It seems as if the electro-nomadic self is a disindividuated self. It also appears to be a split self.
The structure of our electronic technology, from cell-phones, to ‘window’-based operating systems, to the anonymity of online exchange, encourages the dissolution of the traditional singular model of the individual. Older ways of talking about the psyche such as Freud’s or Jung’s which described an organic singular entity which grows, shifts and changes are being side-lined. More contemporary ways of talking about the individual imply an internal multiplicity instead. For instance, imagine yourself in two very different social situations: there is a growing acknowledgement that we behave noticeably differently as we relate to different people in different contexts. Just as organisms change to fit into an ecosystem, so do we change to fit into different situations. In the same way that an ecosystem can be said to behave as an organism as it relates to other ecosystems, so the organism that I am is also an ecosystem: a group of thoughts and beliefs and desires that learn to get along within me.[1] Apparently when talking about their collaboration in writing their book Anti-Oedipus [1972], Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari once wrote that, “since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd.”[2] But we’ve been flirting with this sort of descriptionof self for ages – what does it have to do with technology?
Many of our contemporary tools such as cellphones, pagers, ‘smartphones’ and other sorts of wireless networked devices allow us to operate simultaneously in [at least] two distinct contexts. The people on the bus talking on their cellphones are interacting with both the world about them and also another unseen world. If we take seriously the notion that we are different people in different situations, then what we are experiencing are increasing instances of people operating as different people simultaneously – a ‘layering’ of different versions of themselves.
The structure of our computing devices and their relation to the Internet cause us to easily run several programs at the same time. This sort of simultaneity is made possible by the ‘windows’ of our operating systems. Because of this structural change in our tools, multi-tasking, the engagement with multiple concurrent tasks, has become the standard mode of operation for many of us. Although many of us have grown into this condition, many young adults and children [so-called ‘digital natives’] have actually grown up with, in and through it as a normative condition[3]. Consider the following illustration of a student writing an essay: they are sitting in a room, at a computer. The sun has dropped outside and the room has grown dark. Their hands are connected to a keyboard, they are wearing headphones that are plugged into the computer, their eyes gaze intently at the screen. On the computer, in addition to the multiple programs running in the background, they are intentionally running four programs. Their word-processor is ‘open’ twice, once displaying the essay that they are updating and once displaying their notes cobbled together from class and various sources on the Internet. They also have their Internet browser open – one tab displaying information from an on-line encyclopaedia and another set on the webpage of their email provider where they are perpetually awaiting correspondence. They also have open a media player through which they are streaming music from an on-line ‘radio’ station and an instant-messaging program allowing them to keep in constant contact with friends. In addition to an awareness of sensorial data from the environment around them, they also keep in constant awareness of the information being offered to them by their computer programs. Only a significantly fragmented state of consciousness makes this possible, what psychologists have called ‘continuous partial attention’.[4] As our attention gets spread out over various phenomena, the amount of attention that can be directed towards each element is diminished.
The fact that our minds are being so pulled at in different directions, fragmented by diverse interests and types of information, is worrisome. It is more worrisome that whole generations of citizens are growing up in this mental environment, their neural pathways adapted to it. Careful thought takes time and deliberation. How can a person be expected to make important and meaningful decisions when we can only find a few moments of half-powered cognition to devote to them? And not only does the individual’s thought process take on a scattered, staccato character, but the media by which we access information mimics this. Essays in magazines have progressively become shorter. News articles have shrunk to telegraph-like messages – in desperate attempts to vie for our shortened attention spans. In such amputated media, how can we possibly hope for the depth and complexity of argument that was once demanded of our journalists and critics? There is no doubt about it, ways of communicating that eschew brevity for complexity are being out-moded.
Freed of many of the traditional constraints, our minds drift on the Internet sizelessly. When ‘jacked-in’, we exist as information, flitting in the midst of other information. This phenomenon, which I would like to call the digital derive, is becoming increasingly similar to the hallucinogenic vision of cyberspace described by William Gibson in his novel Neuromancer [1984]. Gibson’s vision of how cyberspace would evolve described a dream-like space in which disembodied intelligences float, drift and zoom freely. Although this isn’t exactly how we experience the Internet yet, there is an element of it in the way people flit through clouds of sites following loose connections and memes, becoming what the psychologist David N. Greenfield has called ‘electronic vagabonds’[5].
In his work on the subject, Greenfield has often compared the use of the Internet to the use of drugs. As he has written, “the act of being online is in itself arousing.”[6] When interviewed about their experiences on the Internet, his subjects report intense intimacy, dis-inhibition, loss of boundaries, and feelings of timelessness, all contributing to the highly addictive phenomenon. One of the most addictive components of being online is the extensive array of possibilities, not just of action but of being – not only can you do a wide range of things, but also you can be a wide range of things.
As the MIT psychologist, Sherry Turkle, has pointed out, “if, traditionally, identity implies oneness, life on today’s computer screen implies multiplicity and heterogeneity.”[7] She compares the online experience to adolescence when people traditionally explore the different possible incarnations of themselves. By allowing people to explore all kinds of identities, the new technology plays, as she puts it, “a significant role in the life cycle dramas of self-reparation.”[8]
But more than simply providing a forum for people to test out various selves en-route to finding a clearly articulated primary self, the online world is a place that accepts the perpetuation of the flexible, split self. “The notion of a decentered identity with multiple aspects,” writes Turkle, “is concretized by virtual experiences.”[9] But according to Turkle the multiple aspects of self nurtured in this environment aren’t truly autonomous – they are all related to each other. The difference between the split self that navigates the Internet and someone suffering from multiple personality disorder is that for the digital flaneur there are lines of communication open between their identities that encourage “an attitude of respect for the many within us and the many within others.”[10] Our age is one in which each person is populated by a multiplicity. More than this though, it is one in which this multiplicity is accommodated – in fact encouraged by our technology.
But what does it mean to allow for a multiplicity within – to think of the self no longer as germ, but rather as ecology or a series of simultaneous windows on a computer screen? Historically, multiplicity in a person was considered a negative trait – inconsistency keeping open the threat of ethical transgression. Inconsistency is a menace to a stable, structured society with clear hierarchical and moral institutions. Stories, such as Plato’s origin of love, that of the Judeo-Christian Bible, or more recent stories such as those of psychoanalysis or Marxism, consistently depend upon an original unity which is splintered and is in search of reconciliation. But there is hegemony to all of these stories in their subtle implication of a male-dominant heterosexual society.[11] Such stories, in Haraway’s words, are “ruled by reproductive politics – rebirth without flaw.”[12] In the 21st century new stories are needed to escape from this hegemony, like Haraway’s image of the cyborg which emphasizes flexibility and the blurring of boundaries: stories instilled with irony.
This sort of ‘irony’ plays an important role in Richard Rorty’s work. His claim has been that irony, which he defines as an attitude built on recognition of our own fallibility, has the power to keep us constantly retuning our values and thus to help avoid cruelty. In this manner, irony allows us to accept difference and build a tolerant, pluralistic society free of domination.[13] Haraway uses a similar definition of irony. In the ‘Manifesto’ she states that, “irony is about contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes, even dialectically, about the tension of holding incompatible things together because both or all are necessary and true.”[14]
It may just be that this split self, encouraged by our technology, with its evolving ‘empathetic gaze’, is actually perfectly suited to this type of ‘ironic’ thinking. Sherry Turkle thinks so. In her studies conducted at MIT she has found that “different children [who have grown up with computers] comfortably hold different theories, and individual children are able to hold different opinions at the same time.”[15] Maybe I am wrong then to mourn the sustained argument and thought structurally disabled by the changes in media. The type of thinking encouraged by our new technology – quick, flexible and plural – may actually be better suited to the ideals of a liberal and tolerant democratic society.
[1] Ballantyne, p.116
[2] Ibid, pg. 108
[3] Small & Vorgan, Scientific American Mind, October/November 2008
[5] Greenfield, p.17
[6] Ibid
[7] Turkle, Social Research, Fall 1997, p. 1093
[8] Ibid
[9] Ibid.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Haraway, p.150
[12] Ibid, p.177
[13] Rorty, CIS, p.xv
[14] Haraway, p.149
[15] Turkle, Social Research, Fall 1997, p.1093
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