What kind of happiness does technology procure then? And why do people remain both enthralled and unsatisfied by it? (Borgmann, 130 [1])
Facebook
provides mnemonic tools for keeping track of family and acquaintances. More
than this, of course, it provides the very tools of friendship itself. Assuming that the nature of friendship has
not budged much since Aristotle wrote about it, this means that for Facebook to
be a one-stop companionship-shop it must allow for friendships based upon use,
pleasure, and the exchange of well-wishing expressed purely for the sake of the
other. I will have more to say about
this later, but at first pass this can translate into commercial
acquaintanceships, mutual affinities between those who share an interest, and
finally the reciprocation of mutual respect between people of fine character – BFFs,
in other words.
One of the
implications of Facebook use, according to anthropologist Robin Dunbar, is that
is slows the decay-rate of friendship [2]. Facebook allows us to collate intimates from
the fragmented geographies of our contemporary lives and to sustain contact
with friends from our past with whom we might otherwise only have sporadic
contact. As I discussed in a recentpost, Facebook may be, in fact, just one of a progression of technologies that
allow us to keep track of our personal human networks (our “tribe”) when these
extend beyond Dunbar’s number, that is, those 150 people predicted to be within
the “natural” limit of our information-retention ability. This limit, Dunbar claimed, is set by the
size of our neocortex [3].
The hallmark of
technologies that allow us to have more than 150 familiars is that they
increase the efficiency of the processes required for social bonding. It takes less time to “like” my mother’s
Facebook comment about her recent trip to Killarney than it does to call her,
and both call for less time than visiting her kitchen in Dublin! Innovations that allow us maintain networks in
a highly time-efficient way free up the brain for a larger circle of
chums. These innovations include
language itself which, Dunbar and colleagues claim is more time-efficient than
social grooming [4].
So assuming that the sequence goes from
grooming to language to telephone…and on to Facebook, then new virtual
networking tools emerge at the end of a respectable pedigree of social
contrivances.
At least it can be said that with Facebook one gets the social juices without ingesting the nits and other ectoparasites than that come with more primordial forms of primate grooming.
At least it can be said that with Facebook one gets the social juices without ingesting the nits and other ectoparasites than that come with more primordial forms of primate grooming.
Now, this is
all well and good but what accounts for the unsettling feeling that some of us share
that Facebook and other social networking tools are not providing all the required
vitamins of friendship. The concern
that, in fact, Facebook is just one of the innumerable fetishistic things we do
to distract ourselves from harder task of cultivating our best
capabilities. Glancing back at the older
technology of spoken language one recalls that a person can become a skilled
orator, but can using Facebook become a source of a unique human
excellence? Perhaps excellence in
Facebooking is displayed by a correct ratio of likes to comments? Or the appropriate
comic timing of status updating? Or is
the concern the opposite one: is Facebook worrisome precisely because it makes
something like friendship too easy, too readily and conveniently
available? That is, rather than not being good enough at replicating
friendship has it, rather, become too
good?
Furthermore, has
Facebook commodified friendship? The price we pay is not only in the cash-investment
for the supporting technologies required to service one’s account but also in
the faith-investment entailed in going down the virtual friendship
rabbit-hole.
A helpful way to
frame the issue of Facebook’s ability to seemingly add and subtract from
friendship simultaneously is by means of Albert Borgmann’s “device paradigm” [1]. In his classic critique of modern technology,
Technology and the Character of
Contemporary Life Borgmann investigates a “debilitating tendency” of our
modern technological lives, which is the manner in which technology makes
promises and subsequently erodes the quality of life in attempting to make good
on its promises. Technology, Borgmann
says, promises to place nature and culture
under our control and does so by means of devices that make goods and services effortlessly
available to us. The characteristic feature of devices is that they perform their
tasks immediately, and without making much in the way of demand upon us in
return. Emblematic devices for Borgmann
include television sets, automobiles and so forth. Facebook and other social media tools seem to
fit the bill (though there is some squabbling it seems in the secondary
literature about what counts as a device and what does not, and I shall revisit
the point in a future post). My point is
that Facebook makes our friends available to us whenever we choose. Space and time all but disappear. Thus I can
conjure up my pals over my morning tea, or on my phone on my commute. It’s easy, ubiquitous, effortless.
So, why might
any of this be a problem?
The problem is
that the device supplants a richer engagement with things. To use one of Borgmann’s own examples when a
wood-burning stove is replaced by heat supplied by a coal-fired central plant
and piped into our homes a rich involvement with the world of the thing is
lost. The stove is more than a mere
appliance – it provides a focus for the home, a hearth. To select and chop the
wood and to learn the knack of lighting and maintaining the stove requires a
social engagement than one does not get by flipping a switch. The family gathers around it. Facebook, in terms of this model, by making
friends appear at the flick of a switch, and in reducing social civilities to
activating “like” buttons unburdens us of many of the responsibilities of
friendship. I imagine that I have
traveled less to Ireland to see my parents and siblings because I they remain
available to me on Facebook and Skype. But
their instant availability comes at the cost of a flattening. A poke from a friend on Facebook has never
been, I suspect, as gratifying as an embrace in the flesh. Gone also is the satisfaction of arriving at
the journey’s end – the door opening, the invitation into the home.
Now most people
maintain a mixed strategy: inter-mingling the virtual and the physical aspects
of their friendships. I have coined the
term phriendships to refer to those
intimate relationships that call primarily for real-world physical encounters[i]. But perhaps even the best of phriendships
becomes a little deracinated by the virtual.
When you finally get together the process of catching is now a little
diluted. That trimmed beard no longer a
surprise, nor are the graying temples, the chronicles of births, deaths, entertainments
and misfortunes have already been shared.
There is simply less work to do – when we next meet up the routine tasks
of friendship have been attended to in tiny byte-sized pieces.
The suggestion
that technology overwhelms by successfully unburdening us seems on the face of
it ungrateful. After all crafting a
critique of technology requires the time and leisure for reflection that one
might argue is the fruit of technology. This
whole enterprise appears nostalgic, does it not? A hankering after tougher times when a man
knew how to hew wood. But it is not the case that Borgmann would
send us all to the lumberyard or back to a smoky kitchen. He calls our attention to that which devices
replace – what he calls focal practices.
By focal practices he refers to activities surrounding those events in
our lives where the means and end are more in concert. Preparing a festive meal for the family, a
walk in the wilds, even trout fishing…where one does not especially value being
disburdened of the associated task.
Where cooking from scratch has its own rewards even when microwaving a
tasty treat is a possibility. The
cultivation of focal practices is proposed as a means of resisting the device
paradigm. It is hard in a paragraph to
do justice to the richness of Borgmann’s treatment so I will defer a more
detailed treatment.
Even from the
perspective of Borgmann’s analysis Facebook is clearly not a device in the way
that a nuclear power plant, or a toaster oven for that matter, is. We presumably use Facebook as a means
incorporating friends into our daily life and that seems like a splendid
thing. Though Facebook may yield to shabby
commodification, nonetheless it does not mean that we all become commercial
pals. In fact, since we can experience
all of Aristotle modes of friendship online, though friendship of the most
virtuous kind are perhaps less successfully achieved. On the other hand, Facebook though purporting
to connect us to friends is nonetheless, like other onanisitic practices, a
solitary practice. It is unlikely that
it will satisfy us in a way that delivers intimacy in all its
potentialities. And the degree to which
the enthrallment of our online lives precludes such small felicities as running
into old friends on a trip back home is that which makes us virtually suspicious.
1.Borgmann,
A., Technology and the character of
contemporary life: A philosophical inquiry. The University of Chicago
Press: Chicago, 1984.
2.Dunbar, R., How many "Friends" Can you
really have? Ieee Spectrum 2011, 48, 81-U95.
3.Dunbar, R.I.M., Neocortex size as a constraint on
group-size in primates. Journal of Human
Evolution 1992, 22, 469-493.
4.Dunbar, R.I.M., Coevolution of neocortical size,
group-size and language in humans. Behavioral
and Brain Sciences 1993, 16, 681-694.
[i]
Phriendship:a physical supplement to a Facebook friendship
where one gets off one's arse and goes to see someone.
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