Data, the Social Being, and the Social Network

“The opiate of the half-enlightened masses in the digital era is information, data, ‘the math’ – impersonal, unarguable, but nonetheless mysterious numbers that promise to turn our messiest and most intractable problems into sudoku puzzles…Knowledge is always better than superstition. But more often the cult of data, abetted by the culture of opinion, seeks a shortcut around difficulty.”
—A. O. Scott, Better Living Through Criticism

We are so much more than our genome, connectome (our neural connections), and what we might call our datome, our cloud of clicks, likes, Instagram uploads, and Facebook shares. What’s at stake in the drive to data is this greater selfhood, altered by the allures of technology. The self is more boundless, fluid, and wonderfully wabi-sabi than data is. Trying to fit the self into a device is like trying to squeeze an elephant into a thimble. It can’t be done, and much life is lost trying. Xiaoshi Vivian Vivian Qin’s KZ (2016), a sculptural work disguised as the 2116 discovery of a fossilized iPhone miraculously still repeating its function, reminds me of both the thrills of technology and how it is ultimately only a distant artifact and distorted reflection of our humanity. An iPhone trilling a datome in a future rock draws our sympathy to the magnificent, hopeful, vital, vulnerable, and perhaps lost beings that once created and used it.

Much has been written about how our devices can distract or even degrade us. Nicholas Carr (The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains) discusses how Internet reading erodes the literary mind, that immersive, meditative state we enter when reading a physical book, with a spine we crack and pages we turn. As a psychiatrist, I’m concerned with the social being, our self as it is composed in relationship, whose chief aim is love and nurturance, rooted in the bond between mother and baby and which is inextricably linked to our survival and success as a species. Its only rival is language and its antecedent, thought. Technology has amplified communication, and it may in fact be vital as the world shrinks and we must become more aware of how we affect each other and the Earth. However, the social being, our capacity for love and compassion, has not kept pace with technology, thought, and language.

We can point to many heartwarming examples of connection and empathy expressed through technology, but we can give just as many instances of the other side: disinhibited, sadistic trolling on Twitter and comments sections, particularly against women; online political polarization; and public shaming, bullying, and other oppressions directed at our most vulnerable. Just pick up Nancy Jo Sales’ American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers for a look at the pervasive dark side of sharing online. The mind, language, and technological potentials are seemingly infinite, but the body, with its need and capacity for touch, love, and care, is finite and requires physical proximity and proximal experience for effect.

I suppose what we need now is some kind of technology to transmit heart. I’ve often thought that if you could somehow transmit the warm, wordless connection that can happen in the space between us, between parent and child, between friends, between lovers, between a doctor and a patient, then all problems and conflicts would melt before its power. The challenge of our day is to make sure we’re all receptive to such transmissions, because they are in fact occurring all around us. My bias is that we are biologically wired for creating these receptors and transmissions only in the time-honored, face-to-face way. So any technology that takes us away from our hearts, the gritty, complicated, and difficult reality of relationship grounded in the real world, is doomed to either fail—or destroy us. Without the face, without touch, without energetic and spiritual presence, we cannot hope to ply one another toward compassion and the wisdom of interdependence.

So far, only art has had the capacity to transmit empathy at a distance. So only art, like KZ, and art in the medium of relationship—call it love—can be the corrective to the sirens of our data-driven, Silicon dream.