Thursday, June 03, 2021

What Zoom Removes

Guest post by C. Thi Nguyen

The paradox of Zoom is: it should make life easy, but it can also make life really, really hard.

My time teaching on Zoom basically broke me. It left me spiritless, drained, miserable. One standard explanation is that the physical and cognitive experience of Zoom is exhausting in and of itself — that Zoom screws with all these minutae of eye contact and bodily signaling. But I’ve started to suspect that the effects of Zoom extend far beyond the experience of actually being on Zoom. Zoom re-orders your entire life.

Halfway through my first Zoom teaching term, I was absolutely falling apart. I slowly realized that, for me, a big part of it was that Zoom had eliminated by commute. Which is strange, because I thought I hated my commute. But my commute had also been one of the few totally isolated parts of my day. I was sealed off from other people and from other demands — from my email, from my phone, from my children. My car commute was enforced non-productive time. And it was non-negotiable. In work-from-home pandemic life, you can try to tell yourself that you should go for a walk or something every day. But when push comes to shove, you can always give up that walk. The commute cannot be bargained with.

Kelsey Piper puts it this way: sometimes, a tiny change in your routine can throw everything out of whack. You didn’t realize that the little change you made took out a load-bearing support for your whole emotional infrastructure. You didn’t realize that your walk to lunch was your only bit of sunshine and fresh air — and how much you needed those moments to unclench. You didn’t realize that this yoga class imposed an specific schedule into your day, or that this new emailing app would mean getting work emails on your phone 24/7. And so you change one little thing, and then everything goes haywire.

Albert Borgmann, the philosopher of technology (and one of Heidegger’s last students), talks about a similar effect, writ large. He’s worried about what a culture might unthinkingly eliminate, in the march of technology. What happens when a society takes out one of its load-bearing supports?

According to Borgmann, there are two basic kinds of human artifacts: things and devices. Things are embedded in a complex network of activity and socialization. His favorite example: a wood-burning stove. Using a wood-burning stove drags you into a complex and textured form of life. You have to acquire the wood. This means going out to chop it yourself, or talking with somebody who will chop it for you. You have to stack the wood. You have to manage the fire — watching it, stirring it, adding fuel to it. And a wood-burning stove creates a particular social world. It create a center for home life, says Borgmann — a social focal point. There is a warm spot where people congregate, and a periphery to where people can retreat. The wood-stove drags with it an entire pattern of life — of skill, of involvement, of attention to the world, of a particular embedded in a social web.

Compare a wood-burning stove with central heating. Central heating is a device. Central heating makes heat appear invisibly and effortlessly. It appears out of nowhere, evenly distributed. You don’t have to fuss with anything, or know anything about how the heat was made. You don’t have to exercise any sort of skill. The method of production drops out of sight.

Says Borgmann:

We have seen that a thing such as a fireplace provides warmth, but it inevitably provides those many other elements that compose the world of the fireplace. We are inclined to think of these additional elements as burdensome, and they were undoubtedly often so experienced. A device such as a central heating plant procures mere warmth and disburdens us of all other elements. They are taken over by the machinery of the device. The machinery makes no demands on our skill, strength, or attention, and it is less demanding the less it makes its presence felt.

The progress of technology, says Borgmann, is driving us further into what he calls “the device paradigm”. The point of a device lies solely in its output — what he calls its commodity. The commodity of central heating is warmth. The commodity of a car is transportation. And unlike a thing, a device gives its users that commodity disconnected from the process of its creation. Frozen food lets you have a meal without cooking it for yourself. Central heating lets you have warmth without fussing around with a wood stove. A device is a kind of shortcut to its commodity. And if we think that all we really want is that commodity — then we want the device to hide from us all the mechanisms by which it creates those commodities. We want the process shoved out of sight, excised from our lives. So we make better devices, that give us faster access to what we think we want. They are better, from our perspective, because they further disentangle the commodity from all these other burdensome elements.

Of course, the key is that we only think these other elements are burdensome. But these burdensome elements also drive us into the complex world, says Borgmann. They drive us into social relationships, into activity, into a rich and sensuous experience of the detailed world. Devices divest us of that. They give us only the thing that we thought we had wanted. But that’s good only if we know exactly what’s good for us.

In graduate school, as I was losing myself to stress, I became temporarily obsessed with fishing. I fantasized about it, I craved it, and I went every weekend I could. I was also terrible at it. I caught an embarrassingly small number of fish, in my years of fishing. Eventually I gave it up as another failed hobby. Without it, I could devote so many more of my hours to my research.

Of course, once I eliminated fishing, my mental and emotional state started to deteriorate, and fast. Here was my mistake: I had thought that the point of fishing was to catch some fish. But, in reality, it was not. The process of fishing was one that forced me out of my tiny apartment, out of the library, away from books and computers. It made me suffer through LA traffic (while listening to music). It made me search through forgotten mountain paths for an unfished stream. It made me stand in a river and do nothing but stare at moving water for hours on end. It gave me days that were so full of fussy and physical detail that I had to stop thinking about philosophy completely. And then I got rid of it, because I didn’t actually understand what I was getting out of it. Fishing wasn’t just about fish. It was a pattern of a whole life, dragged in by the attempt to catch a little fish.

Zoom, I want to suggest, is a device. It is a device for communication. And my point here isn’t that Zoom is somehow “fake” communication, or that virtual meetings aren’t real. It’s that Zoom gets rid of all the other stuff that surrounds a communicative encounter. It makes communication frictionless. It delivers communication as a commodity. Zoom offers a whole new basic pattern and rhythm for a life, by divesting us of that burdensome friction. Without Zoom, you had to commute to school or work. You had to listen to your stupid podcasts and your music. You had to walk around and run into people, to negotiate with them, to chat aimlessly with them, to figure out how to co-occupy physical spaces with them. Before the Zoom Era, I had to fly to conferences, which involved this whole weird complex and deeply annoying endeavor that took me out of my habit, out of my standard rituals. Flying pushed me into strange parts of the world where I had to re-orient myself, to figure out how to be in a space that wasn’t my own. With Zoom, I can go to an unlimited number of international conferences effortlessly. But also, I never leave the habitual patterns of my home life.

Of course, Zoom also brings enormous benefits. So does every device. In my academic life, it’s apparent: Zoom makes it easier for people without travel funding to attend conferences, for students with complex childcare obligations to attend classes. Dishwashers ease the burden of domestic labor. And I’m certainly not giving up my dishwasher or my motorized transport, and the ease and accessibility that Zoom offers is basically irresistible.

But Borgmann gives us a reason, at least, to be cautious with a device, to watch carefully how it reshapes our lives. A lot of times, the value of a thing in our lives is not just what it presents, on its face, as its function. So much of the time, the beauty of an activity is in the process of doing it, and not the simple output. But it’s easy to forget. Things spread their tendrils through our lives, they reshape our interactions and procedures in a thousand countless ways. Devices like Zoom — efficient, frictionless little miracles — give us what we think we want, but they also cut off all those tendrils. And sometimes there was value in that friction, too.

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[image source]

16 comments:

me said...

Great post! For me, the biggest of technological changes to work predates the pandemic (though was one again made worse by the pandemic). It was the advent of online journals and books. When I was an undergraduate, most journal articles still weren't online, then they slowly became digitised. The same goes for books. It is very efficient and convenient. A lot of information is easily available. I don't even have to get up from my desk, walk down to the library whatever the weather, traipse around the shelves, bump into and chat with a colleague, get a coffee on the way back.

Chris McVey said...

Power Failure by Borgmann remains to this day probably the most personally impactful book I have ever read (and it had absolutely nothing to do with the theological message it is pushing). Building on what you have already said, I particularly love the concept of making a distinction between trouble, discomfort, and annoyances that we should reject vs accept in principle.

Things like people dying from diseases we can potentially cure, people starving in the world, people dying in automobile accidents, these are things we should reject in principle and should work at eradicating if possible. Things like going through the trouble of making a meal from scratch instead of ordering in, or as you point out, stoking a fire rather than use central heating or commuting to work instead of telecommuting, well, these are troubles that we should possibly accept in principle because they enrich us in some way.

Technological culture is in the business of eradicating trouble, but it doesn't make a distinction between trouble we really should eradicate and trouble that we really shouldn't. It's sad, really. Since I read that book many years ago I have tried to do things "the hard way" as often as it makes sense. I really feel like it has made me a better and much happier person.

All of that being said, I have to admit I have sort of thrived in the pandemic world and the move to Zoom and online meetings. Just goes to show you that Borgmann's recipe is not a one size fits all!

Julia Sebastien said...

Brilliant--from a media and psychology student, thank you for putting all this into words. They say that 80% of the most efficient work we do takes place in 20% of our working time, and Zoom positions itself to be exactly that; the 20% of the time for which we are 100% "on" and engaged. Except without fully understanding what we are entering into, we schedule hour after hour of these back to back "100%" engaged and solution-oriented meetings, and conferences, oblivious to the padding that was once there; in commodifying communication as a "device", we have replaced our upholstered couches with metal fold-up chairs.

Animal Symbolicum said...

I think this is a really skillful summary of the Borgmannian vision.

You say your point isn't that Zoom is somehow "fake" communication. I'm not sure if you mean that you're setting aside this point, even though it could be made using the Borgmannian ideas you've outlined, or if you mean that the point can't be or shouldn't be made using the Borgmannian ideas you've outlined. Regardless, I'm going to float something you don't propose: that the device paradigm applied to Zoom does reveal such communication to be an attenuated version of the communication it's meant to replace. I'm not sure I'm willing to assert this, but I think it's an idea worth exploring.

The device has a two-part structure: (1) the commodity, which is a valued something-or-other that has been dis-embedded from the context in which we originally and naturally bring it forth and (2) the machinery, which enables or even constitutes the commodity's dis-embedding. But not only does the machinery assume the task of delivering the valued something-or-other. As Borgmann often emphasizes, it transforms the valued something-or-other into something manufacturable, salable, exchangeable, disposable, controllable, measurable — a commodity. Compared to the embedded something-or-other, and like anything that has a price, the commodified something-or-other, according to Borgmann, invites an ethically relevant difference in our comportment toward it. Our relationship to a commodity becomes one of owning, treating, and managing; to a non-commodity, one of cherishing, respecting, being thankful.

Commodifying communication risks engendering the former attitudes toward communication (and, by extension, toward those other subjectivities with whom one communicates). (Zoom is only the most recent manifestation of the same long-running tendency to commodify communication. Borgmann's idea, after all, is that technology has a "numbing sameness." Central heating, microwaveable food, Cool Whip, mobile devices — they all exhibit the same pattern, no matter how many ways companies fiddle with their designs.)

I can't help calling to mind stories in which a loved one waits a long time to receive a brief letter from a beloved. How meaningful, how cherished that letter is! How full, how alive with the beloved's personality those words are!

Howard B said...

Interesting. Have to think through further.
First impressions: there is a happy medium between things and devices; we wouldn't desire life in the stone age or as Scythian hordes whose home they actively invent as they roam the land
How would this impact Maslow's hierarchy of needs? Perhaps meeting the lower needs with devices takes detracts from higher needs necessary for in a way self actualization or full humanness.
Would you include word processing as doing the same wrecking job on thinking?

Animal Symbolicum said...

Howard B:

(1) Borgmann's not evincing a nostalgia for a pre-technological age; it's almost trivial to say that no one now desires a return to the stone age. Indeed, one way of putting Borgmann's point is to say that technology is a medium, sort of like the way water is to fish. There's no simply getting rid of it; we don't even know what that would look like, since a post-technological society would be a radically different dispensation from a pre-technological one, even if neither is structured by the technological paradigm. We live *in* technology, so the idea is to figure out how to live *with* it, and Borgmann's reasoned recommendation is to keep it from encroaching fully on your life, to deliberately choose to arrange things so that there are some non-technological spaces in your life. (Perhaps this is what you mean by "happy medium.")

(2) In explaining what a device is, what a thing is, and what the differences between them are — that is, by contrasting fairly clear examples of each (central heating vs. the hearth, recorded music vs. live music, Cool Whip vs. whipped cream) — Borgmann is trying to get you to recognize patterns you can refer to in investigating your own life and thinking about the extent to which it's surrounded by devices and by things. You can't embark on this reflective and ultimately practical exercise unless you have a clear idea of what a device is and what a thing is. The patterns Borgmann describes are tools for comparison. So "in-between" cases are no threat to his claim. Take for example meal delivery services like Blue Apron or Hello Fresh, which deliver ingredients and recipes to you while you do the cooking yourself. In what respects are these like devices? In what respects are they like things? Borgmann has given you the resources to ask and answer these questions for yourself, and he doesn't claim that meal deliveries have to fully fit one pattern or the other.

Howard B said...

Thank you animal symbolicum, so to speak in religious terms: Borgmann is lending us tools to preserve our souls in a world of not quite temptations, but encroaching and threatening conveniences. Your point clarifies the issue for me. Thank you

Unknown said...

It's going to take a lot of work to counter the tsunami of gaslighting we are about to experience about the success of online teaching. If you were going to write a prequel to 1984, this would be a good start.

FWIW...I like the analysis, but I don't think it goes far enough. Digital instruction commodifies classroom communication because it turns the energy and creativity teachers and students possess when they interact together in emergent classrooms and, quite literally, turns it into a commodity that generates profits for the IT sector. If I feel exhausted after a year of school on line--and I assure you I do--it is because companies are making money by literally sucking the life out of me.

Animal Symbolicum said...

Howard B:

Yes, I think that would be a way of getting at the idea, and, in light of Borgmann's religiosity, quite appropriate. Borgmann's ideas are imbued with a metaphysical texture not fully recovered by the original post (which is by no means a critique of the original post — I, for one, find it expertly faithful to Borgmann's vision, and Nguyen's purposes are distinctively his, so his map of the territory will look different from mine).

One thing Borgmann argues is that when we make room for anti-technological things (that's how I should've put it originally, rather than "non-technological"), we encounter a reality that is clear and coherent but inexhaustible, unmeasurable, uncontrollable, and marked by contingency and thus the opportunity for grace and thankfulness — that is, a world. When we engage with technological devices, we encounter a reality that fractures the more we look into it and that refers us from one measurable phenomenon to the next, until we reach what can only be thought of now as mere resource. To put it hyperbolically but, I hope, illuminatingly: in engaging with things, we encounter a reality that appears to us more as a "Thou" than an "It," but in using devices, we encounter a reality that appears to us more as an "It" than a "Thou."

Siddharth said...

This is a very nice post, thanks!

I first became aware of these kinds of ideas by a very readable and insightful blogpost by Sarah Perry called A Bad Carver, which argued that technology is carves our lives badly, eliminating the ways in which things naturally might go together.

I'm glad to be made aware of Borgmann and his insights on these matters.

Siddharth said...

Sorry, I had the wrong link to the Sarah Perry essay in my previous comment. Here's the correct one:

https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2016/11/03/a-bad-carver/

Arnold said...

Today in philosophy can analytics of the influence of tech-knowledge be understood with our being here...
...our origins tell us...we were using tech-knowledge when we used a stick to spear a fish...

Has are being here changed since then, no it hasn't, we are still here and there, but we mistake our experience as multi in nature...
...being here experience is singular in nature...that we are learning (maybe) to see it...

As a grandfather we need to learn to be here...and to slowly learn to be here (now) again and again...That we share the consciousness of our planet...

Anonymous said...

Totally agree, Arnold. Your assessment of the history and the challenges of tech-knowledge is spot-on.

Arnold said...

While waiting for Eric...
...the New York Times ask "How To Think Outside The Brain", an essay by a Annie Paul...

A good read but, the essay is unable to distinguish or relate our brain is for outer and inner thinking...
... and herein therein lies philosophy's absurd confusion about dualism and so much more in life...

My view as a old grand parent...teach/educate children about inner and outer living...
...that we learn to be quite more and listen, when ever we can...

C.K. said...

Prof. Nguyen, thank you for this post, which I found via your website. I'm a grad student researching the intersection of theology and philosophy of games, and I wanted to offer some thoughts that might expand the philosophical strategy space around the (valid, relevant) topics you brought up.

"Techno-personalism"

For Zoom, it's true that the mediating screen and the banality of software UI frame everything in an impersonal glow. It feels like it takes the warm, personal, human factor out of interaction. I see this as a challenge akin to the way an unremarkable environment in an adventure game makes the player click on everything to find a new part of the game.

At some point, every little bit of the Zoom software took human thought and intention to come to be -- someone had to design it, create the texture file, write the code, test it, write documentation, etc. It’s like there are invisible people hand-carrying the percepts of your voice and face to someone else, but separated from you in space and time. Just like we might look at a wood-burning stove and appreciate that a blacksmith created it for our use, we can look at software like Zoom and see it as a special medium for other thinking, feeling people to facilitate our desires. Devices still imply and generate relationships in and of themselves; it just takes a little more effort to feel it.

Side note: while the sensuality and detail of using really well-designed software are undoubtedly different from fishing in a beautiful forest, I see them more as different points on a larger spectrum of sensual richness than a pure binary. Lamps in video games use real electricity.

Religion and emotional infrastructure

It is very easy for busy humans to forget or de-prioritize that special, isolated, non-productive time we need to regenerate sanity. I think one of the great functions of religion or spiritual practice is enshrining time for contemplation. We know that meditation is good for us and we should do it, but it can take a forcing function (like a commute) to bake it into our lives on a regular basis. The problem is that a pandemic can disrupt it; it can make sense to move the locus of that forcing function to something that is not affected by the external world, i.e. "I do it because this is my time with God." This, of course, requires a whole worldview that may seem at odds with society and sense perception, but perhaps it's not a bad tradeoff if you can swing it.

Copleston wrote of Socrates' development of a universal, rational ethic: "Such an ethic is indeed insufficient, since the Natural Law cannot acquire a morally binding force, obligatory in conscience … unless it has a metaphysical basis and is grounded in a transcendental Source, God, Whose Will for man is expressed in the Natural Law; but, although insufficient, it enshrines a most important and valuable truth which is essential to the development of a rational moral philosophy." I think this observation applies to the question of your commute's true benefits and ways that we as humans deal with the needs of our nature.

C.K. said...

Addendum: I just read an excellent New Yorker article called "A Coder Considers the Waning Days of the Craft" and so I'd like to update the point about "techno-personalism." With Chat-GPT, less and less code is being written by human beings, and so the model of the software engineer toiling at his keyboard like the blacksmith at her anvil is becoming obsolete. However, this does not mean that technological advancements must inexorably lead to an impersonal world. The interesting thing about the article is the writer says that coding with Chat-GPT is more like having a conversation than wrestling with code alone. So, I think the best way to approach things, from the standpoint of preserving the personal sense of the world to maintain human sanity, is to think of AI as a helpful person. Or if not a person in the full, human sense, then maybe something like a pet dog that writes computer programs instead of fetching a ball. The point is to see the relationship as reciprocal -- I feed and walk my dog, and my dog plays with me and provides furry affection, and we are bound together through the mutual acknowledgement of our value to each other. Does AI actually feel the same things (towards me) as my dog does? No, but I don't think that's really important. None of us really knows how anyone else feels, but we somehow derive the satisfaction of contacting a thinking, sentient being from interactions regardless. And in the event that AI does become sentient, then we'll be at least emotionally prepared.