Raiding the inarticulate since 2010

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Digital convenience as an engine of routinisation

This is an important point in Rogers Brubaker’s Hyperconnectivity and its Discontents which runs contrary to the assumption that digital technologies in the lifeworld are inherently generative of reflexivity. From loc 609:

Convenience resets expectations, forms habits, and insinuates its way into our routines. And these expectations, habits, and routines are unobtrusively but powerfully world-transforming. We may lament the consequences of Amazon’s retail dominance, for example, but the immense convenience it has trained us to expect and desire keeps us coming back for more. Click by convenient click, repeated trillions of times, we have co-constructed the immensely powerful platforms that today organize so much of our lives. Convenience reduces friction: it enables us to do quickly and quasi-automatically what would otherwise require time, thought, and effort. In a world of baffling complexity and relentless temporal pressures – complexity and pressures intensified, ironically, by the dynamism of hyperconnectivity itself and the superabundance of digital culture and communication – convenience becomes a cultural touchstone and an economic imperative.

I’m enjoying this book a lot but it does make me wish I’d managed to get Platform & Agency finished more quickly. The thrust of Brubaker’s approach matches my own, albeit with a different conceptual vocabulary. There are many points where he concisely captures what I’ve written about the as the problem of platform and agency. For example loc 906:

A second tradition, associated with Anthony Giddens, understands the self in the “post-traditional” social environment of late modernity as a “reflexive project,” for which the individual must assume responsibility. This is a project that requires continuous self-monitoring, critical self-interrogation, and ongoing choices “not only about how to act but who to be.”2 How has hyperconnectivity transformed this project? In what ways has it heightened the reflexivity of late modernity by generating new tools for self-monitoring, new forms of self-knowledge, and new styles of self-entrepreneurship? In what ways, conversely, might hyperconnectivity diminish reflexive self-making by enmeshing us in sociotechnical systems that nudge, manipulate, and discipline us?

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