SOCIAL MEDIA AND MENTAL LIFE IN THE NEW MEDIAPOLIS
What Might Simmel Say Today in his Seminal Essay ?
by
Gene Burd
Belo Center for New Media
University of Texas
Austin, Texas
Position Paper
for
Seminar on Urban Communities in Conflict and Dialogue
Urban Communication Foundation
National Communication Association
November 19, 2014
Chicago, Illinois
As we ponder and predict how the Internet and social media are leading us
into a new urban geography of mediapolis and computerized cyberspace, it might be
useful now to revisit, reassess, reinforce, or even reject, or refute Georg Simmel’s
classic seminal essay-lecture on mental life in the metropolis delivered 111 years
ago in Dresden. Simmel unexpectedly told his surprised audience in 1903 how
the city affected their “metropolitan public lives” rather than their effect on it. He
told them that his discussion of “the soul of the cultural body. . . .will be my task
today”. He described intense urban stimulation, the deep emotion of the heart felt
in rural and small towns compared to the blasé city’s control of time, money and
intellect. His lecture was not a research report, but more of a “position paper” ,
raising questions, rather than reporting conclusions from a sophisticated study.
Posing pertinent questions often means as much as providing their answers.
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Simmel’s paper was presented more than a century before the arrival of the
Internet and social media and long before use of the term “mediapolis” in 2006 by
Roger Silverstone, a British media economics scholar, who was more concerned
with media’s role in ethical and moral global justice through diversity than with the
common communication issues of the nation-state. Simmel saw communications
technology expanding existing public interaction and
geographical space in a
common megalopolis. Questions might be asked today of Simmel (1858-1918) if he
had lived in this past century. Keep in mind that his seminal essay and his other
ideas related to cities and media in a “BC” period: before computers on which these
words are composed—and before television, the Internet, facsimile, Xerox, e-mail,
voice mail, social media and before many advances in radio, telegraphy, telephone,
photography, and movies; plus before the full arrival of the wheels of autos, wings
of planes, and flights into outer space. He could not be expected to have responded
to
Samuel F.B. Morse’s question as to “What hath God wrought?” when the
telegraph was invented 14 years before Simmel was born; or to responsibly assess
the significance of Alexander Graham Bell’s request to Watson in 1976 to “Come
here. I need you” , when Simmel was only 18.
Simmel’s ideas covered a bewildering and dizzying variety of interdisciplinary
topics in urban life uncluding money, fashion, art, fashion, love, flirtation, mealtimes,
strangers, shame, prostitution, greed etc.. He defied “disciplinary containment in his
unconventional writing style and methodology” and he wrote in a disorganized
manner. His sociology was “thought to be disjointed and over-concerned with the
ephemeral and mundane” in his favored essay format yet the significance of “Simmel
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in Cyberspace” “remains woefully overlooked in studies of computer-mediated
communication (Feldman). He has been called “the unfairly neglected founding
father of sociology” (Frisby; Mackonyte), although there are understandable limits
to his and other human predictions on the future consequences of their current
technology. Both minds and machines---and of course the metropolis-- have
changed since Simmel’s time. Urban “mental life” has been modified far beyond the
geographical space of 19th Century “city limits” to encompass a global world in
which we now re-think old notions of cities and communication.
Simmel’s early grasp of the significance of space in the city beyond physical
geography (Borden) was and is belatedly recognized. The notions “in his fertile
mind” of the geometry of social distance influenced journalist Robert Park and
others creating “The Chicago School of Sociology”—a reminder conveyed in a paper
here in Chicago 29 years ago yesterday at a convention of the Social Science
History Association (Ethington). Another reminder of significant urban ideas
presented here was Frederick Jackson Turner’s paper 121 years ago on the end of
the frontier at the 1898 meeting of the American Historical Association during the
Columbian Exposition in Chicago.
“In a sense, the Internet is an extension of the metropolis as Simmel saw
it.“ (Lehrer). It becomes the site where autonomy struggles with anonymity. . .The
Internet Metropolis strips away opportunities for individuation and gives us
commodities. . . . The Internet milieu prompts us to package ourselves so that we
can recognize ourselves having a identity. Of course, that is where Facebook comes
in.” (Horning; Lehrer) helping social media users
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and advocates to rescue
discourse, emotion and intimacy lost in mass mediation, and to restore the
spontaneity of the non-verbal (Andrews). The emotional viscera, heart and “soul of
the cultural civic body” of Simmel’s “psychic existence beyond technical mediation”
might expand more into the following urban communication settings:
Flesh, frowns, flatulence, voice, touch, sighs, smiles, sounds and smells;
handshakes, hair-cuts, hugs, halitosis, hitting, kissing, kicking plus various body
slaps and body-odors, blinks, belches, bows and bumps, glances, gazes, and glares;
nods and sighs, slouching, spitting, folded arms, crossed legs, hands in pockets,
teasing, taunting, variations of the middle finger) shaming, shunning, inviting,
ordering,; leanings, facing, winks, whines, and waves; yells, cries, moans, and
seldom studied postural interactions in elevators, escalators, lavatories, lobbies,
cars, rest stops and sidewalks.
Also, what may be the consequences from the dissolution of established
communication patterns, such as the natural voice, hand-writing and public clocks
as new media extend, but may extinguish interpersonal communication ? Consider
also the urban blasé of narcissus “bowling alone” in light of Putnam’s classic
landmark 1995 seminal essay turned into a 2000 book in which he described the
decline of social capital—a concept first used by urban journalist Jane Jacobs before
being credited later to social science scholars. (Putnam, 1995, 2000).
Simmel’s
landmark essay did not fit the expectations of other scholars at Dresden and he was
seen as an oddball sociologist off in all directions. Simmel’s intuitive and descriptive
analyses pre-dated the anti-septic refereed survey research of the following century.
Although not duly credited or referenced, Simmel’s concerns have been reflected
in the lengthy lament and alarm in published anxieties of alienation in America
over the last 60 years.—often in the context of urban communication. “Community
has become both emotional withdrawal from society and a territorial barricade
within the city. The warfare between psyche and society has acquired a real
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geographical focus, one replacing the older, behavioral balance between public and
private” as “The new geography is communal versus urban” …(Sennett, 1974).
Some have argued that “hyper-individualism rather than urbanization has obscured
the idea of community’ (Bellah et al). Alarms range from the inner and outer in the
“lonely crowd” (Reisman 1950); to the alienated “bowling alone” (Putnam, 2000);
to being “alone together”. (Turkle 2011). One view is that “in a large sense people
themselves have become the mass media”
through use of
social media like
Facebook and Twitter, about whose impact, the jury is still deliberating on how
those social media affect the inner-directed (rural-small town) and the outerdirected (cosmopolitan) character (Hiebert 2014).
Alarm has reined, rained and reigned on the pursuit of loneliness often in urban
settings (Slater, 1970); in the more rural rampant habits of the heart (Bellah et
al,1985) ; in the fall of public man being moved through public space, yet not be “in”
it (Sennett, 1974); and in the separation of bodily flesh from city stone (Sennett,
1994); in the forbidden public touching of skin (Montague, 1971)—except with pets
and perhaps in pornography. Concern arose over news produced from nowhere
(Epstein, 1973); the emergence of the private future (Pawley, 1974); the rise of the
image and the fall of the word (Stephens, 1998)—the decline of letters and
handwriting; and the end of conversation via face-to-face dialogue (Ferrarotti, 1988;
Burd, 2012); the death and extinction
of discourse in a wired world as the
exchange of reasoned thought and reflection are replaced by “verbalized expression
and
ritualized stylistic performances” (Slayden & Whillock, 1999). We were
reminded that “Virtual reality calls into question our very notion of authenticity”
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(Jones; Hardt, 1993); with an obsessive communication overload for the online
person-- formerly a flesh and blood self, now dead to the real world while pouring
attention into a cell phone. Some say the digital life robs people of solitude and daydreaming with their own thoughts—thereby bringing the end to solitude and
absence (Harris, 2014), with solitude in self-reflection “interpreted as an illness
that needs to be cured (Turkle),
Perhaps here, some past, present and futuristic personal historical anecdotes
can serve as useful anti-dotes to counteract the current epidemic of technocratic
scholarship,
which still frowns on historical autobiography as a research
methodology. As a journalist (or generalist) I am more social than scientist, so
permit me a few autobiographical citations, ideas and scattered range of topics
which might relate to this session on past, present and future dialogue in urban
communities. I was a very isolated rural farm boy until age 14 in the rural Ozarks,
in the 1930s, where lightning was the only electricity, where we went outside to
defecate (with no outdoor “plumbing”), where the only running water was in a creek,
and where you spoke to everybody—a practice that caused some to question my
sanity So to speak) when I did that in the early l940s as a new Los Angeles resident,
where I at first spoke to everyone in public (so to speak)--- I was not blase but
mentally unstable; as I soon learned that the heart emotion) belonged in the
country but the head ( the mind) belonged in the city.
As a student in a sociology class at UCLA, I first read (and quickly understood)
Simmel’s newly translated essay. Our similar cultural pasts, eclectic interests and
urban focus fascinated me and influenced my career in journalism as he had done
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for journalists like Robert Park (one of Simmel’s students) who helped establish the
early bases of the Chicago School of Sociology in the early 1900s. with others at Jane
Addams’ Hull-House where I was later to live in the early 1960s. Later New York
City “taught” me about urban life in the early 1950s, and I often visited nearby
Bryant Park (Keith Hampton’s research site 60 years ago) during breaks from
ushering at a nearby Times Square burlesque theater and delivering books (not yet
e-books) for a book store just east of the lions statues of the public library. In those
days people often spoke and connected to strangers. That was before cell phones,
electric mail and on-line shopping ,when there were still post offices like that huge
one adjacent to J.C. Penney’s mail order offices on 34th Street where I was one of his
office mail boys and got to know him—and his advice for career success. (Decades
later when I was in New York, Penney headquarters had moved to Dallas, it was no
longer safe to stroll at mid-night in Central Park and Bryant Park had changed —but at that same old theater, the same chewing gum was still glued under the seats).
My maternal grandmother was 23 when Simmel was born, and when she
learned how to use a phone, she called me hundreds of miles away and remarked in
amazement: “I can hear you, but you are not even here.” I reacted similarly in the
early 1930s, when I heard the radio voices of Hitler ad his marching drummers,
Churchill’s deep voice, and FDR’s
resonant Pearl Harbor and D-Day Invasion
speeches—not seeing he could not even walk. One day in the early 1940s, my
brother excitedly told me he’d seen a tiny box in an East Los Angeles Sears display
window showing moving pictures. I said it was probably a movie but not in a theater,
to which he exclaimed: “But It’s happening while we are watching” . That reminded
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me of my farmer Dad chiding the periodic traveling movie operator flashing scenes
of actors in an abandoned hall room on a hanging bed sheet screen where my Dad
saw movie actors about whom he said “They don’t mean it. They are all lying”.
More history on screen in the late 1960s, with astronauts reading Genesis
scripture from outer space and pictures from the moon telling us the earth was
indeed round—like the globe in that one-room school. Then came the first word
spoken on to the surface of the moon by Neal Armstrong. It was the name of a
city—Houston-- where I had been a reporter in the late 1950s. Still later in the age
of new media, I recall in the early l970s, an excited professor arriving late to our
annual faculty party excitedly telling us that a new gadget on campus had connected
Christ
and Japan as keywords.
It was the Internet ! Communication history
continued years later when one of my journalism students wrote a story about an
interesting student in her dorm who she said was often up late at night “constantly
pecking on some noisy machine”. That student was Michael Dell.
New media experience continues on the street as I walk seven miles each —
without texting. Once, when I complimented a mother strolling with her baby
saying “Oh, what a beautiful child”, she objectively responded by saying: “But you
should see his picture”. As a breast baby, I called attention to a mother breastfeeding her baby as a “beautiful sight”, but a nearby porno film artist and viewer
called public breastfeeding obscene. Nearby a couple on a bench held one hand
with the other, while their other hand held a cell phone—on which they were both
talking on their own phones—to each other. If technology in such close quarters
inhibits close visceral communication, what does it mean for even more distant
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communication ?
Is geography and physical contact obsolete, ? Will the new
technologies enhance or reduce
Simmel’s concept of blasé ? Why even meet
together here in a geographical place instead of just on-line ? Have “here” and “there”
lost their meaning?
Is conversation in physical space at an end and with what
effect—negative or positive ? Will talking voices from bodies of flesh be forbidden,
as mainly robots communicate with each other? Is there no need for contact in
physical and geographical place and resulting contacts ? If the city is merely a
“mental state”,
then perhaps the city is like the human body, in which the
imagination is perhaps the most significant sex organ in the physical body— indeed
mind over matter---like the late comedian Joan Rivers suggested that the best birth
control method was just to “leave the lights on”-- and let the imagination work.
Will the new media fixation on the self force us to drown in eccentricity with
Narcissus or flee to Walden Pond with Thoreau to get away from the Internet ? Is
the city (of Simmel’s day) and today obsolete as a place, if the individual alone is a
place, in which the MEdia and the SELFie merely humanize the new technologies
like the personal Kodak camera freed people from dependence on artists for
portraits and “art”. Remember that Gutenberg et al allowed the masses to
communicate with God without going through the priests. Today “In a large sense,
people themselves have become the mass media . . (Hiebert)., and social media
makes everybody a journalist (Gant 2007) thereby extending McLuhan’s mantra in
the early 1960s when he reminded us that the medium itself is the message.
People then became “digital” (Negroponte 1996) as MEdia. and SELFie melt and
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merge media, message and mankind into one
metropolitan space and place--
perhaps in Bryant Park. ?
If the new technologies can replace previous communication patterns, and if
they make place, space and time non-essential to communication, city and
community, and if we eliminate the geography of cities, then why meet for these
conferences if communication can take place virtually on-line ? Where is here and
does it exist or even matter anymore ? Perhaps the city will disappear since “What
once had to happen in the city can now take place anywhere” since the new
technologies “will soon begin to provide excellent substitutes for face-to-face
contact, the chief remaining reason for the traditional city” whose “advantages of
proximity for human interactions will continue to decrease.(Pascal, 1987). One
response to Gertrude Stein’s complaint that Oakland had no there there, is that
“There is less and less there anywhere, anymore. Increasingly, there is everywhere” .
We have been told that “Academic observers . . .should stop worrying about the
viability of cities. A system will survive even if it differs from the system we know”
(Pascal, 1987).
Some critics in nostalgic reflection about a more pastoral civic past and the
“urban localism” of “meeting people”(Bellah et al) say that such observations are
nostalgic and idealized
“sociology without data” , and are
“not responsible
sociological analysis” and may be a “useful journalistic paradigm, but not good social
history”, which presumes that if we have “Intellectual brilliance and deep moral
concern. . . who needs data!” ? (Greeley, 1992). Although online social networking
without non-verbal cues has been criticized, some recent research
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by social
neuroscientists show for example that on-line meeting, dating and marriage are
more likely to last longer than reliance on the myth of love at first sight. A University
of Chicago professorial couple (John and Stephanie Cacioppo) did the study, after
meeting on-line and are now happily married (Sapolsky, 2014).
So, what might Simmel today, if new communication technology replaces public
interaction in a geographical place ? One argument is that “ We need face-to-face
interaction. It is crucial to our intellectual and social development, it allows for the
development of richer contexts between people in which more intricate details and
meanings can be shared, and it provides certain satisfactions that are impossible to
technologically replicate” (Chayko, 2002). Studies show that 93% of authentic
(“real”) communication is based on non-verbal body language but “Awash in
technology, anyone can hide behind the text, with e-mail, the Facebook post or the
tweet, projecting any image they want
and creating an illusion of their own
choosing. . . with superficial abbreviations, snippets, and emoticons outside of real
life like on a golf course with its “deeper. and more authentic relationships”
(Tardanico, 2012).
If there is no need for alarm, how might we react to such recent events as the
Dallas hospital crew diagnosing and treating the Ebola patient at bedside while
relying solely on their text messages without even talking to each other next to
them; the California woman who lodged herself in the chimney of the house of a
man she’d met on line, dated, and sought; or the high school student who invited
classmates on-line to join him to dine, and then proceeded to shoot them.
As
traditional face-to-face communication is replaced by mediated communication and
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social robots, more may be expected of technology than of each other as less urban
social interaction creates the illusion of companionship without the demands of
friendship as people talk to machines as the real and simulated life are not
differentiated (Turkle, 2011).
Perhaps eventually people will only touch and communicate with their pets
which they can control. If “Simmel Says” he has a new message, would it be like the
child’s game “Simon Says” where Simon issues instructions to players, who are
eliminated if they fail to follow commands rather than their failure to act--- as the
last player is the winner who followed all the commands. If only machines give
obeyed commands to other robotic machines, perhaps that hated human halitosis
will be hopefully halted or harnessed as we enter and fully embrace post-human,
robotic urban life. Do we merely “Let Georg (Simmel) do It” , or do we wire Sam
Morse to ask “What hath God wrought ?” or do we make a cell phone call to “Mr.
Watson”
and ask for a map to the golf course or Walden Pond—where we can
ponder the placeless urban Internet in the new “City of Netropolis” !
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