Eureka! An angle!

At long last, I have an angle and an outline for my paper.  I even have two or three possible case studies.  I can’t tell you how marvellous it feels. I have purpose and direction.  All is right with the world.

My angle, after reading a few pages from my Prof’s thesis and a few chapters from Turkle’s Alone Together, amongst other things (and realising with horror that all of my ideas have already been had and I’m entirely unoriginal) is this: WHY? Why do we quest after disembodiment?  After all, this is no new thing.  Religion, the concept of a soul, belief in ghosts, astral travelling… it’s all been around for millennia.  So what is it about us that makes us so keen, in some cases compels us, to escape our bodies?  Do we really believe that we can live without them, and that living without them will be better? (This makes me think of Douglas Adams – in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: So long, and thanks for all the fish, the Total Perspective Vortex is guarded by a spirit who is undergoing a trial separation from his body, which is out having fun without him.) How can we even conceive of ourselves if we are not our ‘selves’? Will we use our new technology to create E-bodies, which follow traditional lines, much like E-books; or will we branch out in entirely new directions? I think the latter is unlikely – it is too alien, too extreme. Our entire language is littered with references to the body – ‘I know it like the back of my hand’ and ‘she’s the apple of my eye’ and ‘it’s time to grit your teeth and face the music’ – I could go on. I really could.

The point is, we think in terms of bodies, and it will take a long time for us to stop doing so.  Or perhaps not. Perhaps we will adapt within a few generations. Who can say? I wonder what Stephen Hawking would say about all this.  He’s one of the few people qualified to talk on the subject.

And what if, after we eliminate the need for the body, we find out that our brains (unlike Mr Hawking’s) are far more limited than we hoped?  What if our dualistic future is more Dystopian than Utopian? What if, instead of the traditional ‘greys’ – stunted, small aliens with no musculature but enormous brains – we become more like the wallowing, fat, unthinking, pleasure-seeking slobs in Wall-E?

Perhaps this is the price we pay for having evolved such an advanced consciousness, like the analogy of Adam and Eve, who eat the fruit of knowledge and realise their own nakedness. Perhaps all of this can be boiled down to a fear of mortality; or a desperate desire to connect with more people in our crazy, disengaged world; or to remake ourselves without the usual limitations and rules and prejudices and conventions – the new, fresh, gender/race neutral, possibly anarchistic and hopefully improved post-human version of me; or extreme paranoia and Cartesian scepticism: it is easy to distrust what we see and hear, when so much of it is deceptive, misleading, or complete bollocks – never more so than today.

We cannot know what will happen, or how it will manifest, but we can look to Science Fiction to hazard a guess. And that’s what I’ll be doing in my paper… watch this space.

One final, facetious thought, before I head off to find the film I’ll be using as a case study: if we all become completely disembodied, what on earth will teenage boys and girls obsess about, if their acne and their bodies no longer matter? I’m sure they’ll find something.  Count on it.

The consequences of human interaction.

I’ve been pondering the topic for my paper for a week now, and on Sunday, over lunch in a slightly disappointing Indian restaurant (never drink salt Lassi!) I mentioned the idea to two of the smartest people I know (one of whom is an almost purely online friend – this is only the second time I’ve seen him this year and it was for his birthday and the first time was for my birthday, so go figure).  But before I get ahead of myself, here’s the idea:

Identity has become another social product.  It is a conscious, strategic construct, an often narcissistic representative text, and it can be changed hourly, to coincide with whatever is required in a specific online milieu. People had private journals: now they have public blogs.  Nothing is sacred. Everything is exposed for general scrutiny, trivialised, and forgotten so very quickly. Which leads me to the matter of impermanence, a particularly fascinating issue for me.  In the past, ephemera were often kept, for their value as keepsakes: love letters were squirreled away in secret places, and ticket stubs and invitations to events made their way into scrapbooks.  Photographs were showcased in albums with thoughtful and amusing captions.  People bought CDs (only after careful thought and consideration, because they weren’t cheap) with beautiful inserts, the lyrics included, and listened to the songs for years after their purchase.  They subscribed to magazines, like National Geographic or Reader’s Digest, and kept all the back issues. Essentially, memories were cherished, embodied in small items, inconsequential at face value. 

Those are things that I did, anyway, and for me, things seem very different now. Almost everything seems ‘more’: more options, more disposable, more available, more current, but not more quality or more memorable. Few people bother to print photographs – it is possible to take so many and store them all digitally.  No-one writes letters any more, most invitations are e-mailed or posted on Facebook, and inboxes need to be kept tidy and free of clutter. Tickets for films and shows, even flights and holidays, are all booked online.  Our memories are out of place, disembodied and disoriented, and ultimately, weaker and less meaningful.  David Gray and Jade Petermon agree with this, in ‘Memory, Space, Media’ (2012) but they also show how media can be used to create a storehouse of collective memories which were previously scattered and unacknowledged.

At face value, this change does not seem particularly meaningful, but it may well be a symptom of a deeper malaise: the 21^st century disease of sensory overload, excessive communication without satisfaction, of loneliness despite a permanent lack of total privacy and solitude.

So this leads to two problems:  are social media making us lonely, and is the loss of embodiment (i.e. the tendency towards digital memories) something worth worrying about?  My super-intelligent friends seem to think not.  They think it’s no big deal, that we can archive better than before, and that the medium for the archiving does not affect the meaning of the content. For them, it’s like the difference between DVDs and Blu-Ray. I’m not so sure though, and I won’t be until I’ve done a lot more reading on the topic.  From what I’ve come across so far in a 2010 article by Lea Schick and Lone Malmborg called ‘Bodies, Embodiment and Ubiquitous Computing’, my friends seem to have the right idea in some respects.  Disembodiment allows us the potential to use technology in truly pervasive yet non-intrusive ways.  We can let it become as natural as getting dressed, and it allows us the potential to be so much more than we are right now.

BUT we’re not there yet, and I don’t care what any wise-ass says: look at a picture of your old Grade 1 classroom.  Connect with your old teacher and classmates on facebook.  And then, get hold of a copy of your old Grade 1 reader: smell it, see Jack run, feel the thickness of the paper. And tell me which version – embodied or disembodied – affects you most.