Abstract
How does our desire for mediation provide clues about the modes of expansion of the biological substratum? By facing such question, this chapter will start the journey toward mediation as an anthropotechnic. Inspired by the phenomenological philosophy of the image proposed by Vilém Flusser, it will investigate the desire for limitlessness through smartphone screens tuned into social media Apps. Therefore, this chapter will conduct a material archeology of the screen across three stages: (1) screens and shocks; (2) screens and dots; and (3) screens and waves. The first will study the process of energetic symbiosis of the shock through the touch between fingers and planes that produces the device as a body. The second will map the activation path of the device’s body via the duplication of oneself as a profile dot. The last will make visible the processes of irradiation between person and profile, body and device’s body based on social interaction methods that aim to merge the individual’s mind with the Great Mind of Facebook. We hope that, with such endeavor, we can shine a light on the modes of convergence between body and light that arise from the study of the current mechanisms of the body’s electrocution.
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Notes
- 1.
It is important to stress that such presence, even though continuous, does not entail, in any way, a kind of passive obedience to the incitements of advertisement since “the effects of advertisement upon the modes of being are not produced because it forces people to do something that, deep down, they do not desire. Such effects belong to the order of incitement, since the discourse related to advertisement presents ways of thinking, feeling, having fun, taking care of oneself, consuming, and so on, evidently linking them to products and services” (Hennigen, 2011, p. 5).
- 2.
Such strategies of utilizing web protocols in order to create personalized ads can be seen not only on social networks but also on research websites and on e-mail services such as Google and Gmail since “the monitoring of information and actions belonging to individuals on the cyberspace is intrinsic to any search engine, and it is inherent to its functioning and efficiency” (Bruno, 2010, p. 158). In this sense, a digital trace can not only be understood as a “vestige of an action performed by any given individual in the cyberspace” (Bruno, 2012, p. 5), but also by automatized processes, performed by robots and meta-robots through the sophisticated programming of algorithms. Therefore, there is no way of being online without leaving traces—unless one takes certain measures to avoid that—because they follow any performed action due to the fact that “the more one desires to inscribe oneself into the network, the more one will leave involuntary traces behind” (p. 7).
- 3.
Complete article available at: https://tecnologia.uol.com.br/noticias/redacao/2015/10/04/jovens-adultos-checam-iphone-em-media-123-vezes-por-dia-diz-pesquisa.htm, accessed on 07/27/2020.
- 4.
Complete article available at: https://odia.ig.com.br/_conteudo/noticia/brasil/2015-10-28/mais-da-metade-dos-brasileiros-usam-celular-cinco-minutos-depois-de-acordar.html, accessed on 07/27/2020.
- 5.
Data extracted from the article found at: http://tecnologia.ig.com.br/2013-01-18/entre-os-celulares-usados-no-brasil-36-sao-smartphones-diz-nielsen.html. Accessed on 07/27/2020.
- 6.
Marvelous City is how Brazilians call the city of Rio de Janeiro.
- 7.
The concept of shock, in the nineteenth century, was related to the training of bodies living in the city by means of the speed of images seeing in movies and the impetuous fun of amusement parks (Crary, 2010). However, today this shock is no longer psychological. It became literal: touch and shock are inescapably intertwined in the practices of mediation due to the ascension of the touchscreen technology as a trivial, banal, and recurrent gesture.
- 8.
It is important to stress that the notion of social network predates the existence of any website like Orkut, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, or Twitter because what is understood today as social networks was already existing even before the emergence of the Internet. Based on the anthropological and sociological studies from the 1950s, scholars like J. A. Barnes, J. C. Mitchell, P. Bourdieu, and J. S. Coleman exhaustively worked on the most diverse approaches related to such concept. In general, a common core among several theories considers social networks as being a study about the processes of belonging to certain groups or categories. Social networks would be, then, directly associated to the accumulation of social capital, that is, to the individual advantages and benefits that are obtained via one’s insertion into these communities of living and participation. Nevertheless, since the ascension of the web and the explosion, during the 2000s, of a series of sites also called social networks , the creation of social capital assumed new outlines because “the internet, many times, represents an alternative way to the participation in social groups. Mediation through the computer, thus, would be a way of building social capital, allowing individuals to access other networks and groups” (Recuero, 2009, p. 52).
- 9.
In Portuguese, “Nós” means both “Us” (we) and “Knots”. There is a word play here between Nós (Us) and Nós (Knots) on the web.
- 10.
There are many scholars who identify the notion of network with “an epistemological receiver or crystallizer” (Musso, 2010, p. 17), an “empirical character on the ontology of the present” (Kastrup, 2010, p. 88), a kind of “paradigm and main character pertaining to current changes” (Parente, 2010, p. 92), a “network-space, dynamic, infinite, configured in the dynamics of associations” (Lemos, 2012, p. 2). Historically, the notion of network is quite old: in the East, there is the ancient legacy of a holistic way of thinking that conceives the interconnection between life and cosmos as an inseparable unit. In the Western context, Musso (2010) points out three main movements: the first would be the idea of network as an object external to the body, exemplified by the French concept of réseau such as fishing and hunting nets and fabrics that enwrap the body. The moment these networks enter the structures and fabrics of the body and appear in nature as crystals and minerals ends up creating a second movement. The third one would be the rupture that engendered the notion of network in the passage between the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, when the network is no longer related to the body and to nature, and presents itself as something that can be artificially construed in relation to the space. The exteriorization process of such networks as technical artifacts is even more intensified after the emergence of the Internet and its expansion beyond its restricted use by the military, and becomes articulated as an organizational platform that traverses the capitalistic model.
- 11.
Complete article at: https://g1.globo.com/tecnologia/noticia/facebook-atinge-os-2-bilhoes-de-usuarios.ghtml. Accessed on 07/27/2020.
- 12.
Data available at: https://www.businessinsider.com.au/smartphones-and-tablets-penetrate-globe-2013-10. Accessed on 07/27/2020.
- 13.
Full report at: https://www.gsma.com/newsroom/press-release/number-mobile-subscribers-worldwide-hits-5-billion/. Accessed on 07/27/2020.
- 14.
Probably developed by a company called Corning, world leader and holder of the monopoly on glass, ceramics, and optics research, which on its website pompously announces the advent of the “Glass Age”: “throughout history, materials transformed society and culture. There were the Age of Stone, the Age of Bronze, and the Age of Steel. This is the Age of Glass.” Company website available at: http://www.corning.com/worldwide/en.html. Accessed on 07/27/2020.
- 15.
Pertaining to ITO, tin is an abundant and accessible metal, with a silvery color, malleable and solid in ambient conditions, easily oxidized by air and resistant to corrosion. Indium is malleable, smooth, glossy, highly toxic, and today emerges as the centerpiece in the current “gold rush” due to its scarcity and, therefore, its economic relevance. As a result, other, and less expensive, mixtures of metals combined into oxide forms are also created as an alternative to ITOs, such as the aluminum-doped zinc-oxide (AZO) and the indium-doped cadmium-oxide.
- 16.
The current fusion between the senses of vision and touch in order to produce tactile images and imagetic touches can be thought via Deleuze (2007) based on the concept of haptic. Differently from something optic, that is, of something strictly related to the vision, something haptic is that which promotes a rupture from the logical, representative, and perspectival regime of a world organized by the vision while engendering a presence. A presence capable of creation chunks of feelings, of touching the nervous system and generating a space that loses its extensive and measurable depth. In the haptic regime, the eye assumes a tactile function: from a spatial area of proximities, the vision acts like a tactile proof of what is constituted as presence.
- 17.
Data available at: https://www.tracto.com.br/quantas-pessoas-tem-acesso-a-internet-no-mundo/, accessed on 07/27/2020.
- 18.
Information available at: https://www.facebook.com/policy.php, accessed on 07/27/2020.
- 19.
Amidst this scenario where the “new capitalism metabolizes vital forces” (Sibilia, 2012, p. 33), transforming them into capitalizable mediums, we can see the emergence of an immaterial sharing (Mozzini-Alister, 2019) that is directly related to the transformations arising from an immaterial work (Lazzarato & Negri, 2001). In it, one does not invest only in production, but also in “the whole configuration of the ‘reproduction-consumption cycle:’ the immaterial work is not reproduced (and does not reproduce society) in the form of exploration, but in the way subjectivity is reproduced,” point out Lazzarato and Negri (2001, p. 30). This happens because if, at a certain moment, the act of sharing was limited to presential exchanges of material, palpable, artifacts, today it is diluted and gains a new territory of practices emerging not only from the possibility to share in a regime where presence is not necessarily physical, but also through the sharing of elements that cannot be objectified as external to the subject. One shares their life and its energetic mechanisms as a good, and what could be more abstract? As a result of this constant capture by advertisement of the modes of communication, the outlines and the implications of the mechanisms of immaterial sharing become even more visible. That is the case because, as proposed by Lazzarato and Negri (2001), “advertisement is used not only to spread information about the market, but also to constitute it. It enters in an ‘interactive’ relationship with the consumers, turning not only to their necessities, but above all to their desires” (pp. 62–63).
- 20.
Information available at: https://www.facebook.com/policy.php, accessed on 07/27/2020.
- 21.
Information available at: https://www.facebook.com/policy.php, accessed on 07/27/2020.
- 22.
It is through these virtual spaces of circulation and sharing of the self that, beyond a mere communicative role, imperative advertisement strategies are also developed and used to invigorate the processes of immaterial work and consumption. This happens because, as pointed out by Antoun and Malini (2011), “the act of sharing must be concomitantly controlled and disseminated” (p. 9) because “when managing the act of sharing, capitalism is not concerned about controlling production, but about controlling the circulation, thus managing the time for the socialization of knowledge, of wisdom, of creation” (idem).
- 23.
According to Benjamin (1985), in the first photographs the “sharpness of these visages was scary, and one had the impression that the small human faces present in the image were capable of seeing us” (p. 95).
- 24.
Whereas in the Euclidian geometric plane the structures are equivalent due to the isometric transformation of movements that conserves measures like angles, area, and volume, in the topologic field everything is deformed, except for the intersection between dots (Marcolli, 1974). To double in size, to shrink, to extend, or to bend, do not make a difference as long as one keeps the quantity of intersections between knots stable.
- 25.
By considering the notion of discontinuity as method and effect, the genealogic conception of history proposed by Michel Foucault (2010) juxtaposes, to the authorial human scream, the anonymous whisper. A similar view can be found in Walter Benjamin (1994): with the proposition to tear up the veil of appearances, continuities, and essences in favor of the disruption of the hazardous and the fragmented, history emerges as an intensive and non-linear temporality, in which creation forces emerge as forces of transformation and rupture.
- 26.
In Portuguese, the expression: “Pensando com meus botões” (in a literal translation: “Thinking with my buttons”) means thinking to oneself. It would be akin to introspection or musing.
- 27.
The moment Descartes (1979) publishes Discourse on the Method demarcates, not as an origin, but as a historical rupture, the emergence of the methodological question as a problematic issue for the so-called Humanities . Unhappy with the Humanities’ lack of rational ground and with the overlooking of the use of mathematical knowledge in our daily life problems, he pursued the truth of the concepts via physical and mathematical demonstrations—considered by him as the only indubitable ones. Updating the Pythagorean ideal of submitting the universe to numbers, Descartes posited as methodological precept that only what is evident can be considered true. In this sense, he wanted to, by whatever means necessary, overcome any and all uncertainties, thus proposing the hyperbolic doubt as the method to arrive at the clarity of reason. Facing the hypothesis that we are being deceived by an evil genius, who would guide us toward making mistakes and would prevent us from seeing the objectivity of the material world, Descartes proposed the existence of a benevolent God who, being infinitely good, would ensure that the image people have of the external world is not simply a creation of their minds. If God exists as being the guarantee for objectivity, the certainty that the material world is real is achieved. Thus, our thought offers to our spirit, through the methodical doubt, a series of rules to achieve true knowledge since it is the sensitive knowledge that causes the mistakes and errors, and truth is achieved by the intellect. Via a deductive process, it is the cogito that ensures “the existence of the ‘thinking thing:’ the soul ” (Regis & Messias, 2012, p. 34).
- 28.
In this sense, complementing Flusser, Muniz Sodré (2007) points out that “the question about the act of communicating as creation of common emerges, on the other hand, from the relationship or the affiliation implicated by this ‘with,’ (com) that demarcates the division of a munus, a task or a gift originally performed or offered by one individual to another. To communicate is the action of always, infinitely, seek the common in the community, not as a being (for example, a group or a gathering of subjects), but as a link, therefore, as a constitutive nothing, since such link does not have any material or constitutional substance, it is a pure breach in the language. The subject who is communicating is the same being as “in between,” hence, an interiority destined to an exteriority, the other” (Sodré, 2007, p. 21).
- 29.
It is interesting to point out how the notion of sharing assumed, since 2004, a new meaning with the advent of Facebook. From the Latin “compartiri,” the word is derived from the linking of the prefix “com” (with) with the words “partiri” (to divide, to distribute, to share) and “pars” (a part of, what is common to everybody). If for a long time the composition of the word “sharing” translated a wide array of practices related to the act of sharing something in a community, to share, today, has a new status and another semantic structure since it is associated not only with the materiality of groups but also with the crowd of millions of Internet users that, in an ethereal way, constitute and are constituted by, and through, digital networks. However, we cannot single-out Facebook as “the” catalyst of the current wave of sharing we are witnessing: less than being the cause, the act of sharing led by Facebook arises from the socio-technical transformations that occurred during the passage form the twentieth to the twenty-first centuries, consolidating the so-called Web 2.0. Even if it sounds sequential, the term Web 2.0 is related not to a new version or an update of the Internet, but to qualitative changes in both the way software programmers as well as Internet users used to employ digital platforms. It is within this context that emerges a different browsing architecture based on models such as blogs, social networks , online encyclopedias, websites that share videos, Apps, thus ending that rigid separation between producer and consumer of content, for the focus would no longer be on the isolated transmission, but on the participation and the collaboration. To Zanetti (2011), “it is only after the emergence of the so-called Web 2.0 and the advent of social networks that a discourse putting in evidence the idea of sharing becomes sanctioned, actually legitimizing such practice” (p. 65).
- 30.
In general, devices that possess an antenna will communicate to one another through the irradiation of radiofrequency waves. Wide as buildings or mountains, slow and with little energy when compared to microwave, terahertz, infrared, ultraviolet, X-rays, and gamma rays frequencies, radio waves are considered the least potent waves in the non-visible spectrum. Even so, they represent the most profitable and economically attractive segment of waves related to phone carriers, and are internationally regulated by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), related to the UN.
- 31.
A nanometer is equivalent to a billionth of a meter, that is, a meter divided by a billion.
- 32.
Besides being beautiful and full of life, Diana was also sweet, highly intelligent, wise, and was always smiling. Her dark brown eyes and her big Amazon hands will never be forgotten. Information about the episode that became international news can be found at: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/american-tourist-diannarosa-alduncin-delgado-dies-taking-selfie-on-cliff-in-greek-island-of-zakynthos-hxxjrqmg6 and the Instagram hashtag #livelikediana, accessed on 07/27/2020.
- 33.
A quick observation using the Satellite Viewer website makes it possible to interact in real time with each one of the 16,000 satellites, among which 3000 are still active, that orbit the planet: http://apps.agi.com/SatelliteViewer/, accessed on 07/27/2020.
- 34.
A complete and interactive map of the underwater cables that exist today can be found at: https://www.submarinecablemap.com/#/, accessed on 07/27/2020.
- 35.
Several studies are increasingly relating the use of social networks to the circuits of hormonal liberation of dopamine in the body. More information at: https://www.epochtimes.com.br/psicologa-analisa-vicio-facebook-midias-sociais/, accessed on 07/27/2020.
- 36.
Information available at: https://www.facebook.com/policy.php, accessed on 07/27/2020.
- 37.
Information available at: https://www.facebook.com/principles.php, accessed on 07/27/2020.
- 38.
According to Flusser, this is the idea behind the so-called contemporary cultural revolution (Flusser, 2008). A revolution that unites two distinct but convergent trends: the computation of punctual elements on surfaces, under the umbrella of the term “informatics,” and the transmission of punctual elements through the so-called telecommunication. Two complementary trends that, even though simultaneous, for a long time were considered isolated phenomena. Photography and telegraph, films and telephone: even though pictures could be telegraphed and films could be “telephonable,” something was missing—the idea that both could be technically fused, amalgamated. And it was only after the emergence of the duo video and cable systems that the click finally happened: at last, dots and rays, information and communication were coupled through computers under the term “telematics.”
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Mozzini-Alister, C. (2021). Mediation and the Process of Outer Expansion. In: Does Social Media Have Limits?. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74120-4_2
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