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Abstract
Our sociality is increasingly enacted through technology. This essay argues that the relationship between the technological mediation of social relations and the ways in which these practices are understood conceptually needs to be critiqued, rethought, and extended. Current approaches tend to accentuate the individual to the detriment of the social and often to understand technology instrumentally. Jean-Luc Nancy's notion of being singular plural and his understanding of the relations between singular beings and of ecotechnics are discussed briefly to illustrate an alternate direction for considering ways of being-together in Western techno-society.
Notes
1. Scott Lash, “Technological Forms of Life,” Theory, Culture & Society 18, no. 1 (2001): 107–8.
2. Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (New York: Basic Books, 2011).
3. Paul Di Maggio, Eszter Hargittai, W. Russell Neuman, and John P. Robinson, “Social Implications of the Internet,” Annual Review of Sociology 27 (2001): 307–36; Barry Wellman and Caroline Haythornthwaite, eds., The Internet in Everyday Life (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002); and Nancy K. Baym, Yang Bin Zhang, Adrianne Kunkel, Andrew Ledbetter, and Mei-Chin Lin, “Relational Quality and Media Use in Interpersonal Relationships,” New Media & Society 9, no. 5 (2007): 735–52.
4. Robert Kraut, Michael Patterson, Vicki Lundmark, Sara Kiesler, Tridas Mukophadhyay, and William Scherlis, “Internet Paradox: A Social Technology that Reduces Social Involvement and Psychological Well-Being?” American Psychologist 53, no. 9 (1998): 1017–31; and Gustavo S. Mesch and Michael Frenkel, “Family Imbalance and Adjustment to Information and Communication Technologies,” in Computer-Mediated Communication in Personal Relationships, ed. Kevin B. Wright and Lynne M. Webb (New York: Peter Lang, 2011), 285–301.
5. Howard Rheingold, The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1993); and Barry Wellman, “Physical Place and Cyberplace: The Rise of Personalized Networking,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 25, no. 2 (2001): 227–52.
6. Manuel Castells, The Internet Galaxy: Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Wellman, “Physical Place and Cyberplace”; and Barry Wellman, Anabel Quan-Haase, Jeffrey Boase, Wenhong Chen, Keith Hampton, Isabel Isla de Diaz, and Kakuko Miyata, “The Social Affordances of the Internet for Networked Individualism,” Journal of Computer Mediated Communication 8, no. 3 (2003), http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol8/issue3/wellman.html.
7. Wellman et al., “The Social Affordances of the Internet for Networked Individualism.”
8. Wellman, “Physical Place and Cyberplace,” 237.
9. Vincent Miller, “New Media, Networking and Phatic Culture,” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 14, no. 4 (2008): 395. See also Turkle's observations regarding the ambivalence people express about their connectivity and their relationships with and through their technologies. Turkle, Alone Together.
10. Though, as Turkle notes, this is not an uncomplicated control; there is also the sense that this connectivity (through these technologies) also has some compelling logic or drive that is difficult to evade. For example, see Alone Together, 164, 242.
11. Andreas Wittel, “Toward a Network Sociality,” Theory, Culture & Society 18, no. 6 (2001): 65.
12. Lash, “Technological Forms of Life,” 105–20.
13. Steve Jones, Sarah Millermaier, Mariana Goya-Martinez, and Jessica Schuler, “Whose Space is MySpace? A Content Analysis of MySpace,” First Monday 13, no. 9 (2008), http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2202/2024.
14. Miller, “New Media, Networking and Phatic Culture,” 395. Miller also writes: “[I]n phatic media culture, content is not king, but ‘keeping in touch’ is. More important than anything said, it is the connection to the other that becomes significant, and the exchange of words becomes superfluous. Thus the text message, the short call, the brief email, the short blog update or comment, becomes part of a mediated phatic sociability necessary to maintain a connected presence in an everexpanding [sic] social network.” Ibid.
15. Sherry Turkle, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995).
16. Jeanine Warisse Turner and N. Lamar Reinsch Jr., “Multicommunicating and Episodic Presence: Developing New Constructs for Studying New Phenomena,” in Wright and Webb, Computer-Mediated Communication in Personal Relationships, 181–93.
17. Jeanine Warisse Turner and N. Lamar Reinsch Jr., “Multicommunicating and Episodic Presence: Developing New Constructs for Studying New Phenomena,” in Wright and Webb, Computer-Mediated Communication in Personal Relationships, 181.
18. Jeanine Warisse Turner and N. Lamar Reinsch Jr., “Multicommunicating and Episodic Presence: Developing New Constructs for Studying New Phenomena,” in Wright and Webb, Computer-Mediated Communication in Personal Relationships, 184.
19. Giovanna Mascheroni, “Global Nomads’ Network and Mobile Sociality: Exploring New Media Uses on the Move,” Information, Communication & Society 10, no. 4 (2007): 527–46.
20. Wittel, “Toward a Network Sociality,” 51.
21. Howard Rheingold, “Foreword: The Virtual Community in the Real World,” in Wellman and Haythornthwaite, The Internet in Everyday Life, xxvii.
22. Lincoln Dahlberg and Eugenia Siapera, eds., “Introduction: Tracing Radical Democracy and the Internet,” in Radical Democracy and the Internet: Interrogating Theory and Practice (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 3.
23. On networks, see Alexander R. Galloway and Eugene Thacker, The Exploit: A Theory of Networks (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). On the network form offering possibilities and explanatory frameworks for understanding political and social organization, and indeed accounting for heterogeneous groupings and complementary differences, see Castells, The Internet Galaxy; and Albert-László Barabási, Linked: The New Science of Networks (Cambridge, MA: Perseus Publishing, 2002).
24. Though, in this type of differentiation, the edge is used to describe the relational, the space between, or the touching of node and other node, and node within network. See Galloway and Thacker, The Exploit; and Barabási, Linked.
25. See Galloway's discussion of protocol as a dominating logic enabled and accentuated/evident within technology as one manifestation of this approach. Galloway's work on protocol is more sophisticated than a simple understanding of technology enabling or being a systematic practice—however stripped back, this element is embedded clearly within his argument. Alexander R. Galloway, Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004).
26. Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural, trans. Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O'Byrne (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 59.
27. Benjamin C. Hutchens, Jean-Luc Nancy and the Future of Philosophy (Ithaca, NY: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2005), 1.
28. Nancy writes: “And this singularity is not an identity: it is a movement, an incessant displacement in the self and in relation to others.” Chantal Pontbriand, “The Idea of Community: Jean-Luc Nancy + Chantal Pontbriand, An Exchange,” trans. Brian Holmes, Parachute: Contemporary Art Magazine 100 (October/December 2000): 16, accessed June 4, 2012 via EBSCO.
29. For example, see Jean-Luc Nancy, “Of Being-in-Common,” in Community at Loose Ends, ed. Miami Theory Collective (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 1–12; The Inoperative Community, ed. Peter Connor, trans. Peter Connor, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland, and Simona Sawhney (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991); “La Comparution/The Compearance: From the Existence of ‘Communism’ to the Community of ‘Existence,’” trans. Tracy Strong, Political Theory 20, no. 3 (1992): 371–98; or Being Singular Plural.
30. Nancy, “Of Being-in-Common”; The Inoperative Community; and Being Singular Plural.
31. Michele A. Willson, Technically Together: Rethinking Community within Techno-Society (New York: Peter Lang, 2006).
32. For a more detailed exposition of the term, see Nancy, “La Comparution/The Compearance.”
33. Nancy's very personal account of his experience and self-understanding of being the recipient of a heart transplant, his resultant medication regime, and the effects of the cancer that resulted articulate this affective, situational, and sense-making understanding of technology-human encounters. See Jean-Luc Nancy, “The Intruder,” in Corpus, trans. Richard A. Rand (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 161–70.
34. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004).
35. “By singularity here we mean a social subject whose difference cannot be reduced to sameness, a difference that remains different.” Ibid., 99.
36. “Once we recognize singularity, the common begins to emerge. Singularities do communicate, and they are able to do so because of the common they share. We share bodies with two eyes, ten fingers, ten toes; we share life on this earth.” Ibid., 128.
37. “Once we recognize singularity, the common begins to emerge. Singularities do communicate, and they are able to do so because of the common they share. We share bodies with two eyes, ten fingers, ten toes; we share life on this earth.”, xiii–xiv.
38. “Multitudes intersect with other multitudes, and from the thousand points of intersection, from the thousand rhizomes that link these multitudinous productions, from the thousand reflections born in every singularity emerge inevitably the life of the multitude.” Ibid., 349.
39. “Multitudes intersect with other multitudes, and from the thousand points of intersection, from the thousand rhizomes that link these multitudinous productions, from the thousand reflections born in every singularity emerge inevitably the life of the multitude.” Ibid., 349
40. The literature in this space is growing. However, as a starting point see work by David Berry, Matthew Fuller, or Samantha Frost and Dianne Coole, amongst others. Katherine Hayles and the work of Science and Technology studies scholars also sit to some degree in this space.
41. Turner and Reinsch, “Multicommunicating and Episodic Presence,” 183.
42. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Sense of the World, trans. Jeffrey S. Librett (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 110, original emphasis.
43. Hutchens, Jean-Luc Nancy and the Future of Philosophy, 151.
44. “Ecotechnics gives value to a primacy of the combinatory over the discriminating, of the contractual over the hierarchical, of the network over the organism, and more generally, of the spatial over the historical. And within the spatial, it gives priority to a multiple and delocalized spatiality over a unitary and concentrated spatiality. These motifs compose an epochal necessity (the effects of this mode are secondary, and do not in any way invalidate this necessity).” Nancy, Being Singular Plural, 136.
45. Not all would agree with this assessment. For example, Donald A. Landes claims that Nancy is critical of and rejects phenomenology. See Donald A. Landes, “Le Toucher and the Corpus of Tact: Exploring Touch and Technicity with Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy,” L'Esprit Créateur 47, no. 3 (2007): 90. What I am pointing to here is the way that the world is experienced as a result of or through technological engagement.
46. Interpreting Nancy's view of operating through technology, Ian James asserts: “What Nancy is trying to think here is the manner in which the relation of bodily intentionality or sense to technical apparatus profoundly shapes the way the world appears to us as meaningful. In this sense, when I drive a car, speak into a mobile phone, or type into a laptop computer I am not just ‘using’ technical apparatus; I am connected or ‘plugged into’ them in a way which more fundamentally reveals a certain manner of being or existence and a certain experience or constitution of world-hood.” Ian James, The Fragmentary Demand: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Jean-Luc Nancy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 145.
47. Twitter notes that in 2011 it had over 100 million active users. Twitter, “2011 Year in Review: Who Joined?” http://yearinreview.twitter.com/en/whojoined.html.
48. Hutchens, Jean-Luc Nancy and the Future of Philosophy, 151.
49. David Beer, “Social Network(ing) Sites … Revisiting the Story So Far: A Response to danah boyd & Nicole Ellison,” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13, no. 2 (2008): 526.
50. Turkle, Alone Together, x.
51. David Beer, “Social Network(ing) Sites … Revisiting the Story So Far: A Response to danah boyd & Nicole Ellison,” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13, no. 2 (2008): 526, 15.
52. David Beer, “Social Network(ing) Sites … Revisiting the Story So Far: A Response to danah boyd & Nicole Ellison,” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13, no. 2 (2008): 526, 17.
53. Indeed, at least according to one author, these conceptual maneuvers are themselves symptomatic or an outcome of ecotechnics and the increasing technicity of relations. See Krzysztof Ziarek's comment: “Thus, the celebration of flexibility, fluidity, and differences becomes paradoxically part and parcel of the expansion of the contemporary technicity of relations.” Krzysztof Ziarek, “Is All Technological? Global Power and Aesthetic Forces,” CR: The New Centennial Review 2, no. 3 (2002): 157.
54. For an interesting discussion of this and of the “societies of friends,” see Nick Bingham, “Bees, Butterflies, and Bacteria: Biotechnology and the Politics of Nonhuman Friendship,” Environment and Planning A 38, no. 3 (2006): 483–98.