Tag: Digital Distraction, Personal Agency and The Reflexive Imperative

It occurs to me when confronted with this that there are ever more contexts in which contemporary capitalism undermines the ability to plan ahead. This is striking because much of financialised capitalism is predicated on ensuring the calculability of the future through instruments like futures and securities which lock in certain expectations of future outcomes (and cause chaos when those outcomes can no longer be ensured, as happened in 07/08 when trust evaporated in the face of obviously untenable securities). If we accept the classical Weberian thesis about capitalism, its emergence was dependent upon an orientation which saw present actions as leading to future outcomes. But what happens when this relation to the future is broken? For those on zero hours contracts, each week becomes a unit unto itself, disconnected from the past and the future. For those on fixed term contracts, it will be a matter of years rather than weeks but it remains episodic. As consumers, flexibility about when we act is induced through apparent discounts against stagnant wages and declining purchasing power. Until we can’t even preserve predictably by paying more.

In the last few years, I’ve fallen into the habit of using the term chronopolitics without properly defining what I mean by it. But the sketchy thoughts above are at the nub of my concern. For instance the strategic planning of the rail company concerning their ‘operational complications’ curtails the strategic planning of their travellers. Or to give another example which often comes to my mind during the slow/fast scholarship debate, the desire of a senior professor to avoid spending their time on tedious paperwork leaves a junior colleague or a clerical assistant spending their time on a task. Power can operate through temporality, in the mundane sense of imposed tasks having temporal extension but also in the more subtle sense of imposing one party’s temporal horizon to the exclusion of the other’s. The exercise of temporal power is a powerful means through which existing social arrangements can be locked in (what we might call temporal hegemony) but it capitalism relies upon temporality for its own legitimation then this lock in might ultimately undercut itself and provide the conditions within which its demise could be fermented. However it might also simply lead to ever busier and more distracted people, dimly aware something is fundamentally wrong but too occupied by the intensity of their own lives to have the capacity to act on it.

I just returned from a Remembrance Day service, pondering the relationship between acceleration and the profane after finding the array of people walking past and through the service deeply irritating. It occurred to me that what marks out such a space as sacred, distinguished from the normal flow on everyday life, rests as much on deceleration as it does on silence. In fact the former could be seen as the precondition for the latter, in so far as that it’s hard to avoid making a noise unless you’re standing still. 

There was a constant stream of activity around the service: people walking past, the noise of bikes and cameras clicking as photographers roamed. People were silent during the formal silence but the movement didn’t cease. What happens to our aspiration to the sacred under such circumstances? It becomes harder to sustain but its achievement is all the more powerful for this reason. To actually have a crowd of people stop moving, stand still and focus upon a shared object of attention becomes a moving experience in its own right because there is little even approximating it in everyday life.
This might seem like a niche concern, a peculiarly long-winded way of complaining about the fact of people’s behaviour at a remembrance service. I nonetheless believe it highlights a more diffuse phenomenon, in which the harmonisation of attention is becoming decreasingly possible. This isn’t just a matter of movement or its absence, a proliferation of noise or a respectful silence. Take myself as an example: I’m complaining about the lack of attentiveness shown by others but I found myself writing this blog post in my head during the service. There are so many reasons to turn away from shared experiences, as the decreasing synchronisation of our work and lives (as well as the digital machinery of distraction through which this desynchronisation comes to characterise every facet of our existence) means the traditional pool of collective objects of attention seems to be in terminal decline.

This doesn’t necessarily mean the end of collectivity or even of collective attention. The role of mediation here is interesting e.g. television and Twitter combining to produce intense forms of mediated collective attention. If we accept that collective attention can be powerful even if synchronised then binge-watched television shows which reach the status of ‘cultural phenomenon’ represent an interesting case study. Nonetheless, we see an important and challenging transformation when collective attention comes to depend upon technologies of mediation for its very possibility. I suspect we begin to lose something quite profound, as collective affectivity dependent on real co-ordination of psycho-physical attention in time and space begins to fade away into an (imagined) past. The extent to which this is happening can certainly be overstated: the examples that have proved most transformative in my own experience illustrate this (e.g. key games in live football, the best live music, some protests). But even these are partial experiences, collective crescendos against a backdrop of individualisation, rather than defining features of the experience. The most moving examples also occurred when I was younger, long before any gig was filled with people constantly focused on filming the event using their phone. The only recent example I can think of was the memorial after the Manchester attacks this year, the effect of which upon me had been opaque until I found myself bursting into tears after a few minutes of standing with others in St Andrew’s Square. 

I’m worried that forms of collectivity like this, deeply precious but subtle parts of our lives, increasingly find themselves imperilled by social acceleration and that individualised enforcement of ‘proper’ comportment is liable to make the problem worse rather than better.

ZeMKI international conference „The Mediatization of Time“
December 6-8, 2017

Conference venue:
Swissôtel Bremen
Hillmannpl. 20, 28195 Bremen, Germany

Organizer:
University of Bremen, ZeMKI, Centre for Media, Communication and Information Research
http://www.zemki.uni-bremen.de
Topic:

Recent innovations in the digitalization and datafication of communication fundamentally affect how people conceptualize, perceive and evaluate time to create the kind of world they live in. The conference invites participants to think through the interplay of media and data in respect of the way social time is constructed, modulated, and experienced. This allows to appreciate how new technologies and representations deeply affect the temporal organization of today’s media suffused societies, and it also sheds light on transformations in mediating time. We assume that mediatization as a fundamental societal change that interweaves with the development and spread of communication and information technologies leaves its mark on the ways we process and order the pace, sequence, rhythms and of social reality.

This conference invites to think through the role of media and data people have or had at hand to time their interactions, relations, and states of being.

The conference is organized by Christian Pentzold and Christine Lohmeier from the ZeMKI, Centre for Media, Communication and Information Research, University of Bremen in cooperation with Anne Kaun, School of Culture and Education, Södertörn University, Stockholm.

Registration for non-presenting participants is open until November 30, 2017. Please register with an e-mail to mediatizedtime@uni-bremen.de <mailto:mediatizedtime@uni-bremen.de>, providing your full name, your affiliation and postal address as well as your status: (1) undergraduate/doctoral student or (2) postdoc/professor/other. The registration fee for status group (1) is 20 euro and for status group (2) 40 euro, not including the conference dinner. The registration is only valid with a written confirmation by the conference team.

Participants can book hotel rooms for special conference rates at the Hotel Bremer Haus <https://www.google.de/maps/place/Novum+Hotel+Bremer+Haus/@53.080269,8.816544,15z/data=!4m2!3m1!1s0x0:0xa6937aadfdd13625?sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwikr-aQ0NvWAhVDBsAKHY5yBZcQ_BIImwEwCg> (code: “Mediatized Time”) and Star Inn Bremen <https://www.google.de/maps/place/Star+Inn+Hotel+Premium+Bremen+Columbus,+by+Quality/@53.0822375,8.8093874,17z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m5!3m4!1s0x47b1281208a44ec3:0x65076cdb209c6922!8m2!3d53.0822375!4d8.8115761> (code: “Mediatized Time”) by the end of October 2017.

Conference programme

December 6, 2017

20:00
Get Together (www.canova-bremen.de)

December 7, 2017

09:00
Welcome – Convenors

09:30
KEYNOTE I:
*Helge Jordheim (Oslo U, Norway)

*Response: Emily Keightley (Loughborough U, UK)
*Response: Staffan Ericson (Södertörn U, Sweden)

11:00
Coffee & Tea

11:30
PANEL I: TEMPORAL (DIS-)CONTINUITIES
*Karin Deckner (U of the Arts, Berlin, Germany): Eigenzeit and media-based Eigenzeit as „Heterochronie“
*Tim Markham (Birkbeck, U of London, UK): Subjective engagement in an age of distraction: In defence of temporal discontinuity and ambivalence
*Christian Schwarzenegger (Augsburg U, Germany): Reclaiming Time from the Media – Disconnection and temporal autonomy in times of digital perma-connectivity
*Martin Hand (Queen’s U, Canada): iTimes? emerging practices of negotiation, synchronization, and coordination

13:30
Lunch

14:30
PANEL II: PLATFORM TIME
*Tim Highfield (Queensland Tech, Australia): Socially mediated moments and memories: Now, then, and the tangled temporality of digital media
*Manuel Menke (Augsburg U, Germany): Time as Contrast: Constructing Temporalities of the “Before” and the “After” Online
*Kenzie Burchell (U of Toronto, Canada): Managing the Platform Communication Environment: Observable Social Practices as Time Regulators and Time Meters

16:00
Coffee & Tea

16:30
PANEL III: MULTIPLE CHRONOLOGIES
*Maria Rikitianskaia & Gabriele Balbi (Lugano U, Switzerland): Wireless Around The Clock: Introducing Time Signals By Wireless Telegraphy in the 1910s
*Oliver Görland (Rostock U, Germany): Media Use In Situ: Dead Time and the Acceleration of Life
*Jean-Claude Domenget (U de Franche Comté, France) & Carsten Wilhelm (U of Haute Alsace, France): Recent French perspectives on temporalities in media and communication research
*Sabine Bosler (U of Haute Alsace, France & Olivier Thevenin (Paris New Sorbonne U, France): The Paris Series Mania Festival and the Attention Economy”

18:00
Roundtable: New Perspectives on Media, Data and Temporality (Andreas Hepp (Bremen U, Germany), Espen Ytreberg (Oslo U, Norway), Elizabeth Prommer (Rostock U, Germany), Lee Humphreys (Cornell U, USA), Paddy Scannell (U Michigan, USA)

20:00
Dinner (https://www.tenduere.de)

December 8, 2017

09:00
KEYNOTE II:
*Motti Neiger (The Harry S. Truman Research Institute for the Advancement of Peace at the Hebrew U. & Netanya Academic College, Israel) “”On Collective Vision: The Mediatization of Shared Social Future”
KEYNOTE III:
*Mike Ananny (Annenberg School for Communication, USC, USA)

* Response: Lee Humphreys (Cornell U, USA)

10:30
Coffee & Tea
PANEL VI: TIME IN/OF THE MEDIA
*C.W. Anderson (Leeds U, UK) & Henrik Bodker (Aarhus U, Denmark): Deep, Shallow, and Ecstatic Time in an Age of Data and Mediatization
* Wiebke Loosen (Bredow Hamburg) & Andreas Hepp (U Bremen): Where the future is already the present. How pioneer journalists construct the future(s) of journalism
*Sarah Kohler (Klagenfurt U, Austria): The Adaptation of Temporal Structures in Times of Mediatization: the Two Approaches of SPIEGEL Online
*Sarah Bishop (City U, NYC, USA): Finding the Time: Digital Storytelling and Narrative Fatigue

13:00
Lunch and Farewell

14:00
INTO THE FUTURE with comments from Peter Lunt (Leicester U, UK), Irene Neverla (Hamburg U, Germany), Johan Fornäs (Södertörn U, Sweden)

15:00
Departure

Conference website:
http://www.zemki.uni-bremen.de/en/events/conferences/the-mediatization-of-time.html  <http://www.zemki.uni-bremen.de/en/events/conferences/the-mediatization-of-time.html>

From Counterculture to Cyberculture, by Fred Turner, presents the fascinating history through which avowed cultural radicals of the 1960s came to generate the present day dogmas of working culture under digital capitalism. In the last week, I’ve written about this in terms of the digital nomad and the digital hipster. These cultural forms are, as Turner puts it on loc 3846, “libertarian nostrums” which “can transform a series of personal losses-of time with family and neighbors, of connection to one’s body and one’s community-into a soothing narrative with which they can rationalize the limits of their own choices”.

What in reality is “every bit as thorough an integration of the individual into the economic machine as the one threatened by the military-industrial-academic bureaucracy forty years earlier” (loc 3838) is rationalised as a mode of living freely, living passionately and living openly. One congratulates oneself for resisting integration into the cold, mechanical life-denying system while in reality being integrated into that system in a manner which is, arguably, more comprehensive.

He makes a crucial point on loc 3838-3846 about this nomadic mode of integration. This integration is comprehensive in its scope, with ‘personal life’ constantly under threat from ‘working life’ in a way which was not the case with the careful balance of the bourgeois 9-5. Every facet of life risks being subsumed under one’s (passionate) work. But this is accentuated by the tendency of work to squeeze out what Archer and Donati call relational goods. The form of life of the digital nomad too often precludes the mundanity of everyday involvements which generate relational goods, bonds with others that produce sources of value independent of those of organisations and capital. There is not a necessary feature of freelance labour, as much as it a certain self-articulation and mode of accounting for this condition of labour: the (relative) temporal autonomy which many enjoy could facilitate a very different relationship to the social order. From loc 3838-3846:

It may in fact result in every bit as thorough an integration of the individual into the economic machine chine as the one threatened by the military-industrial-academic bureaucracy forty years earlier. Furthermore, it may cut individual workers off from participating in local cal communities that might otherwise mitigate these effects. To stay employed, Ullman and workers like her must move from node to node within the network of sites where computers and software are manufactured and used, and in order to pick up leads for new work, they must stay in touch with one another. As a result, programmers and others often find themselves selves living in a social and physical landscape populated principally by people like themselves. To succeed within that landscape, they must often turn their attention away from another, parallel landscape: the landscape of local, material things, of town boards and PTA meetings, of embodied participation ticipation in civic life. They must declare and maintain an allegiance to their own professional network, to its sites and technologies. And they must carry with them a handful of rules that Ullman trumpets with more than a little sarcasm: `Just live by your wits and expect everyone else to do the same. Carry no dead wood. Live free or die. Yeah, surely, you can only rely on yourself.”

The reality underlying the ideals of the digital nomad and the digital hipster is the digital monad. If we treat these ideals too seriously, working life under digital capitalism eats away at our independent sources of esteem and value, leaving us with no locus of fulfilment other than work. The more we invest ourselves in working life, the harder it becomes to imagine a life which is not centred around work.

In his superb From Counterculture to Cyberculture, Fred Turner vividly describes The Whole Earth Catalog and the horizon it opened up for many of its readers. From loc 1212:

For many, the Catalog provided a first, and sometimes overwhelming, glimpse of the New Communalists’ intellectual world. Gareth Branwyn, for instance, a journalist who later wrote for Wired magazine, zine, recalled the day in 1971 when he saw his first copy of the Catalog: “I was instantly enthralled. I’d never seen anything like it. We lived in a small redneck neck town in Virginia-people didn’t think about such things as `whole systems’ and `nomadics’ and `Zen Buddhism.’… The Whole Earth Catalog changed my life. It was my doorway to Bucky Fuller, Gregory Bateson, whole systems, communes, and lots of other things that formed a foundation tion to a world model I’ve been building ever since.

This is a conduit to variety (where to go, what to do and who to be) which had an enormous direct and indirect cultural impact. What interests me is the reception of this variety by individuals: how did it change lives? How did it lead people to conceive of their present differently? How did it lead them to imagine different futures?

These are subtle questions which resist capture through quantitative measures, representing personal transformations which the individual themselves might not always narrativize in a straightforward manner. But conduits for variety is a concept I’m using to conceive of how media forms contribute to change in individual lives, including the social change ensuing from their aggregated actions as well as any subsequent participation in collective change.

There’s an interesting extract on pg 52-53 of Infinite Distraction, by Dominic Pettman, discussing the seductions of abundance under conditions of scarcity:

Those readers old enough to remember what it was like to live before the Internet will recall the strange phenomenon where the general noosphere seduced us by its sheer beckoning presence. Thus, we would find ourselves listening to terrible songs or talk shows on the radio in the car rather than listening to our perfectly sequenced mixtape or intriguing audiobook. Or we would end up flicking from channel to channel on the TV, preferring this cathodic wasteland to the stack of quality VHS videos that sat neglected in the corner of the living room. Such perverse behavior exhibits a profound and tenacious will-to-synchronize. Indeed, this is the source and continuing energy supply for everything we call “media” (or what Stiegler calls, following Derrida, our “grammaticization”). This crucial characteristic shapes the general desire to connect with the signals and traces of other monads, no matter how tedious or embarrassing these signals and traces may be. (Just take a look at the top ten movies, TV shows, and albums right now, for ample evidence of this claim.)

It immediately brought me back to being a seven or eight-year-old, fascinated by the Sky TV that our neighbours had, in contrast to what was now experienced as the tedium of four channels. They had Simpsons! They had Wrestling! They had endless cartoons! In reality, the abundance that gripped me so much was a profound scarcity in terms of what was produced and circulating at that time, let alone what is available to me now through the iMac and broadband connection with which I am throwing this blog post out into the world.

But it leaves me vividly recalling an earlier time, in which I was growing up within a cultural ecology profoundly different to the one I now inhabit. I remember the first time I visited an internet cafe, at a point where the idea of having the internet at home hadn’t occurred to me, being gripped by the information I could find on the computer. I used it to look up character backgrounds for Marvel comics, filling in the blanks that the comics I read had left me with. The affectivity of abundance seems interesting in retrospect: I was gripped by the possibility that gaps in my knowledge could be filled, however trivial those gaps now seem in retrospect. Has this lure of abundance now been comprehensively lost?

How significant can a tweet can be? We can point to isolated cases of individual tweets going viral, creating controversy and producing material outcomes in the world. But isolated tweets rarely have such significance. Instead, we need to look at a Twitter feed as a unit of analysis, taking someone’s entire output on the platform as a sustained trajectory of action. This is precisely what Peter Oborne and Tom Roberts do in How Trump Thinks: His Tweets And the Birth of a New Political Language. It’s not a systematic analysis and there are clear limits to it e.g. the failure to state any principles upon which selections have been made from Trump’s output. But I found it a thought-provoking book, both in terms of understanding Trump’s self-formation as a political figure and how we might approach Twitter methodologically.

There are trivial though interesting biographical details which can be ascertained about Trump through the examination of the feed. For instance the consistency with which he tweets extremely early in the morning and very late at nights lends credence to his claim about sleeping little. Looking at how these tweets are sequenced raises fascinating questions about how Trump spends his time and the psychological state in which he takes to social media. From loc 4084:

In this extraordinary sequence of Tweets, despatched in less than two hours before dawn on 4 March, Donald Trump accused his predecessor of illegally tapping his phone and of being malevolent or mentally ill; attempted to conflate Obama’s routine meetings with the Russian Ambassador at the White House with Trump’s Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s undeclared discussions during the election with the representative of a foreign power; and poured scorn on Arnold Schwarzenegger for his failure to sustain Trump’s TV franchise.

As they say, “Twitter is the medium which allows Trump to expose these thoughts to the world in real time”. Uses of Twitter which seems ill-judged can reveal much more about the user than their learned capacity to deploy it for personal gain. But the more important features, to which Osborne devotes much of his attention, concern his evolving strategy and relationship to the platform. He offers a plausible narrative of Trump coming to find his voice on Twitter, a process tied up with his developing preoccupation with the power of the platform and the reach it affords him:

My twitter account is now reaching more people than the New York Times-not bad. And we’re only going to get better! 11:14 AM –4 Apr 2012

With almost 1.3 million followers and rising really fast, everyone is asking me to critique things(and people). Finally, I will be a critic. 11:41 AM –11 Jun 2012

Today we just passed 1.4 million twitter followers.. 11:09 AM –23 Aug 2012

Happy to have just passed 1.3M Twitter followers. Love communicating with everyone daily. 3:51 PM –2 Jul 2012

Today we just passed 1.4 million twitter followers.. 11:09 AM –23 Aug 2012

Happy to have just passed 1.5M followers on twitter. We picked up over 14,000 yesterday alone. It’s great to speak to everyone daily. 10:31 AM –4 Oct

My twitter followers will soon be over 2 million-& all the “biggies.” It’s like having your own newspaper. 10:07 AM –17 Oct 2012

Wow, I have just exceeded 2 million followers-and in such a short time! 10:38 AM –14 Jan 2013

Obviously in no sense does he ‘reach’ this headline figure. There is a revealing naïveté about how he treats this follower count, something it is hard to ascribe to a strategy of simply trumpeting his own demonstrable advance in social media status. We can’t know that he cares about this stuff. But the evidence suggests that he does. His preoccupation with the size of his following is allied with an irritation that not all the reaction he generates is positive:

It’s okay but why do the haters (& losers) want to follow me on twitter?? Get a life! 1:39 PM –12 Feb 2013

My Twitter has been seriously hacked-and we are looking for the perpetrators. 12:00 PM –21 Feb 2013

Twitter will soon be irrelevant if lowlifes are so easily able to hack into accounts. 1:57 PM –21 Feb 2013

I have many great people but also an amazing number of haters and losers responding to my tweets-why do these lowlifes follow nothing to do! 3:34 AM –24 Apr 2013

Wow, I’m at 2,200,000 followers but I’d love to get rid of the haters & losers—they’re such a waste of time! 11:50 AM –25 Apr 2013

But it ultimately seems to be worth it. On numerous occasions he draws the analogy between his personal platform on social media and owning a newspaper. When he enters the presidential race, he styles social media as facilitating his one-man fight back against a crooked established which is stacked against him. Driven by the value he finds in the platform, he continues to celebrate numerical milestones as his Twitter career continues:

“@Heaveenly: @realDonaldTrump how does it feel to have 2.1 million followers” Great like owning The New York Times without the lo$$es! . 8:04 PM –7 May 2013

Just hit a million on Facebook-http://t.co/FDv4aLoomz

Wow, honored to just pass 2.5M followers on @twitter. Thanks to all my followers. We are going to have a great year together.

Congrats everyone-we topped 4 million today on Twitter-and heading up fast! 1:41 PM –1 Sep 2015

He writes about his tweeting in terms of a relationship with his followers and a personal capacity he excels it. As he put it in a Tweet from July 2014, “Many people have said I’m the world’s greatest writer of 140 character sentences”. His professed skill at tweeting is what underwrites his imagined relationship with his followers. Through his skill, he builds a relationship with his followers and through the ever-expanding platform that ensues, he accumulates power. As he declares on 17 Oct 2012, “My twitter has become so powerful that I can actually make my enemies tell the truth.”

He regularly reflects on the specific practices which lead him to accumulate followers:

Everybody’s talking about my doing twitter during the likely very boring debate tonight. @realDonaldTrump #DemDebate 10:09 AM – 13 Oct 2015

#DemDebate was really boring but had a lot of fun live tweeting and picked up by far the most followers. 9:57 AM – 14 Oct 2015

Brian–Thanks dummy–I picked up 70,000 twitter followers yesterday alone. Cable News just passed you in the ratings. 12:14PM -7 Nov 2012

This includes retweeting his followers, selectively landing a platform to those without visibility, resonant of his election rhetoric about the forgotten, at least when they talk in a way congruent with his own ego:

“@redneckgp: All you haters out there, STOP trashing the only candidate @realDonaldTrump that will put ALL OF YOU & AMERICA FIRST #trump” 9:32 PM –8 Apr 2016

Dennis Bryant (Twitter handle “RedneckGP”) at this point had seventy-five Twitter followers. He suddenly found himself retweeted to Trump’s then 8 million followers. Trump loved to lift his supporters from obscurity. This was one way he established an emotional bond with his supporters.

“@phickeyma: When I come home from work my Twitter page is filled with Donald Trump tweets…Love reading them…So Bold & Truthful.” 5:36 PM –18 Oct 2013

Trump loved to retweet messages from his followers, thus forging a personal bond with voters. In the election year of 2016 Retweets would come to form approximately half of his Twitter output.

What interests me is his developing relationship with the metrics. As he sustains his engagement on the platform, he reports upon his own ‘progress’ in ever more granular ways. He’s concerned with what ‘works’ and what doesn’t. He has data about his ‘growth’ ready-to-hand. There is a relational biography here concerning himself and the platform, as well as the real and imagined relationship it facilitates to his followers. I’m interested in what this case illustrates about imagination and social media, how numbers become means through which dreams come to seem realisable. I’ll come back to this in a later post but I couldn’t resist ending on this tweet:

With almost 1.3 million followers and rising really fast, everyone is asking me to critique things(and people). Finally, I will be a critic. 1141 AM – 11 Jun 2012

There’s an intriguing argument in The Mediated Construction of Social Reality, by Nick Couldry and Andreas Hepp, concerning our dependence upon digital media and how we respond to its failure. From loc 5527:

We feel the costs viscerally: when ‘our’ media break down –we lose internet connection, our password stops working, we are unable to download the latest version of software required by the device or function we want to use –it is as if the social infrastructure were itself, in some respect, breaking down: recursivity has been interrupted, ontological security becomes threatened.

I take their point to be that our reliance upon digital media isn’t simply about specific purposes. For digital media to fail does not frustrate us because it impedes a particular purpose. In an important sense, our purposiveness as such, has come to rely upon digital media. For this reason, there is a latent trauma inherent in its breakdown. We experience its failure in terms of a impeded capacity to act within the world, as opposed to simply frustrating specific actions.

The argument is underdeveloped, as can be seen by the “in some respect” clause within it. It’s nonetheless an important and provocative one. It left me wondering if anyone has done qualitative research about experiences of wifi breaking down in terms of the affective fallout from such a failure? My experience of this has tended to be one of whole categories of action being foreclosed when this happens, as in a real sense I lose the ability to proceed with my work, rather  than it simply being a contingent impediment to particular tasks. I imagine there’s a great deal of variability in how people respond to such a situation but I nonetheless think Couldry and Hepp are pointing towards something very interesting.

From The Mediated Construction of Reality, by Nick Couldry and Andreas Hepp, loc 2896-2912:

While there are only so many bodies of a certain size that can fit into a finite space –there are certain natural limits to spatial packing, beyond which the attempt to pack just has to stop (otherwise, bodies get crushed) –the same is not true in time: there is literally no limit to how many messages, each sent in a non-synchronous mode, can ‘be there together’ in one’s inbox, each requiring response ‘now’ across a range of communicative platforms. The situation is very different with white noise, where countless signals cancel each other out so that nothing distinct can be heard. The challenge of communication overload is that each message can be heard –as the carrier of a distinct meaning –yet it cannot be attended to, since the time required for doing so is lacking. In this way, contemporary arrangements for communication tend to generate time-packing demands on individuals, from moment-to-moment, which along with the related of communicative obligations they can never, in principle, fulfil.

‘thin time’ where there is no wider normative framework for ordering action-sequences relative to each other. But they are deeply problematic in ‘thick’ time, or what Robert Hassan (2003, p. 233) calls ‘network time’, that is, ‘digitally compressed clock-time’ in which the temporal calibration of obligations within particular figurations is intensified. The contemporary workplace and the social relations of those periods of intense change in one’s social networks (such as adolescence or early adulthood) are likely to be periods of ‘thick time’ when the burden of communicative obligations left unfulfilled due to time-deficits is felt more strongly (Turkle, 2011). Problems of coordination in periods of ‘thick time’ become potential problems for any wider figurational order.

Soon after becoming Finance Minister of Greece, Yanis Varoufakis found himself surrounded by civil servants whose loyalties he could not assume and staff parachuted in by a political party with which he had little prior affiliation. In his political memoir, Adults In The Room, he recounts his impulse to find “a minder whose loyalties would not be shared with any of my new Syriza comrades, let alone the deputy PM”. He turned to an old friend from university to serve this purpose, describing on loc 2873 the risks he sought protection from:

‘To keep me out of jail, Wassily,’ I replied. He understood. Ministers of finance are at the mercy of their minders. They sign dozens of documents, decrees, contracts and appointments daily. It is humanly impossible to examine closely everything they sign. All it takes is a hostile or absent-minded aide, and suddenly the minister faces the wrath of the public or a summons to court.

What is the danger here? The pace at which he is forced to work, the number of documents which he must formally assess, preclude a meaningful engagement with their content. This is something which could be exploited by those able to exercise an influence over what goes into his in-tray. The specific risks he faced were unique to his role as Finance Minister, as well as the times and circumstances under which he served.

However is there a broader lesson here about distraction and culpability? To what extent do our moral and legal notions of culpability rest on an assumption of the considered evaluation of our actions? If this is the case, it follows that distraction is something which political philosophers ought to take seriously. It has consequences at the moral level, in terms of how we attribute responsibility to persons. But it is also something we should consider in legal terms, if the attribution of culpability rests on assumptions about the socio-temporal conditions for evaluation which were absent in practice.

There’s a helpful summary on Wikipedia of the degrees of culpability recognised in criminal law in the United States:

  • A person causes a result purposely if the result is his/her goal in doing the action that causes it,
  • A person causes a result knowingly if he/she knows that the result is virtually certain to occur from the action he/she undertakes,
  • A person causes a result recklessly if he/she is aware of and disregards a substantial and unjustifiable risk of the result occurring from the action, and
  • A person causes a result negligently if there is a substantial and unjustifiable risk he/she is unaware of but should be aware of.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culpability

If we accept the argument that distraction is socially and culturally produced, should this lead us to qualify the third and fourth dimensions of culpability? I want to sustain the argument that recklessness and negligence are in an important sense liable to be produced systematically, even if it remains extremely difficult to quantify such a claim. What does distraction mean for political theory and political philosophy?

In his Debating Humanity, Daniel Chernilo compares the approaches taken by Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt to the question of thinking. Both began with the philosophical tradition’s opposition between thinking and action: in this sense it implies withdrawal in some sense, relative to a world of activity. However Heidegger saw this thinking as an activity for the chosen few. From pg 80:

For Heidegger, on the contrary, it is defined in terms of the fundamental realisation that thinking is exclusively to do with thinking itself. Thinking is the professional craft of the philosopher; the slow, painful and authoritative listening to the great minds of the past in a process that leads to understand the one idea that a genuine thinker may be able to develop over the course of a lifetime.

This is a radically slow conception of thinking. So slow as to preclude the vast majority of humanity from truly engaging in it. The human disappears in Heidegger’s conception of thought, as the irrelevant site through which thought occurs. His approach to thinking entailed that we leave out the thinker, as thought itself proceeds on a level which is entirely independent of the one who thinks. In contrast, Arendt casts thinking in a thoroughly quotidian frame as “the internal dialogue of a thinking ego that is directed to objects in the world”, ascribing to this “general anthropological capacity of stop and think” the ability of humans “not only to regain some control over their lives but to creatively envisage something that is new” (pg. 80). It is, as Chernilo puts it, “precisely the human quality of thinking that makes thinking worthy of attention” for Ardent (pg. 81).

What caught my imagination about Chernilo’s account is his contrast between the worldliness of Arendt’s conception of thought in contrast to the worldlessness of Heidegger’s. This distinction is one we could usefully apply to contemporary debates on distraction, distinguishing between what I think are two clear tendencies:

  • Constructing ‘distraction’ in terms of a lost past, contrasting the attentional commitment presumed to have once been possible with the fragmentation assumed to define the life of the contemporary mind. What was one slow has become fast, what was once quiet has become loud and human beings (or in some cases only ‘millennials’) are seen to have undergone a process of loss.
  • Constructing ‘distraction’ as a practical impediment to the capacity to withdraw from the world so as to reflect on it. Distraction is cashed out in terms of specific impediments to thought, inviting us to consider what withdrawal actually means and the socio-temporal conditions which can facilitate it.

If we reject the former in favour of the latter, it no longer seems plausible to frame ‘distraction’ in epochal terms. Perhaps more importantly, we can begin to explore the socio-temporal and socio-technical conditions within which we ‘stop and think’, as well as how we can individually and collectively exercise an influence over them. We must insist on worldliness in how we characterise the life of the mind. Or at the very least I should finally get round to reading this book I’ve intended to for years.

I’m not a fan of The End of Absence by Michael Harris but I love this term. From pg 216:

The experience of one person’s distraction compounding another’s. Julie kept texting while I was talking about my cat, so I started texting, too. Existing in two varietals: “limited compound distraction” refers to a moment of positive feedback (Bailey kept texting while I was telling him about the exam, so I started tweeting about it instead), whereas “assumed compound distraction” refers to a predetermined atmopshere of distraction wherein sustained, meaningful interaction feels awkward and unwelcome (Harry and Bryce mumbled to each other about Iran while scrolling through the news on their respective phones).

The concept of overspire isn’t bad either: “the experience of too much inspiration, resulting in no further gains in creativity. Over the weekend I watched a dozen TED Talks in a row and got this vaguely overspired feeling.”

In an early essay on post-war Algeria, Pierre Bourdieu reflected on the existential experience of the urban sub-proletariat and its political significance. This is reproduced on pg 16 of Political Interventions: Social Science and Political Action:

Habituation to prolonged unemployment and the most casual and poorly paid work, along with the lack of any regular employment, prevent the development of a coherent organisation either now or in future of a system of expectations towards which all activity and existence can be orientated. For want of possessing this minimum grasp on the present that is the precondition for a deliberate and rational effort to grasp the future, all these people are prey to incoherent resentment, rather than inspired by a genuine revolutionary consciousness; the lack of work, or its instability, go together with the absence of perspective on hopes and opinions, the absence of a system of rational projects and forecasts of which the will to revolution is an aspect. Enclosed in a condition marked by insecurity and incoherence, their own vision is generally itself uncertain and incoherent.

I’m immediately struck by the parallel between the experience he describes and what I write about as distraction in digital capitalism. As he puts it on pg 17, “Everyday life is experienced as the result of a kind of systematic plan dreamed up by a malign will”. People become objects to which things happen. Life becomes episodic, lacking in continuity. What narrative unity people experience is one of frustration, recurrent attempts to exercise agency being denied by forces that are simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. The tempo of life undermines the capacity to gain purchase upon the conditions of existence, impeding any capacity to reliably pursue a change in them, let alone overcome the obstacles inevitably encountered in such a pursuit. From pg 17:

With steady work and a regular age, with the appearance of real perspectives of social advance, an open and rational awareness of temporality can develop. At that point, the contradictions between over-ambitious expectation  and available possibilities, between opinions offered on an imaginary level and real attitudes, disappear. Action, judgements and aspirations arrange themselves as a function of a plan of life. it is then, and then only, that the revolutionary attitude takes the place of escape into dreams, fatalist resignation, or a raging resentment.

Could anyone recommend material I could read which explores this issue in greater depth? I’m immediately struck by how Archerian this Bourdieu seems. Or perhaps how much Archer was influenced by the Bourdieu of this period. But my broader interest is in how “disintegration and disarray supply a favourable soil for ideologies of passion, and possibly retrograde ones” (pg 19). How can distracted people be mobilised?

What I take Bourdieu to be saying is that collective action, if it is to be sustainable, necessitates a grounding in a degree of regularity within everyday life. The existential conditions of individual life, in a way shaped by but irreducible to the material conditions, provide a basis upon which different forms of collective action become more or less feasible.

In his Uberworked and Underpaid, Trebor Scholz offers an important reflection on the cultural significance of blogging. While its uptake has been exaggerated, dependent upon questionable assumptions concerning the relationship between users and blogs, it nonetheless represents a transformation of and expansion of cultural agency which needs to be taken seriously. From loc 3825:

Web 2.0, to be fair, was incredibly successful as an ideology, a meme, and a marketing ploy with global effects. Already by 2004, the industry claimed that there were some 100 million weblogs. One didn’t have to be a skeptic of numerical reasoning to understand that the claim that everybody on this planet was blogging was based on shaky statistics. Clearly, some of these projections were blind to the digital divide, and overlooked the fact that many weblogs were set up but then never used again. But still, we need to acknowledge that more than a decade after its emergence, blogging had roped millions into a daily writing practice; it made them walk through their lives with the eyes of a participant, somebody who could potentially participate or insert her own perspective. 

This is reminiscent of the appendix to The Sociological Imagination, in which C Wright Mills offers practical advice about ‘keeping one’s inner world awake’. It would be overstating matters to claim blogging is intrinsically tied to the sociological imagination, but the propensity to “insert her own perspective” in a life more likely to be lived “with the eyes of a participant” is something we should take seriously, while refraining from assuming that this flows inexorably from the adoption of blogging as a regular activity. 

A few weeks ago, I found myself on a late night train to Manchester from London. After a long day, I was longing to arrive home, a prospect that seemed imminent as the train approached Stockport. Then it stopped. Eventually, we were told that there was someone on the tracks ahead and that the police were on the scene. We waited. After another ten minutes, we were told that the police were still trying to apprehend the person on the tracks. I checked Twitter and saw this incident had been unfolding for a while, seemingly disrupting all the trains going into and through Stockport train station. We waited some more. The train manager announced that the police had told trains they could proceed… a few minutes later the finally moving train came to an abrupt halt, apparently because the person who, it turned out was still on the tracks, had almost been hit. The train staff seemed surprised and mildly shaken up, unable to explain why the police had given the order to move. 

I eventually made it to Manchester, albeit after the last tram to the north had departed. As a naturally curious person, I wanted to find out more about what had happened, not least of all to clarify the slightly weird Benny Hill-esque images I was left with following these repeated invocations of police “in pursuit of” this mysterious “woman on the tracks” over half an hour. Plus what the hell were the police doing telling the train to proceed when she was still on the tracks? If it was a mistake, I was curious about why exactly they thought their pursuit had ended when they hadn’t arrested her. If it wasn’t a mistake, it seemed an inexcusable and possibly illegal action, both in terms of harm to the woman and the psychological violence potentially inflicted on a train driver.

But I couldn’t find anything. I searched local newspapers but nothing. I searched social media but could only find my own tweet and the blandly descriptive disruption update on national rail enquiries. My point in recounting this story is not to stress the intrinsic interest of the situation itself. It’s not particularly interesting and you likely had to be there to have any concern. Rather, I’m interested in understanding the character of my frustration at being unable to find what I was looking for through digital means. It’s something I thought back to yesterday, when I was looking for a particular clip from the Simpsons to make a point in a conversation I was having with someone, but could not find it no matter how hard I looked.

In both cases, my behaviour revealed an implicit expectation concerning the extent of digitalisation. In the first case, that an incident which presumably delayed hundreds of people under (vaguely) mysterious circumstances would inevitably generate some digital record. In the second case, a memorable incident from a popular tv show would surely have been uploaded to a video sharing site. My frustration, though mild, stems from an encounter with the incompleteness of digitalisation. 

These thoughts are extremely provisional but I’d really welcome feedback. 

I love this concise formulation by Trebor Scholz in Uberworked and Underpaid. From loc 338:

Every day, one billion people in advanced economies have between two billion and six billion spare hours among them. 13 Capturing and monetizing those hours is the goal of platform capitalism.

What’s the moral status of ‘thoughtlessness’? It can be invoked as a defence, used to claim that an action was less morally problematic because it expressed a lack of consideration rather than a deliberate intention. But as the wise Jim Gordon once pointed out, such actions can actually be worse in a way, reflecting a wilful thoughtlessness (that could easily have been otherwise) rather than a deficit of character (which is at least somewhat engrained):

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But where I part ways with Gordon’s moralism concerns the conditions under which such thoughtlessness becomes likely. What happens to responsibility if we are becoming more socially distracted, driven by many overlapping factors in personal life and working life, such that we have less time and space to deliberate? Is it possible we are all tending to become less likely to think through the consequences of our actions, at least some of the time? If rushing is becoming an endemic social condition, albeit one not uniformly distributed, what does this mean for the possibility of responsibility? Is distraction diminishing us on a moral level?