Digital Reality

The Body and Digital Technologies

Melanie Chan

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781501341069
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Estudios de medios

As contemporary scholars, journalists, and commentators have indicated, mobile digital devices promote a constant shift of attention between the world around us and the stimulations afforded by screen-based interfaces. Investigating these uniquely contemporary hybrid interactions, Melanie Chan posits that while digital technologies are part of a long and historic trajectory, they nonetheless may instigate new forms of corporeal practices and experiences. How might continuous engagement with mobile devices and associated software impact our perception of sensory embodied experience? Drawing upon existing scholarship around mobile media and new media, Digital Reality explores digital technologies as phenomena (observable items such as such as smart-phones, handsets, consoles, head-mounted displays and goggles) in the light of theories of reality and corporeality. In so doing, the book highlights the qualitative dimensions of our sense of aliveness, movement, and interaction within a range of environments (virtual, real, or hybrid). Ultimately, the book illuminates how our sense of shared, objective reality changes due to hybrid forms of reality.

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Phenomenological explorations of digital reality

Exploring phenomena

This chapter explores digital technologies as phenomena that can be observed and brought into question. Additionally, the chapter provides an introductory discussion to perception and the bodily dimensions to digital technologies. The term ‘phenomenon’ means to reveal, manifest and bring to light, while logos refers to reason, judgement and discourse. Explicating these meanings, Heidegger states that logos refers to making manifest ‘what is being talked about in discourse’ (2010: 30), while ‘phenomenology means … to let what shows itself be seen from itself’ (2010: 32). Although Heidegger’s explication may sound complicated, what it means in practical terms is exploring how the world appears to us, through sensory perception. The term ‘phenomena’ refers to the things that we perceive in the world such as smartphones, screens, consoles, hand-held controllers, printers, self-tracking devices and head-mounted displays. From a phenomenological perspective, we experience a smartphone as an appearance to our senses. For instance, we may sense the weight of the smartphone in our hands or feel the smoothness of the screen as we swipe our fingers and thumbs across it.

The work of design researcher Donald A. Norman can help illuminate our sensory encounters with objects such as smartphones and how we use them. Norman states that ‘the term affordance refers to the perceived and actual properties that determine just how the thing could possibly be used’ (1988: 9). For example, wood is a material that provides solid support, glass is for seeing through and flat surfaces are for writing on. When affordances are well thought out, we know what to do with a device without using a manual. When considering the smartphone, it has a smooth glass display and a flat surface for displaying texts and imagery. We may also hear and respond to the noises emitted from the smartphone such as various ringtones or sonic alerts. Norman provides a useful definition of feedback as ‘sending back to the user information about what action has actually been done’ (1998: 27). Therefore, the noises, clicks or vibration we sense when using a smartphone tells us that an action has taken place. We might also have a range of assumptions about smartphones, such as how useful they are or about the companies that make them. Furthermore, the linguistic terms ‘smart’ and ‘phone’ bring to mind a range of meanings about technology, intelligence, development, efficiency and verbal communication.

Phenomenology can be regarded as a philosophical approach and research practice that involves suspending some of our assumptions about digital technologies. In this way, phenomenological inquiry can bring digital technologies to the forefront of our awareness, rather than allowing our assumptions about them to be taken for granted.

There is an abundance of scholarship that has opened new insights into digital technologies using various theoretical and methodological approaches. For instance, there are studies that explore the political, economic and sociological aspects of digital technologies such as Castells (2000), Couldry (2012), Athique (2013), Keen (2012; 2015), Lanier (2013, 2018) and Chan (2014), while other scholars have also approached digital technologies via non-representational theory including Thrift (2005) and Moores (2014, 2015). Phenomenological, ethnographic and spatial approaches to digital technologies include the work of Richardson (2011; 2012), Hjorth (2010), Pink (2011; 2016) and Wilken (2011). Additionally, David Parisi and Jason Archer (2017) call for the development of haptic media studies to explore the role touch plays in using and apprehending haptic interfaces such as touchscreens, hand-held controllers and vibration feedback systems. Furthermore, Parisi and Archer challenge the notion that touch resists mediation. Instead, their work indicates that touch is multifaceted involving pressure, vibration, rhythm and movement. Parisi and Archer state that they

take touch not to be a purely biological nor phenomenological category, but rather – like aurality and visuality – a discursively constructed and continually renegotiated category that possesses few inherent and intractable characteristics. (2017: 1527)

This existing corpus of knowledge usefully highlights the connections between social institutions, political and economic power and digital technologies. Moreover, this scholarship provides insight into how different social groups engage with digital technologies.

Phenomenology also helps illuminate the relationships between the body and digital technologies, in the context of lived experience. From a phenomenological perspective, the term ‘lived experience’ refers to the directness and immediacy of experience. Explaining this aspect of phenomenology, Max Van Manen (2016) says erlebnis is a German word that has been translated into English as lived experience. However, Van Manen explains that lived experience does not fully capture the meaning of erlebnis. It stems from the Latin experiential, which refers to an experiment or trial. By contrast, erlebnis relates to the German root word leben, to live. Therefore, Van Manen states that ‘the verb erleben literally means “living through something”’ (2016: 39). In this chapter, erlebnis (living through something) provides a helpful way of exploring our bodily interplay with digital technologies.

It appears that some scholarship about digital technologies is inspired by phenomenology but often downplays the historical dimensions of this philosophical approach. Admittedly, scholars such as Jacques Derrida (1973), Didier Franck (2014), Janet Donohoe (2016) and Dan Zahavi (2017, 2002) have conducted in-depth studies of the development of phenomenology through examining the work of Husserl. However, Husserl’s phenomenological framework does not appear to be a staple feature of studies about digital technologies within the field of media and communication studies. Therefore, by outlining Husserl’s work (1970, 1999, 2003, 2014), this chapter aims to illuminate our bodily interplay with digital technologies.

There is no single model, or unified approach, within phenomenology; rather various scholars such as Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty have built upon and challenged Husserl’s ideas. Husserl (2014 (1913)) contends that his philosophical framework provides a methodology involving a series of practices and processes of perceiving the world rather than an abstract set of theories or rules to be followed. Instead, encountering and reflecting on the intersubjective aspects of existence is a key aspect of phenomenology (Van Manen, 2016). Although there are differences between Husserl’s approach and that of later scholars, there are some commonalities between them. These commonalities include being open and receptive to the world, reflecting on our experiences and questioning our assumptions, all of which are central to exploring our bodily interplay with digital technologies.

Questioning our assumptions is important because we are often so caught up in using digital technologies that we may take our interplay with them for granted. Mostly, we use digital technologies such as smartphones and tablet devices for practical purposes, that is, finding information or sending messages, rather than reflecting on our bodily interplay with them. However, a central idea in Husserl’s work is that we do not encounter phenomena as things-in-themselves. Rather Husserl asserts that our encounters with things in the world are intersected by language and conceptual modes of thinking. For example, the generic word ‘computer’ provides a linguistic label for a range of different devices (with different screen sizes, processing speeds and so forth). We often filter our experience of a particular device by using the linguistic label, computer, as a conceptual category. As such we overlook a device as a thing-in-itself; instead, it becomes part of a category of objects known as computers. Of course, placing objects into categories such as computers, screens and smartphones has practical benefits since it provides conceptual shortcuts to help us make sense of the world. Yet placing objects in categories changes our experience and understanding of them. We also create personal stories about computers, such as where we bought our computer, how much it cost and what images and files we store on it. Through this process of personalization, the computer is transformed from a generic category of objects into a personal possession. While we generically classify computers or tell personal narratives about them, we rarely experience a computer as a thing-in-itself. This is because we cannot speak or write about the computer as a thing-in-itself without naming or categorizing the computer in some way.

Despite the numerous benefits that can be gained from Husserl’s argument and methods, there are challenges arising from them. Husserl’s emphasis on suspending assumptions about reality to get closer to things-in-themselves offers a way of unpacking the processes involved in perception and making sense of phenomena. Yet, according to scholars such as Merleau-Ponty (1998) and Van Manen (2016), perceiving things-in-themselves is extremely difficult. So rather than attempting to produce a grand-scale study of the ultimate foundation of phenomenology, or the intricacies surrounding the development of Husserl’s work, this chapter has more modest aims. By exploring things-in-themselves, this chapter highlights how we make sense of our bodily interplay with digital technologies through social and cultural mechanisms (such as language and categorization). To begin this phenomenological exploration, the following brief biographical sketch of Husserl contextualizes his philosophical framework and provides a springboard for further discussion.

Edmund Husserl (1859–1938)

Husserl is considered to be the founder of phenomenology (Hammond, Haworth and Keat, 1991). His work developed from initial studies in arithmetic to studies focusing on suspending assumptions about consciousness, perception and reality. Husserl’s work may appear esoteric because he uses complex language to outline his ideas, using terms such as ‘transcendence’ and ‘reduction’ in ways that go beyond their common usage. Janet Donohoe’s (2016) study of Husserl’s published and unpublished material indicates that his early work concerns the fully developed ego (or subject). This fully developed ego or subject refers to our sense of self, our identity. However, according to Donohoe, Husserl’s later work shows how our sense of self is a historical, social and cultural construction. As his work matured, Husserl claimed that dividing the world into subjects and objects creates an illusory aspect to our habitual perception of the world. For instance, our perception of the world involves making distinctions between human subjects (animate beings) and inanimate objects such as computers, tablets and smartphones.

Husserl’s work culminated in The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (1970 (1936)). In this later work, Husserl asserts that a crisis has arisen in European civilization due to an emphasis on scientific, rational objectivity as the primary way of explaining the world. It is important to place the development of Husserl’s work on The Crisis in the historical, social and cultural context in which it was produced. Husserl was a German Jew, and from 1934 to 1936, he was researching and teaching in extremely difficult circumstances. For example, he was forbidden to lecture in public or teach in Germany, so he lectured in Vienna and Prague. Furthermore, when Husserl was writing The Crisis, the ways in which objective scientific views of the world can be taken to extremes were starkly apparent in the ‘death factories’ of Auschwitz, Dachau and Treblinka (Abram, 1997).

Cartesian Meditations

In 1929, Husserl gave a series of lectures in Paris which were subsequently translated and published in French as Car tesian Meditations (Moran, 2002). Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations provides a good starting point for discussing his ideas since it raises a series of questions about phenomena, as things that can be observed, as well as the processes and practices surrounding them. In Cartesian Meditations (1999 (1931)), Husserl discusses Descartes’s method of systematically examining experiences of the world to cast away what is doubtful. By casting away what was doubtful, Descartes attempted to arrive at an absolute ground for knowledge. After systemic examination, Descartes postulated that he knew without a doubt that he was thinking. Consequently, Descartes founded his philosophical framework upon the cogito (thought and the mind). He also created divisions between the immaterial mind and the material body. As such, Descartes contended that the mind is capable of rational thought, whereas the body is more closely linked to sensory perception, which is unreliable since our senses can be fooled.

Husserl’s philosophical model follows in the wake of Descartes’s systematic examination of what can be known and what is doubtful. Husserl claims his philosophical method can be understood as a form of wissenschaft, which is a German word referring ‘to any systematic, rational form of enquiry with rigorous and objective … procedures of validation’ (Hammond, Haworth and Keat, 1991: 15). By using the term wissenschaft, Husserl shows that there is a sense of order to his methodological investigations and they make sense through a process of ‘inter-subjective validation’ (Hammond, Haworth and Keat, 1991: 15). Indeed, the central purpose of Husserl’s systematic investigations of phenomena was to provide a firm foundation for phenomenology as a philosophical model to illuminate our knowledge of the world (Idhe, 2009).

Husserl’s philosophical quest to find a firm foundation for philosophy involved exploring consciousness, reality and our experience of phenomena. According to Husserl, we can be sure that we are having an experience (even though this means that we have subsequent doubts about what was experienced). For instance, I know I am experiencing letters appearing on screen as I type these words. Using a laptop computer, keyboard and typing are all familiar habitual experiences which are integrated into my daily life. Yet my habitual experiences of using laptops, keyboards and typing are sociocultural and have been learnt. However, Husserl claims that it is possible to go beyond, or above, the level of our everyday (largely unreflective) experiences of the world. He also contends that by going beyond our habitual ways of perceiving the world, it is possible to reflect upon how meaning and knowledge are produced.

Zahavi’s (2017, 2002) thorough study of Husserl’s published and posthumous material indicates that the conception of transcendental consciousness has largely been misunderstood. Zahavi suggests that Husserl’s discussion of transcendental consciousness is not otherworldly; rather it concerns the ways in which our experience of the world is intersubjective. According to Zahavi, Husserl’s work recognizes that intersubjectivity is part of the constitution of objectivity since ‘our comprehension of something as objective is dependent upon our interaction with others’ (Zahavi, 2017: 128). Objectivity is based on some shared sense of reality of t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Phenomenological explorations of digital reality
• 2 Digital communication technologies and conversation
• 3 Writing and digital technologies
• 4 Movement, meaning and digital technologies
• 5 Movement analysis and digital technologies
• 6 Presence, immersion and virtual reality
• 7 The Peripheral, metaphor and the body
• Conclusion
• References
• Index
• Copyright