Published in 2005, Mediated is not directly concerned with new/social/web 2.0 media. Instead, it attempts to articulate a cultural and philosophical theory of mediated representation. Central to the theory is the notion of the mediated person, the person whose life is ‘composed of an unprecedented fusion of the real and the represented’ and ‘shaped by a culture of performance that consitutes a quality of being, a type of person’. Of course we have always been mediated by whatever tools we’ve had at hand for thousands of years. Only now, however, are we experiencing reality indistinguishable from its representation. That experience is, in turn, creating a new person, a new self, brain and all.

On the face of it the idea that we are unable to distinguish mediated experience from real experience seems extreme. Wouldn’t we all claim to distinguish the representation from the real – a real chicken burger from its representation in a TV advert? According to Zengottita we do make such claims and we can make the distinctions we claim. However, his point is that in the media saturated world in which we are born and grow we simply don’t make the distinction. We don’t make the distinction because 1) represented experience is ubiquitous and 2) representation constantly flatters us.  The fusion is simply too tempting to resist. Instead we go with the flow of representation retreating ever more securely into a virtual world (of representation) created for us and reproduced by our very acquiescence. Our wriggle room inside it is presented to us in the form of options. We choose amoungst endless choice – whether flavours of yoghurt in the supermarket, images to be moved by, body shapes to cultivate, people to friend, books to read … . We are the lifestyle we adopt before we change to a new lifestyle. Mediated is not an academic treatise. Zengottita is a better writer than that genre generally allows. Here’s a taste of the way he expresses the above ideas in his introductory chapter:

Yes, there were ersatz environments and image-driven commodities and glitzy ads back in the 1950s, say, but this is something else entirely. Saying that it’s more than we had before is like saying a hurricane is just more breeze. So you need to ask yourself this: do you parse the real from the fabricated in that melange? Not can you but do you? The Fox screen is showing an Afghan woman learning to read – real or not? Posed? Candid? Some glorious babe in her underwear is sprawled across 35 percent of your visual field. She’s looking you right in the eye. You get that old feeling – real or not? A fabulous man, sculpted to perfection by more time in the health club than most parents have time for their kids, is gliding by on Day-Glo roller blades eight inches high. He’s wearing Tex-Tex gear so tight it looks like it’s under his skin, and the logos festooning his figure emit meaning-beeps from every angle – real or not? What about the pumped up biceps? If he uses steroids? But once again, the issue is not what you can do when I call your attention to it. Then you can be reassured – you can say, “Hey, okay, cool. I see what you mean but I still know the difference.” Not the point. The real issue is do you make the distinction as a matter of routine processing? Or do you rely instead on a generalised immunity that puts the whole flood in brackets and transforms it all into a play of surfaces – over which you glide and hover like a little god, dipping in here and there for the experience of your choice, the ultimate reaches of your soul on permanent remote? (22)

The radical implications of this – and this is where it links into current writings on technology – is that if true, representational technologies have colonised our minds to the extent that, unhinged from direct experience, we literally don’t think our own thoughts. We could, but we just don’t. If Nicholas Carr is right and the internet is increasingly acting as an incredibly sensitive feedback loop, perpetuating and justifying those thoughts (which are not ours in the first place) then Jaron Lanier’s warning to designers of technology futures (to stop treating us like gadgets) really does need to be heeded.

Here’s how Zengottita gets to that conclusion. He starts by making the case that the modern reflexive self has its origins in the invention of the printing press in the onset of modernity:

The idea is that reading and writing, by their nature, turn the mind inward, cultivate habits of rational reflection, encourage the imagination, the inner life in general – thus giving birth to a self in the modern sense. A self that didn’t need the intervention of priests and rituals to connect him to God because his soul had direct access, by way of scripture – call him a Protestant. A self informed by a free press, enabled to make up his own mind about political issues – call him a citizen in a representative democracy. A self that could decide on a career and choose among commodities – call him a participant in a capitalist economy.

… And, later, she and her as well, of course.

He uses that to show how the modern notion of the child was born of the printing press (and universal education which sprang from it) and with it the child-centred society in which we are presently submerged. Zengottita’s take on child-centredness is rather different to those which see the the child as the centre of his or her world or which argue that children should direct their activities. Instead, Zengottita examines the ways in which being a child is a status which stands on its own – it is both self-conscious and self-validating because it exists in a representational world that reflects back on itself. Nor is it exclusive to kids. As I read to my own 7 year-old daughter what I find myself doing is representing the child’s world to her as she sees it. I create mirrors which enable her to ‘learn’ how to be a child. And of course she’s clued up to it. She’s self-consciously a child in ways and extent that are completely alien to previous generations – who lived childhood more directly. And adults collude through those same representations – discovering the inner child in reading Harry Potter or watching the latest Disney production, and even wearing the same clothes as their eight year old child-accelerating-towards-adolescence.

Of course adolescence and ‘the teenager’ is a key ingredient of the soup which constitutes the fusion of the real with the represented. The fact that the teenage years have extended – to the early 30s? – is, according to Zengottita, suggestive of the ways that a mediated world offering more choices, more reflexively, creates a kind of stasis which only accident or necessity can transcend. And the classic posturing of adolescence – the trying and performing of personae – is now validated by an entire culture of identification and self-recognition. Fact, Fiction, comedy and tragedy (in whatever medium or genre) constantly tries to elicit the response, ‘I’m just like that …’ or ‘That’s exactly how I would feel’ (if, as on Jeremy Kyle, my sisters boyfriend had a child with my second cousin). Perhaps this is why the notion of empathy seems to have hijacked sympathy. Empathy, ‘the power of projecting one’s personality into (and so fully comprehending) the object of contemplation’ (OED), is so much more flattering (fully comprehending?) than mere sympathy, ‘fellow feeling’ (OED).

The same process (of course it does, it’s representational) is manifested in politics – the rise of identity politics. Through the expansion of channels of communication/representation the politics of self-expression has been elevated to a new level of self-consciousness. Politics as (self) presentation = politics as (self) advertising.

As political activity becomes the production of representations, the dynamic of commerce is reproduced in politics. Because political representations must contend with clutter, they must be packaged in a certain way, they must grab the most attention in the least amount of time and get across a simple message.

So the days of ideology, of debates which link issues together, which reference philosophies of human nature and analyses of history and which promote policies designed to advance that vision, seem in the 2000s rather quaint. Instead we have issue politics in which, those who are interested, take a position – largely expressing an identity and promoting the interests of those who share that identity. Just watch ‘Question Time’ on the BBCI to get a taste. It may be that the current debate about the ‘Big Society’ is an attempt to put some content back into the public space but even if it is, that public space is so full of attention seeking distraction that its reception might just be filed away in the ‘to attend to’ tray. Performance, representation, self-consciousness, spin, self-validation, identity … it’s difficult to argue against the idea that the fusion of reality and representation is almost complete. Nor is it difficult to understand why so few are actually interested.

But politics is just one manifestation of the ways in which representation has hijacked the real and why we retreat evermore willingly into the simulation of reality rather than get ‘really’ dirty. Whether its managing 650 online ‘friends’, following the fortunes of our online investments, or immersing ourselves in the online travel blogs as we plan our ‘escape’, the attraction of the virtual continually distances the real. The busyness of our lives, the opportunities to multi-task, the constantly connected to everything and everybody, and the endless options we (could) enjoy are the self-sustaining performative mechanisms that numb us into accepting that this is, actually, the best of all possible worlds.

But is it the best of all possible worlds? Isn’t it instead as Zengottita says, a ‘monstor vision’, a vision where the aims of modernity have been fully achieved?

The aim of modernity fulfilled means this: humanly created options that endow ordinary people with entitlements no mortal in history, no matter how exalted, could ever have assumed before. While these entitlement are now limited to a relative and priviledged few, this cohort now comprises many millions, shows every indication of expanding, and is, in any case, the source of the global zeitgeist. Members of this cohort either have, or can realistically anticipate, the obliteration of all barriers of time and space, instant access to every text and image ever made, the free exercise of any lifestyle or belief system that does not infringeon the choices of others, custom-made environments, commodities, and experiences in every department of activity, multiple enhancements of mind and body, the eradication of disease, the postponement of death, and the manufacture of their own progeny in their own image.

Plus improvements. (266)

In other words – and this is the logical conclusion to Mediated – the MeWorld has replaced God with Me.

Zengottita is relentless in his exploration of the representational and the supplanting of reality by its simulacra. And he has no conclusion to assuage the discomfort he inflicts. The idea that ‘Representation Rules!’ has no happy postscript. But … being forewarned is to be forearmed. Understanding the frames that are created and which constitute the real is knowledge. And perhaps a knowledge that will enable other frames to be built to constitute a less dystopic future than the one he so cleverly describes.

about a girl who couldn’t use internet chat with her boyfriend in Spain. The boyfriend, an ‘expert’ in computing had bought her a computer manufactured in China from a shop in Paseo y Malecón. There are rumours that the Asian computers sold in Cuba are pre-loaded with the filter software ‘Green Dam Youth Escort’.

Green Dam Youth Escort is a piece of content control software, i.e. web-filtering software that is:

designed and optimized for controlling what content is permitted to a reader, especially when it is used to restrict material delivered over the Web. Content-control software determines what content will be available (Wikipedia contributors, “Content-control software,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Content-control_software&oldid=372853735 (accessed July 15, 2010).

If computers bought by the Cuban government and used throughout the island have mandated software installed by the state, in this case by proxy through Chinese partners … there really is no hiding place. What you do is what is seen. And certainly there’s no way to ensure that what you write is what is read – at least as long as the state controls how it’s read. Tough times continue.

As these echoes reverberate I’m reading Hope and Memory by Tzvetan Todorov. For Todorov the most significant innovation and greatest evil of the twentiethy century was totalitarianism. Unlike many historians, Todorov considers fascism and Communism as two of its variants. The book examines in detail the origins and development of totalitarianism to support this hypothesis as well as including a moving account of six people who resisted it. Todorov is himself a survivor of a totalitarian regime (he spent the first 24 years of his life in communist Bulgaria) adding weight not only to his evocation of those six people, but also to his implicit criticism of the (largely left-leaning) intellectual conceit that the Soviet regime was progressive and that it’s ‘errors’ could either be conveniently forgotten or understood to be stages on the way to social justice. Todorov attacks the conceit by contrasting the ideal of totalitarianism with the ideal of democracy and detailing the similarities between variants of the ideal of totalitarianism, Stalinist communism and Nazism. It’s an attack that needs to be extended to the conceit – still held by many – that Cuba is an island stubbornly holding out against the imperial ambitions of its Goliath neighbour; that it is still trying to achieve a social justice so totally abandoned by the Capitalist world; that its achievements in education and health justify its intolerance; and that the future would be rosy if only its sovereignty could be respected.

It’s clearly difficult for me to read Hope and Memory without reflecting on Cuba. Todorov’s analysis gives constant food for comparison. Here’s how he characterises totalitarianism:

Because the group must take precendence over the individual, pluralism in a totalitarian state is relaced by its opposite, monism. This means that:

On the one hand, individual life is no longer divided between a free private sphere and a regulated public sphere; instead, everything in it, including beliefs, tastes, and affections, becomes part of a unified whole which must conform to public standard. … On the other hand, a totalitarian system imposes monism in all aspects of public life so as to reach the ideal of an organically unified and “bonded” community. By making the state dogma out of a single ideal, by requiring subjects to subscribe to it, by establishing itself as a “virtuous state”, totalitarianism effectively restores the old unity of the theological and the political. (14)

That ‘public standard’ in the merged private/public sphere in Cuba is constantly monitored and those who are seen to subvert the standard run the continuum of pressure to conform, of being hounded, villified, stigmatised, criminalised and, ultimately, expatriated. The expression of difference is anti-social, anti-social is anti-state and so, very easily, pluralism becomes an act of treason. Even when Cubans retreat into the four walls of a small apartment, the unfreedom of that private space allows for little development of autonomous thinking – so little free dialogue dilutes its future possibility. Public dogma can very quickly colonise private space.

Totalitarianism subordinates economics to the political sphere through nationalisation and ever-changing edicts of state control. The changing ideological climates in Cuba have meant that any ‘opening’ of the economic sphere towards less central, state control has always been provisional. Trading licences are given then removed without explanation. Markets appear and then disappear according to political whim.

A totalitarian state operates a single party system which means the abolishing of political parties altogether. The state takes control of all other types of public organisations and associations. The difficulty of assembly in Cuba makes the legal formation of non-government approved groups impossible. The only alternative is to act clandestinely – however open or secretive you are prepared to be. The Catholic church may have emerged into a more open position during the last few years but its an involuntary alliance – a pragmatic, strategic valve to which the state holds the key. Hence the use of the Roman Catholic Church in the release of the political prisoners.

Social unification gives form to a new social hierarchy: the masses obey party members, party members obey the nomenklature (the party elite), and these in turn are the servants of the inner circle of leaders at whose apex sits the supreme commander, or “guide”. Whilst the system may be creaking in Cuba and lip-service often paid to obedience, this is still the system that operates and without recourse to another system, even lip-service is enough to maintain it. Raul may be the President of the Council of State, but Fidel remains an influential “guide”. I’m sure there was no coincidence that Fidel appeared on Cuban TV, after a long absence, the same evening that the released prisoners left Cuba from Jose Marti airport. Nor was it a coincidence that no mention was made of the prisoners during the one and a half hour broadcast.

In totalitarian regimes on paper, the sovereignty of the people is respected, but in practice the “general will” is hijacked to benefit the leadership group, which uses elections as plebiscites. Whilst the product of the elections in Cuba may be transparant, the processes which lead up to them are certainly not. The sovereignty of the people expressed through the “general will” is a construct, moulded and manipulated for the benefit of those in power. Used then as a mirror it reflects itself in never-ending self-perpetuation. It does so because all information services are controlled by the regime; no dissident opinion can be expressed. The trials and tribulations of attmpts at alternative publishing in Cuba are legendary.

The ideal of equality is proclaimed, but in fact totalitarian society is riddled with complex hierarchies and levels of priviledge. The priviledges of the party elite (in educational choices, career advancement, travel opportunities) have been inbuilt since the beginning of the 1960s in Cuba. Only now with the less oblique, more transparant overlay of the dual economy, has the situation become critical and the legitimacy of the ideal begun to be questioned. But it is the dollar economy that is criticised – of course it is. To criticise the priviledges endemic to the system would not be tolerated.

Todorov does not discuss ‘authoritarian’ states in Hope and Memory. It’s an interesting ommission though I tend to think with regard to Cuba that the label has been used as a sop to those still holding to the conceit and as a distancing mechanism from the more extreme right-wing views of some Cubans in Miami. Todorov’s book stimulates thought – as I’ve shown above – and is full of wisdom on every page. He reminds us that the habits of thinking that engendered totalitarianism have not gone away – they are alive in Cuba but they are also alive in the utopian ideals of freedom and the war against evil that have fuelled the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. In the accounts of Vasily Grossman, Margarete Buber-Neumann (a survivor of both Soviet and Nazi concentration camps), David Rousset, Primo Levi, Romain Gary and Germaine Tillion, Todorov shows the human capacity for seeing good even in the face of the most extreme suffering. We should not be simply fighting evil in the name of good, Todorov says, but struggling against ‘the certainties of people who claim always to know where good and evil are to be found’. Ultimately, for Todorov as for Grossman, it is freedom and kindness that mark the path for humanity – a path towards the autonomy of the individual and the autonomy of the collective.

The reflection of the the universe in someone’s consciousness is the foundation of his or her power, but life only becomes happiness, is only endowed with freedom and meaning when someone exists as a whole world that has never been repeated in all eternity. Only then can they experience the joy of freedom and kindness, finding in others what they have already found in themselves. ( Grossman: Life and Fate 69)

In The Big Switch Nicholas Carr looks in detail at the rise of internet technology as a utility, comparing it to the rise of electricity as a utility and reflecting on the changes it bodes in society, culture and economics. Such changes, he argues will be ‘epochal’, by which I think he means very, very large:

Electric light altered the rhythms of life, electric assembly lines, electric assembly lines redefined industry and work, and electric appliances brought the Industrial Revolution into the home. Cheap and affordable electricity shaped the world we live in today. (11)

When electricitybegan to be delivered into the home and factory, not by individual generators but by central grids, electricity became a utility – a universal service which everyone could benefit from. In Part 1 of The Big Switch, Carr charts this story from Henry Burden’s water wheel in the 1850s through Edison’s innovations in electricity production and distribution to the breakthough into a central electricity grid pioneered by Samuel Insull. It was Insull who held the key to electricity as a universal utility by realising that with new technologies electricity supply could be consolidated in enormous central stations which would meet the demands of even the largest industrial consumer. He was also the first to realise the power of the network effect: ‘as a utility served more customers, it would become more efficient, allowing it to cut the costs of power further and in turn attract more customers’ (39).  If this is the history of electricity production, distribution, and consumption, what are the lessons to be learned for the development of computing as a utility?

The most instructive similarity between electricity and computation is that they are both general purpose technologies; platforms rather than discrete tools which can be used to construct many different applications. The more ubiquitous the applications, the more opaque the technology that acts as its platform. We don’t think of the electricity supply when we are styling hair, instead we think about how beautiful our new hair tongs will make our hair. In the same way we don’t think of our own computer’s chip when Google comes up with 834,000 results in 0.2 seconds for a term we entered in its search box. In both cases the technology is delivered at great speed over a network, takes advantage of economies of scale, and innovates constantly to improve the service.

Of course, many of us have already begun to use computer technology as a utility. Google as a search application is just the most central of its services to encapsulate the utility model. The application Google Docs allows users to take advantage of Google’s chips, memory and storage devices to write documents, create and deliver presentations, and store accounts information in spreadsheets. The Web is now full of such services. One of the results is a general re-thinking of what your computer is. Once we filled a big fat box next to our desk with programmes and worried about how much hard disk space we had to store them all. Now we’re increasingly satisfied with a laptop and a lightening connection to the Web where we read, write, listen, watch, save, store and share (pretty much) whatever we want. All the processing power that’s needed to do all this is now available on the Web and more is coming. At the moment it’s still a matter of the ‘early adopters’ who are using and experimenting with such services (though some big companies and institutions are clearly taking advantage of the cost cutting benefits of outsourcing for example memory and storage capacity) but Carr asks us to imagine what it will be like when the only computer is the internet computer and where we simply plug in when we need to ‘do digital’. What will that world look like?

Carr is no cyber-utopian. His 2008 article in the Atlantic, Is Google Making us Stupid? put him on the grumpier side of the cyber divide. Carr doesn’t believe we can control technology. We can’t control the way we pursue and embrace technological innovation because the economic imperative simply doesn’t allow us to do otherwise. This is how Carr explains it and positions himself in the technological determinism debate:

Technology shapes economics and economics shapes society. It’s a messy process – when you combine technology, economics and human nature, you get a lot of variables – but it has an inexorable logic, even if we can trace it only in retrospect. As individuals we may question the technological imperative and even withstand it, but such acts will always be lonely and in the end futile.

This ‘cyber-existentialism’ shapes Carr’s detailed examination of the implications of the internet-as-utility model in Part 2 of the Big Switch. And as we live more of our lives in the ‘computing cloud’ it’s not all good news. Here’s a summary of his observations:

1. As the market economy is rapidly subsuming the gift economy, user-generated content is devastating information sectors such as newspapers, film and music companies, and photography where thousands are losing their livelihoods.

2. Wealth is being concentrated not in the hands of a small number of companies but in a small number of individuals – YouTube was initially owned and run by two people, Flickr was sold when it had 10 employees. Both companies amassed billion dollar value on the back of very large and active user communities. It’s this new phenomenon of crowdsourcing that generated such wealth:

By putting the means of production into the hands of the masses, but witholding from those masses any ownership over the products of their communal work, the World Wide Computer provides an incredibly efficient mechanism for harvesting the economic value of the labor provided by the very many and concentratin it in the hands of the very few. (142)

And people still claim that the Web is still in search of a business model!

3. Culturally, the personalisation of content afforded by the the technology is creating polarised, homogeneous communities where our experience of ‘otherness’ (in people and information) is automatically filtered out to flatter, passify and encourage our digital selves to, well, shop more and protest less.

As the tools and algorithms [of filtering technologies] become more sophisticated and our online profiles more refined, the Internet will act increasingly as an incredibly sensitive feedback loop, constantly playing back to us, in an amplified form, our existing preferences.

4. As more and more information data is outsourced by companies and governments (and it will be simply because it will be cheaper to do so) there will be increasing concern about where such data ‘is’ and how secure it is. Some of the questions may be answered peaceably in discussions about how the trans-continental computing grid should work but it’s not difficult to see very serious conflicts emerge over who owns the cloud(s).

5. Computer systems are technologies of control (not of emancipation) designed to influence and monitor human behaviour. Governments use them to spin their messages, identify and contain dissident voices and extend the focus group to the networked group. Companies use them to influence the lives and thoughts of their employees as well as extend the working day and the monitoring of that working day. Your boss gives you Blackberry – hurrah! – you’re always at work. Companies have even convinced customers to become ‘friends’ through social networks and products actually contribute texts to micro-blogging sites like Twitter. All in the service of selling more.

6. The development of the artificial mind promised by the inventors of Google is imminent. Collective intelligence is it’s current incarnation where every time we click a link we’re feeding our intelligence into Google’s system. Slowly, but inexorably, we are transfering our intelligence into the machine which we then access to retrieve what we forgot we had. Ultimately, according to Carr (and this is the frightening bit that I think will be expanded upon in his latest book The Shallows) the Internet Computer is changing our brains – as with all new tools, memory, perception and language begin to change. As we become more plugged in the more we’ll be shaped into hyper-efficient data processors at the behest of the cloud and who controls it. The more we are trained to think like computors the more our consciousness will thin out and flatten and our humanity become a distant memory.

I did say that Carr was far from being a cyber-optimist! He is convincing though extreme and rarely gives justice to opposing positions and counter-voices to his skepticism/pessimism. But his writing – ‘high journalism’ – is engaging and the book is a real page turner. So, I’ll certainly be ordering his new book – though I may wait until the summer is over and the encroaching darkness of Autumn makes for a more appropriate reading experience!

Could it be that the RSA is contibuting to a certain zeitgeist coalescing around some fashionable reading of late:  Nudge, Connected, Blink, The Wisdom of Crowds, The Tipping Point … ? The “Yes, We Can” optimistic ethos evident in these books is, however, pretty low on overarching theory. There’s a need for a more all-encompasing rationale and plot for the story of “where do we go from here and why” to sustain the myriad projects and inniatives garnering interest and receiving (ever-dwindling) funding. Unsurprisingly for an institution founded in the 18th century, the RSA’s response lies in the Englightenment – but the Enlightenment cherry picked for its more positive, project-enhancing ideas and linked to emerging ideas on behavioural economics and neuroscience.

The source for much of this re-purposing of Enlightenment thinking comes from Tzvetlan Todorov’s recent book In Defence of the Enlightenment, the first chapter of which he reads in the following lecture he gave at the RSA in December, 2009.

Todorov writes clearly, succinctly and persuasively. However, there is something slightly alarming about the desire to harness an intellectual ‘movement’ (however disparate and internally debated), which flourished in the 18th century,  as a guide to our emergence from present ills and difficulties. But this is exactly Todorov’s wish:

what we need today is to re-establish Englightenment thinking in a way that preserves the past heritage while subjecting it to a critical examination, lucidly asserting it in light of its wanted and unwanted consequences … it is through criticism that we remain faithful [to the Englightenment project] and put its teaching into practice.

Todorov’s discussion of that project in the book is nuanced and qualified but not immune to challenge. He examines the claim that Englightenment thinking led directly to colonialism in the 19th and totalitarianism (Fascist, Nazi and Communist) in the 20th and argues that ‘the politics of colonisation were camouflaged behind Enlightenment ideals, but in reality they were driven by straightforward national interests’ (31). But there’s nothing straightforward about ‘national interests’ which were defined by a set of ideas about the free circulation of goods, individual and collective sovereignty together with an understanding of the aims of human action – all of which originated in the Enlightenment. To say that Bush and Blair’s invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan were camouflaged around a Judeo-Christian discourse of Good versus Evil but driven by national interests tells us very little. National interests and world-view are interrelated in complex ways. Without the world-view, the decision to invade might never have happened. There were easier ways, surely, to frame and promote ‘national interests’.

Similarly, the idea that the Englightenment project embodies an understanding of linear progress, Todorov argues is a distortion. Instead of linear progress what the Enlightenment philosophes were really arguing for (at least Rousseau) was the perfectability of the autonomous individual: we are capable of improving ourselves and our world. Whilst profoundly reassuring and trivially correct (through dedication, discipline and practice I could play a Bach cantata on the piano) it also flies in the face of much thinking from Darwin on. Steve Jones reminds us in his review of Matt Ridley’s The Rational Optimist,

Darwin insisted that there was no intrinsic direction to evolution, and modern biology shows that he was right.

Freedom in Darwin’s world is very different to freedom in Rousseau’s. The ‘Big Issues’ (climate change, sustainability, growth itself) that an Enlightenment lense may throw light on can in no way be ‘solved’: there can be ultimately neither optimist nor pessimist.

So what then of the three pillars of Englightenment thinking (I’m avoiding the temptation to call them the ‘Holy Trinity’) suggested by Todorov as enabling a reinvigorated practical project of humanism (and a carion call for the RSA) in the 21st century? The autonomy of individuals; universalism; and the human end purpose of our acts are all ideas that were at the core of the Enlightenment project. Here are some unworked-through notes:

On the autonomy of individuals. According to Zengotita in his book Mediated (deserving of a separate post) in an age of relentless and ubiquitous representation, where representation is replacing reality, the individual is reflexively autonomous in ways our grandparents could not even imagine. Of course there has always been representation, even in the 18th century. The difference now, according to Zengotita, is that we are aware of it as never before. We know all about mediation and choices. We also know that our life is a performance, that we can construct any identity or persona we want for ourselves, attach ourselves to any cause, and become a brand in the marketplace of personality. We know it and we willingly play along. This is an autonomy then that wallows in celebration to the flattered self. It’s not the individual that Rousseau, Condorcet, or Kant would recognise. If we are all our own Gods, then salvation is guaranteed; if happiness is a lifestyle choice then lets just keep on choosing. Of course things are more complicated and fewer people than ever claim to be happy. But the point is that the nature of the experience of being an autonomous individual is so different from that on which the Enlightenment thinkers predicated their theories. We haven’t just emerged from a dark age. We are living mediatised lives. Can we really claim the kind of autonomy suggested by such thinkers?

On universalism – the idea is that people as people deserve dignity and share fundamental rights. There are a couple of problems here for me. The first is its anthropocentricity – it’s all about humans, and certain kinds of humans – those capable of rational thought. So, the idea of a social contract – the Rawlsian one which is used to establish those principles that lead to a fair society – is premised on the exclusion of all those who are weaker than the proto-individual: the insane, children and animals. This seems to me to be one of those unintended consequences of the principle of universalism that emerged in the Englightenment: it’s not universal enough!

The human end purpose. Of course I get up in the morning thinking that today is going to be a good day. I also, probably, consider that today will be a better day than yesterday. I give a lecture believing I can give it better than I did the last time. But I don’t kid myself that there is some intrinsic, meaning-making sense in the idea that such betterings are progress. With progress tied to linear time there is always an end at which every progress that was thought to have been made is lost. The ongoing lectures can only be betterments, not progress. And the end purpose? The end purpose can’t be happiness or it’s modern equivalent, ‘well-being’: happiness is not a feeling to be attained but a way of being, at least for today.

And the thornier question of whether there is an end purpose at all? The self-deception that life has meaning has been dealt with by religions for a long time. And it’s a comforting thought which we are all susceptible to, especially when times are hard, confusing or both. The problem with the defence of the Englightenment, taken up by both Todorov and the RSA is, I think this. It’s a comforting idea to think that what we do has a meaning, it makes it easier to make decisions, to go on, to get up thinking that today will be just a little bit better because it leads to something. But like religion, isn’t this form of Enlightenment another superstition – sometimes useful and sometimes the reason for untold horror – but a superstition just too uncomfortable to deny?

It turns out that I don’t exist, because no state entity has me inventoried, because I don’t pay a fee to a union or appear on the list of some workplace cafeteria.  Although I walk, sleep, love and even complain, I lack a certificate-of-existence that would give me affiliation to a small—and boring—number of neogovernmental organizations.  In practice, I’m a civic ghost, a non-being, someone unable to show the sharp eye of the doorkeeper even the slightest proof of being in the official mechanisms. (GY, 24th March 2008)

Yet Sanchez is visibly in the blogosphere as a citizen journalist. Though not openly identifying with the moniker, it is getting stickier by the week as her posts become embedded in the Huffington Post, the US citizen-journalist aggregator par excellence. The fact that she perceived herself, in the eyes of the state, as a civic ghost in the blog post above echoes Atton’s idea that citizens’ media aim primarily not at state promoted citizenship but at media practice in constructing citizenship and political identity along with everyday life. Citizen media are mechanisms for resistance and tools for the constuction of alternative forms of citizenship – a theme running through GY. The difference between dominant professional, state-owned media practices and marginal, amateur practices is so often celebrated, as in the following post:

Of the series of films directed by Del Llano, this one has hit me the hardest with its thematic immediacy and reference to the gagging of the official press.  Seeing it, has confirmed for me the immense privilege I enjoy of not having an editorial boss, censor, or anyone who dictates to me what topics I can cover or what importance to give them.  My worst professional nightmare would be to find myself at a table like that, where everyone’s watching their backs, in order to preserve the small privilege of working for Granma, Juventud Rebelde, or some provincial newspaper. (25th March 2008)

Yet it is easy to simply celebrate GY, to create of Yoani Sanchez an icon of resistance and mediator of an emergent (more) civil society in Cuba. What Atton reminds the reader in this chapter is that we need a theory of cultural production that can enable a more critical understanding of the ‘work’ of alternative media. To enable that critique he uses Bordieu’s theory of cultural production and particularly his notion of ‘field’. It is this notion that can enable us to see the distinctions between mainstream and alternative media (and alternative medias) and ultimately find an alternative vocabulary

Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon.
Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted,
And human love will be seen at its height.
Live in fragments no longer.
Only connect…

This was the exhortation of E.M. Forster who, in Howards End (1924), explored the the difficulties in, and promises of, connecting in Victorian society prior to the first world war. Eighty five years later Hilary Clinton in a speech on internet freedom argued for enshrining Forster’s epigram to Howards End in the charter for universal human rights: ‘only connect’ becomes the right to connect.

According to Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler in Connected: The Amazing Power of Social Networks and How they Shape our Lives, the connections that bind form the bedrock of what it means to be human. If Forster was exhorting and Clinton demanding, then Christakis and Fowler are claiming that both miss the point: we cannot – and never have been able to – not connect. Connecting is both in our DNA and a characteristic of our pro-social intelligence. What is interesting is not that we connect but how we connect, the results of the connections and how an understanding of both can lead to a theory which has both explanatory and predictive power.

That theory builds on the idea that the sum can be greater than the parts – and has echoes of the hive mind and swarm intelligence so inimical to Jaron Lanier. Christakis and Fowler are however, at pains to detail the principles that govern contagion and connection in order to explain why social networks exist and how they work. These principles are:

1. we shape our network 2. our network shapes us 3. our friends affect us 4. our friends’ friends’ friends affect us 5. the network has a life of its own

So we can still choose the connections that we make and how salient each connection might be in a particular network but once that network is established, including our position in it,  it can shape our behaviour in different ways. It can make us happy, rich, poor and suicidal. That our friends influence our behaviour seems obvious but that our friends’ friends’ friends – individuals that we may never know – can influence us seems less so. Until we begin to think of social norms and the attempts to influence them. The reinforcement of complex processes involves multiple social contacts – so it’s argued, surrounding a smoker by multiple non-smokers is better than getting one ex-smoker to persuade a smoker to quit. Because the network has emergent properties (a cake is not reducible to an average taste of each of its ingredients, it transcends those ingredients and emerges as something else) the connections that are present can lead to something that transcends those connections. So, the argument implies, get the network ingredients right and we could cook goodness and happiness. We could of course also cook evil and although the authors spend some time looking at Milgram’s experiments with obedience to authority, they could have explored in much greater depth the ways in which evil can be an emergent property of particular social engineering. By coincidence, as I was reading Connected I also watched The Wave, an example of the ways in which group conformity can be manipulated through the ties that bind, leading to predictably frightening consequences. Evil is an emergent property but I’m not convinced that it is exclusively emergent in particular networks.

But to return to what Christiakis and Fowler did do. The notion that ideas and behaviour can be infectious and even contagious is not a new one. In the 1940s and 50s social scientists were studying how behaviour flows through groups. Paul Lazerfeld, in looking at the ways in which products became popular, saw that there was a two stage process involved: product popularity starts with an inner group and moves through connections outwards. So developed the idea of ‘viral’ marketing – creating the buzz with the cool kids, the influencers, at the centre and with the idea that those at the outer reaches of the network will become infected. The medicalisation metaphors continued in the 1990s with ‘epidemics’ of obesity, suicide, and more recently loneliness. Much of this earlier work was reconstructed after the event. Some behaviour became prevalent and the researchers tried to explain it. Only more recently with the digitisation of everyday behaviour through social networking sites have social scientist been able to look at dynamic networks and map their changes in shape, constitution as well as the issues that travel through them. What Christiakis and Fowler have been able to do however is to take data from an extensive ongoing study of heart disease (the Framingham Heart Study in the US which has followed more than 15,000 people, over 50 years and three generations) which has collected information on social connections between the people involved and begin to map those connections against the spread of various behaviours. They found that as people are connected so is their health connected.

There are clearly some unanswered questions with the research they conducted. In the UK there is a north-south divide in life expectancy with the more affluent regions recording higher levels of longevity than the poorest. The question is: are people living shorter lives in Glasgow because they are connected to people living shorter lives? Or are there other factors involved? Christakis and Fowler look for their answers in the network but surely environmental factors are playing a large part. Of course, some behaviours are contagious – even behaviours we enact ourselves. Charlie Chaplin suggested you should ‘smile when your heart is breaking ‘ because simply by smiling ‘you’ll find that life is still worthwhile’. Or perhaps you’ll find other smiley people and as ‘birds of a feather flock together’ you’ll find yourself in the company of like-minded people. This idea – homophily – is a powerful explanation of many of the ways in which we behave in groups and in opposition to other groups. Homophily is the glue that binds so much of our networks and which creates the kinds of self-prophesying ideas and echo-chambers increasingly being witnessed in our digital connections.

There are also a couple of dangerous implications buried in Connected. If I know my health and happiness are tied to my connections, why not simply break the unhealthy connections and stick with the healthy ones? Cut those ties to smokers … even to friends who have friends who are smokers. Want to improve the health of a particular network? In the same way as viral marketing works best from the most connected cool kid to the least connected kid on the margins, so better health starts with the most connected ‘node’ in the network and spreads out to those on the margin. Logically, health care benefits should be given to those people first and then it’ll spread out – good health will be a contagion as obesity is. The policy implications are not lost on Christakis and Fowler who chillingly suggest in a sentence that echoes Minority Report:

Correlating people’s network centrality with their mortality risk, their transitivity with their prospects of repaying a loan, or their network position with their propensity to commit crimes or quit smoking offers new avenues for political intervention.

The Philosopher and the Wolf never claims to be a philosophy book. Instead it jumps through a joint autobiography with regular incursions into philosophical areas such as the nature of happiness and evil; the differences between ape and lupine intelligence; perceptions of time, memory, and death. Ultimately though, it’s a defence of animals and a corrective to the Enlightenment bias towards the human ape as being uniquely better, more intelligent – above and beyond the animal kingdom over which it governs. Rowland’s meditation, particularly on the deception and deceit which are the progenitors of our social intelligence and which ground our evil, forces a re-thinking of that claim.  Our greatest achievement – ‘our civilisation’ – is in fact a complex defence against our own bestiality, our own natures.

Rowlands engaged me both with the ‘whodunnit’ style of the developing relationship between the man and the wolf as well the philosophical understandings that relationship forces upon him. Clearly, living with a wolf is a life changing experience. The real nature of that relationship and the changes that it brought about are most clearly, and most beautifully explored in the final section of the book which describes Brenin’s death and legacy.

Half way through reading The Philosopher and the Wolf my father-in-law died suddenly. I remembered a passage I’d read two days before and returned to it:

It is in our lives and not, fundamentally, in our conscious experiences that we find the memories of those who are gone. Our consciousness is fickle and not worthy of the task of remembering. The most important way of remembering somone is by being the person they made us – at least in part – and ling the life they have helped shape.

It’s  a strange strap line (book meets marketer?), manifesto. It’s not a call to arms – there’s neither plan nor promises here – unlike the main political parties of the moment. Instead there’s an argument – at times willfully contradictory – about the value of multivalent works that unapologetically mix channels, forms and sources and see no reason to explain how, why or from whom. If once inscribed it’s all a lie anyway, why not celebrate the con which is delivered with a wink of the authorial I/eye.

Shields excites and stimulates but he doesn’t completely convince. He deals with novels but says nothing of stories. The ‘narrative turn’ in much social science has looked at the ways in which our perception of the world revolves around the structure of story – we ‘story’ experience in order to understand it. When we can’t story it we can’t make sense of it: unstoried is in one important way, unhinged. Walter Benjamin captured it this way when he wrote:

the story, which is one of the oldest forms of communication. It is not the object of the story to convey happenning per se, which is the purpose of information; rather it embeds it in the life of the storyteller in order to pass it on as experience to those listening.

The story, however embedded, can revitalise our personal experience by revealing that what might be ordinary can be extraordinary, revelatory. The story in which character and plot drives the action can also increase empathy – lost in the plot the story can inspire understanding for unsympathetic and even monstrous characters. That can enrich our experience. And that’s why I keep reading them.

Reality Hunger is – and this is an irony – a linear romp, a page-turner in which I was was drawn into and through very quickly. At the same time it’s a mine – there’s all those underlined sections and annotations to return to and mull over. So, a paradoxical success: a page-turning modernist thriller-argument and post-modern esoteric navel gazing.

Or perhaps a lyric essay for our times.

The Economist

dissident

adj. Disagreeing or differing (in opinion, character, etc.); at variance, different. Const. from.

Disagreeing in political matters; voicing political dissent, usu. in a totalitarian state.

One who dissents from the established or dominant form of religion; a dissenter.

(The Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. 1989. OED Online. Oxford University Press.)

Once Catholics couldn’t speak their name: now anyone with an opinion that goes beyond the ‘very unhappy’.