With regards to both Jeffery Bilbro’s lead essay and Alastair Roberts’s follow-up reflections, I have little to add except a hearty “Amen.” Bilbro and Roberts have each given us a compelling and eloquent analysis of the disorders that characterize our shared media environment. I was especially appreciative of Bilbro’s framing of our media ecosystem when he notes that it is reorganizing not simply how we communicate with one another but “how we belong to one another.” This is an apt formulation, which helps us better grasp just how profoundly we are shaped by new media technologies. Also, Bilbro is absolutely right about the inadequacy of the most popular remedies on offer, such as fact checking and diversifying our feeds. These strategies are not only inadequate, they also tend to fuel the very dynamics they seek to curtail. Roberts, too, is incisive in his enumeration of the “threatening flipsides” that accompany the “supposed negative freedoms” we secure through the deployment of modern technology.
I will also second their encouragement that we find in our local, fully embodied communities resources to better navigate the turbulent currents of the digitized public sphere. It is absolutely vital that we do so. Taking cues from both Hannah Arendt and Jane Jacobs, I have argued elsewhere that digitization tends to abstract our relationships from the context particular places and shared spaces. Under these conditions, we lose our standing in a common world of common things that grounds our common sense, understood not simply as things every body takes for granted but rather as an understanding of reality that is held in common.
“To live together in the world,” Arendt argued in The Human Condition, “means essentially that a world of things is between those who have it in common, as a table is located between those who sit around it; the world, like every in-between, relates and separates men at the same time.”
When we gather, as we so often do now, on a platform like Zoom, where exactly are we? Where is the interaction happening? And, what difference does it make, say, that there is no here we can easily point to and much less is there a table? What sort of world is this that now harbors so much of our social and political life, and how might we distinguish it from the world of common things, which for Arendt was so important to meaningful public life?
It seems apparent that the digital realm lacks the permanence that Arendt thought was essential to a common world in which individuals could appear and be seen, and also that it has accelerated the liquefaction of modern life. Consequently, it fails to stabilize the self in the manner Arendt attributed to a common world of things. It also seems that Arendt’s fears about the epistemic consequences of the loss of a common world of things were well grounded. By abstracting our interactions into a placeless world of symbolic interchange and by creating the conditions of what Jay Bolter has labeled digital plentitude, digital media tends to undermine rather than sustain our capacity to experience a common world, which would in turn generates common sense. Increasingly then, we come to suspect that we are all occupying altogether different realities.
“The presence of others who see what we see and hear what we hear assures us of the reality of the world and ourselves,” Arendt argued, “and while the intimacy of a fully developed private life […] will always greatly intensify and enrich the whole scale of subjective emotions and private feelings, this intensification will always come to pass at the expense of the assurance of the reality of the world and men.”
So, once again, let me join Bilbro and Roberts in commending the virtues of a life committed to our given communities, the place and people in the midst of whom we find ourselves, as an indispensable counter-practice in the age of digitization. In this way we honor not only our neighbors, but also the fundamental goodness of the human body, whose limitations we do well to receive not as constraints to be overcome but rather as the parameters of our flourishing as the kind of creatures we are.
Having said this, however, I find myself wanting to probe our situation a bit further, if for no other reason than to reckon, as fully as possible, with the challenges before us. Put simply, we need to consider the degree to which we can, at this stage, distinguish between the digital and the local, practically speaking. The dynamic of turning to the local community in order to find a respite from the digital publics recalls the older framing of domestic life as a shelter from the harsh realities of industrialization. Family life was, as the popular image put it, a “haven in a heartless world.” However, as Ian Marcus Corbin noted in a recent review, that bargain has broken down “due to a growing incursion of market forces into the haven of the family home.” And this incursion has been abetted by digital technologies, which have eroded the boundaries between the home and the market.
This particular example is but a case in point of a larger pattern. Digital media has everywhere eroded boundaries, between work and home, home and the market, labor and play, the private and the public, and, we might add, between the local community and the virtual public sphere. Indeed, part of the problem is that we tend to see this latter pair, the local and the virtual, as a pair of like things. In my own thinking of late I’ve been trying to guard against language that suggest that digital media transport us into a realm that is somewhere else, that it constitutes another place, even if we think of it as an anti-place. The problem with this framing is that it suggests that we can toggle, as it were, between one realm and the other. Within this framing, for example, we might imagine ourselves deciding to spend less time in “cyberspace” and more time in “meatspace,” as it is sometimes crassly put. I’m not certain that this is the best way to think about the consequences of digitization. The digital and the local are not so much realms apart as they are modes of relating to the world that are dynamically entangled.
When we conceive of the digitization in this way, we are likely to miss the degree to which our experience of the local has already been structured by digital technology. Consider our local congregations. To what degree do they represent a realm distinct from the dynamics we associate with digital media? The answer, of course, will vary from one congregation to another, but we would find that digital technology has already exerted a formative influence on how, for example, church members imagine the way they belong to one another.
Along similar lines, I would suggest that we approach the question of digital media in the way that the 20th-century historian, social critic, and Catholic priest Ivan Illich eventually came to see the problem of modern technology. In the 60s and 70s, Illich published a series of scathing critiques of industrial age institutions—education, medicine, and transportation notably among them. By the 1980s, however, Illich came to believe that his project had been flawed by his failure to recognize the true nature of technology in an age of systems.
Illich had come to the conclusion that in the late 20th century modern societies transitioned out of the age of instruments into the age of systems. Unlike instruments, which could be easily distinguished from the user and thus regulated, systems incorporated their user in such a way that it was difficult to simply prescribe better policies for their use. ”I would like to get […] people to think about what tools do to our perception rather than what we can do with them,” Illich declared in a 1988 lecture. He wanted to show “how their use shapes our perception of reality, rather than how we shape reality by applying or using them.” With regards to medicine, for example, Illich had been initially been interested in understanding what we were doing to the body with our medical tools. He later came to see that it might be more important to understand how our tools shape what we think a body is?
I would encourage us to examine not only what we do and don’t do with our digital tools, but to also explore how digital media has already shaped our perception, our experience of place and time, and our understanding of community. I offer this not as an alternative to the project of more deeply grounding our experience in local communities, but rather as a step toward that end.
Michael Sacasas is associate director of the Christian Study Center of Gainesville, Florida, and author of The Convivial Society, a newsletter about technology and society.
With regards to both Jeffery Bilbro’s lead essay and Alastair Roberts’s follow-up reflections, I have little to add except a hearty “Amen.” Bilbro and Roberts have each given us a compelling and eloquent analysis of the disorders that characterize our shared media environment. I was especially appreciative of Bilbro’s framing of our media ecosystem when he notes that it is reorganizing not simply how we communicate with one another but “how we belong to one another.” This is an apt formulation, which helps us better grasp just how profoundly we are shaped by new media technologies. Also, Bilbro is absolutely right about the inadequacy of the most popular remedies on offer, such as fact checking and diversifying our feeds. These strategies are not only inadequate, they also tend to fuel the very dynamics they seek to curtail. Roberts, too, is incisive in his enumeration of the “threatening flipsides” that accompany the “supposed negative freedoms” we secure through the deployment of modern technology.
I will also second their encouragement that we find in our local, fully embodied communities resources to better navigate the turbulent currents of the digitized public sphere. It is absolutely vital that we do so. Taking cues from both Hannah Arendt and Jane Jacobs, I have argued elsewhere that digitization tends to abstract our relationships from the context particular places and shared spaces. Under these conditions, we lose our standing in a common world of common things that grounds our common sense, understood not simply as things every body takes for granted but rather as an understanding of reality that is held in common.
“To live together in the world,” Arendt argued in The Human Condition, “means essentially that a world of things is between those who have it in common, as a table is located between those who sit around it; the world, like every in-between, relates and separates men at the same time.”
When we gather, as we so often do now, on a platform like Zoom, where exactly are we? Where is the interaction happening? And, what difference does it make, say, that there is no here we can easily point to and much less is there a table? What sort of world is this that now harbors so much of our social and political life, and how might we distinguish it from the world of common things, which for Arendt was so important to meaningful public life?
It seems apparent that the digital realm lacks the permanence that Arendt thought was essential to a common world in which individuals could appear and be seen, and also that it has accelerated the liquefaction of modern life. Consequently, it fails to stabilize the self in the manner Arendt attributed to a common world of things. It also seems that Arendt’s fears about the epistemic consequences of the loss of a common world of things were well grounded. By abstracting our interactions into a placeless world of symbolic interchange and by creating the conditions of what Jay Bolter has labeled digital plentitude, digital media tends to undermine rather than sustain our capacity to experience a common world, which would in turn generates common sense. Increasingly then, we come to suspect that we are all occupying altogether different realities.
“The presence of others who see what we see and hear what we hear assures us of the reality of the world and ourselves,” Arendt argued, “and while the intimacy of a fully developed private life […] will always greatly intensify and enrich the whole scale of subjective emotions and private feelings, this intensification will always come to pass at the expense of the assurance of the reality of the world and men.”
So, once again, let me join Bilbro and Roberts in commending the virtues of a life committed to our given communities, the place and people in the midst of whom we find ourselves, as an indispensable counter-practice in the age of digitization. In this way we honor not only our neighbors, but also the fundamental goodness of the human body, whose limitations we do well to receive not as constraints to be overcome but rather as the parameters of our flourishing as the kind of creatures we are.
Having said this, however, I find myself wanting to probe our situation a bit further, if for no other reason than to reckon, as fully as possible, with the challenges before us. Put simply, we need to consider the degree to which we can, at this stage, distinguish between the digital and the local, practically speaking. The dynamic of turning to the local community in order to find a respite from the digital publics recalls the older framing of domestic life as a shelter from the harsh realities of industrialization. Family life was, as the popular image put it, a “haven in a heartless world.” However, as Ian Marcus Corbin noted in a recent review, that bargain has broken down “due to a growing incursion of market forces into the haven of the family home.” And this incursion has been abetted by digital technologies, which have eroded the boundaries between the home and the market.
This particular example is but a case in point of a larger pattern. Digital media has everywhere eroded boundaries, between work and home, home and the market, labor and play, the private and the public, and, we might add, between the local community and the virtual public sphere. Indeed, part of the problem is that we tend to see this latter pair, the local and the virtual, as a pair of like things. In my own thinking of late I’ve been trying to guard against language that suggest that digital media transport us into a realm that is somewhere else, that it constitutes another place, even if we think of it as an anti-place. The problem with this framing is that it suggests that we can toggle, as it were, between one realm and the other. Within this framing, for example, we might imagine ourselves deciding to spend less time in “cyberspace” and more time in “meatspace,” as it is sometimes crassly put. I’m not certain that this is the best way to think about the consequences of digitization. The digital and the local are not so much realms apart as they are modes of relating to the world that are dynamically entangled.
When we conceive of the digitization in this way, we are likely to miss the degree to which our experience of the local has already been structured by digital technology. Consider our local congregations. To what degree do they represent a realm distinct from the dynamics we associate with digital media? The answer, of course, will vary from one congregation to another, but we would find that digital technology has already exerted a formative influence on how, for example, church members imagine the way they belong to one another.
Along similar lines, I would suggest that we approach the question of digital media in the way that the 20th-century historian, social critic, and Catholic priest Ivan Illich eventually came to see the problem of modern technology. In the 60s and 70s, Illich published a series of scathing critiques of industrial age institutions—education, medicine, and transportation notably among them. By the 1980s, however, Illich came to believe that his project had been flawed by his failure to recognize the true nature of technology in an age of systems.
Illich had come to the conclusion that in the late 20th century modern societies transitioned out of the age of instruments into the age of systems. Unlike instruments, which could be easily distinguished from the user and thus regulated, systems incorporated their user in such a way that it was difficult to simply prescribe better policies for their use. ”I would like to get […] people to think about what tools do to our perception rather than what we can do with them,” Illich declared in a 1988 lecture. He wanted to show “how their use shapes our perception of reality, rather than how we shape reality by applying or using them.” With regards to medicine, for example, Illich had been initially been interested in understanding what we were doing to the body with our medical tools. He later came to see that it might be more important to understand how our tools shape what we think a body is?
I would encourage us to examine not only what we do and don’t do with our digital tools, but to also explore how digital media has already shaped our perception, our experience of place and time, and our understanding of community. I offer this not as an alternative to the project of more deeply grounding our experience in local communities, but rather as a step toward that end.
Michael Sacasas is associate director of the Christian Study Center of Gainesville, Florida, and author of The Convivial Society, a newsletter about technology and society.
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