This was a lead image in a story from the New York Times titled, “Your Phone Versus Your Heart“. Let’s break this image down, shall we?

Becoming a parent has inflected how I see everything in the world, including the practice of “being online.” I apologize for using scare quotes so soon into this essay, but it feels necessary. “Online” contains several types of possible connection, as Jenny Davis and others at Cyborgology have argued. And the “being” part is what needs to be at stake: how does the way in which we exist change when that existence is networked and distributed? The anthropology of “being online” therefore includes a consideration of the ontological effects on people as much as empirically measurable effects of using iPads and Facebook.

A common narrative, and one Cyborgology has consistently disputed, is that “technology” or “social media” or “the digital” have impinged on an authentic mode of life that previously existed and which we retroactively call “offline.” This narrative relies on constructing images that can quickly code as “authentic,” as in this video that Nathan Jurgenson has dissected. The graphic above, from a New York Times essay, crystallizes this narrative as it makes us of family and child-rearing as an icon of authentic offline living. Devices and the information they present come between a parent and the child. They blot out the child’s pleading face. Tellingly, the phone is represented as blank–the viewer is not asked to make a judgment about the value of what the person is doing with the phone (checking Twitter? responding to an email? calling 911?), they are asked to condemn its vacuity.

There is a grain of truth to this story, but one that leads us to a more complicated account of networked devices than we would find in a digital witch hunt. Speaking anecdotally, it is my experience that interactions with an infant require me to minimize the use of electronic supplements. I think this is because the capabilities of an infant cannot be meaningfully supplemented by what those platforms offer. My main forms of interaction with my 3 month old are eye contact, gesture, touch, warmth, food, and sound. Those are not types of information that current electronics are especially good at storing or transmitting.

By contrast, I find interactions with other adults via computers to be very satisfying. That shouldn’t be a surprise–we are in a golden age of consumer electronics designed to facilitate communication between adults. With most adults, I want to exchange words or images quickly, and computers are very good with words and images. In some cases it even helps me communicate to have my voice stripped down to bare text. I’m comfortable as a writer but not as an actor, and always doubt that my voice will sound the way I mean it to (part of the reason IM and SMS are good platforms for flirting). I can imagine people on the other side of the fence might find that frustrating, but we also have Facetime and Skype–technologies that provide better fidelity for conversations between adults but do not begin to touch the haptic channels that are so important for connecting with an infant.

Starting with that observation–that online communications have higher fidelity with adults than with babies or children–it is tempting to map a division between “online” and “offline” onto other, older methods for describing how adult humans are a unique type of being. Online and offline take on the ontological textures of language or even “world” in the Heideggerian sense: full blown humans have it, animals and lesser humans are poor in it or have prototypical/degenerate/facsimile versions of it, and brute matter is without it. “Online” would then provide a curiously historical-material metaphor for the mysterious relationship between humans and language. Whereas inspired language uses the Muses as the go-between with the realm of the divine–in the beginning was the Word–those of us who are online have electronic clients that can quickly send and receive large amounts of data to and from distant servers. A description of the mode of activity where we are online is not too far from a concretization of the mystical theory of language. On one hand, the online represents an historical rupture–being online requires technology and infrastructure that have never before been possible–but insomuch as they are geared around the transfer of certain types of information they reinscribe a concept of the human that is very old.

To the extent that such an ontological-anthropological account of language works–and we need to inject some heavy caveats for it to work– it also helps us understand onlineness. Many, many people have criticized the use of language to separate humans from animals. The two broadest arguments are that humans are neither as much masters of language as they would like to think, nor are animals as bereft of it. (Jacques Derrida and Donna Haraway have probably made these arguments as well as anyone, if you are interested). But if we accept that different types of beings have access to different communicative systems, and that how a being communicates with itself and its environment is part of what constitutes its way of life, then we can add the “online” mode to our analytic toolbox for describing those ways of life. Some beings are rich in online and some are poor in it. (The important step to avoid is correlating communicative abilities with ethical standing. Humans, for example, are extremely poor in the communicative system of scent, but that doesn’t mean our suffering is less morally relevant than a pig’s).

While animals are not posting pictures of themselves online, the internet is full of animal pictures. With the rise of social networks, cute animal pics may someday account for more views than porn. Babies, also unable to access the internet, command considerable attention online. They are what Michel Serres call quasi-objects: objects in the sense of not exercising agency but subject-ish in that they compel and organize the activity of subjects acting around them (Serres’s example is the relationship between soccer players and the ball).

To the limited extent that my daughter can be represented within the online order, I am glad that she is. When I look at that New York Times graphic, my first thought is that the adult is taking a picture of his or her child to send to a relative. When I went back to work, my wife would send me pictures every day to make it easier for me to be apart from my daughter. Now I have a video of her giggling that never fails to make me smile. My daughter’s capacity to be rendered in the types of media that exist online are increasing as she enters the linguistic order that has informed the construction of the online. And while my daughter might not like that my phone comes between us when I’m taking her picture, that’s a small price to pay to keep my mom, who lives across the country, connected to her. Before cell phones–way before them–we were already social creatures living in networks. It might be confusing for children that they can’t fully exercise themselves in the online order but to categorically pit digital media against family connectedness is facile and untrue. That has been said before–the online does not lack for advocates–but when we take a side in a dichotomous debate about internet connectedness we miss the ontological effects of the online as a constant modality of our being.

Saying that “online” is a modality means, as many at Cyborgology and elsewhere have argued before, that “being online” is not something that is either on or off, true or false, but always there in varying degrees of attention, intensity, and praxis. It also means that being online is not zero sum with being offline. Pulling out your phone doesn’t flip you over from offline to online. The phone was sending and receiving data while out of sight. Your brain was also aware of the potential for digital communication at a background level. Engagement with the digital modality can be more or less or intense, and regulating that modality of being is not a bad thing–it is probably a necessary practice in the care of the self, just as other modalities have been in the past.

For my part, it also allows me to think of my child’s growing engagement with her environment in terms that are more flexible than a dichotomy between online/offline, and less laden with a metanarrative of transgression and guilt than digital abstinence. Online is not a bewitched place to treat with mystical apprehension. Like other modes of human experience–sex, the sacred, memory–one should develop a relation to it that is intentional and empowering rather than overwhelming and addictive. One step is to redefine the debate away from its current dilemma and toward an understanding of being human that contains being online.

Greg Pollock is a game designer and writer in San Jose.

Lead image via.