The Crisis of Presence in Contemporary Culture

Ethics, Privacy and Speech in Mediated Social Life

Vincent Miller, Author

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781473906570
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781473910669
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

"Discussions about the contemporary online world are often in a one-dimensional manner shaped by moral panics about online trolling, cyberbullying, cybercrime, terrorists online, etc. The associated right-wing extremist agenda for Internet politics is about control, surveillance and censorship. Vince Miller's book questions this agenda and is an excellent work for understanding how to use philosophical thought for the analysis of ethics, privacy and disclosure in this turbulent world of the Internet in the information society. It shows how to come to grips with the contested relationship between online freedom and control."
- Christian Fuchs, University of Westminster, Author of Social Media: A Critical Introduction 

By investigating three issues which have captured the public imagination as ?problems? emerging directly from the contemporary use of communications technology (anti-social behaviour, privacy and free speech online), Vincent Miller explores how the digital revolution is challenging our notion of ?self? and ?presence?. Through a critical and philosophical examination of each of these cases, he argues that they have at their root the same phenomena: 'a crisis of presence'.

Focussing on the concept of presence, and the challenges that our changing presence poses to our ethics, privacy and public discourse, Miller illustrates how ubiquitous communication technologies have created a disjuncture between how we think we exist in the world and how we actually do exist through our use of such devices. 

The solution, he claims, is not to focus exclusively on 'content' and its regulation as much as it is to examine, understand and resist the alienating aspects of the media itself, such as the technological ordering, metaphysical abstraction and mediation which increasingly define our social encounters and presences. He suggests that such resistance involves several ambitious revisions in our ethical, legal and technological regimes.

1 METAPHYSICAL AND TECHNOLOGICAL PRESENCE

Rapidly, we approach the final phase of the extension of man – the technological simulation of consciousness, when the creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of human society, much as we have already extended our senses and nerves by the various media. Whether the extension of consciousness, so long sought by advertisers for specific products, will be ‘a good thing’ is a question that admits of a wide solution. (McLuhan 1994: 4)

Much of the debate in the social sciences and the humanities around the Internet in the 1990s and 2000s was framed around the question of whether the ‘disembodiment’ achieved by interactions online would have a positive or negative impact upon people and social life more generally. As Yar (2014) points out, this can be seen in the academic study of early Internet research, which was, for the most part, optimistic, even hyperbolic, in terms of its praise of the potential for cyberspace to provide a forum for the realisation of the self. In practical terms this usually meant an escape from the body and social structures built around the oppression of co-present bodies:

the ongoing hold of hierarchical and discriminatory cultural categories (such as those around gender, class, ethnicity, sexuality and disability) constrain individuals’ capacities for self-realisation and social acceptance. As with modern societies’ difficulties in realising hopes for democracy, community and equality, the dissatisfactions centred upon the project of self-realisation incite virtual utopians to look to the Internet as a source of redemption. (Yar 2014: 41–42)

Internet utopians such as John Perry Barlow, author of The Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace (1996), rested their rhetoric on this distinction between an outdated material society of flesh and steel and a new virtual space of mind: a shift which promised a freedom from subjugation and the rebirth of ‘freedom’ itself (Yar 2014: 29–30). Yar suggests that this echoes the enlightenment premise that a move to the abstract and the rational is a move towards the ideal (truth) and away from illusion. The Earth, its objects, bodies and materiality itself needed to be escaped for humanity to fulfil its full potential. Far from McLuhan’s broad notion of ‘extensions of man’, the Internet, from its outset, has been largely conceived of as an extension of abstract intellectual and social capabilities.

Because of the freedom from material restrictions and the problems of the material world, the Internet, it was suggested, would reactivate a moribund public sphere through increased access to information and the increased ability to provide a more reasoned, enlightened and authentic dialogue between citizens, not contaminated by issues of status, gender, race or other ‘meat’ issues. It would be ideas, not speakers, which carried weight (Dakroury & Birdsall 2008; Hague & Loader 1999), revealing what Habermas (1989) referred to as the ‘ideal speech situation’. The Internet also would encourage more just and fulfilling communities built around reciprocity as opposed to accidents of geographical proximity (Baym 2002; Day 2006; Rheingold 2000). It would also allow for expressions and realisation of the self, unhindered by the weight of material bodies (Stone 1995; Turkle 1995), as well as expressions and subversions of capitalism (Poster 2006) and even the transcendence of the human itself into a more intelligent, robust and even immortal kind of human (Kurzweil 2005).

In these early debates, this hyperbolic enthusiasm for digital communications technology was theoretically questioned by a small group of writers (Dreyfus 2001/2009 and Garza 2002 are excellent examples) who were influenced by writers from deconstructive, phenomenological and pragmatic traditions, such as Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, Dewey, and Merleau-Ponty, and inherently hostile to the kind of metaphysical mind/body dualism inherent in such utopian claims. They wanted to emphasise the importance of embodiment as integral to our understanding and experience of the world, as well as the experience of ourselves as conscious beings. For them, the future for a humanity moving towards a social life of disembodied interactions was problematic because it was based on the idea that our bodies and our material environments are some sort of hindrance to our self-realisation and our relationships with others. They believe the opposite is true – that our relationship with the world, each other and ourselves is through our bodies, and that by giving those bodies up, we are losing a very important part of what it is to be human. Far from utopian, a networked world where we achieve a kind of ubiquitous mental and social presence beyond our physical bodily location was seen as some sort of dehumanising digital nightmare.

To a greater extent, where you find yourself in this debate is very much dependent on what you think a ‘self’ is. This is not just a debate about ‘what’s more important, the mind or the body?’, but a debate about ontology: what it means to exist, what it means ‘to be’ and what it means ‘to be human’. This chapter will summarise the rationale behind the metaphysical self (or the ‘metaphysics of presence’ as it is often referred) and its applicability for contemporary online life. It will then go on to examine the criticisms of metaphysical presence by (largely phenomenologically inspired) writers which emphasise the self as embodied and relational and continue on to discuss how such critiques have been used in the evaluation of the ‘dangers’ of online culture.

THE SELF AS METAPHYSICAL AND SELF-CONTAINED

The metaphysical way of thinking about being has its roots in classical Greek philosophy, and particularly Plato, who made a distinction between the material world and the realm of abstract ‘pure’ forms. Plato used form to designate ‘essence’ or the basic quality that makes something what it is. Form (Eidos), in the Platonic tradition, refers to the abstract nature of ideal or pure form. It was pure forms that represented truth or the highest level of reality. Much in the same way as a drawn circle can never be ‘perfect’, but a perfect circle can exist in our conceptions and be mathematically depicted, the moving, changeable material world can only mimic or imitate the stable, ideal world of pure forms. By contrast, the material ‘thingness’ of things would always be a lesser reality and a lesser being to the reality and truth of the pure form. Such a metaphysical understanding of being composed of two unequal registers inserted a philosophical legacy in the West of a suspicion of the material and the senses and a celebration of the rational, the ideal and the immaterial.

For Plato, essence or form is the ultimate marker of being that makes things what they are. What it is about, say, this individual dog that makes it a ‘dog’ needs to refer to a certain ‘dogness’ in an abstract, metaphysical sense. Therefore, the understanding of truth, reality and being becomes a question not of understanding individual concrete things but of understanding the abstract nature of being or essence across individuals and what things ‘are’ in a basic, fundamental and unchanging sense. This distinction between the abstract and the material is not only applied to objects however, as the essence of humanness in the Platonic tradition is similarly located in the intellectual, immaterial or spiritual subject, and contrasts with the inherently lesser material object of the body and its surrounding material environs. This implies a faith in the thinking psyche and a mistrust of the material, sensual or perceptual and provides the basis for a kind of subject-centred encountering of the world in which we see ourselves as present but separate: the human is something that observes the materiality of the world through fallible bodily senses and seeks to give that world some meaning or truth. This tradition holds that knowledge of the world is obtained on the basis of a reasoning mind, which means that the things of the world are seen as objects for a thinking subject to consider. The ‘ground’ or meaning of objects in the world, in this view, resides in the thinking subject which considers it as something present and possessing essential properties (Gumbrecht 2004; Heidegger 1962; White 1996).

While ‘being’ under Plato begins to be considered within the realm of subjectivity and as a transcendental subject of consciousness, this metaphysical form of being and presence becomes solidified in Western thought through the works of Descartes (1956), who again focused the entirety of being within the concept of the transcendental subject and the thinking or rational mind. As Dreyfus (2001) points out, Descartes was influenced by the technology of his day, telescopes and microscopes, as well as new research on the sensory organs and pathologies such as phantom limb syndrome. He used these to suggest that our access to the world is indirect: things are always mediated in some sense (say through the mechanism of the eye which translates light for our brains), and therefore the phenomenal world can never be directly present to us. The only thing that we ever experience directly is the inner voice of our own thoughts (Dreyfus 2001: 53–54). Thus, in Descartes’ formulation, the only certainty is the presence of oneself to oneself. ‘I think, therefore I am’ separates the thinking subject (mind, psyche, spirit) as ontologically prior to both our bodies and the world of objects around it.

Such thinking becomes foundational for the Western characterisation of being and subjectivity, where the self is determined and known through self-presence and the reference to a stable, distinct phenomenological subject: something theorised by Descartes, Rousseau, Hegel and many others (Gendron 2004). Descartes tried to approach such a self through radical scepticism: doubting the existence of everything of the mind cannot be certain, leaving only the mind itself. Res cogitans is what is left after everything external to the mind has been eliminated. It stands alone, outside all reference or relationally (Gendron 2004).

This ontology entails a strong division between immaterial subject and material object. Descartes formulated the human as an abstract, self-enclosed, metaphysical, thinking individual subject: a ‘thinking thing’ (res cogitans) which views the other beings in the world as separate substantive objects of experience to be considered, thought about and abstractly examined. This presents an understanding of being as something more akin to ‘modern mathematical physics and its transcendental foundations’ (Heidegger 1962: 129) by forcing all inquiry about the nature of being to submit to the dictates of abstract reason and mathematics.

Because of the abstract conception of the self which originates in the Platonic concept of ideal forms, the metaphysics of presence also refers to ‘the present’ as in ‘now’. It is in the present that things come into being and where one can be ultimately ‘present to oneself’ through the inner voice of one’s own thoughts, or res cogitans. Thus, in the metaphysics of presence, the now-time of the present is seen as closest to the essence or the truth of being because things of the past, or of the future, are not material entities which can be directly perceived, and therefore they need to be represented or mediated. Things in the past or future are ‘absent’ and thus have to be represented. This means that they stray away from truth (Fuchs 1976). For Plato, Descartes and others, the nature of true being is eternal and unchanging because it is ever-present. Just as our inner voice or our eternal souls in Christianity do not age, neither does the essence of what makes us human.

So ingrained in our culture is this conceptual approach to being that even after three-and-a-half centuries, when contemporary subjects may be somewhat sceptical about ‘souls’ and mind–body dualism in principle, most people would still agree with Cartesian statements such as ‘I am who I am’, ‘I was born the way I am’, ‘there is a “real me” inside me, and this “me” doesn’t change’. One can see how such a foundation sets in motion the priority of the metaphysical: the acquisition of knowledge on the basis of abstract reason (as opposed to an appeal to worldly truths or empiricism), and the emphasis on what primarily constitutes one’s being as the abstract, unchangeable, rational ‘self’, which just happens to be seemingly located in a body with senses – senses that should always be treated with suspicion and scepticism. In summary, we can point to three key aspects to the metaphysics of presence:

• Being as abstract ‘subject’. The locus of what it is to be human is in being a ‘thinking thing’, that approaches a separate world of material objects.
• Being is self-contained (e.g. ‘I think therefore I am’). Being is not related to entities or conceptual determinations. It is self-present and self-referential.
• Being is eternal, unchanging and immutable (i.e. ideal forms and essences). It excludes the temporal, changing or incomplete and thus is eternal and beyond time.

METAPHYSICAL PRESENCE, TECHNOLOGY AND THE INTERNET

From the perspective of metaphysical presence, technology becomes a means to satisfy human ends by aiding the acting out of considered, reflective and rational intentions of the mind or subject onto the world of objects:

Knowing the force and action of fire, water, air, the stars, the heavens and all other bodies that surround us, just as distinctly as we know the skills of our craftsmen, we might be able, in the same way, to use them for all the purposes for which they are appropriate, and thus render ourselves, as it were, masters and possessors of nature. This is desirable not only for the invention of an infinity of devices that would enable one to enjoy trouble-free the fruits of the earth and all the goods found there. (Descartes 1956: 35)

The influence of the reflective, subjective stance cannot be underestimated in the development of Western society, technology and culture, and as once articulated by Descartes and others who followed, Western civilisation was led down a path that it might not otherwise have travelled (Rivers 2005). Indeed, almost four centuries later, in the early stages of research on presence and telepresence in virtual environments, computing scientists, engineers and psychologists were demonstrating their internalisation of Cartesian dualist thinking in their struggle to develop virtual environments which offered a convincing sense of presence to their users.

For example, an early and comprehensive examination of presence in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communications by Lombard and Ditton (1997) ends up defining presence as ‘the perceptual illusion of nonmediation’. Such an illusion occurs when a person fails to recognise the role that technology is playing in their experience and therefore operates in a way as if the technology was not there. Floridi (2005) refers to this as the ‘epistemic failure’ model of presence, where successful presence is viewed as an (illusory) experience of immersion in an environment.

In any case, presence was seen by many engaging in telepresence research as some sort of special effect which fools the individual into a perceptual illusion of non-mediation (see also the International Society for Presence Research, undated). This ‘forgetting’ of the mediated nature of immersive experience (of, say, a Cambodian jungle in a first-person shooter game) implies that the technology is deceiving one away from a ‘real’ experience of a ‘real’ reality. This is very much an approach that is concerned with how the ‘mind’ (subject) attempts to use the senses to perceive a world of external objects and how these senses are ‘tricked’ into perceiving or experiencing something that simply is not there or is not ‘real’.

Outside virtual reality debates, the metaphysical understanding of being and what it is to be human lends itself to our experience of wider digital culture in three important ways. First, the world of the web is one that is set up to satisfy calculated human intention. We do not stumble upon things or beings on the web as we would stumble upon a porcupine or a rock when walking through a wood. We do not encounter an Internet community in the same way we might encounter an unexpectedly enchanting village while on a road trip. The web brings things to us either directly by our own intention (i.e. searching for something specific in which we are interested) or because they have a categorical property in which we may be interested. With regard to the former, it is reasonable to ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Publisher Note
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• Acknowledgements
• INTRODUCTION
• 1 METAPHYSICAL AND TECHNOLOGICAL PRESENCE
• 2 PRESENCE, PROXIMITY AND ETHICAL BEHAVIOUR ONLINE
• 3 ‘FIND LOVE IN CANADA’: DISTRIBUTED SELVES, ABSTRACTION AND THE PROBLEM OF PRIVACY AND AUTONOMY
• 4 ‘GOING TO AFRICA…’: THE PROBLEM OF SPEECH IN A WORLD WHERE WE WRITE INSTEAD OF TALK
• CONCLUSION
• References
• Index