The editors of Real Life are always looking for thoughtful and distinctive work about living with technology. Please email contribute@reallifemag.com if you have a piece of writing or art in mind for the magazine. Below are some themes we’ve been thinking about recently:
There is a weird sensation when you see memes or #hashtags printed on signs or T-shirts, or hear people say out loud “lol” or “Don’t @ me,” or meet embodied versions of people who have only been screen names and profiles. It highlights the strange relation between what happens on and off the screen. Perhaps it feels like ectoplasm — the seemingly immaterial world leaving its trail of slime in our material reality. What is happening when what we are used to seeing on screens leaks out? How does the uncanniness of that organize social experience?
Whatever happened to Klout? It seemed at once inevitable and revolting that a concept like Klout would emerge online — something that purports to boil down one’s behavior and influence into a single score. No one apparently wanted such an explicit measure of social capital, but the logic behind Klout remains — whether in China’s Social Credit scheme or in the various attention metrics prominently featured in most social media. How do we mediate our experience of social hierarchies? How are the terms of reputation changing?
In 1951, psychologist Martha Wolfenstein coined the term “fun morality” to express how fun had become obligatory, a lever by which boundaries between work and play are blurred. “Fun” has also emerged recently as a pretense for a variety of aggressive and exclusionary bullying tactics supposedly necessary to keep spaces “weird” or open for “free speech.” How has pleasure been recruited as an alibi for exploitative work practices and divisive politics? Is there any such thing as innocent fun?
It’s increasingly difficult to differentiate one era from the next: They begin and end rapidly, and as the present cannibalizes the future, the past transforms. Nostalgia is a weapon, a retreat, a tool. As individuals, we can be drawn too close to our pasts, haunted by the persistence of who we’ve been. We are bombarded by information that is not always labeled by year or marked by tense. How do we locate ourselves in the present? How do we live with the past? How do we wrest some control over the future?
Charisma is a distinct form of authority — it seems to inspire devotion for its own sake, and motivates not through fear, or envy, or justice, but from something closer to sheer fascination. Max Weber used the term to describe a kind of power that exceeds existing logic, that overrides bureaucracy and promises a state of exemption from ordinary rules and consequences, at least until the charisma is spent. What do we seek in those who hold charismatic sway? How do different communication forms facilitate charisma? Can media and devices themselves have charisma?
Marc Augé discussed “nonplaces” in terms of the way they impose anonymity on those passing through them. Often this idea is applied to homogenized and corporatized spaces: malls, train stations, hotels, highway rest stops. But these spaces are not intrinsically “non-” — they are often sites where many intense affects collide, and where a certain breed of flâneur thrives, where undisturbed stretches of waiting breed tiny monsters. The overlay of social media on space adds another dimension to transitory places; they make it so that one is always on the way somewhere, even when one is sitting still.
Real Life
August 3, 2017