#mediology

so, there’s this meme, right, that floats around in contrarian liberal (as always, liberal-as-opposed-to-left) twitter that is supposed to be this dunk on traditionalist conservatives who gripe about the atomizing effects of new technology. i’ve seen the same basic premise in several different images, but this is the one i’ve seen most—it has over a million views on imgur alone (which only counts how often people click through to the image, a comparatively rare occurrence).

"All this technology is making us antisocial"

i’m just curious—to what extent does something like this ultimately blunt our critical capacities? in other words, what do we gain from an insistence that the digital sphere is basically coterminous with the non-digital sphere, as Nathan Jurgensen has suggested? of course, there’s something to be said for skirting a kind of grumpy Heideggerian critique of technology, but what is gained by placing an apprehension of the _specities_ of different modes of communication outside of our ambit? i’m not really a huge mediologist or technology studies person, and i’ve been kind of knee-jerkedly skeptical of people who bend the stick too far the other way—McLuhan etc—in the past. Some of the emphasis he lays on the powers of the medium to effect a change in social relations definitely resolves itself into a kind of technological determinism, as ol’ Haunty points out here. At the same time, i am kind of predisposed to some kind of concept of the non-neutrality of social forms that Hegel and Marx are so keen on. after all, as I.I. Rubin stressed, Marx was very aware of how objects—though powerless themselves—could be invested with a very real power by people. Rubin is great on explaining how Marx, that great debunker of technological-determinism, still held that "things…[can] acquire particular social characteristics, a particular social form" and be "‘bearers’ of the production relations among people". the key is that there is no paradox here; Marx’s point was precisely that things which mediate—that is, connect—isolated individuals in large-scale societies can take on powers that have nothing to do with their intrinsic qualities but everything to do with the alienation of human powers onto things [1].

so my question is: are we being too hasty in dismissing the kinds of subjectivity produced by Twitter or Tumblr vis-a-vis a newspaper, a community gathering, or a book? i don’t want to regress into some kind of naive anti-digitalism, here, but i think we should really try to take stock of the specific effects of specific mediums. part of what plagued the nonproductive debate about “hashtag activism” was precisely this: that one side simply associated “technology” with newfangled, ineffective, ephemeral bullshit and the other side refused to problematize technology at all or to even entertain the idea for a minute that organizers might not simply be able to migrate the whole of our activity over to the digital world without problems. both rely on a conception of technology that is hopelessly general, that either assumes that it is some monolith that has to be opposed in toto, or that it is so benign and unworthy of comment that it's a waste of time to investigate any differences in social relations that (dialectically) interact with new technologies

in short, i think i’m going to try to start thinking about this more—clearly, this concept of technology as neutral is not only not the anti-technology-fetishism it appears to be, but it may actually be fetishistic itself, in the same way that deriving from the stone the “primitive origin of capital” is.

1. there have been appx. a zillion things written about Marx and fetishism/ideology, but this essay by Luccio Colletti, Jan Rehmann’s book, Terry Eagleton’s book and my friend John Clegg’s short paper here [warning: word doc automatically downloads] are some good, non-obsolete intros.

Regis Debray (translated by Martin Irvine). Régis Debray, What is Mediology?

Translation of Régis Debray, "Qu'est-ce que la médiologie?"