Hello. My name is Dick Pountain and I'm a Flickrholic. Instead of interacting normally with other human beings, I spend too many hours slumped at the computer, Photoshopping photographs I took earlier to make them look like mad paintings (www.flickr.com/photos/dick_pountain). Then I fritter away my remaining time probing the complete works of Bill Frissell, Brandt Bauer Frick and Bartok on that notorious online service Spotify (a villainous outfit which steals food from the mouths of Taylor Swift and Chris Martin). For a while I was a Multiple-Service Abuser, enslaved also to the hideous FaceBook, but that addiction cured itself once the user experience deteriorated to a point where it turned into Aversion Therapy. Yes folks, it's official, the internet is bad for all of us. In South Korea you can get sent on a cure. Here the Guardian runs stories every other day about how it's driving all our young folk into mental illness: cyber-bullying, trolling, sexting, and ultra-hard-core violent porn. We all live in terror of having our identities stolen, our bank accounts drained, or our local sewage works switched into reverse gear by shadowy global hacker gangs.
I'm going to exit heavy-sarcasm mode now, because though all these threats do get magnified grotesquely by our circulation-mad media, there's more than a pinch of truth to them, and mocking does little to help. An anti-digital backlash is stirring from many different directions. In a recent interview Christopher Nolan - director of sci-fi blockbuster Interstellar - expressed his growing dissatisfaction with digital video. Obsessive about picture quality, he feels he can't guarantee it with digital output (the exact opposite of orthodox opinion): “This is why I prefer film to digital [..] It’s a physical object that you create, that you agree upon. The print that I have approved when I take it from here to New York and I put it on a different projector in New York, if it looks too blue, I know the projector has a problem with its mirror or its ball or whatever. Those kind of controls aren’t really possible in the digital realm.” Or consider Elon Musk, almost a God among technophiles, who's recently taken to warning about the danger that AI might spawn unstoppable destructive forces (he compared it to "summoning the demon"), and this from a man who invests in AI.
What all these problems have in common is that they occur at the borderline between physical reality and its digital representation. My Flickr addiction is pretty harmless because it's just pictures (pace Chris Nolan's critique), while Musk's fears become real when AI systems act upon the real world, say by guiding a drone or a driverless car, or controlling some vast industrial plant. And the problem has two complementary aspects. Firstly, people continue to confuse the properties of digital representations with the things they depict. I can repaint my neighbour's Volkswagen in 5 minutes in Photoshop, but on his real car it would take several hours, a lot of mess, and he'd thump me for doing it without permission. Secondly too much absorption in digital representations steals people's attention away from the real world. As I wander around Camden Town nowadays I'm struck by the universal body-language of the lowered head peering into a smartphone - while walking, while sitting, while eating, even while talking to someone else.
If you want a name for this problem then "tele-absence" (the downside of telepresence) might do, and it's problematic because evolution, both physical and cultural, has equipped us to depend on the physical presence of other people in order to behave morally. The controller of a remote drone strike sleeps sounder at night than he would if he'd killed those same people face-to-face with an M4 carbine: the internet troll who threatens a celebrity with rape and murder wouldn't say it to her face. And "face" is the operative word here, as the Chinese have understood for several thousands of years (and Mark Zuckerberg rediscovered more recently).
Maintaining "face" is crucial to our sense of self, and "loss of face" something we make great efforts to avoid. But we can't make face entirely by ourselves: it's largely bestowed onto us by other people, according to the conscious and unconscious rules of our particular society. Tele-absence robs us of most of the cues that great theorist of social interaction, Erving Goffman, listed as "a multitude of words, gestures, acts and minor events". We've barely begun to understand the ways that's changing our behaviour, which is why criminalising trolling or abolishing online anonymity are unlikely to succeed. Safety lies in hanging out online with people of similar interests (Flickr for me), but at the cost of reinforcing an already scary tendency toward social fragmentation.
[Dick Pountain sometimes wishes his shaving mirror supported Photoshop's Pinch filter]
No comments:
Post a Comment