This article written by Pedro Garcia Campos was originally published in February 2015 on El Estado Mental, a Spanish magazine – find more about this very interesting cultural beacon here. The original version of this article can be found here. We would like to thank the author for granting permission to reprint this article and a special thanks goes to our editor-in-chief, Paul Turner.
Instant messaging systems are no longer just a useful tool, they have become a mirror. Our mobile phones are increasingly modifying the perception we have of ourselves and of our social circles.
How is the use of WhatsApp changing our lives?
It seems to me that with its features (double check, groups, emoticons, the various different types of relationships) we are becoming more and more people inhabiting every single instant. A type of beings whose lives are shaped by their fingertips.
This application has become a reflection of the information world as well of the social commentary, satire (imagine an immense meme factory) but also of our emotional relations. Similarly to other social networks, on WhatsApp we are forging a “public Self” whose expression will influence not only our self-perception but, most importantly, what other people can perceive about us. Today these messages and the instant gratification are creating narratives and a type of reality that 10 years ago would have been unthinkable.
So here we are. In Spanish society today the presence and usage of mobile phones and instant messaging have reached European record figures: 25 million people are using WhatsApp making 6% of its global revenue. This is a country where philosopher Ortega Y Gasset jokingly talked of “national hysteria” – meaning “national history”.
In Spain we are all “instantaneous”: we want it all and we want it now – like Jim Morrison in “Five to one” – and this rapidity embodies perfectly the philosophy behind these platforms or simply put: they somehow provide an incontrovertible proof of “realness”. Let’s look at the recent corruption scandals involving the Prime Minister or the popular case of a fraudster that have both been exposed thanks to conversations via WhatsApp – making it a perfect tool for journalistic work.
Let’s take a detour. Or to be more precise let’s peek through the keyhole. No image can grasp fully the shifting notions of ‘public’ and ‘private’ in this landscape for digital interaction. What meaning are these two concepts acquiring when using these external personality containers? Are we really the ones writing on WhatsApp or is it more a projection of our Self, a character that we have the chance to create and manipulate for few seconds, minutes or even days, before making it public?
25 years ago Evaristo – singer of the Basque punk rock band La Polla Records – encapsulated the change that was taking place in the ways and means to communicate: “In this oh so modern fucking world/No more sex drugs and roll/you can’t do it anymore/and if you want to have a shag/than you’d better bring a doctor”. Once the analog paradigm has been transcended everything becomes fast and efficient in this society of sanitised communication. Everything has to be so. According to “techno-fundamentalism” and the precepts of hegemonic giants like Google of Facebook, everything must be managed every millisecond – both in the material world and the emotional and personal relationships world. The aim is to provide services for an express economy of feelings by transforming our fast-paced busy lives into operating systems.
Personality containers
This seemingly banal depth of toing and froing expands from Facebook to Twitter and slowly reaches WhatsApp. Josep Pla (Catalan legendary cultural commentator) used to say “The deepest thing a man has it’s his skin”. A dermal layer that in this case is digital and changes constantly according to slogans and communication channels. The old media – TV, radio, printed press – with their closed sentences, fixed truths have given way to the Internet and to its ultimate expression: social networks, a Trojan horse for a reality more and more liquid and organic…a sort of blurred photograph obtained with hyper-precise algorithms. What with the notion of authenticity then? Public social networks like Facebook or Twitter, and the private ones like WhatsApp or Line are becoming the total sum of projections and individual holograms. What’s more in these “places” we are born, we grow up and eventually pass away – some even provide a biography of our “life”. In this world the romantic difference between public Self and private Self is diluting into the tension between “analog self” and “digital Self” where technology becomes a constitutive element of the human being, therefore social networks are showing the hegemonic narrative of our lives. In other words: what comes from our fingertip activity ends up giving shape to a character that we cannot escape.
Michel Foucault in his seminar “Technologies of the Self” described a reconfiguration of the links between sexuality, bodies, and power through the oppositional couple of “care of the self” vs “know thyself” (the Delphi oracle motto). He also listed four types of technology, each “representing a matrix of practical reason”, that could be seen as pathways to self-care and self-knowledge. 1) Production technologies “which allow to produce, transform or manipulate things” and I would dare compare to social network and public biographies of the Self; 2) Technologies of the sign system “which allow to use signs, meaning, symbols” that, in my humble opinion, are akin to emoticons 3) Power technologies which according to Foucault “determine the conduct of individuals, submitting them to a specific domain or to particular aims…and this is obtained by objectifying the subject. – this may be similar to group of friends-contacts or followers 4) Technologies of the Self “that allow individuals to operate changes on one’s body, soul, thoughts, behaviour, or any other form of the Self, in order to have a transformation to attain a state of happiness, purity, wisdom or immortality”. This last type could be compared to the spectacular aspect of networks and the online storage of messages and conversations we had in the past – that can now be looked up in every moment – as sort of “cloud of memories” like the ones managed by the characters of the British miniseries Black Mirror.
In an essay (“On practice, institutions and socialisation”) David Alvarez considers these concepts of technologies “very similar to daily practices going on today in social networks where we verbalize our day-to-day activities and share them with our social circle”. As Alvarez highlighted “it is an interesting coincidence that Foucault spoke about “moods” an element that is a default feature in many social networks. Just like in WhatsApp.
Let’s focus on type number 2) technologies of the sign system – or what we call emoticons in WhatsApp. Codification and symbology are used throughout all our lives and limit our emotions and their communication to an increasingly limited sphere where urgency is the predominant aspect. An emoticon substitutes an emotion not simply with a face or a gesture or a non-verbal yet communicative symbol, but first and foremost it substitutes a word. Owen Churches, researcher and Professor of Psychology at the Flinders University in Australia has devoted several years to investigate the use of faces and symbols to express moods and emotional syntagms. Can we consider emoticons a limited set of emotions that reduce our freedom of expression and communication? According to Churches “every language is a closed system and emoticons are a sub-section of this system that belongs to the written language used by human beings for more than 5.000 years. If we want to know more about it…it is necessary to experiment comparing not simply the J and the L with smiling and sad faces but also with words. Nevertheless, like with every language, it is important to highlight the existence of a poetic possibility: little changes that can produce new meanings”.
An altar made of pixels
Little changes are taking place faster and faster. Churches adds “A single day it’s not enough to keep track and record the enormous amount of emoticons created every single day. My conclusion is that this issue is felt to be problematic, then the only solution is to use emoticons creatively.” According to Churches, it is partly natural that we use the yellow faces to sum up our intentions. Somehow it was “inevitable”: “I think there is sufficient evidence to hypothesize that written language has modified our brain in the last 5 millennia and this is partly responsible for the predominance of our left hemisphere (which presides to processing languages and other closed systems) over the right one, which presides over contemplating the world and its complexity and uniqueness.”
Aside from the hypothesis and current challenges, Churches is been able to map and analyse reaction and stimuli to specific areas of the brain when exposed to different emoticons and real faces. The findings were quite surprising “Emoticons and faces are obviously very different things, so there will be different reactions to different stimuli, but there is a specific part of the brain – the superior temporal lobe – that reacts in the same way to both. This is the area that gets activated when facial recognition is required and this equivalence is important.”
A higher speed requires more conceptualization and symbolization. With our fingertips as a symbolic representation of ‘contact’ on one side, and the ‘instantaneity’ as a universal element on the other, we have a duality that creates an ocean of elements emerging in real time as we communicate digitally. The world becomes global: the local turns to global which in turns becomes local…and so on. As a result, distances are more relative depending on factors like information transport, the growth of consciousness and the whims of one’s feelings.
Features like missed call and the anxieties that come with it, or the emoticons as a placebo for the emotional layers, are setting the tone of many of our relationships. A sort of fast-mood economy that is slowly and gently developing alongside the current crisis.
WhatsApp groups can be seen a pathological aspect of relationships in a given community: the collective control and the passage of the Self into the public domain coupled with his development in the public sphere are being influenced by “askesis” the perception of the Self in its becoming – and so we’re back to Foucault. A “Self” caught in the process of becoming itself – a Self that can be looked at in the “cloud – world”. A Self as friend, work colleague, lover, partner, old friend etc…We can list endless examples of mutant identities and types of groups on this application. From police detectives sharing information and latest crucial news from their informers, to criminals using jargon and specific codes to avoid detention and plan robberies or assaults; there are activists organizing protests or events; drug dealers and their customers; car drivers sharing information on how to avoid Spanish police speed test or roadblocks; and start-ups and freelancers sharing work documents and expanding their contacts via WhatsApp.
What these groups could be hiding is a PANOPTICON mechanism made of pixels: a place where no guard is needed because the sum of all the private gazes constitutes a vigilant and normalizing collectivity that extends to all the nooks and crannies of our modern society. This is reflected by the new symbol-driven generation which is establishing the very basis of control….in a way this is similar the two types of domestic altars in the Indochinese society of South Eastern Asia. One is the Buddhist altar, the other one is the spirits altar. If you are successful both need to be maintained and receive offers otherwise people would think of you as ungrateful of the spiritual guidance. Nevertheless, if things go bad in your life, you have the right to neglect the spiritual altar and leave it empty. No flowers, no incense sticks, and no perfumed water. A bit like a WhatsApp with no pending friend messages; no monkeys covering their ears or rockets exploding in a confetti rainbow.
Kultur Garden 