In a recent exchange on the Media Ecology Association's listserv, an exchange that started with a discussion of web 2.0 and its negative implications and that ended with a discussion of human qualities lost (or not-present) in cyberspatial communication, I was struck by how non-specific was the actual discussion of web 2.0 and how easily that discussion slid into more recognized and routinized forms of critique. This isn't a failing of anyone person or group of persons on the listserv, but rather a consequence of a certain oppositional understanding of the human, one that posits the human entity as something distinct from the media with which that entity negotiates the world around them, people included.
The problem is one that remains familiar to certain strands of phenomenological inquiry regarding media, namely that the results of critique are already prescribed by the methodological presuppositions contained within the critique itself. For many phenomenologists, telecommunication necessarily poses problems in that it provides merely the illusion of presence and never the advent of presence itself. The specificity of the particular telecommunications medium matters only tangentially; be it a phone or a television, a blog or an email, video conferencing or text messaging, the fundamental axis of the critique is presence, and so there is little need to attend to particularity. In the critique of what might be dubbed (and was dubbed, albeit favorably, by one of the interlocutors) the "human vibrancy" critique, again what matters is the "essential" attributes that constitute humanness, and the fact that many of these attributes (for example, touch and smell, or even more ethereally, a preternatural sort of physical resonance between two people) simply cannot manifest within cyberspatial communications. This will be as true as it is for a joomla installation as it is for an email exchange, or a postcard, for that matter, and so it's easy to elide the particularities of a medium, in all its technological singularity, in favor of the more universal application of a metric that exists oppositionally - as the thing against which mediation is understood.
I find this means of critique problematic for a variety of reasons.
First, I believe these sorts of methods rely on fundamentally ablist assumptions. Ablism is the belief in a certain normative conception of the capacity of the human body, and the assumption that there are certain essential qualities that constitute the human, when not everyone has those qualities, seems to me to define entire sections of the population as an exception or exclusion to a universally desired humanity. Those with speech impairments, incapacities in motor functions, who have to deal with mental disability or retardation, and who require technological assistance to facilitate communication are being told, in effect, that their communication is somehow subhuman. The definitions we deploy, the concepts we embrace, the ideas we refine have consequences. In this case, one of those consequences is political/discriminatory, and an embrace of these warrants really needs to be called into question on ethical grounds.
Second, the human vibrancy and phenomenological critiques also carry with them practical implications for the possibility of positive critique, the sort that works to make cyberspace a better place (where better is obviously a subjective or communal assessment). These assumptions limit the potentiality of writing, of cinema, of the telephone to mean in any manner as substantially as the human voice; instead what we have, in effect, is a narrative of the "fall" of humanity into the sin of mediation, wherein the technological contaminates some original human purity. It is a repudiation of a 2000 year old transmission through writing and printing. It is one that routinely manifests as an absence of specificity when tackling particular new media. To understand the web 2.0 phenomenon, for example, you need to understand the changes made possible by xhtml/css, php/ajax, and possible flash compression, the rhetoric and discourse of online "community," the hardware and software constraints, including the development of firefox, which has since influenced other browser design, and the rise of social networking and social contexting, but the conversation rarely arrives at this level of technological specificity because the axis around which the human vibrancy critique revolves never requires it. I think this impoverishes the possibility of that positive critique that so many media scholars want.
So what is the alternative? At one point in the exchange, Stephanie Bennett remarked that when it comes to shaping the new media of cyberspace to better form community and communication, what matters is that "This effort is a human one and cannot be replaced by technique." This is a sentiment predicated on an ontological assumption I find extremely problematic; for me there is no human without technique, and the move to separate the two, to keep them ontologically or epistemologically discrete, a move that can be traced directly back to Plato's diminution of tekhne in the face of episteme, and that is perhaps the most pervasive and subtle binary in all of Platonism, seems to me both unsustainable and dangerous.
It's not that I think there is nothing intrinsic in human beings, only that I think that nothing that we think of as intrinsic is also universal; the kernel or essence of Dasein is as contingent as any other socio-historical phenomenon. Concomitantly, I find unworkable any fantasy of immediacy or any paradigm of communication as communion, since by necessity I believe human being to be always already mediated. This recognition, that human being is from its very inception, technological - that there exists a sort of originary prosthetic that makes possible the simple fact of being-there, requires that we think about new technology based upon its particular prosthetic, supplemental effect, rather than through a matrix of a human purity that assumes that the technology we have (speech, language) is our natural state, and that any other technological device degrades that natural state. I referred to this tendency once as technostalgia, the belief that old technologies are naturalized and that this natural state is inherently superior to newer media and technologies by dint of its naturalization (which is usually a spiritualization). It's a move we can find in Plato, Heidegger, Innis, Ong, and Postman, to name just a quick handful of folks, and it's an unsustainable move, one that provides the pleasures of critique alongside the impotency required by such pleasures.
Comments (4)
Kennenth,
I'm with you until you list Ong as one of the technostalgic, that he believes technology "degrades that natural state," although this may just be a blindspot in my own reading of Ong. I agree with you that we need to think of language itself as a technology rather than think of it as a natural, non-technologized state as Ong seems to, but I don't see the leap to the idea that technology degrades that state. Is there anything in particular that you could point to? I ask because, as you may know, I'm interested in the reception of Ong, in the readings and misreadings of Ong, and I'm keenly aware that I might be misreading Ong as well.
Posted by John Walter | January 9, 2007 12:52 PM
Posted on January 9, 2007 12:52
I could easily be wrong about Ong, and as it is I consider him to be somewhat exeptional to the above list, as I think he's much more affirming of the idea of a consciousness constituted by its mediation, a claim with which I am obviously in full agreement. But I find his notion of interiority and his distaste for the idea of media over the notion or model of "human communication" to serve as reversions back to some more proper source material or origin, and the spiritualization that is often the means of naturalization seems fairly prominent in the privilege he accords sacred texts, as well as his notion of the interiority, which seems to me a decidedly Christian conceptualization. But I would be more than willing to admit being wrong here if you'd like to direct me to some passages that you think solid rejoinders.
I will say, though, as a preempt, that there is clearly something within Ong that fuels the technostalgiac impulse, at least if the recent MEA list conversation is any indication, as there were at least three different people using Ong's interiority as a warrant for their claims about the privilege and value that should be awarded to embodied, co-present communication. If you watched that exchange, I'm sure you saw them, if not I can try to recreate the exact warrants for them here.
Posted by Kenneth Rufo | January 9, 2007 4:51 PM
Posted on January 9, 2007 16:51
Ken,
Sorry for taking a few days to get back to the discussion. While I agree that Ong privileges presence as something sacred and this is rooted in his religious faith, it's also rooted in existentialism (see, for instance, the lecture "Voice, Text, Fundamentalism, Hermeneutic, and God's Word: The Personal Grounding of Truth," available from lectures section of the Ong Collection web site, as well as revised published version "Hermeneutic Forever: Voice, Text, Digitization, and the 'I'." Oral Tradition 10.1 (1995): 3-36), what I don't find in Ong that you seem to see is "his distaste for the idea of media over the notion or model of 'human communication' to serve as reversions back to some more proper source material or origin."
In an unpublished lecture from 1995 titled "Orality, Textuality, and Electronics Unlimited," which I quote because I was skimming it yesterday, Ong writes "In all this, I should not want to be interpreted as unfriendly to technological development. I am all for it. But to make it work, we have to face honestly the dimension of the problems it entails. All progress introduces new problems. [...] This means that we must prayerfully think through our information and communication world today and how we use it, as our predecessors have had to think through the worlds they lived in" (17).
I might also point you to Ong's autobiographical profile, written in 2001 with the intent of being part of a website that never launched. See the eighth paragraph of Part III, were he writes in part, "He firmly believes that there is no way to go back to the past, which interests him largely in its relation to the present. “The good old days never were what they used to be,” he likes to repeat. What drives him wild is the mentality of those (a minority) of his fellow Christians who think that Christian faith is past-oriented, who want to get back to an age supposed to be better than the present. [...] The second coming of Christ--to which Christians look FORWARD, lies ONLY AHEAD. Looking to the past for salvation gets you NOWHERE."
While both are overly religious in tone, I hope, serve to demonstrate that Ong wasn't anti-media or nostalgic. If they're not convincing enough, let me quote from one last work, from "Technological Development and Writer-Subject-Reader Immediacies":
It's not that Ong dislikes media or wants to get back to something more pure, it's that he, as he states in the passages I quote above, wants to wants to understand the present, he wants to understand the affordances and constraints of media today.
It should be said here that while Ong discusses face-to-face verbal communication as nontechnologized, and while he regards it as a purer form of presence than media communications technologies, this does not mean that Ong believes face-to-face verbal communication is unmediated or unproblematic. One of his favorite sayings was "Total verbal explicitness is impossible. (This statement is also self-referential.)" He believes that all communication is mediated, that there is always an "I" and a "you" and that those two figures can not fully know or understand each other. Again, see "Voice, Text, Fundamentalism..." and/or "Hermeneutic Forever...." Existentialism, personalism, and "I-thou" communication have been central to Ong's thought from early on. You can find it in The Presence of the Word and in "The Barbarian Within: Outsiders Inside Society Today," and he taught a class on existentialism in literature for years.
As for the technostalgiac impulse that Ong "fuels," I'd suggest that people read their own technostalgia into Ong's work. Orality and Literacy in particular, is such a problematic text that lends itself to misreading for the reason's Farrell mentioned on the MEA list recently.
Posted by John Walter | January 11, 2007 5:48 PM
Posted on January 11, 2007 17:48
I'm convinced, at least that there is an Ong that runs counters to the one being used on the MEA list. Thanks for this - I'll strike him from the list.
See, now if I could get this quality of comments from you on every post, I'd be a happy blogger :)
Posted by Kenneth Rufo | January 12, 2007 5:37 AM
Posted on January 12, 2007 05:37