relativestrangers.ca

The Age of Touch

Wednesday, March 30th, 2011

2011 marks the centenary year of Marshall McLuhan’s birth. I mention this because in 2007 I made a film on his life called “McLuhan Way: In Search of Truth”. I opened the film standing by his gravestone, stenciling out the words “The Truth Shall Make You Free” that were engraved upon it and the thought that resonated deepest within me was this: “In our age of constant communication, with our seemingly obsessive desire for connection, are we witnessing an age of greater communion or perhaps an even deeper loneliness?”

I love the age of the digital revolution. It opened the doors for me as a storyteller. I praise it’s leveling of the playing field. I participate. And I watch in wonder at the peaks of possibility that it takes us to and the depths of darkness it can dredge. In all, it seems there’s a pretty blatant thirst for communion going on – on a global scale. But where is this thirst taking us? Incredible new tools of communication, unprecedented openness and access to information, powerful new ways to be connected, all markers of our time. But in the age of social media, as we collectively expose more fragments of ourselves than ever before and exist on virtual validation scales of likes, retweets, comments, shares and more, what is the connection we’re experiencing?

Talking about her new book “Alone Together”, MIT professor Sherry Turkle said, “I think there are ways in which we’re constantly communicating and yet not making enough good connections, in a way that’s to our detriment, to the detriment of our families and to our business organizations.” What’s at play here? Why does this have such a ring of truth?

We’re not newbies to this whole communications revolution. It’s goes beyond the TV and the radio. We boil it back to the onset of electricity. Amazing as our technological and cultural changes have been in so many ways through this period it seems astounding that in even more ways we still don’t have a handle on where we’re going and what it’s going to be like when we get there. In these terms McLuhan’s voice reverberates as relevant as ever. In his famous 1964 book “Understanding Media”, McLuhan floated out this now well documented truism: “In the electric age, we wear all mankind as our skin.”

Skin. Touch. Something huge is happening between us and our tools of communication or extensions of man as McLuhan dubbed them and it dramatically involves the dynamic of human relationship and touch. Kevin Kelly gave an interesting talk recently on the evolution of the book highlighting some perspectives on the technological now and his new book “What Technology Wants”, in which he noted that “we are now becoming people of the screen”. Derrick DeKerkhove, former Director of the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology and author of the “Skin of Culture” called the screen “the new connective thinking system“. But we’re pushing past thinking and past tools of communication into tools of being. Online being. Virtual being. Beyond extensions they are our other selves. I know one young writer who took a Facebook detox this year, banning herself for a period from what she described as “this blue and white overlay that we pin over the top of our normal tangible lives.” While incredible new connections open up, some massive tensions are being exposed too.

I’ve still not pinpointed my relationship with social media or my feelings toward it. The information sharing is awesome but as we start getting into evaluating people’s societal worth by their social media clout something starts to turn in my very core. “Relative Strangers” is an honest reaction to the use of terms like “friends” and “followers” to describe how we are relating to each other in this digital here and now. The age of virtual, the life simulation, the blue and white layer fronting our lives.

TV dominated much of my childhood and youth. But it was also a catalyst that sent me searching for an authentic experience of community in my post B.A. twenties. I spent 7 years living and working in the community of L’Arche Daybreak where I cared for people with developmental disabilities. I wasn’t alone. L’Arche is like a beacon for youth seeking a more truthful purpose and meaning in life. The lessons I learned there about real communion, about being present to one another, about simply BEING, and our value in the bodies and lives that we were born into, are now like a part of my skin. But L’Arche was founded on the body. The need to be physically cared for is at the root of L’Arche. It’s also the first lesson any of us learn in life. In an NPR interview for the program “Being” Jean Vanier, the revered founder of L’Arche, described L’Arche as a “community of the body not the word…from the body relationship grows and we begin to see that we are together”. It is an interview worth watching. I have embedded it below.

As we enter a new digital age where the body is becoming both central and peripheral, where touch is opening new magical relationships to our digital machines, where we are experiencing digital layers on our real lives and our real world experiences and investing so much of our time and attention in them, then it becomes drastically more important to truly understand what it means to be human.

The Wisdom of Tenderness from On Being on Vimeo.

Tags: Being, deiren masterson, digital lives, facebook, HCI, Human Computer Interaction, jean vanier, Krista Tippett, masterworks productions, McLuhan, NPR, online presence, relative strangers, Social Media, Touch, twitter
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »