A Crisis of Presence: On-line Culture and Being in the World

Abstract

This paper is a discussion about presence and its relationship to ethical and moral behaviour. In particular, it problematises the notion of presence within a contemporary culture in which social life is increasingly lived and experienced through networked digital communication technologies alongside the physical presence of co-present bodies. Using the work of Heidegger, Levinas, Bauman and Turkle (among others), it is suggested that the increasing use of these technologies and our increasing presence in on-line environments challenges our tendencies to ground moral and ethical behaviours in face-to-face or materially co-present contexts. Instead, the mediated presences we can achieve amplify our cultural tendency to objectify the social world and weaken our sense of moral and ethical responsibility to others. In that sense, an important disjuncture exists between the largely liminal space of on-line interactions and the ethical sensibilities of material presence which, as these two spheres become more intensely integrated, has potential consequences for the future of an ethical social world and a civil society. The examples are used of on-line suicides, trolling and cyberbullying to illustrate these ethical disjunctures.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Johnny Ilan, Anne Alwis, two anonymous referees and the hillside behind Rutherford College at the University of Kent, for assistance in the completion of this paper.

Notes

It is important to state early on that the position put forward is not that information technologies cause unethical behaviour. Reasons for these behaviours can, and should be, seen as complex. I suggest that ethical behaviour results from certain ways of being present and that these are changed as we live more and more of our lives through the medium of communications technologies.

I am using the word ‘presence’ here in a similar manner to Gumbrecht (2004). He suggests that Heidegger's use of ‘being’ and his use of ‘presence’ are interchangeable. I agree with this and use them interchangeably in this essay.

In the 2006 Nikki Catsouras case, Miss Catsouras died in a high-speed collision with a California highway toll booth. Grisly accident scene photographs had been leaked into the Internet, which were then posted on fake Myspace pages in her name and even sent to parents and family members via e-mail by several sources.

“Hostile intensions characterised by words of profanity, obscenity, and insults that inflict harm to a person or and organisation” (Alonzo and Aiken, 2004: 205).

For example, in 2012, a German model, Claudia Boerner, subsequent to an appearance on a reality television programme (‘The Perfect Dinner’), received a barrage of abuse via social media and e-mail to the point that she took her own life.

There is a big discrepancy among teens and adults in this study. For example, 20 per cent of teenagers, vs 5 per cent of adults, categorised their overall experience of behaviour on SNSs as ‘mostly unkind’.

The term ‘deindividuation’ is used by psychologists to describe a situation where individuals, usually involved in groups and involving a certain degree of anonymity, lose their sense of individuality and thus personal responsibility for their actions, allowing them to engage in behaviour they would not otherwise.

Castellà et al. (2000) found that anonymity is not the determining factor in on-line abuse that is commonly assumed and suggest that “uninhibited behaviour is not then an inevitable consequence of anonymity, but instead depends on whether or not it forms part of the group norms” (Castellà et al., 2000, p. 144).

That is not to say that civility, kindness, affection and many other positive human interactions do not also exist, but to suggest that these more negative aspects are largely ignored within social science research, despite such behaviour being somewhat endemic.

The key exceptions here are Silverstone, 2007; Ploug, 2009; and Willson, 2012.

Dasein is usually translated as ‘being-there’, ‘presence’ or even ‘unfolding existence’. Heidegger uses Dasein (along with being-in the-world) to describe the human condition of consciousness emerging from a living relationship with the world, while at the same time possessing an awareness of one's own existence and the finiteness of it.

These potentials are of course part of the optimism behind the potential of a revival of a ‘public sphere’ on on-line contexts as well.

The cybersexual encounter perhaps best sums up this relationship. On the one hand, this is very much an encounter rooted in the needs of the body and may well involve stimulation of the senses through the viewing of erotic materials; on the other, several studies suggest that such encounters are primarily experienced through imagination, idealisation and self-projection (Döring, 2000; Ross, 2005; Ben Ze'ev, 2004).

Statements such as “UNIX expresses too large a belief in discrete abstract symbols and not enough of a belief in temporal, continuous, nonabstract reality” (Lanier, 2010, p. 11) seem an almost logical extension of Heidegger's critique of metaphysical presence in modern philosophy into the digital age.

The stranger here can be used as a substitution for the other, in the sense that the stranger refers to a figure of ambiguity, one who upsets cognitive, aesthetic and moral boundaries which separate ‘us’ from ‘them’ or ‘we from ‘they’, thus strangers cannot fully be identified. The stranger is a continuous problem in modern (and particularly urban) life and produces a moral and ethical indecisiveness in our relationship to the other (Silverstone, 2006; see also Bauman, 1993).

However, more general concerns over privacy and crime in the digital age can also be seen as illustrative of this trend.