Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media
by Wendy Hui Kyong Chun
First reviewed August 2017
As I was archiving a cascade of books that I wrote about in 2017, this one fell into kind of a blank spot—what did I get from this, five years ago? Old me really seemed into adding youtube links—maybe I was going for some comment about hyperlinking and social media?
Finally, being grateful facebook wasn’t around during college is pretty shortsighted— “the kids” today are more adept at protecting their digital selves by simply not posting, and as a generation seem more understanding about what should stick to others of their cohort. Elder millenials, let’s get over your(our)selves.
The continued rise of Mystery Science Theater 3000 nearly two decades after its cancellation is no surprise. It is a perfect metaphor for the disaffected—commentary as coping for those allowed only to view, not shape, their worlds—and remains the acme of what every group of dorky kids does together while watching movies (and cranky old aristocrats do at the theater) and what all of us do, now, constantly, on social media.
As an ex post portent for Twitter—the network that created an infinite, portable audience for wisecracks—MST3K showed that if you can’t change the channel, you might as well try to goof on it. Twitter ramps up the quips and simplifies the truth of the ultimate panopticon; the elision of fame and notoriety burns a clear path to the heart of the opt-in internet; publicity is existence. If your jokes aren’t the funniest, no one cares if you’re even in the theater.
The internet writ large has become the ultimate movie screen: to adapt Plato’s Cave metaphor, the shadows on the wall are now the only things worth caring about. Through the ubiquity of our networked digital present, we are our shadows, stretched thin across the internet— illusory and unreachable—but connected to the rest of the teeming massless masses in no other way. The distance shades our interactions with cruelty—“This isn’t real, it’s just online.” But because these projected selves have become our daily rituals—much the same as how we remain who we are when we go buy a cup of coffee from a stranger without giving them our name—our online presences are still reality.
The whole world is now MST3K; physical life is the bad movie underpinning the commentary, upon which we joyless puppets and hapless humans are overlaid. Jokes and quips and ironic observations are made to maintain any sense of control over a system which suffers no impact from the average captured participant:
This book has argued that what matters most is what and how things linger. Because we are all entertainers now—forever dancing for the rest of the world or else silent ghosts haunting the web—what matters isn’t that we are flawless performers but admittedly fallible and eminently forgivable: : Technoculture’s unendingly circulating information stream casts doubt on the value of this content. This is the creepy part of making oneself seen: once we offer ourselves up, once we are displayed on the screens of technoculture, we are as trivial as everything else.
What matters is context, kindness, understanding. What matters is to be viewed as a person to be heard, not as content to be consumed. Not shadow-selves, but selves: not “just online,” but as projections of who we are. A person, not content, or else you truly are illusory.
The internet is here and it binds us together; Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media posits this a need to avoid a return to the sheltered isolation of the private household—privacy built on control of bodies—but public digital spaces, a freedom to exist. An ability to err, to post mistakes and continue to live, to write dumb things and grow and change without being forever tethered to your error. “I am so happy facebook didn’t exist when I was in college.” I hear that from my contemporaries and from my own mouth. But that doesn’t mean we regret college, or even most of the things we did that were embarrassing—they were steps along the path to who we are now—it means there’s something fucked up about facebook:
Technoculture’s unendingly circulating information stream casts doubt on the value of this content. This is the creepy part of making oneself seen: once we offer ourselves up, once we are displayed on the screens of technoculture, we are as trivial as everything else.
The erasure of personhood as we become consumable content, of silence or infamy shame or invisibility, is not a required state. Personhood—respect for an online presence—doesn’t mean tethered digital footprints or even a harkening back to the halcyon days of an open Usenet. Rather than struggling against the benefits or submitting to the inadequacies of the present status, the habits surrounding the networked-now can be reshaped.
Habit produces freedom for thought beyond immediacy—how much time would I waste, in my daily life, if I had to think about every breath I took?—but habit can force us down paths that are no longer beneficial. Once habits become unmoored from the goals they supported, their vestigial remains can haunt us, warp the way we approach the world:
Although goals can be satisfied in various ways, there is only one way to satisfy a habit: by repeating it exactly.
After a generation of watching images on a screen and being told over and over, “This isn’t real, this is just entertainment,” the habit of dismissing the flickering shadows projected into our lives has become our reality. We don’t believe what we see, nor do we even believe what we say—the always-on nature of the network means your “brand” can never waver: always be riffing; I’m just kidding. Unless…; say whatever gets the most likes. If a tree falls in the woods and no one is around to retweet it, does it make an impact?
What is required now is a holistic approach to digital media—a realignment of perception—where the characters we play for our screens can turn back into the people that we. A new series of habits, where commentary isn’t the only possible interaction, is required; for that, society needs to redesign who is allowed to control our access to digital spaces:
We must develop new habits of connecting that disrupt the reduction of our interactions into network diagrams that can be tracked and traced.
Public engagement, rather than corporate estrangement, is the only hope for a networked future that won’t leave everyone in the dark.