Abstract
In the conclusion of Peter Sloterdijk’s epic Sphären trilogy (1998–2004), the German philosopher performs a contemporary iteration of Socrates’ original critique (as documented in Plato’s Phaedrus around 370
Media, concludes Lisa Gitelman in her history of phonography and the world wide web, are located ‘at the intersection of authority and amnesia’ (2006: 6), as people tend to ignore the role of media in their lives, and in the process forget how the kind of media they use format and shape their interactions with the world around them. Gitelman points to a profound paradox intrinsic to the findings of studies on the appropriation and use of media – something that Sebastian Kubitschko and Daniel Knapp (2012) similarly signal in their critique of the media life hypothesis (Deuze, 2011). The more people use media in the domains of everyday life and seem to take media for granted, the more reflexive debates and experiences about the potential consequences of such media become. It looks as if people are not just aware of the media in their lives – our everyday interactions are often shaped around this awareness. This understandably leads media scholars to stipulate that our capacity for social action and democratic change takes place with and through media.
At the same time as professors, parents, physicians and politicians are actively concerned or excited about the role of media in people’s lives, our lived experience with media makes media disappear. Regarding their material conditions as artefacts, media have vanished into the thin air of embodied interactions with game consoles, the haptic interface of touchscreens, and the altogether ethereal nature of wireless mesh networks and an emerging ‘internet of things’. 3 In terms of our activities with media, it is not just enough to signal that more people own or regularly use a mobile phone than have access to electricity (at the time of writing: 80 percent versus 20 percent of the global population). Such ubiquity in itself negates the present-at-handedness of media. One could furthermore consider the differences reported in time spent with media through for example phone surveys, personal diaries and participant observation – which are stark. 4 As almost every waking moment is either directly or indirectly spent with media, when asked about it, people tend to forget most of that media use.
Considering how media artefacts and activities in effect become the social arrangements of people’s lives, Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin signal ‘the ambivalent and contradictory ways in which new digital media function for our culture today […] in which digital technologies are proliferating faster than our cultural, legal, or educational institutions can keep up with them’ (1996: 312). They suggest this ambivalence stems from a double logic of remediation embedded in all media. On the one hand, media make themselves known to us by remixing their properties: today’s phones include music players, video screens and so on; any television show or advertisement uses conventions and formulas from previous genres, formulas and formats; and people are in their daily activities concurrently exposed to media. This at times makes us hyper-aware of media. Simultaneously, media work very hard to make themselves invisible through a logic of immediacy, which automates and erases their operations. Beyond the media’s evolution into natural user interfaces, examples are increasing realism in sophisticated digital games, augmented reality applications on smartphones and all the programs within the popular genre of reality television. The immediacy of media, then, makes our ongoing negotiations between who we (think we) are and the broader social system of which we consider ourselves part (but that remains largely invisible to us other than as experienced through media) subject to the mediation of media technologies that, more and more, endeavour to fade from our active awareness of them.
Beyond all of this, an additional point can be made with reference to experimental work by Byron Reeves and Clifford Nass, who recognize the humanlike aspects of what media do – as ‘media equate real life’ (1996: 5, italics in original). When people engage with media in ordinary, mundane, everyday settings, their media devices, what they do with them, and how all of this fits into their daily lives, are reality. Even if we forcefully claim a real beyond media, Paul Taylor daintily offers that ‘in many ways we act as if [media] are real and we only pretend to pretend to believe that they are mere representations – despite what we might say, in terms of actual doing, we treat [media] as if they were real’ (2010: 15). All this boisterous arguing among media and communication scholars about the object of their studies can therefore be seen as an elaborate ruse of reciprocated self-denial. By looking so hard at media and telling each other loudly what we see we fail to witness what is all around us – what we are. Media.
Beyond pointing to the generally unreflective and therefore largely unseen ways in which media find a place in people’s lives and considering their relative invisibility as technological infrastructures, it is vital to argue on a more fundamental level that people can never really ‘see’ media, because ‘it is difficult … to think outside of the media networks through which we express and communicate our thoughts’ (Gane and Beer, 2008: 32). This kind of blindness, which understandably confuses Kubitschko and Knapp with reference to ocular observations, needs complex articulation as media are not ‘external and extensive objects’ that we can switch on or off and therefore control, but, as Friedrich Kittler argues, ‘[media] on the one hand and man on the other are inseparably linked by an endless feedback loop’ (2009: 29).
Any day in our media life ties us in with a social and symbolic fabric that is pervasive, and in part because of its ubiquity remains largely unseen. The question perhaps is not how little or much we know about the technological infrastructure lying underneath our homes, streets, and oceans, nor what kind of programming languages we can or should master (or how we should be capable of being able to read between the lies of advertisements, news, and other flights of fancy). A dialectics between visibility and invisibility (or between life as performed and experienced online versus offline) such as proposed by Kubitschko and Knapp eloquently misses the point, additionally running the risk of redundantly rehashing a century’s worth of media scholarship.
To keep media and life apart in analyses of the human condition with specific reference to our responsibilities towards each other, our technologies and the planet reifies man’s ability to switch media (and machines in general) off, and reiterates the possibility of choice. This personalist bias is based on the flawed notion, that there is something special about us as human beings. There is not. What may be hopeful is a type of media studies that aims to assist people, as individuals, to find creative ways to wield the awesome communication power of media both ethically and aesthetically. In other words: to live a good and beautiful media life. My port of entry to that actionable agenda is respect for the way people already live: inside their very own Truman Show, within which perpetually mediated reality they are surrounded by – and silently dancing with – multiple versions of themselves (their avatars, online social network profiles, digital dossiers, and so on and so forth). None of these personas can be effectively deleted, nor switched off – and none are exactly the same.
We have always lived in media. Following the argument of Kubitschko and Knapp, let me invoke Neil Postman: ‘our languages are our media’ (1986: 15). Our media, by virtue of their invisibility, have not come to shape or define us (as Postman would argue), but constitute us as much as we do them. Where Kubitschko and Knapp rightfully ask about the potential for democratic engagement and agency in such a media life, they fail to see how whatever we think that kind of social action means always already exists in (and gets made by) media. In effect, for well-meaning critical scholars such as Kubitschko and Knapp, the true power of agency vis-a-vis what Douglas Rushkoff considers as an emerging awareness ‘of just how much of our reality is open source’ (2003: 37) will remain forever unseen, as they keep convincing themselves it can be found outside of their invisible media.