“Problematic Internet Use. PIU is described as a general behavioral addiction (Griffiths, 1999). It refers to repetitive impulsive behaviors that have negative effects on the lives of users and their relatives and are associated with mood, obsessive–compulsive, and substance use disorders (Villella et al., 2011). A cognitive–behavioral model of PIU characterizes it as a preference for online social relationships, mood regulation through the Internet, and deficient self-regulation (Gámez-Guadix, Calvete, Orue, & Las Hayas, 2015). Nevertheless, the concept and criteria of PIU and Internet addiction remain controversial. A recent attempt to determine PIU in adolescents has yielded four essential components (Siciliano et al., 2015): (a) excessive use, often with a loss of sense of time, that causes loss of sleep or neglect of basic drives; (b) withdrawal, including feelings of anger, tension, and/ or depression and anxiety when the Internet is inaccessible; (c) diversion from usual activities such as homework and real face-to-face social life, preference to stay connected instead of spending time with friends in other activities; and (d) excessive time spent online to the point of being urged to reduce the use of Internet by parents or friends.” (Ibid., f)
“This broader term of PIU refers to concepts beyond addiction, such as Internet use that interferes with offline socialization (Moreno, Jelenchick, & Christakis, 2013), therefore was used in the present study.” (Ibid.: 3393)
“Fear of Missing Out. FoMO is characterized by the desire to stay continually connected with what others are doing and is especially associated with social media technologies (Przybylski et al., 2013). A handful of studies lends support to the mediating role of FoMO in linking deficits in psychological needs to excessive use of social media.” (Ibid., 3394)
“In a similar vein, Beyens, Frison, and Eggermont’s (2016) study indicated that an increased need to belong and an increased need for popularity might be positively associated with Facebook use. These relationships were mediated by FoMO, which was positively associated with increased stress related to Facebook use.” (Ibid., 3395)
“Another study (Elhai, Levine, Dvorak, & Hall, 2016) demonstrated the importance of social and tactile need fulfillment variables, such as FoMO and need for touch, in explaining problematic smartphone use and its association with depression and anxiety. FoMO was the variable most related to problematic smartphone use.” (Ibid.)
“Similarly, Lai, Altavilla, Ronconi, and Aceto (2016) investigated the neurobiological correlates of FoMO in response to social exclusion and inclusion.” (Ibid.)
REFERENCE: Alt, D. and Boniel-Nissim, M. (2018). Parent–Adolescent Communication and Problematic Internet Use: The Mediating Role of Fear of Missing Out (FoMO). Journal of Family Issues,39(13), 3391-3409.
When wandering to one of the near-by shops to do “essential” shopping in week 5 of Lockdown, I came across the exhibition ‘Pause’ at m2 Gallery in Peckham, which shows various recorded faces on big screens looking back at whoever stands before them. These screens are approachable from outside, so this is one of the rare exhibitions you can visit despite of the closures of art spaces caused by Covid-19. It was striking that the artist Gerry McCulloch must have felt the need to elicit face-to-face encounters. Standing before one of those moving-image portraits (there is a frequent change to another portrait after what feels like a very long time) reveals how we are not used to really looking at someone without any major movements (those of talking, laughing, etc.). The intimacy of the encounter is awkward and almost unbearable, were it not for the screen and the fact that the person on the screen is not actually present, but previously recorded. So, there is the reassurance that they don’t actually look back at us, in real time or ever. In this case, the TV screen makes this non-verbal, yet very social face-to-face encounter bearable and possible. It’s almost impossible to imagine an up-close, non-verbal encounter like that in reality. It’s a shame that it’s deemed as awkward to just silently look at each other without there being any action. When I say action, I am thinking of actions like making a joke to wipe away the awkwardness or say something to break the moment of silence. Looking at each other silently is most commonly seen by lovers expressing their love for each other or their desire. Another context where these non-verbal, intimate encounters are possible, is a spiritual, meditative one. Looking at each other silently for some time is also a recognised exercise in empathy. This intimate way of pausing and paying attention to each other creates empathy and emotions almost immediately. There is something humble, grounding and respectful or loving in taking the time to really look at each other. So, why are we so restricted to do it without being in any of the mentioned contexts? It’s a shame it’s weird to have that encounter among strangers. It’s merely not doable. Does the screen help us look at each other or does it make the divides between humans in real life bigger? Would you look up from your phone to look someone in the eye and see them, risking that you are called intense or weird, when you could just keep staring at your phone, browsing through millions of faces every day, on the news, on your social media feeds. Do you wish you could be more connected to your surroundings and fellow humans in your present moment?
Here’s what is written about the artist’s project Transpires: “Transpires consists of multiple large-scale, projection-mapped, moving-image portraits, filmed from inside the intimate spaces of subjects, using a hidden arrangement of mirrors. Transpires functions as an antidote to politics of estrangement founded on difference, and aims to de-stigmatises otherness. Engaging with the work dissolves boundaries of language, religion, politics, ethnicity, age, gender, socio-economic status and personal sovereignty. Participants subliminally discover that in vital respects we are all “the other person” to one another.” (Darshana Photo Art. Available at: https://www.darshanaphotoart.co.uk/Gerry)
“In an era of aggressive, competitive individualism (paradoxically founded on dualism), Transpires proposes a unified alternative. The accent is on inter-connectedness, not otherness and the status of the process is in equanimous balance with the product. In this configuration of creativity, the artists position themselves as unselfconscious catalysts rather than self-determined authors. Participants and observers are regarded as co-creators and collaborators.” (Ibid.)
“The artwork is not ‘about’ the subject. Indeed, no hierarchy is proposed between artist and subject. The artist advances no conceptual message that resides elsewhere in some halcyon space requiring intricate explication to be decoded by an intellectual elite. Instead, the work has evolved with inclusivity as its core. Integrated meaning transpires entirely through involuntary experiential interaction.” (Ibid.)
“The film elements in Transpires comprise entirely of the simplest unit of filmmaking – the close-up. There is no set, no action, no actors, no dialogue and no editing. Framing is uninflected, using a standard fixed lens under neutral lighting. Voluntary participants see no camera, there is no costume or make-up and only minimal guidance is offered. Nonetheless, this amalgamation of non-interventions provokes maximum meaning from minimum means.” (Ibid.)
“Participants encounter increased levels of innate, silent correspondence with others – a connection that transmits in mediated form to observers via screens in gallery and cinema contexts. A selection of feedback from Transpires participants: “This artwork brings us a step closer to world peace.”, “It should be mandatory for Heads of State to participate in this experiment.”, “I would take part in this project on a weekly basis if I could.”.” (Ibid.)
REFERENCE: Darshana Photo Art. Available at: https://www.darshanaphotoart.co.uk/Gerry [Accessed 19 April 2020].
The artist who created these face-to-face encounters together with those filmed, must have felt that there is a need to pause and acknowledge each other’s existence, and through that create more togetherness. Even though, the exhibition started before the Coronavirus pandemic, its experience is more needed than ever. If you feel alone in these times of social distancing, you can walk to m2 Gallery in Peckham and have a silent face-to-face conversation with one of the people in the moving-image portraits recorded by Gerry McCulloch.
It’s these face-to-face encounters that have struck me in Gerry McCulloch’s work. Facing another person eye to eye and just looking at each other is something that has become very rare, predominantly because of the smartphone and our fixation to it. I would go further and say that smartphone use can lead to increasingly avoiding face-to-face encounters, because the smartphone user feels safer on their device, than in unmediated face-to-face encounters. When we have less IRL face-to-face encounters and more mediated online encounters, we may unlearn natural facial impressions and their right interpretation. This creates anxiety towards real life encounters, because they, and our reaction to them, can’t be predicted or controlled. Although Gerry McCulloch’s series of moving-image portraits does not elicit live encounters, as they are pre-recorded, they do enable the onlooker to experience facial expressions and “endure” the unfamiliar immediacy and intimacy of eye to eye contact. It is because they happen on-screen that it becomes possible, rather than awkward, to experience another person’s immediate attention. The lesson learned in this experience of being eye to eye with someone via a screen is sort of one step before “live” encounters and after mediated solipsistic encounters and solely “experienced” online on the phone. It’s kind of the in-between of managing to be with someone in real life without being anxious about it, and avoiding face-to-face encounters (and phone calls) altogether. That exposure grounds one in human relations. It’s almost like exposure therapy used in CBT, where the person who fears real life, face-to-face encounters is exposed to them to overcome their fear. However, in these works, there is no fear of being looked at or being perceived the wrong way. On the contrary, you get to face someone in a safe setting, experience bodily human relations, which may get you closer to overcoming your fear of meeting people IRL. Through the exposure to the face, we are exposed to human emotions which are happening in the present moment. This human relation cannot be expressed by emojis.
Meanwhile in Japan:
“Technology may be making things worse, increasing young people’s isolation. Japan is famous for a condition called hikikomori, a type of acute social withdrawal. The Japanese Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare defines hikikomori as people who refuse to leave their house and isolate themselves from society in their homes for a period exceeding six months. According to government figures released in 2010, there are 700,000 individuals living as hikikomori with an average age of 31. An overlapping group of people with the hikikomori, otaku are “geeks” or “nerds”. While hikikomori is mostly a Japanese phenomenon, cases have been found in the United States, Oman, Spain, Italy, South Korea and France. The young person affected may completely shut himself – it is most often a male – off from the outside world, withdrawing in to a room and not coming out for months or even years.” (Wingfield-Hayes, 2015)
“But that is only the most extreme form of what is now a widespread loss of direct face-to-face socialising.” (Ibid.)
“”Young people in Japan have a lot of knowledge,” Mr Nishida says, “But they have no life experience. They have no idea how to express their emotions.” (Ibid.)
“They have forgotten what it’s like to touch a person.” (Ibid.)
“When they think about sex they have high anxiety and no idea how to deal with it.” And when young people do find themselves isolated and depressed, they have few places to turn to.” (Ibid.)
REFERENCE: Wingfield-Hayes, R. (2015). Why does Japan have such a high suicide rate? Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-33362387 [Accessed 27 April 2020].
“[…] a study this week that found a strong correlation between a decline in face-to-face contact and a decline in our well-being. Engaging with people face-to-face, they say, has a deep and profound effect upon us that’s related to our status as a social species. Social media, it appears, isn’t that social at all, coming in for particular criticism for its “insidious negative effects”.” (Marsden, 2014)
“A chiropractic physician voiced his fears over the increased incidence of what he terms “Text Neck”, a condition where the practise of hunching over a phone is resulting in the first few bones of our cervical spine bending forward in an unusual way.” (Ibid.)
“Then, in the New York Times, writer Jessica Bennett explored the anxiety related to the “typing awareness indicator”, the ellipsis (“…”) that messaging apps display to tell you that a reply is imminent. We can spend endless empty moments staring at that indicator, knowing that someone is thinking about us but not knowing precisely what, and in many ways that behaviour is indicative of our need for synchronous, real-time interaction – the kind that face-to-face communication, by its very nature, provides.””(Ibid.)
REFERENCE: Marsden, R. (2014). Is a decline in face-to-face contact leading to a decline in our well-being? Available at: https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/features/is-a-decline-in-face-to-face-contact-leading-to-a-decline-in-our-well-being-9709980.html [Accessed 27 April 2020].
“Like the city itself, the promise of the internet is contact. It seems to offer an antidote to loneliness, trumping even the most utopian urban environment by enabling strangers to develop relationships along shared lines of interest, no matter how shy or isolated they might be in their own physical lives. But proximity, as city dwellers know, does not necessarily mean intimacy. Access to other people is not by itself enough to dispel the weight of internal isolation. Loneliness can be most acute in a crowd.” (Laing, 2020: 216)
“In 1942, the painter Edward Hopper produced the signature image of urban loneliness.Nighthawks shows four people in a diner at night, cut off from the street outside by a curving glass window: a disquieting scene of disconnection and estrangement. In his art, Hopper was centrally concerned with how humans were handling the environment of the electric city, the way it herded people together while enclosing them in small and exposing cells. His paintings establish an architecture of loneliness, reproducing the confining units of office blocks and studio apartments, in which unwitting exhibitionists reveal their private lives in cinematic stills, framed in pens of glass.” (Ibid.)
“More than seventy years have passed since Nighthawks was painted, but its anxieties about connection have lost none of their relevance, though unease about the physical city has been superseded by fears regarding our new virtual public space, the internet. In the intervening years, we have entered into a world of screens that extends far beyond Hopper’s unsettled vision.” (Ibid., 217)
“Loneliness centres around the act of being seen. When a person is lonely, they long to be witnessed, accepted, desired, at the same time as becoming intensely wary of exposure. According to research carried out over the past decade at the University of Chicago, the feeling of loneliness triggers what psychologists term hypervigilance for social threat. In this state, hyperalert to rejection, becoming inclined to perceive their social interactions as tinged with hostility or scorn. The result which the lonely person becomes increasingly suspicious, intensifying their sense of isolation.” (Ibid.)
“This is where online engagement seems to exercise its special charm. Hidden behind a computer screen, the lonely person has control. They can search for company without the danger of being revealed or found wanting. They can reach out or they can hide; they can lurk and they can show themselves, safe from the humiliation of face-to-face rejection. The screen acts as a kind of protective membrane, a scrim that permits invisibility and also transformation. You can filter your image, concealing unattractive elements, and you can emerge enhanced: an online avatar designed to attract likes. But now a problem arises, for the contact this produces is not quite the same thing as intimacy. Curating a perfected self might win followers or Facebook friends, but it will not necessarily cure loneliness, since the cure for loneliness is not being looked at, but being seen and accepted as a whole person: ugly, unhappy and awkward as well as radiant and selfie-ready.” (Ibid., 218)
“This aspect of digital existence is among the concerns of the MIT professor Sherry Turkle who’s been writing about human-technology interactions wary of the capacity of online spaces to fulfil us in the ways we seem to want it to. According to Turkle, part of this problem with the internet is that it encourages self-invention. ‘At the screen,’ she writes in 2011’s Alone Together, ‘you have a chance to write yourself into the person you want to be and to imagine others as you wish them to be, constructing them for your purposes. It’s a seductive but dangerous habit of mind.’” (Ibid.)
“This period coincided with what felt like a profound shift in internet mores. In the past few years, two things have happened: a drastic rise in online hostility and a growing awareness that the lovely sense of privacy engendered by communicating via a computer is a catastrophic illusion. The pressure to appear perfect is greater than ever, while the once-protective screen no longer reliably separates the domains of the real and the virtual. Increasingly, participants in online spaces have become aware that the unknown audience might at any moment turn on their real self in a frenzy of shaming and scapegoating.” (Ibid., 219)
“The dissolution of the barrier between the public and the private, the sense of being surveilled and punished, extends far beyond our human observers. We are also being watched by the very devices on which we make our broadcasts. As the artist and geographer Trevor Paglen recently observed in frieze: ‘We are at the point (actually, probably long past) where the majority of the world’s images are made by-machines-for-machines.’ In this environment of enforced transparency, the psychic equivalent of the Nighthawks diner, almost everything we do, from shopping in a supermarket to posting a photo on Facebook, is mapped, the gathered data used to predict, monetise, encourage or inhibit our future habits. This growing entanglement of the corporate and social, this creeping sense of being tracked by invisible eyes, demands an increasing sophistication about what is said and where. The possibility of virulent judgement and rejection induces precisely the kind of hypervigilance and withdrawal which increases loneliness. With this has come the slow-dawning realisation that our digital traces will long outlive us.” (Ibid., 220)
“Faced with the knowledge that nothing we say, no matter how trivial or silly, will ever be completely erased, we find it hard to take the risks that togetherness entails. But perhaps I am being too negative, too paranoid, as lonely people often are. Perhaps we are capable of adapting, of finding intimacy in this landscape of unprecedented exposure. What I want to know is where we’re headed. What is this sense of perpetual scrutiny doing to our ability to connect?” (Ibid., 221)
“The future does not come from nowhere. Every new technology generates a surge of anxious energy, since each one changes the rules of communication, rearranging the social order. Take the telephone, that miraculous device for dissolving distance. From the moment in April 1877 that the first line was linked phones No. 1 and 2 in the Bell Telephone Company, it was perceived as an almost uncanny instrument, because it separated the voice from the body.” (Ibid., 222)
“The phone swiftly came to be regarded as a lifeline, an antidote to loneliness, particularly for rural women, stuck in farmhouses miles from family and friends. But fears around anonymity clung to the device. By opening a channel between the outside world and the domestic sphere, the telephone facilitated bad behaviour. From the very beginning, obscene callers targeted both strangers and the so-called ‘hello girls’ who worked the switchboards. People worried that germs might be transmitted down the lines, carried on human breath, and they also worried about who might be lurking, invisibly eavesdropping on private conversations. The germs were a fantasy, but the listeners were real enough, be they operators or neighbours on shared or party lines.” (Ibid.)
“Anxiety also collected around the possibility for misunderstanding. In 1930, Jean Cocteau wrote his haunting monologue The Human Voice, a play intimately concerned with the black holes that technologically-mediated failures of communication produce. It consists of nothing more than a woman speaking on a bad party line to the lover who has jilted her and who is imminently to marry another woman. Her terrible grief is exacerbated by the constant danger of being drowned out by other voices, or disconnected. ‘But I am speaking loud … can you hear me? … Oh, I can hear you now. Yes it was terrible, it was like being dead. You’re here and you can’t make yourself heard.’ The final shot of the television film starring Ingrid Bergson leaves no doubt as to the culprit, lingering grimly on the shining black handset, still emitting the dead end of a dial tone as the credits roll.” (Ibid.)
“The broken, bitty dialogue of The Human Voice underscores the way that a device designed for talking might be in fact make talking more difficult. If the telephone is a machine for sharing words, then the internet is a machine for constructing and sharing identities. In the internet era, Cocteau’s anxieties about how technology has affected our ability to speak intimately to one another accelerate into terror about whether the boundaries between people have been destroyed altogether.” (Ibid., 223)
“Everyone is promoting, no one is listening.” (Ibid.)
“[…] These films take the experiences of contemporary digital culture – the sickening, thrilling feeling of being overwhelmed by a surge of possibilities, not least of who you could become – and speed them up. Trecartin’s work is often ecstatically enjoyable to watch […]” (Ibid., 224)
“[…] a futuristic solution to loneliness: dissolving identity, erasing the burdensome, boundaried individual altogether. But there remain fairly thick currents of unease, not least around the question of who is watching.” (Ibid.)
“What’s it like to be watched like this? Many of the pieces suggest that it feels like being in prison – or perhaps in the quarantine bunkers designed by Hong Kong artist Nadim Abbas. These tiny cells, no larger than a single bed, had been furnished, Apartment Therapy-style, with potted plants, striped throws and abstract prints, an atmosphere of modish domesticity at odds with the implicit violence of the space. As in Hopper’s Nighthawks diners, there’s no way in or out; simply a pane of glass that facilitates voyeurism while making contact impossible. Touch can only be achieved by way of two sets of black rubber gauntlets, one pair permitting someone – a guard, maybe, or a nurse or warden – to reach in and the other allowing the incumbent to reach out. It’s hard to think of a lonelier space.” (Ibid., 225)
“In Jennifer Egan’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel A Visit from the Goon Squad, published in 2010, there is a scene set in the near future that involves a business meeting between a young woman and an older man. After talking for a while, the girl becomes agitated by the demands of speech and asks the man if she can ‘T’ him instead, though they are sitting side by side. As information silently flushes between their two handsets, she looks ‘almost sleepy with relief’, describing the exchange as pure. Reading it, I distinctly remember thinking that it was appalling, shocking, wonderfully far-fetched. Within a matter of months it seemed instead merely plausible, a little gauche, but entirely understandable as an urge. Now it’s just what we do: texting in company, emailing colleagues at the same desk, avoiding encounters, DMing instead.” (Ibid., 227)
REFERENCE: Laing, O. (2020). The Future of Loneliness. March 2015). In: Funny Weather. Art in an Emergency. pp. 216-229.
With my dissertation, I want to focus on the body and how we become alien to our own bodies and those of others when we are mainly online and for that, hunched over our devices.
“The politics I try to transmit with the twerkshops are ‘pum pum politics’: the pum pum is the ass but also the pelvic floor. We have hierarchized our bodies and we have lied to ourselves, making the center of gravity the second center, and making our brain – our ego body – the main center of our bodies. Online, we only exist through the mental and the ego self. The twerkshops reconnect us with the center of gravity, our first brain. We have neurons in our wombs and for a moment, we get to taste what it feels like to have our center there.” (Sosa, 2015)
“We’re decolonizing our bodies. The pleasure politics are also very important: being a pleasurable, fun body of colour is a political stance. We live in a system that wants these bodies dead, in pain, invisible. So pleasure is power, in a non-hierarchical way.” (bid.)
“It’s a bit paradoxical: does the internet do harm to our sense of self and agency? Yes and no. It amplifies it and also shuts it down.” (Ibid.)
REFERENCE: Sosa, F. (2015). An Interview with Fannie Sosa: On Twerking and the Commons. Available at: https://www.berlinartlink.com/2015/06/22/artfeminism-an-interview-with-fannie-sosa-on-twerking-and-the-commons/ [Accessed 27 April 2020].
“Daniel*, a 42-year-old university lecturer, was diagnosed with generalised anxiety disorder and depression five years ago. Since the pace of life slowed due to the pandemic and he stopped commuting, he has experienced a sense of profound relief, more energy, and an improvement in his anxiety. “My usual life feels like a pinball machine. You’re whacking the buttons and the paddles are flailing around, sometimes not even making contact, and it just doesn’t feel like that any more.”” (Jarral, 2020)
“For some people without an underlying mental health diagnosis, the simple factors of more time to sleep – despite, perhaps, having more weird dreams – more time with pets and loved ones, home cooking, and not having to deal with the overstimulation of life in the outside world, have led to a greater sense of general wellbeing. Daisy Fancourt is leading a team at University College London in an ongoing study to look at the psychological and social impact of the coronavirus pandemic. So far, the results of surveys of over 74,000 people have shown that, despite an initial decline in happiness prior to the lockdown starting, wellbeing has risen over the last few weeks, and anxiety levels have fallen for both people with and without existing mental health disorders.” (Ibid.)
“Although this drop in anxiety might well be transient, the reasons behind it are worth exploring. Jasmine Cooray is an integrative counsellor working with people suffering from anxiety and depression. She has noted that “lockdown relief” has been especially pronounced in people who have high levels of internal pressure. “People who are driven by keeping up appearances, productivity, showing up to everything, achieving lots, being visible and being there for everyone have found themselves chilling out, landing in a feeling of relief at not having to perform any more. Because they have been given permission to do what they want to do … their relationship to themselves is much more authentic and organic as a result of not having an audience.”” (Ibid.)
“Anxious rumination can be eclipsed by real-world, serious events that blow those thoughts out of the water and offer a sense of perspective. Fomo has lost some of its power now that the scope for envy-inducing activities has shrunk. We are all acutely aware of our own soft-bellied human vulnerability at this moment. It’s OK to not be OK, and to say so.” (Ibid.)
“The bitter political divisions that pitted us against one another over the last few years have receded in the face of a collective threat, at least for now. We have a precious opportunity to think about the ways in which “normal” life can make people anxious and ill. If we can change the arrangement of the post-pandemic world to prioritise compassion, pay people decently, value essential workers, and to fund our public services properly, perhaps we can hang on to this silver lining.” (Ibid.)
REFERENCE: Jarral, F. (2020). The lockdown paradox: why some people’s anxiety is improving during the crisis. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/29/coronavirus-lockdown-anxiety-mental-health [Accessed 29 April 2020].
“Ironically enough, another factor that might be helping some people with depression and anxiety cope during this crisis is a habit that, in normal life, we try to avoid. Many people who experience depression and anxiety find themselves separating from their immediate situations, either intentionally or unintentionally—a mental process called dissociation. A person might, for instance, focus intensely at work before coming home to disappear into a TV show or endlessly scroll through Instagram.” (Bradley, 2020)
““That’s not great when we’re in our lives because that means you’re missing a lot of your life,” Cohen said. “However. Right now… if you’re a master dissociater, you’re going to be in a better place… You have, basically, a toolbox of how not to have to deal with all the scary feelings.”” (Ibid.)
““The part of us that’s judging and comparing us to everything and everyone around us is so exhausting—and especially, I think, for people that are feeling disconnected,” Visceglia said. “That people are openly and actively struggling with loneliness and isolation… For someone that’s been feeling that in a crowd already, it can be kind of validating.”” (Ibid.)
““I’m used to being in a room alone with my thoughts for an extended period of time,” Weinstein said, […] Due to her history of depression and anxiety, Weinstein is also used to, as she put it, “shrinking away from life” for a period of time.” (Ibid.)
REFERENCE: Bradley, L. (2020). If You Have Anxiety and Depression but Feel Better During Coronavirus, You’re Not Alone. Available at: https://www.thedailybeast.com/coronavirus-is-making-a-lot-of-people-anxious-and-depressed-but-some-sufferers-actually-feel-better-now?ref=scroll [Accessed 27 April 2020].
“Now we all socialise by […] video-conferencing apps such as Zoom and, if you have friends who are younger than 35, Houseparty. Because I am over 35, I prefer the former, because you have more control over who’s bursting through your screen.” (Freeman, 2020)
“Bye-bye, Fomo, ain’t nothing going on outside: the party is happening here.” (Ibid.)
“Where once my friends and I would text one another, calling only in an emergency, we now regularly pop up on each other’s laptops as we work, so desperate to see a face that doesn’t belong to someone we live with that all the old concerns about intruding into each other’s day have been hastily jettisoned. […] We were separated by screens, distance and once unimaginable fears, and yet in some ways closer than ever.” (Ibid.)
REFERENCE: Freeman, H. (2020). Bye-bye, Fomo – now the party is being Zoomed to my laptop. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/04/bye-bye-fomo-now-the-party-is-being-zoomed-to-my-laptop [Accessed 29 April 2020].
My research questions are at this point: What might the differences between face-to-face and online interaction be? Can virtual interaction ever replace face-to-face interaction? If not, why not?
“Fear of missing out, need for touch, anxiety and depression are related to problematic smartphone use.” (Elhai, Levine, Dvorak and Hall, 2016: 509)
“Problematic smartphone use is an important public health challenge and is linked with poor mental health outcomes.” (Ibid.)
“Participants responded to standardized measures of problematic smartphone use, and frequency of smartphone use, depression and anxiety and possible mechanisms including behavioral activation, need for touch, fear of missing out (FoMO), and emotion regulation. Problematic smartphone use was most correlated with anxiety, need for touch and FoMO.” (Ibid.)
“Frequency of use was associated with need for touch, and (inversely) with depressive symptoms. Behavioral activation mediated associations between smartphone use (both problematic and usage frequency) and depression and anxiety symptoms. Emotional suppression also mediated the association between problematic smartphone use and anxiety. Results demonstrate the importance of social and tactile need fulfillment variables such as FoMO and need for touch as critical mechanisms that can explain problematic smartphone use and its association with depression and anxiety.” (Ibid.)
“Smartphones are ubiquitous in modern day society globally.” (Ibid.)
“Studying problematic smartphone use is therefore of significant public health significance. Our focus in the present paper is on correlates and mechanisms of problematic smartphone use involving psychopathology, dysfunctional self- and emotional control, and social and tactile need fulfillment.” (Ibid.)
“Evidence for the construct of problematic smartphone use, or smartphone addiction, comes from a growing literature base. In Pew Research polling, nearly half of Americans reported that they “couldn’t live without” their smartphones (Smith & Page, 2015, April 1). When separated from one’s smartphone in experimental studies, many participants evidence mounting anxiety (Cheever, Rosen, Carrier, & Chavez, 2014) and physiological increases in heart rate and blood pressure (Clayton, Leshner, & Almond, 2015). Furthermore, phantom cell phone vibrations are commonly reported, despite an absence of incoming phone notifications (Kruger & Djerf, 2016). These dependency-like behaviors and withdrawal- like symptoms are not surprising given how much people rely on their phones in daily life for productivity, information seeking, and social interaction, among other things (van Deursen, Bolle, Hegner, & Kommers, 2015).” (Ibid., f.)
“Most widely reported are relationships between problematic smartphone use and severity of depression and anxiety symptoms. Other research has shown associations between problematic smartphone use and more general stress and self-esteem, but with less consistent findings (e.g., Smetaniuk, 2014; van Deursen et al., 2015).” (Ibid., 510)
“First, within Billieux et al.’s (2015) extraversion pathway, fear of missing out (FoMO) is a newer personality construct involving reluctance to miss important information, including social information. FoMO results in the need to frequently stay connected to social networks. FoMO was first discussed in the news media (Fake, 2011, March 15; Morford, 2010, August 4). People high in FoMO likely overuse their smartphones to satisfy the need to stay connected. FoMO appears to drive overuse of social media based on web surveys with college students and community participants (Alt, 2015; Przybylski, Murayama, DeHaan, & Gladwell, 2013). Among college students, FoMO was associated with increases in problematic smartphone use in a laboratory study (Clayton et al., 2015).” (Ibid.)
“Another relevant construct, within the impulsive pathway to problematic smartphone use, is decreased emotional self-control, or emotional dysregulation. Dysregulated emotion is often defined by two processes e decreased cognitive reappraisal, and increased emotional suppression (Gross & John, 2003; Gross, 1998). Problematic smartphone users likely overuse their phones in part because of an inability to regulate their emotions. Additionally, problematic smartphone use may be a technique (albeit ineffective) to deal with or regulate negative emotion.” (Ibid.)
“One addictive aspect of smartphone use is the pleasure derived from tactile sensations in holding the phone, and the autotelic touch (Peck & Childers, 2003a) required in completing tasks with one’s fingers (Lee et al., 2014). “Need for touch” (Peck & Childers, 2003b) is a construct from the marketing field describing a personality variable of desiring haptic information through the hands. […] People high in the need for touch may demon- strate an overuse of a smartphone’s touch screen to satisfy this need. Lee et al. (2014) found in a Taiwanese community survey that problematic smartphone use was significantly related to need for touch.” (Ibid.)
“According to the Behavioral Model of Depression, low levels of positive reinforcement are responsible for depressive symptoms, and increasing positive reinforcement can be obtained by increasing the number and types of gratifying/pleasurable events in one’s environment (Lewinsohn, 1974). […] Behavioral activation involves engagement in adaptive gratifying/pleasurable activities as a functional response alternative to avoidance. Behavioral activation has shown great promise as a target for alleviation of clinical depression (reviewed in Dimidjian, Barrera, Martell, Munoz, & Lewinsohn, 2011).” (Ibid.)
REFERENCE: Elhai, J., Levine, J., Dvorak, R., and Hall, B. (2016). Fear of missing out, need for touch, anxiety and depression are related to problematic smartphone use. Computers in Human Behavior, 63, 509-516.
“Many of my friends, however extroverted, now confide that seeing people on screen leaves them feeling more alone, and have begun to avoid Zoom […] ‘When you see someone in person you *are* the energy, whereas onscreen you have to *create* it’ […]” (Sudjik, 2020)
“[…] Jeremy Bailenson – a professor at Stanford University who studies what happens when humans shift their interactions into cyberspace – explained in the Financial Times: ‘Most of us are not used to staring directly into enlarged faces on screen for hours on end. This can be exhausting, since it requires us to actively engage our brains, like being immersed in a new language.’” (Ibid.)
“As Megan Nolan, self-isolating alone, wrote in the New Statesman: ‘So far, I have accepted these imperfect interactions as “better than nothing”, but I am beginning to seriously doubt that… Now I suspect that the inadequate approximation of something as profound and fundamentally necessary as human connection may ultimately be more depressing than its absence.’” (Ibid.)
“There may be comforting ways to simulate normality with technology, like when Connell falls asleep while Marianne works at the other end of a Skype call in the TV adaptation of Normal People, but it is still a simulation. Even a soothing, silent presence (less exhausting) can’t make up for the lack of real, physical touch so many of us are experiencing 24-7, or when we try to ‘stay in touch’ virtually.” (Ibid.)
“I already knew about the relationship between physical contact and oxytocin, the bonding hormone released during sex and childbirth, but this week I learnt about the neurological phenomenon of ‘skin hunger’ – the biological need for human touch. […] “When you touch the skin,” explains Tiffany Field at the University of Miami, “it stimulates pressure sensors under the skin that send messages to the vagus [a nerve in the brain.] As vagal activity increases, the nervous system slows down, heart rate and blood pressure decrease, and your brain waves show relaxation. Levels of stress hormones such as cortisol are also decreased.”” (Ibid.)
“Without human touch (or even a pet) we are less calm and less sane – which may cause us to socially withdraw.” (Ibid.)
REFERENCE: Sudjic, O. (2020). Touching the Void. Available at: https://www.buro247.com/experience/experience/olivia-sudjic-on-technology-and-touch-in-quarantine [Accessed 12 May 2020].
From here I will focus on sociological research:
“Computer-mediated communication (henceforth CMC) may be expected to differ from face-to-face interaction, yet from a sociological perspective, the interactions may be subjected to analysis to discern patternings and routines, social rules and sanctions, as would an ethnography of a ‘traditional’ field setting. […]” (Fox and Roberts, 1999: 644)
“However, as Poster (1995) points out, this opposition between real and virtual is problematic. While earlier forms of community such as the village were determined by kinship and residence, later notions such as ‘the nation’ are highly dependent on imagination (1995: 88). Part of the complexity of CMC, Jones (1995) argues, is that it is not just a tool; it is at once technology, medium and engine of social relations.” (Ibid.)
“It not only structures social relations, it is the space within which the relations occur and the tool that individuals use to inhabit that space. It is more than the context within which social relations occur . . . for it is commented on and imaginatively constructed by symbolic processes initiated and maintained by individuals and groups. (1995: 16)” (Ibid.)
“In exploring the sociology of virtually-constructed social spaces, and the issue whether on-line interactions amount to ‘community’, we can identify various relevant features of CMC. First, there is a temporal discontinuity to such communication: unlike that other virtual technology, the telephone, the majority of virtual communities are currently based on asynchronous communication. Participants (whether using personal e-mail correspondence or within a discussion list or bulletin board) need not be on-line at the same time, and can collect and respond to messages at a time which is personally convenient. Where participants are geographically distant, time zone differences can mean communication which spans hours or days between message and response. This, suggests Escobar (1996: 123) contributes to a new kind of time, which is neither circular (as in oral culture), nor linear (as in cultures dominated by books), but punctual.” (Ibid., 645)
“Second, electronic mail (and other forms of electronic writing such as World-Wide web (WWW) pages) provides the possibility for hypertextual links to other blocks of text, ad infinitum. Poster (1994) argues that this further distances a text from its author, fostering a playful, imaginative subjectivity in the users of CMC, while Landow (1992) sees in hypertext the empirical support for the post- structuralist analysis of writing as an endless process of referentiality and differentiation (Derrida, 1978).” (Fox and Roberts, 1999: 645)
[…] “Fourth, these social spaces generate relationships which become established despite the lack of face-to-face meetings. ‘Community spirit’ might be a good way to describe the “. . . social aggregations that emerge from the net when enough people carry on those public discussions long enough, with sufficient human feeling, to form webs of personal relationships in cyberspace.” (Rheingold, 1993) Rheingold speaks of a gift economy, in which information is given freely and requests for information are swiftly met: the currency of this economy is elegantly presented knowledge, while trivia and idle talk in CMC groups create social cement, as people get a sense of the others’ personalities and attitudes.” (Fox and Roberts, 1999: 646)
“MacKinnon (1995) suggests that on-line interactions are conducted by ‘personae’ and that the actions and feelings expressed in postings may not be mirrored either physically or symbolically by their creators.” (Ibid.)
“Finally, the virtual world is paradoxically both without dimension, and yet possessing great depths. Rheingold (1993) suggests that ‘people in virtual communities do everything people do elsewhere, but we leave our bodies behind’, yet our embodiment is socially and psychologically constructed, and we must acknowledge the complex psychodynamics of interactions in a virtual community.” (Ibid.)
“Thus the motivation to construct virtual spaces, Lupton (1995) argues, is not only intellectual, but also emotional and irrational. The body of the computer is enigmatic: what is ‘behind’ the screen may be perceived as risky or the site of conscious or unconscious desires. The search for ‘community’ may consequently reflect both conscious and unconscious needs of participants in an otherwise fragmenting world (Springer, 1993: 717).” (Ibid., 647)
“In summary, CMC is one aspect of a growing dependence on computers by many people in all aspects of their working and social lives. The construction of virtual ‘communities’ may be not only a substitute for an absence of real-life community, but a place in which identities are created, developed and perhaps destroyed. […] CMC is important socially, psychodynamically and philosophically (Land, 1995), and a sociology (or anthropology) of virtual communities may expect to uncover a richness equivalent to that of a ‘traditional’ social grouping or community.” (Ibid.)
“[…] in the study of a text-based ‘virtual community’ this ambiguity is total: there is no fixed point against which an ethnographic account might be measured, as there is no underpinning ‘reality’ upon which participants’ representations might be based: the ‘community’ exists only in people’s heads. In a nutshell, there is only ever representation, and that representation is totally divorced from the only ‘reality’ there is, namely the passage of electrical charges through computer circuits (Landow, 1992).” (Ibid., 650)
“Other writers within sociology have sought to problematize the notion of community itself, acknowledging that in post-traditional societies the creation of a sense of community around such ideas as ‘the nation’ and ‘class’ are largely conceptual and a consequence of imaginative construction (Anderson, 1991; Poster, 1995; Wagner, 1994). Wagner sees ‘imaginary community’ as a feature of modernity, while Bauman (1992) connects the construction of ‘imaginary community’ to the logic of post-modernity, arguing that what such communities lack in stability and institutionalized continuity, they more than compensate with the overwhelming affective commitment of their self-appointed membership (1992: xviii–xix). The work of constructing community or ‘post-modern sociality’ serves to elaborate ‘a logic of identification involving personae with various masks’ (Maffesoli, 1990: 92). Poster argues that the virtual community of cyberspace is suited to a postmodern fluid subjectivity (1995: 89–90).” (Ibid., 664)
“Virtual communities derive some of the verisimilitude from being treated as if they were plain communities, allowing members to experience communications in cyberspace as if they were embodied social interactions. Just as virtual communities are understood as having the attributes of ‘real’ communities, so ‘real’ communities can be seen to depend on the imaginary: what makes a community vital to its members is their treatment of the communication as meaningful and important. (Poster, 1995: 90)” (Ibid.)
“Stone (1992) suggests that a further characteristic of electronic communication is that participants act as if they were inhabiting physical space, and this research offers some support for this proposition, for example in the forms of greetings, which ape face-to-face rather than paper- written communications, and in references to the list as like a staff coffee-room.” (Ibid.)
“Certainly we can see several strategies adopted by participants to establish and further the illusion. Messages use textual symbols to mimic facial expressions, signatures establish cues and contexts for the interpretation of messages, and the informality of the communications fosters warmth and camaraderie. However, what is also needed is a contextualization: to grasp how the virtual community is situated within historical circumstances. What are the motivations of participants, such that they engage in on-going cognitive work to construct a shared sense of something other than a series of textual communications on their computer screens?” (Ibid., 666)
“We need to understand the sociology of this ‘virtual community’ in relation to the wider social and psychological environment which spawned it.” (Ibid.)
“In conclusion, this research supports Schroeder’s (1995) argument that part of the sociological significance of new technologies lies in their ability to intensify and extend human beings’ attempts to manipulate the natural and social world.” (Ibid., 667)
“If the future shape of society includes the proliferation of virtual communities, explorations of these cyber-spaces may give clues to the social relations beyond the computer screen and world-wide web, and have implications for social inclusion and citizenship.” (Ibid., 668)
“For the cyber-ethnographer and social theorist there is a rich source of material here, concerning the construction of virtual communities and virtual identities by those who use computer-mediated communication and interaction media, the social relations which develop in such environments, and the relationship between ‘life’ in such hypertextual environments and the ‘loss of certainty’ in late- or post-modern cultures (Landow, 1992; Poster, 1995).” (Ibid.)
“For the research methodologist, studies of virtual settings (in which ‘reality’ is entirely constructed in representation) raise issues concerning the validity and reliability of research reports which are also pertinent to the social study of ‘traditional’ settings (Tyler, 1986; Armstrong et al, 1997).” (Ibid.)
REFERENCE: Fox, N. and Roberts, C. (1999). GPs in cyberspace: The sociology of a ‘virtual community’. Sociological Review, 47(4), 643-671.
I am interested in the “way in which online visual economies mediate social relations and intimacy” (Homersham, 2019).
REFERENCE: Homersham, L. (2019). Intimacy Rising. Art Monthly no. 432, December 2019-January 2020.
“As personal connections are a valued currency for Facebook, one might ask whether this context for friendship generates a crisis of intimacy in the digital age.” (Chambers, 2017: 27)
“Are such social media platforms reshaping personal relationships or is the concept of ‘friendship’ transforming to describe looser social ties?” (Ibid.)
“A striking legacy of early social thought on friendship corresponds with the contradictory ideals associated with today’s mediated values of intimacy and friendship. The 18th century ideas of friendship as freed from commercial concerns and the 19th century ideas of friendship as individualised and market-like coexist in today’s digitally mediated sociality. A modernising, egalitarian view of friendship signifies a society where the central unit is no longer the community but the individual.” (Ibid.)
“[…] television as a communication technology that facilitated social integration (and control) by projecting the public realm into the privatised home. In her account of the correspondence between technology and individualism in the digital era, Sherry Turkle (2011) invokes a crisis of intimacy. Turkle bemoans the way we allow technology to shape our emotional lives, arguing that it defines and redefines our perceptions of sociability, self, intimacy and privacy. Arguing that privacy is now lost and our sense of intimacy distorted, she advises that we ‘put [technology] in its place’ so that we can retrieve human connections and attachments (Turkle, 2011: 295).” (Ibid., f.)
“In the first phase of debates about transforming intimacies, from the mid- to late 20th century, changes were explained via a thesis of individualisation by scholars such as Anthony Giddens (1991, 1992), Ulrich Beck and Elizabeth Beck-Gernsheim (1995, 2002) and Zygmun Bauman (2003).” (Ibid., 28)
“For Spencer and Pahl (2006), ‘personal communities’ involve intimate and activities with friends, neighbours and workmates, as well as kin. The third phase involves the rise of ‘networked individualism’, characterised by a move from tight bonds to more fluid, loose systems of interaction centred on individuals with shared interests rather than groups or places (Haythornthwaite and Wellman, 1998: 1101–1114; Wellman, 2002: 10–25).” (Ibid.)
“Networked individuals develop new social skills and strategies for problem-solving and meeting the needs of a high-tech age. These include actively managing self-presentation and personal boundaries in digitally supported networks (Rainie and Wellman, 2012). Similarly, the idea of a ‘network public culture’ (boyd, 2011) in which this individual is embedded, matches the positive attributes of late modern intimacy and friendship by appealing to aspirations of choice, agency, flexibility, respect, mutual disclosure and companionship.” (Ibid.)
“Bucher proposes the concept of ‘algorithmic friendship’ to uncover the programming of sociality through the socio-technical dimensions of online friendship (Bucher, 2012: 485).” (Ibid., 29)
“The management of this online ‘friendship’ can be demanding. But, via shared default settings and a friendship discourse, users are persuaded to share feelings through questions on Facebook status updates such as ‘What’s on your mind?’ while the ‘share button’ is described as ‘the people you care about’. Thus, this technological design engineers particular kinds of sociality (Bucher, 2012; Van Dijck, 2013).” (Ibid.)
“A key principle that structures friendship on Facebook is an assumption of compatibility. Software elements of findability and compatibility locate then gather friends, driven by the People You May Know algorithm (Bucher, 2012: 485). Facebook’s friendship procedures prompt users to ‘remember’ and befriend past connections.” (Ibid.)
“The privacy settings warn that changing the defaults will ‘prevent you from connecting with your friends’. Conversely, by keeping the default, you will ‘help’ your friends from all spheres of life ‘to find you’ (Facebook, 2011). Yet, news reports and blog traffic on Google reveal bewilderment and anxiety about how these algorithms operate amid concerns about privacy.” (Ibid.)
“A culture of engineered sociality which allows lateral surveillance by social network sites indicates that online friendship is characterised by a double logic of open connectedness and commercial dependence.” (Ibid.)
“Social network sites process vast quantities of users’ behavioural data every second, yet the platform’s mechanisms are difficult to detect, raising issues about privacy, trust and levels of human agency (Van Dijck and Poell, 2013).” (Ibid.)
“The social media rhetoric of sharing fosters a new kind of ‘sharing citizen’, a digitally socialised citizen, not so much for the good of the online community but for the good of the social network company (Van Dijck and Poell, 2013).” (Ibid., 30)
“But this engineered connectedness entails careful self-management as users navigate their way through the technical affordances of persistence, replicability, scalability and searchability (boyd, 2011).” (Ibid.)
“And there is a sense in which ‘algorithmic friendship’ is inferior to a past ‘genuine’ intimacy. Turkle (2011) laments the preference, among younger generations, for communicating through social media rather than face-to-face. Should today’s mediated intimacy be judged inauthentic or as corrupted through public exposure?” (Ibid.)
“The privacy paradox and spectacles of intimacy. Although many users express concerns about privacy online (Marwick and boyd, 2014), they often fail to take privacy-protecting actions (Strater and Lipford, 2008). This inconsistency in users’ online activities is referred to as the ‘privacy paradox’ (Barnes, 2006). It suggests a user readiness to trade privacy regulation for convenience (Quinn, 2016).” (Ibid.)
“Some audiences are invisible when a person is contributing online. Observers can lurk undetected.” (Ibid.)
“Public anxieties about young people’s uses of social media are supported by reports that youth tend to ignore boundary control mechanisms (Livingstone and Helsper, 2013). Teenagers are perceived to be displaying their bodies and emotions heedlessly. At the same time, issues of online bullying, sexting and revenge porn indicate serious breaches of intimate trust (see Ringrose et al., 2013).” (Ibid., f.)
“Addressing a cultural economy of spectacle, Liam Berriman and Rachel Thomson (2015) use the term ‘spectacles of intimacy’ to explain that these contradictory practices form part of an emergent moral landscape among adolescents.” (Ibid., 31)
“Turkle (2011) suggests that some teenagers are gratified by a certain public exposure because they consider it to be a validation, not a violation, of their privacy.” (Ibid.)
“Social media create a space for new kinds of intimacy practices: ‘intimacy at a distance’ (Elliott and Urry, 2010; Hinton and Hjorth, 2013; Lomborg, 2013).” (Ibid.)
“Eva Illouz (2007) highlights the correspondence between positive notions of sharing on social media and late modern therapeutic narratives of sharing one’s feelings. Social media may accelerate and intensify a ‘public intimacy’, yet this displayed intimacy tends to follow the pre-existing logic of the market. Participants on talk shows and reality TV are encouraged to expose inner problems and feelings. This display of intimacy is part of the wider culture of emotional capitalism: ‘emotions have become entities to be evaluated, inspected, discussed, bargained, quantified and commodified’.” (Ibid.)
“Significantly, these practices migrate almost effortlessly from mass media to social media platforms through live webcams, updated personal profiles and blogging. For example, Jenny Davis (2010) refers to ‘exteriorised intimacy’ to describe a form of exposed intimacy digitally generated by the popular practice of sharing platforms as Flickr and YouTube. Such websites normalise the practice of sharing videos and pictures. Thus, the public display of intimacy on social media forms part of a preceding re-signification of intimacy.” (Ibid.)
“Social media are commonly assumed to spread individualistic behaviour globally. […] Highlighting issues of user agency, their research suggests that social media contribute to, but are not the source of, changes in sociality.” (Ibid., 32)
“An example is Snapchat whose affordances change the rules of communication when compared to Facebook. The limited time during which a Snapchat message is accessible renders sharing transient yet makes communicators pay attention, changing the sense of the intimate contact.” (Ibid.)
“Whether face-to-face or mediated, the genre of banter is stable, suggesting that the quality of the platform and associated affordances are not causative. In China, the custom of giving cash as a ceremonial gift in red envelopes has migrated to social media. WeChat, a popular Chinese platform, is a medium through which cash is given via a virtual red envelope. While WeChat is similar to WhatsApp in the West, the latter is not considered appropriate for sending a gift of cash. This suggests that cultures of sociality alter the medium to reflect social norms (Miller et al., 2016).” (Ibid.)
“[…] in English culture, social media do not simply facilitate intimate connectedness. Miller (2016) refers to a ‘Goldilocks Strategy’ where platforms such as Facebook allow people in English communities to keep connections ‘at exactly the right distance’ – neither too hot nor too cold, but just right. He uses the example of friends who meet on holiday: you don’t reject them, you can keep in touch with them via social media, but you don’t have to waste your time with them. Facebook friendship is quite sufficient. It avoids rejection and impoliteness and prevents intrusiveness. This cross-cultural study confirms, then, that in a poly- media context, scalable sociality can flourish with social media supporting pre-existing cultural norms.” (Ibid., 33)
“We might, then, point to a social media-led crisis of intimacy signified by three issues: the exploitation of intimate connections for marketing purposes, intimacy exhibitionism and breaches of privacy.” (Ibid.)
“The mediation of public intimacy via social media is a response to Western social trends that prefigure the rise of social media: the escalation and intensification of an openly connected, capitalist society.” (Ibid., 34)
“This does not mean that social media technology is neutral. Sites such as Facebook may not be the cause of current trends in sociality, but they can accelerate and intensify them.” (Ibid.)
REFERENCE: Chambers, D. (2017). Networked intimacy: Algorithmic friendship and scalable sociality. European Journal of Communication, 32(1), 26-36.
Do get in touch if you have any suggestions/ ideas/ anything you want to say or ask at all!
This project only becomes sociological with you. If you can relate to any of what is written here or if you simply want to join in on an ecstatic, collective experience to reconnect to your body, I would be delighted to have you on board as a participant. An information sheet and a consent form would be sent to you should you agree to join this project. There you will find the information that you can drop out at any given moment and without any explanation, should you want to.
As you might have noticed, it is highly ironic to do the research process online, when the aim of this project is to encourage offline and face to face encounters. This is sadly due to the current coronavirus pandemic which forces us to stay inside. We are encouraged to self-isolate and practice social distancing. Now that we are physically removed from each other, might we learn to appreciate each other’s company IRL again?
Stay tuned. Given that those who self-isolate are forced to stay at home, you might have some more time than usual on hands. So, let’s get through this together – for now, only virtually – but once this is over, let’s meet face to face and ditch our phones.
@2020 MA dissertation research. All rights reserved.
Social isolation 