Is there a difference between stuff that takes place on the Internet and stuff that takes place away from it? Now, quite clearly and from the outset, that question is problematic. First, it assumes that the Internet is a thing, and a singular thing at that. That’s neither particularly sensible nor particularly helpful. We use ‘Internet’ to mean many things. It is hardware, including servers, routers and browsers, and the various devices we use to access this hardware. It is software, including the web programming languages and the tools and services built using those languages. It is a web of tangled social, cognitive and behavioural complexities that, in different ways, are related to the hardware and the software that has become available. It is the people who use this technology to organise, communicate, describe, deny and delineate each other. Second, it implies that the Internet can be defined and bound in some way, so that one can say that the Internet is over here but not over there. Such a notion might have made sense when the Internet was only accessed via a fixed terminal and a dial-up modem, and when accessing it (which means... accessing the web pages stored on the servers elsewhere connected to the communication network?) was tied to a fixed location and a (modem-defined) timeframe, but it’s an idea that is now debunked[1]. At least, that’s the thesis proposed by Nathan Jurgenson and his colleagues at the Cyborgology blog. Starting in 2009 Jurgenson began to promote a concept he called augmented reality. Jurgenson holds it up as an alternative to another coinage, the “fallacy” of ‘digital dualism’. Digital dualism is, effectively, the idea that the Internet exists in one place but not another, or in one space or not another, or that it constitutes a “reality” distinct from our prevailing reality – what we might call the offline, physical or natural world. In Jurgenson’s own words: “Digital dualists believe that the digital world is ‘virtual’ and the physical world ‘real.’” Instead, he wants: “to argue that the digital and physical are increasingly meshed, and want to call this opposite perspective that implodes atoms and bits rather than holding them conceptually separate augmented reality.” In a later post, Jurgenson moves away from the polarity of this view and describes different categories of dualism/augmentation: Strong Digital Dualism: The digital and the physical are different realities, have different properties, and do not interact. Mild Digital Dualism: The digital and physical are different realities, have different properties, and do interact. Mild Augmented Reality: The digital and physical are part of one reality, have different properties, and interact. Strong Augmented Reality: The digital and physical are part of one reality and have the same properties. [2] The two strong positions are ‘ideal types’ (in that no one seriously could possibly think those things could they?) and are used to develop the conceptual framework, whereas the real thinking, and the debate, should take place between the two mild positions. And a debate has been taking place, energetically and at some length here, here, here, here and here, for example. Grappling with the idea of these two realities (or domains, or spaces, or whatever) is clearly difficult, important and interesting. I agree, absolutely, that academia and techno-punditry alike have to sort out the various assumptions, misperceptions, wonkery, spin and damn inanity that characterizes much of our thinking about the supposed offline/online dualism. Defining a dualist/augmented binary is an interesting place to start the discussion. But since first reading Jurgenson’s paper [PDF] last year and, more recently, trying to work out whether the concept is helpful for a paper I’m writing, I’ve decided that it might be, but only in very a limited way, because I think that a) it’s inherently contradictory and b) it doesn’t tell us very much anyhow. To start with, invoking a notion of reality, be it digital or physical, is unhelpful. Most of our formulations of ‘reality‘ incorporate some degree of subjectivity, so to use reality as unifying coda on which to hang the dualist/augmented binary simply doesn’t work very well. We could talk about spaces, spheres or domains perhaps, but I guess that Jurgenson uses ‘reality’ because he wants to evoke the ontological and epistemological processes involved in generating a perception of reality. Perceptions of reality are different from the theoretical ideal of reality though. It makes sense to talk of reality when one is postulating a unified experience shared by all humans beings, augmented or not, but I don’t think it makes sense to use reality to define one half of a binary in which the other half has to deny unification. Sherry Turkle – who is “probably the longest-standing, most outspoken proponent of what we at Cyborgology call digital dualism” – doesn’t believe that logging into Facebook initiates some sort of trans-dimensional migration between realities, presumably, and I can’t believe that Jurgenson is accusing her of that. So how is he defining reality? Clearly reality can be split, at least in two, because this is the only difference between his two mild positions. He talks about the digital (virtual) and the physical as though they were the realities? But are we limited to digital and physical realities? Are there broadcast realities? Print realities? How far can you break down reality into realities before the idea loses logical and descriptive coherence? I would hazard a guess that this is not how most people are thinking about their online/offline experiences. What social phenomenon, then, does digital dualism/augmentation elucidate? The most frequently accused ‘digital dualist’ is Sherry Turkle. Examples of digital dualism are found in... her writing. So this new term represents a theory that describes the way that some other theorists describe their theories about this thing we call the Internet. Does it illuminate what people out there, in the world, think or feel when they use their Internet hardware? Does is explain collective or individual behaviour? Does it offer any insight into social processes or ideologies? Maybe it does. I have no idea. There are very few attempts to test this idea in the real world – or the augmented world. I’ve found just that one paper by Jurgenson, dated January 2012, in which he relates the idea to the Arab Spring, Occupy movement and UK riots, because all are “massive gatherings of digitally-connected individuals in physical space; and they have recently become the new normal.” I’m not certain that they have become the new normal, at least not in any numerical or mass-experiential sense, and I’m not certain either that these examples support Jurgenson’s argument that protestors and rioters are creating an augmented reality by tweeting while they protest. Partly it’s the problematic ‘reality’. I have no idea what ‘reality’ looks or feels like for someone with a smartphone in Tahir Square. But also it’s because I’ve struggled to find rigorous attempts to test this theory against the technologies, the subjects, the behaviours or the consciousness it is meant to describe. Of course, this is mainly a complaint about methodology. Jurgenson and his bloggers at Cyborgology are theorizing the web, working out ways to think about these technologies that they find helpful. Inevitably, and necessarily, there is an element of abstraction in this process. To talk of ‘digital dualism’ and ‘augmented reality’ is to abstract heinously complex social, liminal and subliminal process into a model that helps one make sense of them. I take a somewhat different perspective. Put simply, both terms are useful only inasmuch as they are metaphors that clarify the social experience. Metaphors are frequently used in the social sciences to help theorists order their thoughts about the social world. There’s absolutely no problem with that, as long as the metaphors have an explanatory power that relates directly to the social phenomenon being described. But, as Mark Erickson articulates in this paper about sociology’s love affair with the (social) network metaphor, it becomes problematic if a) the metaphor doesn’t relate very well (and doesn’t describe) the social phenomenon of interest, or b) the sociologist forgets that he or she is working with a metaphor and starts to study it as though it were the social phenomenon of interest. Unpicking the descriptive and the relational aspects of metaphors in sociology makes my head hurt, and I’m not sure I’ve decided how well the augmented reality idea works in the (limited) theoretical scope for which it is appropriate. I suspect that Jurgenson would debate vigorously even that this concept is metaphorical, perhaps arguing that our experience is augmented by Internet technologies in actual, real, physical and observable ways. And I’d agree with him, I’m not denying that smartphones exist and that people carry them everywhere, using them to guide, shape and augment their everyday experience. But I can’t escape the doubt that there are metaphors at work here, and that they’re being applied incorrectly. I think it’s the dualist/augmented binary that’s both metaphorical and problematic – the idea that reality can be broken down into an online and offline, so that dualism and augmentation can exist as separate states other than in a framework we employ to think about the world. So perhaps it’s best to put that worry aside for the moment and focus on the other test of a metaphor’s power: how well does it describe or illuminate social processes and shared consciousness relating to the phenomenon under inquiry? In short, what is it’s descriptive potential? I think that depends on two things: the extent to which the metaphor approximates what we observe in the social world, and the internal consistency of the metaphor. One criticism of augmented reality is that there are people, seemingly quite a lot of them, who do perceive that there is a difference between being online and being offline. One of Jurgenson’s colleagues makes exactly this point, before dismissing those people as being wrong. Nick Carr argues that, actually, whether they are wrong or right, the interesting question is why they should think or feel that the online and offline are separate domains. I agree with him on this point, partly because I think it is the interesting question, but also because trying to determine whether or not someone is wrong about reality, depends on identifying the correct version of reality, and, as discussed, I think that’s something so subjective it is essentially unknowable. Having said that, Jurgenson’s original point – namely that Internet technologies have penetrated so far into all aspects of our lives, it makes very little sense to talk about the Internet (the digital) as though it were some separate space – is something I can accept... with caveats. If you are a Western postgraduate student theorising the Internet then, yes, absolutely, it must be pretty hard to imagine a corner of your existence untouched by the digital. We bought my 87 year old grandmother an iPad but, more often than not, she cannot remember how to turn it on, and mostly does not want to. She will go days, often weeks, without any physical interaction with an Internet technology. I suppose that the Daily Mail might mention (angrily) something it read on Twitter, but for my grandmother, that domain is mostly unknown and, in many ways, quite separate. I think this is where augmented reality starts to run into real trouble. If it is meant to say, simply, that is wrong to talk of separate realities, because all experience is augmented, by the Internet yes, but also by all other technologies and all media, and always has been, then, well, fair enough, but so what? We already have a plethora of terms and frameworks to describe this phenomenon and invoking a notion of augmented reality doesn’t seem to add anything to what has been said. However, I think it's important to look, once again, at the two mild positions – the two positions which someone might reasonably take. Mild Digital Dualism: The digital and physical are different realities, have different properties, and do interact. Mild Augmented Reality: The digital and physical are part of one reality, have different properties, and interact. The digital dualist believes that the digital and the physical are different realities. She is wrong. The augmented realist believes that they are one reality, but with different properties. He is right. So what is the difference between realities and properties? This is the only distinction between the two positions, it is fundamental to the binary, and yet it is unexplained. Clearly realities are composed of properties, but not defined by them, because it’s possible for there to be one reality incorporating competing properties. Elsewhere, Jurgenson writes that “atoms and bits have different properties, influence each other, and together create reality”. I’m not clear if atoms and bits are realities, proxies for realities, properties (with their own properties) or intermediaries between realities and properties. Attempts elsewhere to define the properties of atoms and bits don’t resolve this confusion for me, and don’t seem to pay much heed to the respective disciplines from which the terms atoms and bits are borrowed. Can a reality exist independently from the properties that create it? Even the single augmented reality seems to include other realities that are, in some way at least, distinct from each other. Jurgenson continues “the two [offline and online] are mutually constitutive, just not fully mutually constitutive”. I’m afraid I can’t make sense of this formulation, despite all my italics. Ultimately, I think all the augmented realist does is substitute the idea of properties for the idea of realities. In essence, then, he remains inherently dualist: there is still something different between the digital and the physical – they have different properties. Essentially, this is the argument Bankford makes in the post linked to earlier. Another cyborgologist, Whitney Erin Boesel, is troubled by what properties might mean in this follow up post, where she argues it’s necessary to start defining them. I absolutely agree with this. Looking for, defining, exploring and trying to explain the properties that make the digital different from the physical is exactly what I think we (?) should be doing. But she doesn’t think that this represents a problem for the binary logic upon which the critique of the digital dualist and the birth of augmented realist is founded. I’m afraid, I disagree. It’s illogical, imprecise and incorrect to dismiss the “fallacy” of digital dualism in favour of augmented reality if that new term recognises a distinction – a dualism – between digital properties and physical properties. This difference is semantic only, and I cannot resolve the logic behind the semantics. So I’m happy to call myself a digital dualist and I’m going to continue to work on the assumption that there might be something different between the digital and physical. Otherwise, there’s not much point in being a digital communication practitioner or, indeed, a digital-anything practitioner. I don’t think that there are separate realities defined by being digital or physical, I’m happy to proceed as though there was just one reality – or no reality. I think that digital and physical experiences both contribute to any formulation or perception of reality, but I don’t know whether there are properties that are only digital, and properties that are only physical, or if these two property-types work differently or similarly during this interaction. I think it is trite to reduce these two states to atoms and bits and to proceed as though these two terms – one borrowed from the natural sciences, the other from computer science – define inherent properties that explain how a social interaction works[3]. Which leaves me where? Wondering, I guess, what these properties might be and where I might find them. A fallacy perhaps, but I can live with it. [1] Actually, it didn’t make much sense even when the Internet was a tied to dial-up modems and computers required desks. Accessing the Internet never meant dialling up and connecting to the network, not in any popular parlance anyway. It meant accessing the information held on the servers attached to the network and that information could exist in other places, in other forms, could be downloaded and re-uploaded, shared, debated, further mediated, expanded or destroyed. In short, the content accessed, the software, the stuff of web pages, was never locked into some online space, for the very obvious reason that it relied (and it still relies) on people to put it there in the first place. [2] In Jurgenson’s framework, these four categories are distinct. It’s not possible to slip from the strong digital dualist category into the mild because there is another binary distinction in the way – a strong dualist believes that the digital and the physical ‘do not interact’; a mild dualist believes that they do. But to reach this framework of four categories, the original binary has been split apart, and I’m not clear with these four categories are therefore fixed or somewhat arbitrary. Why not pursue the logic further and create eight categories, or 16, or, inevitably, a spectrum of belief about dualist/augmented thinking? One could play with the combination of beliefs, or the strengths of interaction or, indeed, cite another parameter – time, perhaps – to distinguish between categories. [3] A practice which, I think, involves too much assumption and reduces very complex and specific concepts into board-stroke explanations for how the digital and physical might be different.
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