The Technosocial Transformation
A Rumination
We are living in a time of the technosocial. But what is the technosocial; the society that is technological? It is more than the mere interplay between society and technology—for such interplay is in itself unremarkable. Rather, the technosocial is a society that is mediated solely in technological terms, wherein the socius and the individuals mediated through the technology of the socius are reducible to information. Thus, a new aporia of the social arrives. The technosocial is an excess of information coupled with a digression from concrete truths—it is at once the drawing nearer of individuals (a radical deterritorialization) and simultaneously the rapid anonymization of individuals (thus at once driving apart what is drawn near). The more information that accumulates, the more obscure the individual becomes.
Though the term “technosocial” has been implemented in a variety of ways, it has yet to be given a thorough philosophical reading. Let us consider it.
The technosocial is not simply a social network, but social networks are integral to the technosocial. It is an unprecedented development. Facebook is one example, and has, by and large, supplanted MySpace as the premier interface of the technosocial. It is the internet in general that facilitates the technosocial, that is its medium, and we can turn to any number of sites where this interplay between the excess of information and the digression of truth plays out. The social network, such as Facebook, is a near ideal case study, because it accomplishes a number of technosocial goals: 1) it amasses information on the “user,” a euphemism for human beings; 2) it prompts quasi-anonymity; and 3) it combines the accumulated data and anonymity to generate target specific desires (in the form of advertising, but also in the formation of idiosyncratic sub-groups).
The excess of information available qua the technosocial would, at a glance, lead one to suspect that anonymity would be near impossible. This is the illusion, the virtual reality, of the technosocial. The technosocial identity of the individual is a tertiary individuation. There is, first, the individuation of the real. This is the individuation that cannot be escaped; it is the face-to-face encounter, the one who returns our gaze from the mirror, the speaker—the one who delivers speech. Then, there is the individuation of the inscription of identity. This is the re-individuation of the real into the formal written. If Derrida is to be believed, and speech is always already a writing, then we have already fallen into a seemingly infinite gap. The absurdity of the technosocial is that it widens an already infinite space. It pretends to mediate the “real” individual across an infinite divide qua digital inscription, to the others within the technosocial. Thus, the third individuation: from the formal inscription of the individual to the virtual self—the online “handle,” the avatar, the representation of the representation of myself. This representation of representation has a superficial problematic in that it is self-defined. It is I who generates the virtual-I consciously. I choose the virtual-self I am to become. This does not necessarily mean that I lie—but the selection of the details is a kind of censorship. One would almost never say, “I attend Purdue University, and I beat my children,” or, “I prefer Victorian literature, and anonymous masochistic sex,” though such irony would not go unnoticed. The virtual I is a sanitized I; but more to the point, it is an I teleologically sanitized. It is a creation that must serve a purpose: self-promotion, the improvement of self-esteem, the garnering of praise, the accumulation of friends, the assimilation of politics, activism, religious witnessing and so on. The virtual self is a self-design.
But the individual within the technosocial is not merely self-selected (for this happens in concrete social relations as well). The more profound problematic is that we are not presented with some ideal-self—the representation is not a representation of a perfected self. It is rather a deluded projection of a supposedly “real” self that has been reduced to information, reduced to a virtual inscription. It used to be that a person had to move away from where they were well known to achieve this sanitization. Think of the provincial Lucien Chardon from Balzac’s Lost Illusions as he moves from Angoulême to Paris in order to transform himself into the poet, Lucien de Rubempré. Remember Lucien’s anguish as he recognizes the difference between the actual provincial that must be met face-to-face and the great Parisian poet he wished to be. Recall how he “felt himself parted from the world about him by a sort of gulf, and be began to consider how he should cross it, for he firmly resolved to be like this delicate, graceful, refined youth of Paris.” But his illusion, still mediated as he was through concrete encounters, still subjected to making speeches and such, was ironically just as delicate in his identity as the Parisian dandies he so admired (a secret he tried to keep even from himself). The technosocial has exceeded in all proportion the level of sophistication available to sanitization of the self. In the technosocial, we approach the horror of the cloned man Daniel from Michel Houellebecq’s The Possibility of an Island. In it, a cloned descendant of a 21st century man named Daniel is attempting, through the writing of a book, to create a lasting memory of himself in the clone that will succeed him upon death. Thus, true immortality may be achieved through the passing of information—a clone is, after all, simply a copy of the code inscribed in the genes—isn’t it? The future man muses on Pierce’s first law to the extent that it:
…identifies personality with memory. Nothing exists, in the personality, outside what is memorizable, (be this memory cognitive, procedural, or emotional); it is thanks to memory, for example, that the sense of identity does not dissolve during sleep…Pierce's three laws were going to put an end to the hazardous attempts at memory downloading through the intermediary of a data carrier, in favor of, on the one hand, direct molecular transfer, and, on the other, what today we call life story, initially conceived as a simple complement, a provisional solution, but which was, following the work by Pierce, to become considerably more important. Thus, curiously, this major logical advance resulted in the rehabilitation of an ancient form that was basically quite close to what was once called autobiography.
Thus too is the virtual self in the technosocial a memorizable self. Reduced to the information “about” me: age, gender, religion, political affiliation, favorite books and movies. A few photos, preferably the more flattering ones, unless my sense of humor is memorable or self-deprecating. The concrete has been dissolved. I must no longer deal with speech making at the Opera House or amongst the society into which I must enter. I am, always already, among “friends.” My speeches are always to a choir. I can now edit my speech. The words never pass my lips, are never really heard. I am read. I am information, inscription, fiction—a living memoir.
I can have hundreds or thousands of friends or followers but I may never be met. The concrete has been dissolved qua technology into the virtual. The socius is deterritorialized into an excess of information, but it is information without form—a book without pages. The technosocial is a form of inscribing the subject onto the book without pages that is a form detached, perhaps infinitely, from the concrete person interfacing with a computer terminal. Such an excess of information, a multitude of users, a reduction of persons.
Anonymity is thus symptomatic of the technosocial. The excess of information obfuscates any concrete manifestation of identity—mannerisms, speech patterns, dress, demonstrable talent, vice. Information becomes a substitute for memory in the concrete, the virtual memory of the machine contra the neurological memories of the brain. The technosocial is the fiction we write ourselves into. The virtual more clearly reveals our plurality, for it allows various manifestations across networks through the compartmentalization of information. We laugh at how different our co-workers may be at the company picnic, or the change in our classmates when family is around. Masturbation is usually reserved for private. More radical is the variation allowed by the anonymity of the technosocial due to the compartmentalization of information regarding the virtual self. One identity manifests on Facebook, another on Match.com, Twitter and Facebook can become integrated, while Blendr or Grindr are more…closeted. We are inscribed and re-inscribed across the vast book without pages. Which is real? What is real? Even Lyotard could not then conceive of this post-modern condition. It is, however, a deep skepticism of meta-narratives[iv] that drives the diversification of self-inscription across a virtual landscape. There need not be just one me. There can be a plurality of identities that overlap, or that may never met, except in the hand that inscribes them.
However, the technosocial does not exist only on the Internet. I do not want to give that impression, for it would be a false one. The Internet is merely the medium of the technosocial; just as a computer or smart phone are interfaces. I can be mediated by the Internet into a variety of technosocial enclaves; societies whose existence are facilitated by interfacing with the technological. I can concretize the relations I experience online should I so choose. I can purchase goods, and they will be delivered to me via a circuit of technologies; I can go out on dates, or join political groups, or have religious studies; I can publish my thoughts on a blog or seek out other avenues of publication. All of these things become available to me through the technosocial. I can, in a sense, achieve a hypersociality. Arrangements that formerly took days or weeks can now be facilitated in hours, minutes, sometimes, even seconds. Paul Virilio comments on this aspect of globalization as well. He indicates two features of globalization as being temporal compression (events occur in a shortened timeframe) and tele-surveillence (the world becomes ever present due to the dissemination of telecommunications that allow us to see the previously un-seeable parts of the world).[v] However, we should not read this to mean that the world is “getting smaller.” That the world is “getting smaller” is often assumed to be true of globalization and the expansion of the technosocial. Pierce's three laws were going to put an end to the hazardous attempts at memory downloading through the intermediary of a data carrier, in favor of, on the one hand, direct molecular transfer, and, on the other, what today we call life story, initially conceived as a simple complement, a provisional solution, but which was, following the work by Pierce, to become considerably more important. Thus, curiously, this major logical advance resulted in the rehabilitation of an ancient form that was basically quite close to what was once called autobiography. I wonder: how will such a small world accommodate the ever-increasing multiplicity of subjectivities?
I posit that the technosocial is among the excesses of urbanization, and that it is excess that most marks the technosocial. As such, it presents a sort of anti-ethics. That is, it is a socius that admits no limitations on one’s character—returning here to the Greek roots of our word “ethics.” Even with an overabundance of information concerning a given character, the character begins to loose all definition in the sense of being definite. It is given, but given subjectively by a potentially unreliable narrator. There is always the question—who are you, really? Are you my friend? Are you my peer? Are you a woman, or a man? Are you how old you say you are? Does it matter—when should it matter?
The urbanization of the technosocial is to be emphasized because therein the illusory nature of the virtual is revealed. The concrete distance is not destroyed by the virtual. Travel once to a rural area, far from a metropolitan center, and try to order food on GrubHub (a smart phone app for the purpose of ordering take-out or delivery). It likely hasn’t “got there yet.” If you can get a signal Facebook and Twitter still function, but your choices on Blendr, or Grindr, or OkCupid may be limited. Again, it is not just these social networks that constitute the technosocial in its entirety, for these technologies themselves can facilitate the entry into a concrete relation, but it becomes a concretization formulated on the mediation of the technological. I may choose to meet a group, or another person, or order my dinner, but the chances of a successful encounter in the actual, as opposed to the virtual, is dependent upon physicality, and probabilities increase in proportion to increased urbanization. Similarly, an older manifestation of the technosocial appears with the accessibility of planes and trains. Rural areas become increasingly under-serviced and are criticized in relation to their lack of urbanization.
Let us consider some conclusions.
It may seem at first at though the technosocial is a harbinger of a new freedom, that we can be freed from the concrete restrictions on our person and enter into a virtual reality in order to vent our desires among an increasingly idiosyncratic in-group. We can find many variations on human desire via the Internet, from the germane to the scandalous. However, the illusory nature of this virtual world has been shown. This freedom would not be an absolute freedom. It would not fulfill our existential angst. Rather, it is a freedom contingent upon mediation qua technology. What is more, such a freedom marks the abrogation of the responsibility found in the face-to-face encounter.[vi] I am not held in the gaze of the other, as it were. Such a fact does not doom the technosocial to immorality, but the technosocial is to be navigated with great care because it lies beyond the ethical. By its contingency upon technology, and the unreliability of the characters inscribed across the book without pages, the technosocial is marked by excess. It exceeds, without measure, the bounds of convention and is therefore separated from concrete truth. Truth lacks a certain determination that normally indicates verifiability—the technosocial is, for now, an epistemic dark space. Such a claim seems counterintuitive because the Internet is so heavily relied upon for fact checking purposes. But we must look no further than the current Presidential elections to see that fact checking is not always determinative of belief. The technosocial facilitates this vacillation. I makes possible, through the inscription of enclosures around sub-groups, the ignorance (the ignoring) of facts. Facts count for less in the technosocial because the technosocial is based on the inscription of information alone, not on the truth function normalized by a pragmatic notion of correspondence. In concrete relations, if you tell me it’s raining, I can look outside and verify your claim. Such verification becomes obfuscated, along with identities, under the massive stockpiles of information. Truth then becomes an unending uncovering: the task of a virtual archeology.