John Durham Peter’s writing on the historical transition of the post office sent me pin-balling through what it means to have private communications. Dead letters describes the switch from the open dissemination of interpersonal communications to the private sealed envelope. This transformation in conceptions of privacy, of the loss of these intimate communications to the public realm, are curiously marked with a certain sadness. He describes dead letters as not simply noetic/of the mind, but erotic/of the body, not a missed communication in the sense of a misinterpretation, but in physically missing the connection. Moreover, his association of dead letters with mortality are powerfully intriguing -“Communication cannot escape embodiment” Peters opines, and his writing elicits the possibility that language and communication have actual breath.
Peters writing reminded me of scenes from Jane Austen novels. Letters are news channels in her stories, read aloud to every visitor, the turn of phrase discussed, the eloquence of the handwriting commented on. Social information was communicated in a public forum – only in the guise of a private address. Current understandings might view this as breach of trust. However, we do seem to be moving towards this older, more open, notion of communication in the digital age – what Walter Ong call Secondary orality.
Facebook and Twitter have this same kind of open dissemination, the sense of a secure channel, communication amongst ‘friends’ – without being any of those things. We share some information publicly about our private sphere, but we want to retain the right to curate who might hear our news, what is shared and to what extent. Do we still imagine that some communication will remain “tightly coupled” with its intended recipient? What does ‘public’ mean to us in contrast to the “private”. Do we still think about these things in the same way – as opposed opposites?
My ideas of the private versus the public self have become so complicated and full of twists and turns. My limited study of the effects of digital communication on culture has unearthed a lot of these tricky false dichotomies. What meaning does a term like “real” versus “on-line” identity actually have? How do we reconcile the bleeding together of intimate communications and public expressions? What does it mean for our communications to have a ‘corps’ or even ‘corpse’ as Peters would have it. And what effect do these ‘real’ public and private communications, relationships have on the body politic – our democracy?
Writer and academic David Taras outlines some serious problems with citizenship, philanthropy, and political engagement in his text Digital Mosaic . Post what he calls “media shock“, Taras describes young voters as “digital natives” who do not want to involve themselves in long reading and devoted political concern, and only want to “snack” (p.59). Taras talks about “peek a boo citizens” who approach life with a “continuous partial attention” and describes digital natives as “shallow thinkers” (p, 118). Moreover, he points to the way we curate social media and our on-line presences, which creates ghettoization and polarization in political views. He describes a public sphere that is a far cry from Habermas’s ideal. Is technology changing us? Are we not who we once were – as individuals and as a society?
If Marshall McLuhan is right and media “penetrate(s) deeply into the human psyche” then we need to address dichotomies like Real versus Fake; Public versus Private;Noetic and Erotic. Lines have been redrawn in our conceptual understandings and meanings have become very blurry. These distinctions are less apparent, or perhaps even less meaningful for us. And as they are being redrawn – who is doing the meaning making? Us or the algorithm? How can we understand how we should live together, or politically organize our communities, when we have so little understanding of who we are and where we are going?