{"id":14657,"date":"2013-03-20T04:39:18","date_gmt":"2013-03-20T08:39:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/?p=14657"},"modified":"2013-03-20T23:13:04","modified_gmt":"2013-03-21T03:13:04","slug":"difference-without-dualism-part-one","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/2013\/03\/20\/difference-without-dualism-part-one\/","title":{"rendered":"Difference Without Dualism (Part One)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"reality\"<\/a>Alright, pop quiz: Is there a reality outside of human experiences? Please circle YES or NO.<\/p>\n

Chances are you find this question either very silly or very complicated, possibly both. But I argue that this question is actually lurking in the background of much this month\u2019s earlier digital dualism debate<\/a>, and that giving it some attention straightens a lot of things out\u2014especially the compelling (but ultimately incorrect, I argue) charge that augmented reality is itself a dualist framing<\/a>.<\/p>\n

To illustrate why this question matters, consider the following fictional (but not entirely unlikely) scenario, in which I either am or am not a jerk:<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

say PJ (@pjrey<\/a>) and I are working on a paper draft late into the night. I go to read a paragraph PJ\u2019s just added and disagree with how he\u2019s put something, so I add a comment in the margin with my critique. PJ reads my comment and responds that, okay, he can see my point, but he also feels I\u2019ve been unnecessarily harsh in how I\u2019ve made it. I, on the other hand, feel that my phrasing is perfectly reasonable. Recall that it\u2019s late, so we\u2019ve probably been at this for a while and we\u2019re both probably tired; it\u2019s entirely likely both that I\u2019ve been careless with my words and that PJ is feeling more sensitive to critique than usual. But the question remains: have I been a jerk co-author and a bad friend, or haven\u2019t I?<\/p>\n

If you believe that human experiences determine reality, you\u2019ve got a bit of a problem. On the one hand, PJ very much experienced my comment to be out of line; therefore, the reality of the situation is that I have been mean, and I am a jerk. On the other hand, I very much experienced my comment to be acceptable, so the reality of the situation is that I have not been mean, and I am not a jerk. How can we resolve the tension of these two mutually exclusive versions of reality existing at the same time? There are two easy moves here:<\/p>\n

1)\u00a0\u00a0 Multiple realities. PJ\u2019s human experience and my human experience each inform one of two separate realities (that happen to interact some). PJ lives in his reality, and I live in mine; in PJ\u2019s reality I am a mean jerk, and in my own reality I am not a mean jerk. Since we need to finish that paper though, probably the best thing for me to do is apologize for the fact that I did something (whether right or wrong) that has made PJ upset\u2014after all, that PJ is upset with me is real in both of our realities.<\/p>\n

2)\u00a0\u00a0 Varying degrees of humanness. If human experience determines reality, then perhaps one of us is less human than the other\u2014probably me, given that I\u2019m a woman and PJ\u2019s a man and that\u2019s just how these things tend to go. In this case, PJ\u2019s human experience determines reality, and I am a mean jerk; since I am less fully human, my own experience of not being a mean jerk is less fully real. Again, I should probably apologize\u2014but for my comment itself, in addition to the fact that it hurt PJ\u2019s feelings.<\/p>\n

\"no-more-reality\"<\/a>Now as far as the fictional example itself goes, this isn\u2019t so bad. After all, nature of \u201ctruth\u201d or \u201creality\u201d aside, it\u2019s always a good idea to honor your friends by taking their feelings seriously\u2014so who really cares why<\/i> I\u2019ve apologized so long as PJ and I get our paper done and still like each other at the end of it. But if something about the above is ringing a bell\u2014perhaps something about \u201cseparate realities\u201d and \u201cless human\u201d\u2014then you see where I\u2019m going with this: I\u2019m arguing that a fundamental confusion about the relationships between \u201crealness,\u201d \u201creality,\u201d and human experiences underlies both what Nathan Jurgenson (@nathanjurgenson<\/a>) recently categorized as ontological digital dualism<\/i> and the as-yet-unnamed strains of digital dualism theory that deal with degrees of enmeshment and evaluations of what is \u201cmore real, deep, human, and true<\/a>.\u201d My goals in this essay are pretty big: by the time it’s done, I\u2019m going to attempt to straighten out digital dualism\u2019s ontological confusion, clarify some things about augmented reality to show why it\u2019s not a dualist position, propose important refinements to theories of both digital dualism and augmented reality, and see if I can\u2019t make some of my points about that Nicholas Carr piece<\/a> along the way. (Good thing I\u2019ve got all day.)<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s go back to that question: Have I been a jerk co-author and a bad friend, or haven\u2019t I? But this time, let\u2019s think differently about the relationships between human experiences and reality: suppose that there\u2019s one singular reality, but that it exists independent of human experiences (see David Banks\u2019s [@DA_Banks<\/a>] introduction here<\/a> for an illustrative story). Human experiences exist inside this reality\u2014they are themselves \u201creal\u201d\u2014but they neither determine reality nor necessarily reflect it. This means that PJ\u2019s experience of me as a mean jerk is real, and my experience of myself as not-a-mean-jerk is equally real, but that neither<\/i> of our experiences determines (or potentially even reflects) the underlying objective reality of \u201cwhat happened\u201d when I made that comment. We can argue and attempt to persuade each other as to the nature of that underlying objective reality if we really want to, and either come to an agreement about how we will determine what is \u201ctrue\u201d or not, but the fact remains: human experiences are real, but they are not themselves the whole of reality. <\/b>(Besides, I\u2019d rather apologize and spend the last of the night’s waning collective brainpower tromping through \u2018the ontological weeds\u2019 than role-play Boyle and Hobbes<\/a> anyway.)<\/p>\n

Here’s augmented reality in a nutshell: There is but one objective reality, and it exists both outside of and prior to human experiences. This reality contains all sorts of stuff, and all that stuff is real: stuff comprised of atoms (ex: my body), stuff comprised of bits (ex: my online presences), stuff comprised of both (ex: my self<\/a>), and stuff comprised of neither (ex: my feelings and experiences, social forces, discrimination, love, hate, power, the lot of it). All of these things interact and affect each other in a huge multitude of ways, and again: they are all equally real. There you go: there\u2019s our world. There\u2019s augmented reality. It\u2019s not hard.<\/p>\n

So what\u2019s up with digital dualism?<\/p>\n

\"reality-check-1\"<\/a>The first mistake that digital dualism (broadly speaking) makes is in the dualism<\/i> part. (Recall that the definition of dualism is, \u201cthe division of something conceptually into two opposed or contrasted aspects, or the state of being so divided.\u201d) We at Cyborgology haven\u2019t always been super-consistent or clear about what that dualism actually is, so I\u2019m going to look at the three big ones: Atoms\/Bits, Physical\/Digital, and Online\/Offline. We\u2019ve tended to use these three interchangeably\u2014or to treat them as analogous to each other\u2014but I think that, overall, doing so has created more confusion than clarity. I’m going to start trying to untangle them below.<\/p>\n

On a conceptual level, all three pairs are co-produced<\/i>\u2014meaning that for each pair, our conceptualization of each-as-such also shapes and creates our conceptualization of the other, because the two concepts come into being simultaneously as the result of drawing a single conceptual boundary. We didn\u2019t think about \u201catoms\u201d the way that we do now until we were also thinking about \u201cbits,\u201d for instance, and we didn\u2019t think about \u201cthe physical\u201d in the way that we do now until we were also thinking about \u201cthe digital\u201d in the way that we do now (remember that \u201cdigital\u201d used to mean something physical: \u201cof or pertaining to fingers\u201d); there was simply no such thing as \u201coffline\u201d before we started thinking about \u201conline.\u201d [If you’re new to co-production<\/a> [pdf], it’s a particularly useful way to think about these supposed binaries because it rejects a priori<\/i> demarcations (such as those that define any of these pairs) and \u201csweeps back into the analyst\u2019s field of vision connections between natural and social orders that disciplinary conventions often seek to obliterate, thereby doing injustice to the complexity as well as the strangeness of human experience.” In other words: when you\u2019re thinking about \u201cthe physical\u201d and \u201cthe digital\u201d (for example) as being co-produced, you\u2019re inherently recognizing that \u201cphysical\u201d and \u201cdigital\u201d are not rigid or stable categories, and that there\u2019s nothing \u2018natural\u2019 or inevitable about them.]<\/p>\n

Ontologically speaking, however, neither Atoms\/Bits nor Physical\/Digital is truly a dualism. Neither pair includes two things that are mutually exclusive; neither pair represents stuff that forms an oppositional binary in that one reality outside of human social experience. Even if we\u2019re looking for a contrast dualism rather than an oppositional dualism, neither pair comprises the whole of reality: reality includes more than atoms and bits, and more than things that are physical or digital. Granted, that Atoms\/Bits and Physical\/Digital are (ontologically) false dualisms doesn\u2019t mean that digital dualists\u2014and other people who are wrong\u2014don\u2019t invoke them as dualisms anyway (e.g., as if \u201cthe physical\u201d and \u201cthe digital\u201d would somehow have beef with each other if suddenly all the people disappeared and there was no one left to imagine it that way), but the important point here is: these two are slippery<\/i> dualisms.<\/p>\n

\"funny-reality-check\"<\/a>Both (at least in part) represent concepts that attempt to map onto stuff that exists whether there are human beings around to think about conceptual categories or not. Engaging with these pairs (or critiquing others who have done so) requires careful attention to the level of discussion: are we working on the conceptual, \u201cideas that some people have\u201d level, or on the ontological, \u201cstatements about the nature of our one reality\u201d level? Lack of consistently explicit clarity here is one reason some critics can claim we think all digital dualists are strong digital dualists<\/a>\u2014and in either case, it\u2019s important that we call attention to when these pairs are being invoked as oppositional binaries without ourselves reinforcing the idea that there\u2019s anything zero-sum about them. There are lots of things which are not physical, for example, but also not digital; “digital” and “not physical” should not be used interchangeably.<\/p>\n

The Online\/Offline dualism, however, is a bit different. For starters, it\u2019s a genuine oppositional binary: though proponents of augmented reality argue otherwise, in its original (or typical) framing, \u201conline\u201d and \u201coffline\u201d are mutually exclusive and diametrically opposed. Notably, where both the Atoms\/Bits and Physical\/Digital dualisms take two preexisting concepts and pair them in a newer oppositional relationship, the \u201conline\u201d and \u201coffline\u201d concepts were from their first use co-produced as a zero-sum pair. And importantly, this dualism has the lowest chance of slipping unexpectedly into an ontological conundrum: \u201conline\u201d and \u201coffline\u201d are entirely conceptual, and don\u2019t attempt to map onto anything in objective reality (the way that, say, the human concept of \u201cnature\u201d tries to map onto rocks and trees and other things that exist without people[i]<\/a>). Of course, Online\/Offline is a spurious distinction; as we\u2019ve argued over and over again, the nature of augmented reality is that atoms, bits, and everything else are thoroughly and inextricably enmeshed, which makes augmented reality a non-optional system<\/a>, so no you simply cannot \u201clog off\u201d or \u201cdisconnect.\u201d<\/a> The impossibility of escaping the influence of digitally-mediated interaction means that there is simply no \u201coffline\u201d (and since there is no cyberspace<\/a>, there’s no pure “online” either); there are only varying degrees and types of engagement or connectivity.<\/p>\n

I was originally going to propose Online\/Offline as the defining dualism of digital dualism writ large, largely because it\u2019s a less slippery and more clear-cut dualism than the other two. Upon further consideration however, I think these dualisms map fairly well onto Jurgenson\u2019s three strands of digital dualism critique<\/a>, so instead I propose the following:<\/p>\n