Technology has changed the world as we know it

Watch this video before reading the article. This doesn’t want to be an advertisement. The video has just been conceived as a support for developing the topic of the text. 

In the article “Always-on/Always-on-you: The Tethered Self”, Sherry Turkle talks about communication technologies. There is a special focus on the way our lives are constantly mediated by ubiquitous devices that surround us, and how these technologies have totally transformed us and the communities we all belong to.

By giving some familiar examples of the prevailing need to constantly be “on” something, the author introduces the concept of the “tethered self”, namely a new sense of the self, which she clearly states, cannot be distinguished by device, due to a persistent craving for them and “the people and things [it] reaches through them”.

The author goes on by saying that experiencing digital relationships is more important that paying attention to people who are physically there.

Without technological devices we would feel out of the loop since – I quote Turkle – they “become a badge of our networks, a sign that we have them, that we are [somehow] wanted”. Not only are we tethered to technology for communication, the author suggests, but we are even more dependent on it for the gratification it offers us.

She then contends the powerful appeal of these devices for constructing new subjectivities for adults and especially for adolescents, who are here the main focus of Turkle’s case-study.  By providing a number of “teen tethered” informants’ samples, the author points out how being always electronically connected could constitute as a burden or release, especially at an age when identity assumes such an important role in an adolescents life.

Turkle goes on referring to the issue of “continuous partial attention” and the fact that today’s dependency on technology has encouraged the body to develop new gestures to incorporate technology into our lives. People are strictly fastened to their technological devices to the point that ordinary conversation, she argues, is continuously endangered by the  “demands of tethering”.

Beings so accessible and mobile, technological devices invade every moment of our lives, resulting in a world which, according to Turkle, has become difficult to separate ourselves from “the machines that tether us to each other and to the information culture”.

At last she raises the question of whom, or better, what are we “tethered to” arousing the  idea that it’s human sociality that is actually affected by our new intimacy with technological devices.

References:

TURKLE, S. (2008), Always-on/Always-on-you: The Tethered Self, in Handbook of Mobile Communication Studies, edited by James Katz, 121–38. Cambridge: MIT Press. 

Where are we heading?

“In advanced modernity the social production of wealth is systematically accompanied by the social production of risk”. 

With this statement, Ulrich Beck opens the first chapter of his most renowned work “Risk Society, Towards a New Modernity”(1986). It has been a long time since then, and yet some of the German sociologist’s pioneering considerations contained in that book seem to be still valid today. 

In what Beck refers to as ‘modern’ society there has been a shift from a ‘wealth-distributing’ society to a ‘risk-distributing’ one as a product of the modernization process itself. The staggering techno-economic development and its mass production of goods, Beck claims, has unfortunately led to an uncommonly production of “bads” or, to put it differently, of risks.

“Risks” – the author promptly clarifies – “are not an invention of modernity” and yet, there are substantial differences between past risks and modern ones. Risks were once perceptible, whereas today most of them are undetectable.  Moreover, in the past they were due to a dearth of technology (especially in sanitation), whereas in our day they ascribe to overproduction. In short, Beck maintains, “they are a wholesome product of industrialization, and are systematically intensified as it becomes global”. 

The author continuously insists on the global threat they represent for all life on Earth.  Owning to the very “nature” of the risks here examined – namely radioactivity, toxins, as well as pollutants in the air, water and foodstuff- the very notion of calculation collapses.

Risks mostly occur in scientific knowledge about them, the author states, outlining this way the increasing reliance on science for defining them. All we know about risks, he alleges, comes from people with specialized knowledge in certain research areas.

Another crucial point here presented is that concerning the social inequalities connected to risks. On the one hand, some risks, Becks points out, could be classified as class-specific risks, since they can result from the place where you can afford to live, form education and even from the food and beverage you can afford to buy. On the other hand, risks are unevenly distributed between underdeveloped countries and industrialized ones, with the former, so to speak, “purchasing” additional dangers to cope with poverty (here the author hints of the “cultural blindness to hazards”) and the latter “selling” them to be safer (e.g. “balkanization of risks”).

In this sense, the author claims, “old social [as well as national] inequalities are strengthened on a new level. But that does not strike at the heart of the distributional logic of risks”. Because of the ongoing globalization process, “risks display an equalizing effect within their scope and among those afflicted by them”. Risks don’t discriminate between class and nationality. They represent a global threat and therefore worldwide solutions through transnational cooperation are required.  “Risk society in this sense is a world risk society” Beck states.

Nevertheless, risks don’t escape the logic of capitalism.  “There are always losers but also winners in risk definitions” the author asserts.  In the long-run, risks will eventually affect also the people who profit from them. “Under the roof of modernization risks, perpetrator and victim sooner or later become identical” and in this regards, risks involve what Beck calls a boomerang effect.           

Another “intrinsic property” of risks is that they “have always to break through in order to be acknowledged”. Only after being socially recognized, they enter the public domain, usually sparkling a heated debate over whom is to blame for the catastrophe.

Going back to the incalculability of risks, Beck adds a further argument by saying that by their very nature modern risks – bear in mind that some of them involve a latency period – require the “sensory organs of science – theories, experiments, measuring instruments- in order to become visible or interpretable as hazards at all”.

In Beck’s point of view, there are no experts on risks.  There are too many parties at stakes, especially when it comes to risk assessment.  There are different ways to deal with risks, but in the case of civilization’s risks, the author asserts, “the sciences have always abandoned their foundation of experimental logic and made a polygamous marriage with business, politics and ethics”. With regard to risk definition, there is a sort of selection of (im)plausible hazards, which depend both on scientific expertise as well as on what a society recognizes as a risk and defines how important it is do deal with it.

As a final point, Beck argues that as much like inside capitalism, world risk society features a lack of responsibility. “Everyone is cause and effect, and thus non-cause”. It’s the generalized other- the system- the one to be blamed.

Throughout the passage, the author highlights the upcoming threatening component that risks basically express. Quoting directly from the text, Beck assesses that “the center of risk consciousness lies not in the present, but in the future. In the risk society, the past loses the power to determine the present. Its place is taken by the future”. In view of this impending fate, how can society acts defensively if there is no escape from such global peril? Anxiety, fear, indifference, rage, Beck says, are all understandable feelings if one takes into account the uselessness of any concrete measure to cope with modern risks. However, non action is not admissible because behind carelessness risks grow and run out of control.

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Now then, do you think that Ulrich Beck’s theorization of risk society could be taken as a framework of reference for the current proliferation of end-of-the-world narratives that throng contemporary cultural expressions? Staying within the domain of audiovisual texts I am sure all of you would have watched at least once in his life, one of the so called ‘disater movie’. Thus, what I would like you to do now, is to watch something so to say ‘offbeat’: a 82 minutes docufilm, that presents a far more frightening vision of the world witout being as spectacular as the blockbuster disaster-movie you are all familiar with: based on real events and plausible conjectures, Collapse by the American filmmaker Chris Smith, explores the theories, writings and life story of a single man, Michael C. Ruppert.

References:

BECK, U. (1992), On The Logic Of Wealth Distribution And Risk Distribution in Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, New Delhi: Sage. (Translated from the German Risikogesellschaft) 1986.

Image Credit:

Ulrich Beck and Hardcover of the Book: Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity taken from Google Images 

What do you think history is? Has literature got anything to do with it?

In this article I’d like to talk about the connection between history and literature and to do so, I will focus my attention on the work of a scholar, namely Hayden White, who studied the narrativizing process involved in the recording of historical events. Hayden White is a very important and though controvertial figure in the field of history and literary criticism. In his “The Historical Text as Literary Artifact” (in Tropics of discourse: essays in cultural criticism, 1978), Hayden White critiques what he considers as a “reluctance to consider historical works as what they manifestly are”, contending that history is a verbal artifact, or rather an object of language. He tries to blur the disciplinary distinction between historiography and literature (being the former traditionally thought of as a representation of reality and the latter as dealing merely with fiction) by defining history as “constructed narrative”. In his opinion, history is always a matter of telling stories about the past. Those stories take their shape from what he calls “emplotment”, namely the process through which the facts contained in chronicles are encoded as components of plots. This is a very relevant point insomuch as it both foregrounds the creative action of constructing narrative out of a set of events and draws attention to the multiplicity of stories that an historian could conceivably tell by using roughly  the same set of facts.

In this way he recounts, therefore, the explicit involvement of the historian in creating his personal reconstruction of the past and by doing so, aligning him with the role of the writer.

Moreover, the author identifies four possible emplotments (tragedy, comedy, romance, satire) that historians share with their audiences by virtue of their participation in a common culture. The reader, in the process of following the historian’s account of those events, gradually comes to realize the story he is reading is of one kind rather than another.

The very process of emplotment also  requires to make some choices of emphasis and omission that obviously come from the  historian’s own preferences. History, he puts forward, turns out to be neither concrete nor exact, but rather an interpretation of events.

The author argues that historical narratives are more closely linked with literature not because historical narratives are fictional themselves but because while trying to make sense of any given historical event historians employ tropes in the very process of  “storytelling”. He distinguishes four master tropes, or mode of figurative representation (metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony) which correspond to the four types of emplotments already mentioned. The language in which history is written, he finally asserts, cannot be dismissed. In short, historical narrative does not reproduce the events it describes, but rather tell the reader in what direction to think about them.

In conclusion, White deplores the present state of the discipline and calls for reconnecting history with its “literary basis” in order to allow for the incorporation of theories of language and narrative and thus a “more subtle presentation” of historical events.

References:

WHITE, Hayden (1978), The Historical Text as Literary Artifact in Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism, John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore.

Image Credit:

Hayden White taken from Google Images.