Disconnected Varieties of Augmented Experience

In a short blog post, “This is What the Future Looks Like,” former Microsoft executive Linda Stone writes:

I suspect that you would be able to offer similar anecdotal evidence. I know that this kind of waking somnambulation characterizes a good part of those making their way about the campus of the very large university I attend.

Stone offered these comments by way of introducing a link to a video documenting Jake P. Reilly’s 90 day experiment in disconnection. He called it “The Amish Project.” Riley was very pleased with what he found on the other side of the connected life. Asked in an interview whether this experience changed his life, Reilly had this to say:

Although not directly addressing Riley’s experiment, Jason Farman has written a thoughtful piece in The Atlantic that calls into question the link between online connectivity and disconnection from lived experience. In “The Myth of the Disconnected Life,” Farman takes as his foil William Powers’ book, Hamlet’s Blackberry. In his work, Powers commends the practice of taking Digital Sabbaths. Farman has good things to say about Powers’ work and technology Sabbaths (in fact, his tone throughout is refreshingly irenic). Nonetheless, he does find the framing of the issue problematic:

Farman then discusses a variety of mobile apps that in his estimation deepen the experience of place for the smartphone-equipped individual rather than severing them from physical space. His examples include [murmur], Broadcastr, and an app from the Museum of London. The first two of these apps allow users to record and listen to oral histories of the place they find themselves in and the latter allows users to overlay images of the past onto locations throughout London using their smartphones.

In Farman’s view, these kinds of apps provide a deeper experience of place and so trouble the narrative that simplistically opposes digital devices to connection and authentic experience:

My instinct usually aligns me with Stone and Powers in these sorts of discussions. Yet, Farman makes a very sensible point. We must acknowledge complexity and resist dichotomies that blind us to important dimensions of our experience. It is also true that debates about technology tend to gloss over the uses to which technologies are actually put by the people who use them.

All of this calls to mind the work of Michel de Certeau on two counts. First, de Certeau made much of the use to which consumers put their products. In his time, the critical focus had fallen on the products and producers; consumers were tacitly assumed to be passive and docile recipients, even victims, of the powers of production.  De Certeau made it a point, especially in The Practice of Everyday Life, to throw light on the multifarious, and often impertinent, uses to which consumers put products. In many respects, this also reflects the competing approaches of internalists and social constructionists within the study of the history of technology. For the former, the logic of the device dominates analysis; for the latter, the uses to which devices are put by users is key. Farman, likewise, is calling us to be attentive to what some users, at least, are actually doing with their digital technologies.

De Certeau also had a good deal to say about the practice of place, or how we experience places and spaces. In a chapter of The Practice of Everyday Life titled “Walking the City,” he explicitly focused on the manner in which memories haunted places.

Places have a way of absorbing and bearing memories that they then relinquish, bidden or unbidden. The context of walking and moving about spaces leads de Certeau to describe memory as “a sort of anti-museum:  it is not localizable.”  Where museums gather pieces and artifacts in one location, our memories have dispersed themselves across the landscape, they colonize.  Here a memory by that tree, there a memory in that house. De Certeau develops a notion of a veiled remembered reality that lies beneath the visible experience of space.

Places are made up of “moving layers.” We point, de Certeau says, here and there and say things like, “Here, there used to be a bakery” or “That’s where old lady Dupuis used to live.”  We point to a present place only to evoke an absent reality:  “the places people live in are like the presences of diverse absences.” Only part of what we point to is there physically; but we’re pointing as well to the invisible, to what can’t be seen by anyone else, which begins to hint at a certain loneliness that attends to memory.

Reality, we might then say, is already augmented.  It is freighted with our memories, it comes alive with distant echoes and fleeting images.

Digitally augmented reality functions analogously to what we might call the mentally augmented reality that de Certeau invokes. Digital augmentation also reminds us that places are haunted by memories of what happened there, sometimes to very few, but often to countless many. The digital tools Farman described bring to light the hauntedness of places. They unveil the ghosts that linger by this place and that.

The first observation that follows is that in contrast to mental augmentation, digital augmentation, as represented by two of the apps Farman describes, is social. In a sense, it appears to transcend the loneliness of memory that de Certeau recognized.

De Certeau elaborated on the loneliness of memory when he approvingly cited the following observation: “‘Memories tie us to that place …. It is personal, not interesting to anyone else …’”  It is like sharing a dream with another person: its vividness and pain or joy can never be recaptured and represented so as to affect another in the same way you were affected.  It is not interesting to anyone else, and so it is with our memories.  Others will listen, they will look were you point, but they cannot see what you see.

I wonder, though, if this is not also the case with the stories collected by apps such as [murmur] and Broadcastr. Social media often seeks to make the private of public consequence, but very often it simply isn’t. Farman believes that a better understanding of a place and a deeper connection to its meanings is achieved by collecting and distributing knowledge of that place “no matter how banal.” Perhaps it is that last phrase that gives me pause. What counts as banal is certainly subjective, but that is just the point. The seemingly banal may be deeply meaningful to the one who experienced it, but it strikes me as rather generous to believe that the banal that takes on meaning within the context of one’s own experience could be rendered meaningful to others for whom it is not only banal, but also lacking a place within a narrative of lived experience out of which meaning arises.

The London Museum app seems to me to be of a different sort because it links us back to a more distant past or a past that is, in fact, of public consequence. In this case, the banality is overcome by distance in time. What was a banal reality of early twentieth century life, for example, is now foreign and somewhat exotic — it is no longer banal to us.

Wrapped up in this discussion, it seems to me, is the question of how we come to meaningfully experience place — how a space becomes a place, we might say. Mere space becomes a place as its particularities etch themselves into consciousness. As we walk the space again and again and learn to feel our way around it, for example, or as we haunt it with the ghosts of our own experience.

I would not go so far as to say that digital devices necessarily lead to a disconnected or inauthentic experience of place. I would argue, however, that there is a tendency in that direction. The introduction of a digital device, however, does necessarily introduce a phenomenological rupture in our experience of a place. What we do with that device, of course, matters a great deal as Farman rightly insists. But most of what we do does divide our attentiveness and mindfulness, even when it serves to provide information.

Perhaps I am guilty, as Farman puts it, of “fetishizing certain ways of gaining depth.” But I am taken by de Certeau’s conception of walking as a kind of enunciation that artfully actualizes a multitude of possibilities in much the same way that the act of speaking actualizes the countless possibilities latent in language. Like speaking, then, inhabiting a space is a language with its own rhetoric. Like rhetoric proper, the art of being in a place depends upon an acute attentiveness to opportunities offered by the space and a deft, improvised actualization of those possibilities. It is this art of being in a place that constitutes a meaningful and memorable augmentation of reality. Unfortunately, the possibility of unfolding this art is undermined by the manner in which our digital devices ordinarily dissolve and distribute the mindfulness that is its precondition.

February 9, 2012