In Praise of Voyeurism

At what age do you wake up and become crotchety?

I'm afraid it's happened. In response to my last post, a friend asked whether I thought all these new-fangled machines left nothing to worry about. On the contrary, I think there are tons of problems with these dagnabbed kids and their dagnabbed Tamagotchi-ma-call-ums. It's just that Facebook is not a serious threat. It's so popular, in fact, largely because it imitates the way social interactions were already taking place or being conceived.

(Incidentally, I was glad to see that I wasn't not alone in my grumbling about Zadie Smith's article--bigger, badder responders can be found here, here, and here, some with data to back up what the others argue more deductively and intuitively.)

What really strikes me about the growing popularity of electronic forms of entertainment is how boring they are. They're good for an awkward minute--but how someone can spend longer than a half an hour wandering through landscapes and shooting at things is beyond me. Even the games I remember loving growing up now feel dull--in general, I'd rather read.

I think the problem is interactivity. A gaming culture expects to be able to provide input and to have that input be acknowledged. The problem is that games don't, in their current state, have the virtual robustness to set up interesting possibilities with unpredictable results. It's like one of those Choose-Your-Own-Adventure novels that were popular when I was young: it was exciting to have choice, but the novels never lasted long or went into much complexity, and the choice was necessarily constrained. Every opportunity the reader/player is given to make a real decision uses up informational space that could have been devoted to greater richness or complexity of the world depicted. And those decisions are hardly real--all they're sensitive to is "shoot/don't shoot," "touch object/don't touch object," etc.

It makes me feel like some cantankerous Joad Cressbeckler to say so, but I think that these kinds of interactive entertainment generate a certain set of expectations and a certain skill set in people. People who grow accustomed to them become very good at exploring the strengths and weaknesses of an impoverished set of choices given to them, and they expect their every decision or input to generate an immediate reaction. But they become unable to think of new or more complex options, and impatient with forms of entertainment or information that do not provide room for immediate feedback.

What are the results? People want to express and communicate and exchange messages before they build up enough complex information and ideas to provide significant feedback. A lot of learning takes place in idleness or passivity, when we're accepting information, ideas, and words without responding to them yet, or when we're digesting the information that we have taken in and are evaluating it. The problem, in other words, is not excessive stimulus, but excessive response. There needs to be a lag time, time to evaluate, regroup, and realize what does and doesn't make sense. The idea that technology is robbing us of this kind of time isn't new, but I think it has developmental effects on people in terms of the kind of information and interactions they get used to participating in.

I don't like to think of the solution to this kind of dwindling downtime as reflection. Reflection already seems so purposive: something you do in response to a stimulus. (Spend a couple of minutes reflecting! Then, you'll get to give your feedback!) Idleness is better, because there's a sense of total lack of activity, which is what I'm really talking about. Passive intake, mandatory idleness, and then--if ever--the possibility of some kind of response. Maybe surprisingly, I think the kind of voyeurism associated with Facebook is a step in the right direction--it involves passively absorbing other people's lives without any necessary expectation of interaction. It's different from the Internet more generally; the kind of personhood it encourages is older and more thoughtful. Compare it to, say, blogs, which prioritize speedy stimulus-and-response, both on their own comment threads and in exchanges with each other.

Those're my two cents. Absorb it, don't comment on it--I don't let you, after all--and go be idle somewhere for a while.

Facebook, Death, and Literature

Facebook is killing our souls. Or so culture pundits are claiming, as usual. Zadie Smith's review essay in the most recent NYRB trots out all the usual fears, as she reviews The Social Network and You Are Not a Gadget, the new book by Jaron Lanier, who has been discussed in these pages before.

Smith's take on The Social Network is interesting--it's when she wades into cultural critique of the impact of Facebook (buttressed of course by Lanier) that she goes astray. Smith's fears for the coming generation are somewhat incoherent--she worries, on the one hand, that Generation Facebook is more wonderfully gooey and rich than any of our measly technology allows us to show:

[T]he more time I spend with the tail end of Generation Facebook (in the shape of my students) the more convinced I become that some of the software currently shaping their generation is unworthy of them. They are more interesting than it is. They deserve better.

Sweet of her, I guess. But on the other hand, she fears that she already sees how boring our technology is making us, as she compares her old (Harvard) students with her comparatively less interesting new (NYU) crop, and concludes that "it's absolutely clear to me that the students I teach now are not like the student I once was or even the students I taught seven short years ago at Harvard"--because the new students have a "denuded selfhood" unrecognizable to her. (Sucks to be her student and to read this article, don't you think? But I digress.)

What are we losing with Facebook? Principally, depth. The most compelling part of Lanier's argument (as Smith summarizes it) is that technological systems are essentially kinds of representation, and that they can only represent or encode a very small bit of what it means to be human. As Smith rightly points out, literature does this, too, but--and here's the key "difference"--it does it less. What's really on the table here is not a difference of kind, but a difference of degree, and Smith is smart enough to know this, but still unconnected enough (only connect, Zadie!) to want it to be a more dramatic and devastating difference than it is.

At a crucial turning point in the essay, Smith broaches that most literary of topics: death. Death (as we all know from the profound novels we try to imitate) is something that broods over us, coming home to roost in sudden epiphanies like Gabriel Conroy's at the end of "The Dead". Smith models this approach to death nicely as she walks casually to a movie theater to see The Social Network. "Soon I will be forty," she realizes, "then fifty, then soon after dead; I broke out in a Zuckerberg sweat, my heart went crazy, I had to stop and lean against a trashcan." Then she brings home the fundamental question: "Can you have that feeling, on Facebook?"

That's a rhetorical question, of course, and the obvious/ominous answer is "OMG no u tots cant!!!" Having primed us for this answer, Smith looks at how death does manifest itself on Facebook, glancing over the wall of a dead girl and puzzling over the strange new sort of people who choose to leave messages there: "Do they genuinely believe, because the girl's wall is still up, that she is still, in some sense, alive?" Does Smith ask the same question when she sees flowers on tombstones, or when she hears speakers, at a funeral, addressing the dead? I'm going to guess no, but because these equivalent activities take place within social rituals Smith is used to, she doesn't feel the need to tear her hear or beat her breast over them.

The irony is that a substantial portion of Smith's fame comes from a very public conversation she herself has had with the dead. I'd like to ask her how she feels about E. M. Forster. Does she think he's dead, completely? Or, when she engages in a literary conversation with him, does she genuinely believe, because his novels continue to exist and be read, that he is still, in some sense, alive? And if so, is that a bad thing? And if we can't all become famous novelists, is it so wrong that some little bit of us should remain, as a memorial and a site of remembrance, in the space of representation? Or does everyone have to make a masterpiece to be worth that?

A radically different approach to death on Facebook appeared only a short while ago in the Atlantic, and it shows how, in a strange way, the voyeurism of Facebook allows people to feel close to each other in a fashion that would have otherwise been impossible--an example of the manner in which Facebook can actually humanize, rather than dehumanize, relationships that otherwise never would have existed at all. These are the sorts of things that paranoid pundits can't see, because they simply don't want to. People don't live in Facebook, so the lack of certain possibilities in Facebook does not mean the end of those possibilities. People may not have dizzying death epiphanies while logged onto Facebook. But people can't have sex on Facebook, either, and yet Smith doesn't seem to be concerned that we'll stop breeding.

While Facebook certainly conditions how we think of ourselves, its modes of conditioning thought aren't new; they're borrowed from older technological forms (the facebook, the visiting card, the trading card) that haven't destroyed society yet. If there are some people who are shaping themselves around Facebook personae and thereby "becoming" two-dimensional, so be it. There were people who shaped themselves around two-dimensional literary personae before Facebook; there have always been two-dimensional people who have tried to make themselves more interesting by shaping their personalities and social roles in relation to current forms of media.

That, I think, is the truth that a believer in the profundity of every human soul has a hard time accepting. It's harder to see that humanity is full of flat characters when you live in a highly literate culture, because people who borrow their quirks from Joyce and Freud appear more profound and interesting than those who borrow them from Facebook. So in a way, this breezy technology is a boon--it lets us see more of the shallowness of people than before, a vision that's only frightening if you were living in denial of it.

Literary sages are always good at denouncing the new, because it's so obviously different from what they're used to. Ruskin railed against railways in his lectures of the 1860s; by the time Forster was writing Howards End in the early 20th century, it was the railways that seemed to demonstrate a true, old, and stable connection with the land, while motorcars were fast, unpredictable, and destructive. And so Smith steps into the role of sage here, denouncing the technology she isn't yet totally familiar with and peppering it with the paranoid fears of commerce in which sages have always, somewhat paradoxically, traded. But while sages are great at finding flaws, they're incredibly bad at predicting the upside of change. The Atlantic article is one small example of that upside (although it maintains the fashionable skepticism that has to be fit into Facebook stories to make them sell); other upsides will reveal themselves over time. After all, writing itself was once a dramatic technological change, one that meant the end of oral memory--and yet somehow, we seem to have survived, even though our civilization doesn't look like an ancient bard might have predicted. Do any of us regret that?

Now that the election frenzy is over...

...it seems like a perfect time to point out that the clearest and most coherent comment on American democracy to come out in recent years is entitled "Douche and Turd." I thought about it--and yea, in moments of darkness and doubt, drew strength from it--every time I cowered beneath the onslaught of "I voted" stickers and Facebook messages that poured past us all last week. Here's a choice snippet, and the full link:

Douche and Turd
Tags: SOUTH
PARKmore...

Or, if you like your critiques a little more highbrow, there's always Matthew Arnold on the subject:

[The democrat] complains with a sorrowful indignation of people who "appear to have no proper estimate of the value of the franchise"; he leads his disciples to believe,--what the Englishman is always too ready to believe,--that the having a vote, like the having a large family, or a large business, or large muscles, has in itself some edifying and perfecting effect upon human nature.

In short, I didn't vote. Anyone know where I can get a sticker for that?