DANCE — Digital Love — Short Film
This is as short film about one man’s quest to find love and meaning through his mobile device until he is faced with a choice: does he dive into the digital abyss or does he attempt to find love in a different way?
Genetically, like all species, we are wired to search for a mate, which is why courtship rituals evolved over thousands of years. However, with the advent of the digital age, more specifically the mobile device, the prospects of finding a “mate” have grown exponentially.
The mobile device has become an inescapable worm hole, creating a new realm of connectivity, while changing interpersonal time and space, and naturally adding layers of noise to communication.
It’s replaced verbal cues with written and visual cues, which are disrupting the effectiveness of the message. A consequence of this, is a shift in the way people engage and interact with each other romantically — be it to hook up, to date, or to fall in love.
DANCE analyzes the various modes of modern courtship as well as the anxiety and pressures of social media that fuel a need to become more desirable.
The film also aims to explore how social media influences our perception of self and how we compensate for our perceived defects or faults, faults which might or might not exist — Are our digital personas real? Or are they produced media channels, broadcasting a heightened self-identity stemming from an internal battle between the ego and super ego?
During my discussions about the film with philosopher and artist Seth Binsted, I discovered the the work of German philosopher, author, and cultural theorist, Byung-Chul Han.
Han discusses this modern dialogue and its effects on the interpersonal relationships of the “community” or public sphere in his book SWARM,
“Digital communication has made community — the we — deteriorate markedly. It is destroying the public sphere and heightening human isolation. It is not the percept “Love thy neighbor” but narcissism that governs digital communication. Digital technology does not represent a technology for “loving one’s neighbor as oneself.” On the contrary, it has proven to be a narcissistic ego machine. Nor is it a dialogical medium.” (Han, Byung-Chul, SWARM)
It would seem that the more we camouflage our need to be connected and incessantly uploading content as just the “status quo” or “the future,” the less connected we become. Our obsession with consistently churning out curated content into a self-appointed digital hierarchy and then begging for validation from it is masochistic and psychologically reckless.
It’s detrimental to the human condition from an emotional standpoint because the ‘next option’ is constantly being served to us. Capitalism sneaking into the confines of even our most intimate decisions…
We continually chase what’s in front of us instead of being content with what we have or who we are — something we cannot change.
Bygun-Chul Han describes this as the Other:
“The crisis of love does not derive from too many others so much as from the erosion of the Other. This erosion is occurring in all spheres of life; its corollary is the mounting narcissification of the Self.”(Han, Byung-Chu. Age of Eros)
The stakes of these consequences are not just individual, they affect the collective mind, the next generation of humanity, a generation where incessant social media interactions correlates to normalized behavior. If humanity is always looking into their reflection, drowning within their own narcissism as they strategize their next post, then they won’t be able to learn from one another or develop emotional depth to weather the storm.
And that storm is life.
“A face that exhibits itself and vies for attention is not countenance. No gaze inhabits it. The intentionality of exhibition destroys the interiority, the reserve, that characterizes the gaze: ‘In fact, he is looking at nothing; he retains within himself his love and his fear: that is the Look” (Han, Byung-Chul. SWARM)”
Society cannot flourish without communication, and relationships cannot be forged without communication. And it’s these relationships that are at the cornerstone of civilization.
DANCE explores my fear that digital technology is eroding our innate mode of communicating with each other.
I believe this is spawning a systemic nihilism driven by the ability to assign digital-value to everything and soon the need to quantify our most subjective human experiences with metadata. This dilutes the meaning of life and reinforces the artificial.
These digital alterations in human behavior are destroying interpersonal interaction and soon the noise within the message will be too great, and we will lose the ability to interact, and thus, one of the most intrinsic aspects of being human, to LOVE.
