Untitled. After Pandemic
It has been four years since the last two essays I wrote about the mutation that digital evolution is producing on us (humans) were published.[1] It has been always the countryside, and specifically Cuadro Benegas in San Rafael, Mendoza, Argentina, where ideas sedimented, filtered, got clearer.
Truth is that those who write and think about the digital paradigm and the anthropologic mutation produced by it, are those ―including myself―, who feel and suffer it with conscience. Because it is only by conscious understanding of pain how deeper analysis is processed, and further growth achieved.
People who write about digital anthropology are not technophobic, nor techno fanatics. As Martin Hilbert answered on an Interview to Flavia Acosta in 2017, “we are already fused with this technology”, and we try to make the best use of it.
Doing research, spending time thinking about how our sensitivity is being shaped by digital evolution, and writing about it, which is simply sharing those thoughts with a community, is a work developed through conscience.
It takes time to arrive to deeper analysis about what is happening. A time which is not proportionated by the speed of cognitive capitalism and the digital market.
Products, apps, and brand developments get de-mode extremelly fast. Tech-companies, advertisement agencies and marketing people are in a constant wheel of innovative production in order to launch new products to be consumed and new ways to catch the attention of their different consumer targets; an attention which has been eroded to a point in which conscience is almost impossible.
We inhabit a permanent state of brain exhaustion, a fragile mode of cognitive operation which collapses (gets burned out) quite frequently. Companies know it and this is why tech enterprises like Google and Facebook (the biggest and most popular worldwide), design, build and implement spaces and activities for their workers to relax, play, practice mindfulness and take a break. But of course, since these are the companies with the largest budgets, the context and the possibilities of most cognitive workers are not as such.
What has changed between 2018–2019 when my last essays were published and today?
Covid-19 Global pandemic and human confinement.
This crisis from which we are still feeling its economical traces, worked as the mayor catalyst and accelerator of the transformation I am referring to in this essay.
[1] “FIBERS. Voice, Skin and Earth”, edited by Matilde Soligno, Droste Effect Magazine, Bulletin 20, August 2019 and “How to Make Sense of a Life Surrounded by Cognitive Mining?” published in Post-Everything Ritualism and Hypernaturality, Veronika Dräxler catalogue, Galerie GEDOKmuc, Munich, 2019.
All companies, institutions, bureaucracies, and activities turned remote and digital for a while, and many of them permanently. The possibility of working remotely, video-calling with people from around the world or in the same city — just to save time and avoid traffic — , which means working with a community not physically present next to you, existed already. The radical change is the extent to which it has expanded, adopted, and naturalized.
The App-rization of everything
Today, every need has an app:
There is an app for your finances that measures your incomes and your expenses. It measures how much you need to save and has a place where you check when paying any service, so it prevents you from forgetting about it and accumulating debt.
There is an app that measures the growth from an embryo until it becomes a baby. Here life is measured in relation to fruits and veggies. One day the pregnant woman has a grape in her belly, another day an avocado, etc.
There is an app that messages you before you get your period.
You meditate with an app.
You network with an app.
You seek desperately for love with an app.
You wake up with an app and close your eyes with an app.
Apps handle memory’s erosion. As our attention spams shorten to minutes or seconds due to virtual multi-channelling and multi-tasking and the paradigm of hyper information (we consume more information than what we can properly absorb and process), we turn grateful for those inventing those applications where we deposit important information, guidance and reminders.
We know that when we delegate this power to our phones, we lose personal capacity. But we do not care, because we do not need to imagine what to do without them if they are always with us. Until they die, and we buy a new one.
The beginning of my research about digital anthropology was triggered by the question: “why should I keep imagining and making exhibitions as an art curator, if people are mediating everything with their phones. If connecting with art is already hard enough because it demands attention, it demands connection, it demands opening up to your senses, to your sense, to your sensitivity… how would people approach that if they are permanently drifting away from all these when they mediate and get distracted with their phones?”
I have not answered these questions yet, and still, I have organized some exhibitions after making myself that question, but not so many. As a response, I have put my efforts in going deeper into connection and research along my curatorial job and produce alternative work.
Moreover, my focus is set into how our sensitive and empathic capacities are mutating due to the ongoing digital mutation, which is a bigger scope than “contemporary art exhibitions”, and it takes form in multiple cases. Let’s dive into another example.
“Skinship”[1] (2014) is a short film by director Nichola Wong. The film portrays “how our obsession with connectivity could cause an offline disconnect. It examines our obsession with electronic devices that promise to be a gateway to new connections but many end up causing fatal disconnect.”
The film’s presentation reads: “set in the near future, the film attempts to explore the possible consequences of lives so taken up by on-screen communication that many of us are left virtually incapable of touching and communicating with those closest to us.” “The story is told through Mel, an alienated office worker who turns to a talented touch therapist to fulfil her need for flesh-to-flesh contact, and to help her to re-learn the habit of touch ―not of screens, but rather, of people.”[2]
In a very “Black Mirror”- way, the protagonist seems alienated and has forgotten of her capacity for touch and closeness with other skin-and-flesh human beings. But she is also aware and conscious about that thing she has lost, as she assists, by her own decision, to a touch therapist. Furthermore, in the film, she also observs her husband when he automatically uses his phone in each occasion in which they could be sharing or connecting. Mel, the protagonist, also watches the alienation of other human beings in the city, with strangeness, as it was not normal.
Her suffering for the loss of her capacity to touch and be touched, to affect and be affected by skin & flesh connections, shows up in many ways in the film, until Mel breaks into tears in the last therapy session in which she lets herself be hugged, feels it and reciprocates it.
Besides this poetic fiction of the transformation we are living, I would also like to focus in the accumulation of observations developed through heard and seen stories of online romantic connections. I would narrate one story from which many other examples may link.
This is a story of the need for love, desire and fantasy projection between two people across the world, living in two different continents. They found each other online, on Instagram, through algorithmic suggestion. Their sensitivities have a lot in common and as interest for their projects grew, one messaged the other to express how beautiful his project seemed to her. It was a moment of mutual reflection through creative expression. They started exchanging ideas, poetry, photography, for a few days. Then, they proposed to make a phone call, to listen to their voices and see what happened. These calls repeated and somehow the connection started to seem more romantic. But how would they know what was happening between them without body connection? He booked a flight. She got nervous, but at the same time convinced herself that he was “a virtual friend” that came from across the globe to meet her and they already knew they shared a lot of interests in common. So she organized activities for the two of them to do in her hometown, and they shared meals with her friends. Of course, bodily approach ―through a kiss and the approximation to her body arrived as a natural thing to do―. She felt as if everything was marvellous except her body did not want his. She asked herself, “Why?” This seems as the purest love. He is so kind. He brought all these things for me. We really connect when we talk. That is real.” He felt rejected and could not tolerate the lack of reciprocity in sexual desire, so he booked a flight for a work trip ―gaining some time and space for reflection―. He came back to her city and they gave it a second try. They slept together and had sex. It was fine, but it was not love or real bodily connection―from her side―. He was frustrated, hurt, and could not understand. She would have died for that to be real. And at the same time, she kept asking herself: “Is this real? He does not know me. He just came and imagined me to be this kind of person but he does not know me still…”
Short story is, that ―as many stories of bonds―, there was a lot of projection and expectation from one side, even before meeting the real person in flesh and body. This is something usual, as human beings carry previous stories with them, wounds, and desires, which sometimes blurs the image in front of them. But the difference between a connection started in a face-to-face encounter, to a connection originated in the digital realm is, that this fantasy projection can instantly expand as the other person is not physically there, and many details and information can be unconsciously completed with imagination (until further reach). Probably this story will resemble to a million of other stories lived or heard.
But truth is, this is not a problem from the media (the internet, social media, the apps). The problem is how we use them, how we let them enter our wounds and unsolved issues, our needs, and our uncertainties.
New means of communication and interaction can be great. Be aware of what is behind.
[1] Available to watch on Nowness Channel on Youtube [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2Ligw08pMM — 18 minutes. Last seen on April 9th 2023].
[2] Nichola Wong, May 19th, 2016. Published on Nowness website [https://www.nowness.com/series/dark-web/skinship-nichola-wong. Last seen on April 9th 2023].
