I write these fast. I don't take time to really think about them. They are off the top of my head and consequently, I frequently miss fairly obvious stuff. Take the previous post. I stated somewhere in there the key aspect about morality is it pertains to how I relate to the rest of you. I immediately jumped to the largest scale I could think of (another frequent failing) and neglected considering the more common, and more relevant, matter of my daily life.
90% of my personal interactions occur via my computer. Either email, Facebook (I know I am way too old and uncool but since Facebook hasn't been cool for years, I figure I'm alright), occasionally Skype, whatever. The fact of my daily existence is the only people I speak with face to face and in the flesh are people I'm buying something from. Technology intrudes wherever it can.
Everyone will have experienced this or something very similar - you are sitting with some friends, maybe eating dinner and, in the middle of the conversation, a smart phone pops out. Someone wants a photograph or feels the need to post what you are doing on some social website. Worse is when someone decides the smartphone takes precedence over the people sitting right there with them and starts to text under the table.
When I was writing the syllabus for the class I taught last fall, I wrote a whole section clearly explaining 1) no smartphones or computers of any kind in the class, and 2) the reasons for that prohibition. The students seemed to regard this as a harmless eccentricity on my part and brought their computers and smartphones to class anyway. Most people find it incomprehensible someone might want to set aside a portion of their daily life - asylum from the constant interruption or temptation of technology.
I don't go to parties very often - I used to tho, and they were very different. The parties I go to now, everyone is waiting for their picture to be taken, sub-consciously preparing for the unexpected flash to go off. It's weird. And you better look good when that unexpected flash eventually goes off because the image (with your name and a geo-locator tag) can be online in seconds. I am the least social of people, but my face is online dozens of locations. My efforts to protect my face as my own property have come to nothing so far.
People seem to judge their lives now by a different set of criteria. How will this look on my website? Is this cool enough for the judgmental eyes of my 1200 "friends". This is a grotesque expansion of the super-ego. The damning super-ego injunction ("Have fun!!!") has gone from a strictly internal edict to an externalized function - "Have fun and make sure everyone knows it!!!" So the super-ego has become socialized and, as a result, become a different kind of moral factor.
The super-ego has always had moral relevance. It is that part of you that demands moral action - combating the Id and it's insatiable demands for satisfaction. (Hey this could be a pop song, I just rhymed action and satisfaction!). And the super-ego has always possessed a communal aspect, since it is responsible for generating our ideas of how we ought to behave and what we ought to do. But I can't help but think the new, metastasized super-ego is a very bad thing. Technology has added a giant ticking clock to super-ego injunctions. The fact our interactions with social media occur in real time exponentially increases the urgency of these injunctions.
An aside here - I sometimes think there is a market for surrogate fun. If you really don't feel like going out and doing anything interesting, adventurous and worthy of internet sharing - why not outsource? Hire a surrogate to post a steady stream of fictional updates that perpetuate precisely the image you wish for your various internet avatars? It isn't so different from interns handling celebrity Twitter feeds.
So how is all this super-ego pressure properly moral? It creates an unnecessary narcissism. And narcissistic people are generally bad moral agents. How many tweets have you read from the food bank? Or from people volunteering at retirement homes? There is a reason the bible says charity should be performed with the left hand while the right remains ignorant. Charity is inherently self-less - it is a subordination of personal interest under communal interest. Technology, as it is used in my life and the lives of people I know, isn't very good at that. It's fantastic at self-aggrandizement but shit at whatever the opposite of aggrandizement is.
If you don't think super-ego injunctions are a big deal, you're flat wrong. How many times have you heard people complain about their life? My life sucks. I don't have a life. I wish I knew what I was doing with my life. This is pure super-ego. The answer to the question, "What am I doing with my life?" is completely obvious to the person who asks. [I offer myself as an example; I'm reading a lot, occasionally applying for jobs, worrying about my teeth, smoking way too much, and eating too much take-out food.] The question, more accurately phrased, would be, "What will it take for my super-ego to leave me alone for a few fucking minutes!?!" That the super-ego is the source of these complaints is equally obvious. You hear these questions / complaints even from people in a state of almost total Id satisfaction - "Yes, I'm having the best sex of my life and the food is also fantastic but what am I doing with my life?" The super-ego is an unyielding and merciless critic. It is never satisfied. So magnifying its power with an omni-present camera and real-time updates re "what you are doing with your life" seems a profoundly bad idea to me.
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