Why are we here, again?
A quick refresher on why these conversations are important.
Hey everyone, welcome back. As we’ve finished up our recent series around maps, I thought it might be helpful to go back a few steps and remind ourselves why we are here.
From the outset, we’ve worked to understand better our contexts: how we shape them and how they shape us. We’ve covered a good bit of ground through this journey, but in our progress, it can be easy to forget why we are here in the first place.
The biggest irony in this newsletter might be that we lose sight of our purpose here and that this becomes a thing I do just because I’ve been doing it: our tool for exploration (this newsletter) might become an example of runaway self-reinforcement. This get’s at Niel Postman’s point here:
To the question, “What problem does the information solve?” the answer is usually “How to generate, store, and distribute more information, more conveniently, at greater speeds than ever before.” This is the elevation of information to a metaphysical status: information as both the means and the end of human creativity.1 [emphasis mine]
When information becomes the means to the end and the end itself, we’ve entered a loop that’s hard to pull out of. Our explorations here taken as a whole must be another tool for understanding our world.
So, if not learning more and more information, what are we doing here?
Lance Strate, in the waning pages of Media Ecology, notes:
What we call a medium or environment represents a highly complex set of interrelationships, which may seem overwhelming at times, but this should not keep us from engaging in ecological study, and working towards a greater understanding of our media and ourselves. If anything, an awareness of how inextricably we are linked to and interact with our environments ought to motivate us to engage in further scholarship, to learn all that we can about the effects of our environment on ourselves, and the effects of our activities, our innovations and mediations, on our environment.2 [Emphasis mine]
One needs to look no further than how we engage on social media websites like Facebook. Even if recent allegations prove mostly untrue, it’s clear to everyone that the way we engage with one another has been substantially changed by the way Facebook (and other platforms) facilitates our interactions. L. M. Sacasas puts it this way:
The human self, as philosophers have long noted, emerges in relation to others, or to the Other, if you like. The character of the self develops under the gaze of this Other, and is shaped by it. In the Digital City, we are under the gaze of an algorithmically constituted, collective Other. This audience, composed of friends, strangers, and non-human actors, is unlike anything we might have encountered in the Analog City. Like the gaze of God, it is a ubiquitous face looking down upon us, whose smile we dearly desire. We seek its approval, or, failing that, at least its notice, and we subtly bend our self-presentation to fit our expectations of what this audience desires of us.3
The Digital City, the world of social media that has been constructed for us, has given us an ever-gazing eye to desire approval from. The first question for us is: did we notice?
Our goal here is to gain awareness of how connected all of this is. While that might seem to be a small goal, as we’ve explored so far, we are typically blissfully unaware of everything that’s happening around us. So as you go on through your lives today, take a few moments to pause and reflect:
What environmental factors, happenings in culture, and forces just at the edge of your awareness are shaping you?
How are your day-to-day actions shaping your environment: your family dynamics, living arrangement, the physical world around you?
How can you be more mindful of that mutual shaping that is happening, whether you acknowledge it or not?
And with that, thanks for reading. See you next week!
Technopoly, 61
Media Ecology, 186