The Blind Giant (19 page)

Whether there’s an underlying sense of worry about what’s real – and I would say that there is, and that it derives in part from a sense not that the physical world isn’t real but that some of our interactions are somehow not immanent, fraudulently mediated by cognition rather than directly experienced through our senses – we are in our everyday lives at pains to distinguish between things that are real and things that are not, and especially in our encounters with digital technology. Commentators – particularly those who are not in favour of digital media – are at pains to distinguish between ‘real life’ friends and those found and predominantly encountered online. And, looking back at
Proust and the Squid
again, it seems to me that there is a difference: online friends are primarily understood through text – at least initially – which makes them friends you know cognitively before you know them through your senses. Your relationship is mainly thought-based. I’m not sure what that means in everyday terms, except that you don’t have a physical sense of them, don’t know how they move or smell or any of the other characteristics that, fairly or not, consciously or not, influence how we relate to people. For some, that makes life easier: there’s no risk of being rejected on shallow physical criteria or having to explain or announce disabilities. I met someone when I was playing
World of Warcraft and conversed with him on and off for months and never realized he was deaf until he told me; well, obviously: in the textual context it simply wasn’t relevant.

But at the same time, when you talk only through text, you fail to receive any number of cues and signals. Text can be starkly emotionless, can appear unsympathetic, hence the desire to create
simple textual signifiers of emotion –
emoticons. They may not be subtle, but they do, at least, let you know when someone is teasing you where a flat line of text might simply look cruel. It’s one of the most painful aspects of autism spectrum disorders, and one of those most likely to lead to difficult and distressing situations – memorably highlighted in Mark Haddon’s novel,
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time –
that those affected are sometimes unable to interpret facial expressions.

Physical communication goes a lot further than the face, though: the techniques of kinesic interview are about establishing a rapport with a subject by adopting similar postures – or pushing them away using aggressive stances, and so on. It’s surprisingly easy to unsettle and even frighten a conversation partner by forcing yourself to communicate wrongly. Most people have at one time or another encountered someone who appears to be talking past them to empty space. We’ve all also been discomforted by someone who stands too close or stares too long. We’ve become cross because someone won’t make eye contact, or suspected a friend or family member wasn’t listening because they weren’t making the small, affirmative noises we use to keep a conversation going. We have a lot of these minor cues, and if you depart from the narrow window of normal behaviour by even quite a small amount, people will find you rude. Stray too far and they will assume you are drunk, or mad.

But you don’t get these things online, except as they are conveyed through text. The
New Yorker
cartoon has it right: online, no one knows you’re a dog. Except that, in fact, there are some ways to tell things about people through text; there is a language of context that goes with Internet discourse. Email addresses, for example, can yield basic or even fairly complex information if you know how to read them: a .edu suffix means an American educational institution; .ac.uk means a British one. A
Gmail address is generic, but a Gmail address with a common name without numbers – [email protected] – suggests a very early
adopter of the Gmail service, someone who was already immersed in the Net in 2004. Apple’s paid-for
addresses have changed from mac.com to me.com, so someone who still uses a mac.com address is probably older than twenty-five and a little bit stubborn (like me). Other domains such as aol.com and .gov addresses tell other stories. Other services – blogs and Twitter pages – can have similar clues and cues.

Initially, you register these things consciously, but as with reading – and probably body language – the observations rapidly become almost unconscious. Just as a church can be read (although not perhaps to the degree implied by Dan Brown’s
The Da Vinci Code
) and clothes convey tribal messages about status and mood, so a Twitter profile tells you something about the style of engagement of a user and who they are. I tend to assume that people who have many followers but choose to follow very few others, for example, are essentially disengaged and have not really understood the inherent contract of a level social playing field that Twitter implies.

It’s interesting also that the
University of Buffalo study
⁶
I mentioned earlier suggests that it’s possible to empathize quite genuinely with fictional characters in text – well, yes, we all knew that, but it is now scientifically sound as a supposition – which in turn implies that a genuine emotional bond can be formed with a person via digital media. Again, when you spell it out, the first reaction is: well, yes, of course you can. But if that’s the case, then what’s the hang-up about the reality and authenticity of online communication? It’s different, yes, and we should be alert to that difference and aware that we’re exercising the cognitive part of the brain rather than the bits that deal with offline life. But it’s hard to see why it should be thought of as lesser.

There is, though, a definite tendency to consider anything that happens in the offline, analogue world as real and authentic (a sense that probably owes a certain amount to the early adoption of ‘IRL’ – ‘In Real Life’ – by Internet communities such as the
WELL) and anything that happens online as unreal and probably inauthentic. I think partly this is because we are fundamentally analogue creatures; we are not cognitive homunculi riding in the control room of a giant fleshy robot, much as we occasionally imagine that we are. The sense of sight being in the head, along with the ears, nose, mouth and brain, sometimes gives us an exaggerated sense of the extent to which the ‘I’ is vested in the uppermost 13 per cent of the body. It’s not true. We are tactile, physical creatures, our moods and perceptions created by our whole bodies (in one experiment – and I love this, because it’s utterly alarming – researchers found that ‘people whose frown muscles had been frozen with Botox took longer to read sad or angry sentences than they did before receiving the treatment’).
⁷
The direct apprehension of things is really what persuades us they’re real. We say ‘I wouldn’t believe it if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes’ despite knowing that our eyes can be deceived by half a dozen tricks. We court the dissonance when we go to see professional magic shows; we know the magic isn’t real, that it’s a trick, but we enjoy the sense of bafflement and impossibility.

As the world embraces digital things, though, that simple posture – online fake, offline real – becomes more problematic. We’ve already looked at relationships mediated by the machine, but it goes beyond that. Online objects such as the currencies of various virtual worlds have real world value, for example; they represent work, time spent and are (artificially) scarce. Gold in Blizzard’s online game, World of Warcraft, can be bought on a black market from gold sellers who obtain it by hiring cheap labour, often in South-East Asia, to sit and play the game for hours to accrue the virtual currency. WoW gold can be moved around the world and traded for conventional money such as euros or dollars. Items inside the game have a value in WoW gold, and in effort, and hence also in money. Some virtual universes have experienced in-game con tricks, thefts and so on; all part of the game, and yet at the same time also the removal of
real monetary value from one person and its transferral to another person. How should we think of these events? And how should we think of the transfer of a digital
Vorpal Sword between users in different countries if it has a value in real money? Is it subject to import tax?

But it’s also important to ask whether there is any reason to assume that the more natural mode of communication – face-to-face – is inherently the superior one. The mediated form of communication allows people to express themselves from behind a translucent barrier. The mild anonymity of the Net frees many. The lack of consequences can make people bolder, less inhibited about seeking friendship. Casual meetings are easier, and interaction can yield more serious relationships: a genuine meeting of minds. I cannot help but wonder whether the suspicion of this kind of meeting (an idea celebrated until it was actually possible, and now regarded with scepticism) derives from that same cultural perception I described earlier which sees the mystical journey, which cannot be expressed in words but must be experienced immanently, as far more important than the cognitive kind.

I believe that a balance is necessary: I think there’s much to be gained from satisfying the various aspects of the human self. But I think it’s mistaken to say that one is superior to the other, just as it’s ridiculous to claim that fish are superior to birds. An ostrich under thirty foot of water is in trouble, yes, but so is a tuna on a mountain top. Each of them in its element is immensely successful. In the context of human life, though, we need both access to the immanent experience, through our senses, and the chance to think, read and analyse with our cognitive selves. Pattern and presence are both significant, and the reality is that in our own internal context they may actually be indivisible.

The issue of pattern and presence is also part of the wrangles over
copyright. When I was ten, commercial content like music was
indivisible from the medium on which it was purchased (usually vinyl, although cassettes were the coming thing, much derided by music purists as low-fi) and people never really considered – and companies never sought to educate them – whether they were paying for the physical object or for access to the content via a storage medium. That confusion was thrown into sharp relief by the arrival of tape-to-tape machines and the dawning realization among record companies that people were taping songs from the radio. In the popular perception, when you bought a copy of an album, it was then no one’s business what you did with it. You could see this as a notion of ‘exhaustion of rights’, but I think that’s over-complicating it. Purchase carried an item from the public world of rules and exchange into the private world of the hearth. Once brought into the hearth, the object was then subject to hearth rules, not public ones. If you chose to use your vinyl as a coaster, the record company could not come in and tell you that was wrong. Why should they do so if you then chose to record that album on to a cassette so that you could listen to an inferior recording on your new (enormous) Sony Walkman? It was none of their business what you did in your private space.

That discussion was never properly resolved: the kind of legislative clarity that would produce some kind of sanity seems to be completely beyond elected assemblies: the process almost immediately becomes a festival of self-interested lobbying and ridiculous demands, and those of us who are neither red-toothed zealots of IP protectionism nor freevangelists seeking a world where intellectual property is deemed to be held in common go unheard in the din.

The problem is that the content industries as they exist (or possibly as they existed until recently, although the change is far from wholehearted) are largely premised on the idea that their products are both rivalrous and excludable, i.e. that an item that I have cannot also be possessed by you, and that it is relatively
simple to prevent me from getting access to it in the first place unless I pay. This set the scene for a showdown. On the one hand, content licensees and vendors – who are often, by the nature of the industries involved, not content creators – set their teeth against the reality of the present day, namely that it is simply impossible, in any reasonably private and democratic society, to police content to the degree that would be required to secure intellectual property absolutely; on the other, organizations such as the
Pirate Party are apparently unable or unwilling to outline a way for creators to make a living in a world where their primary skill no longer produces anything that can be sold. (I interviewed
Andrew Robinson, then leader of the Pirate Party UK, for FutureBook in 2010. I asked him how creatives would make a living in the new world.
⁸
He replied: ‘This is an interesting point, is it the job of politicians to look purely at what is morally right or wrong when making laws, or should we also be expected to devise new business models to replace ones that have been made obsolete by technology? In a way, it’s odd that the Pirate Party is expected to extrapolate our moral position into business practices; however it’s very easy to do so. Simply put, the middlemen will have a much smaller role, and the public will deal directly with the creators of content. File sharing will be understood by content creators as an indispensable source of free advertising.’ Which is interesting, but still doesn’t tell me specifically how anyone earns a crust in an environment where people don’t feel they need to pay for content.)