| Watch
out -- incoming...
Of course
I'm here. I'm online, aren't I?
And why? 53 million adult Americans use some form of Instant Messenger
(IM) on a daily basis. 53 million people make themselves constantly available
over their computers, cellphones, and handheld devices. Forget calling
someone up. Better to send them neat little digital packets of abbreviated
words featuring little to no punctuation, such as "meet me outside,"
"how RU," or the detestable "c u l8r." Getting someone's
screenname, or online persona, is just as good as getting her phone number.
Instead of waiting to be haunted by the unexpected call, we plunge our
bodies-without-organs into cyberspace, where any of the 150 or so people
(specters? the seen spirits?) on our "buddy list" can cast their
utterances across a vast abyss of non-space. We are online – vulnerable,
answerable, ready to be invaded. It's really, really creepy. But we won't
sign off. IM is an obsession. We can't keep away.
A brief overview: Instant Messenger is an instant-gratification substitute
for a telephone call, e-mail, or face-to-face communication. It's most
similar to a cellphone text message, the difference being that IM allows
users the chance to communicate with countless "buddies" at
a time, and track which buddies are online, how long they have been idle,
and (based on an "away message") tell what they are up to if
not glued to their respective computer screens. By choosing the "direct
connection" option (in which a popup window appears reading "[Your
buddy] wants to directly connect"), users can share music and image
files at will and even detect when each other are typing. College students
make plans over IM. Large corporations have for the most part forgone
group meetings and walks down the hall in favor of IM chat rooms and person-to-person
messages. Millions of users passionately affirm the societal expectation
that they should be "online" and answerable during all waking
hours. Without uttering a word or moving an inch all day, one could potentially
conduct her entire social life over IM.
Many of the themes and catch phrases of Avital Ronell's Telephone
Book (and lecture hall) call to mind Instant Messenger as a technology
quite similar to the telephone but perhaps even more suited to schizophrenic
behavior. As a haunted space full of electricity, static, and phantomatic
projections, IM can even be seen as a metaphor for the schizophrenic body
itself. The software can be considered what Marshall McLuhan called "a
live model of the central nervous system." And yet even as a "live"
person signs on, she feels a traumatic lack, as she notices that most
of her buddies are not online with her right at that time. Their names
do not appear on her buddy list; to her online persona, they are dead.
The names that do appear seem alive, but they are bodiless, silent, and
far away. The notion of a "live model" itself seems strange,
notes Ronell. And yet with the IM community as representative of the central
nervous system, there are signs of life. Even in the middle of the night,
there are a few darts of displaced human activity shooting across cyberspace
in desperate attempts to reach others – or maybe, as Heidegger would
say, a desperate attempt to reach the self. Ronell's concept of "dead
batteries" and a death that is "not finite but can be recharged"
makes a lot of sense in the online atmosphere. A user "signs on"
and a battery goes to work; she "signs off" and becomes asleep,
dead to the rest of the community with no promise of return.
The haunted nature of Instant Messenger is primarily what draws people
to it. (Admittedly, this user might be biased, because she enjoys creeping
herself out with speculations about the varying tones of certain IM conversations
and registers a strong paranoia that her "buddies" are all out
to get her. After six years of using IM every day, the paranoia strikes
deep… to the point at which one of her screennames – for the
best IM users play around with multiple personas – is a combination
of the name "Annie" and "paranoia." How cute.)
Imagine viewing a friendship or sort-of friendship with a certain level
of hauntedness. Maybe "Cutie802" meets "Yarmouth99"
for the first time in the office kitchen. Some sparks fly. Both of them
are attractive, friendly, and easy to talk to. Hey, sounds like they'd
be great IM buddies who never have to deal with each other in person ever
again! So they exchange screennames. As these two sit down at their computers
and add each other to their buddy lists, the presence of the new name
on the buddy list immediately takes on haunted quality. Physically and
mentally, that other person is still largely unknown. And yet the online
alter-ego of the other user torments the self as a constant visitation,
the ghost that won't go away – precisely because she has invited
it inside.
During the afternoon and evening, when most people are on IM, the buddy
list is a surplus of spectrality. It is Derrida's "visor effect"
to the extreme – when you are trapped by ghosts you can't see but
you know they are looking at you. In this case, you can see the little-yellow-man
icons ( ),
which are representative of actual people but really only collections
of colored pixels on a screen. You stare at the ,
and the intimidating ghost stares back at you. Yet for all its hauntedness,
you need that buddy on your list. You need to be reaffirmed of that person's
presence online – which is not a physical presence but a hallucination.
You must consider the thing and the a-thing at the same time. You can
pretend, "I have seen nothing," but the ghostly on-screen idol
still haunts.
IM can be characterized as a "visual program" in that images
appear on the screen. "The blindness associated with any call,"
then, is less harsh on IM, because we know who is calling and have the
visual to affirm it (Ronell, 21). Like the telephone user, though, the
recipient of an IM gets the idea she is talking to a phantom instead of
a person. Answering an IM is much different than answering a phone. There
is no speech involved, so there is no expectation to invoke the question
mark with the inflected "Yes?" discussed by Ronell. You have
signed on and made yourself reachable; to invoke surprise by actually
typing a question mark – "Yeah?" – would seem even
more out of place than it would on the phone. No one is ever surprised
to receive an instant message. She might be surprised to hear from a particular
buddy, but there is no shock involved when the IM conversation box randomly
interrupts a user on her screen. By being online in the first place, the
user expects the invasion. More than ever, the user is in "a situation
whose gestural syntax already means yes" (5). What does it mean to
have submitted to the yes before even being messaged? The user can do
another activity in her room, but once messaged, she must drop everything,
become "automatically indebted," and respond "like a hypnotized
thing" (29-30).
This automatic response brings up the question of why IM users want to
be wanted so badly. Surely signing on in the first place can be seen as
a sort of desperate move. Do we need human interaction that badly? Or,
since instant messaging is only a phantomatic stand-in for human interaction,
could it be that we prefer the phantoms to the people themselves? Dealing
with someone online is arguably easier than conversing on the telephone
or in person, especially if one or both of the parties is typically awkward
or shy. But what makes us sign on in the first place? Heidegger's argument
in Being and Time that when we answer a call, we respond to something
both within and beyond us is appropriate here. He writes, "the call
undoubtedly does not come from someone else who is with me in the world"
(275). If the call comes as an IM, the conversation box appears and it
is clear that this phantom is not with the user in the world. It sprouts
up from nowhere on her screen, an intangible apparition. The message comes
from her and yet from beyond her. Ronell writes, "the call also calls
from me. In this sense the 'me' is a receptionist who takes calls which
are both outgoing and incoming; but when the connection is made, and I
receive the call, to a certain extent I receive it because 'it reaches
him who wants to be brought back''' (33).
The IM user is a perfect example of the receptionist who places and takes
calls – often, schizophrenically, she takes multiple calls at once
– and the concept of IM's "away message" can help explain
why a user would want to be "brought back." If merely signing
on can be considered an invitation for invasion, then putting up an away
message only heightens a user's vulnerability. Perhaps users fool themselves
into thinking a tiny graphic of a notepad ( )
with a message attached to it can act as an extra shield between their
online presences and the rest of the IM community. The opposite is true;
the draws
attention to a user that would not be paid if not for the 's presence.
Signing on in the first place is the user's welcome, extended to her online
contacts, or phantom effects. When a user puts up a ,
hospitality and exclusion are at work together. The user's online contacts
are at once conjured and shooed away.
Many users even compose away messages that will guarantee invasions. "Writing
a paper". . . . "You'll never guess". . . . "Not here."
If the user was really focusing on paper-writing, she wouldn't be online.
"You'll never guess" is just a blatant plea to be abruptly aroused.
"Not here," or "Away for a bit," or "Be right
back" – those are tricky. Away messages like those imply an
absence, but that these notices of absence even exist only affirms the
overwhelming presence of the user. She is both there and not
there, but as long as her screenname and
appear in her buddies' lists, she is always reachable. The forced absence
involved in the away message only reinforces that a user "wants to
be brought back" from being "away."
Structurally, IM reminds one of the schizonoiac body run through by electric
currents – literally, "technology has broken into the body"
(Ronell, 109). The whole of cyberspace might be considered a body-without-organs,
and the Internet user sitting at her computer is the "subject alongside
a machine" for whom "desire has been rerouted, computerized,
electrocuted, satellited according to a wholly other rhetorical order"
(R, 110). So not only is IM conceptually similar to the schizophrenic
body, but its switchboard-like terrain is a breeding ground for schizophrenic
behavior. The same schizophrenic who "might be attracted to the carceral
silence of a telephone booth" would relish the silence of IM, vast
in its theoretical scope but physically limited to a somewhat carceral
17-square-inch computer screen – an artificially constricted space
(Ronell, 4).
The hebephrenic, the catatonic, and the paranoid schizophrenics would
all be comfortable on IM. Despite a user's buddies' expectations of her
to be chatty and alert online, if so inclined, she can choose instead
to stare blankly at the screen, participating in the cyber-community without
actually engaging in a direct hit. Simply by being signed on, the user
is in the mode of "stationary mobility" occupied by the schizophrenic.
Even if she decides to distribute "telephone receivers along her
body" by messaging multiple people at once, her migratory patterns
stay in space (Ronell, 4). Ronell describes the schizophrenic mind as
"a kind of switchboard where several lines can be maintained in the
organ of consciousness simultaneously, without influencing one another"
(116). When the user instant messages multiple people, she often feels
schizophrenic. But the behavior is learned instead of automatic, so that
the "openness" of her switchboard is always in question.
Maintaining several lines of communication is unnatural for most users,
prompting forgotten conversations, long pauses between messages, and an
unintended disjointedness in a user's "tone of voice" or attitude.
On a screen splattered with nine different conversation boxes, at least
one box will be stacked underneath the others, seemingly set aside. But,
as in the schizophrenic, the voices continue to visit the IM user. She
engages in what C. J. Jung called "the switching on and off of the
interjected voices." Perhaps with particularly boring (or just bored)
buddies, IM conversations often resemble "the 'stupid chattering'
about which so many schizophrenics complain" (Ronell, 118). One of
the user's unfortunate buddies, unaware that his conversation box has
been minimized or covered up by others, will continue to yap. "Hey."
"Hello?" "Are you ignoring me?" The dynamic is similar
to that between the telephone caller and receiver: by placing the call,
the caller is saying Come here, I want you, I desire you, you are
not here. In taking the call, the receiver becomes indebted, answerable.
The IM user has the benefit of a little extra time – the sense of
urgency to respond quickly is not as intense as it is on the telephone.
With multiple conversations, though, the urgency heightens. Like schizophrenics,
IM users become anxious and withdrawn from reality as they attempt to
answer all the artificial voices. "Schizophrenia lights up, jamming
the switchboard, fracturing a latent semantics with multiple calls. No
one can take all the calls," writes Ronell (137). IM, too, is "a
picture of unsystematic randomness, so to speak, in which the continuity
of meanings so distinctive of the neuroses is often mutilated to the point
of unintelligibility" (Jung, 179). At some point, the overwhelmed
IM user must disconnect, or "sign off," to escape the conversations
that are no longer running smoothly.
Whether the user communicates with one or multiple "buddies"
during her online sojourn, her activity is just that: a departure, or
vacation, from reality. Like the schizophrenic, "permanently under
the spell of an insuperable complex," the IM user is captivated by
the software's alternate online universe. Her fingers move rapidly to
send out random currents of electricity along the switchboard, but she
is otherwise dead to real life, or her physical environment. There is
an "alienation from reality, the loss of interest in objective events,"
in both the IM user and the schizophrenic (Jung, 97-98).
Despite all the voices and buddies involved in the IM experience, the
above description of it as an alien complex makes engaging in the cyber-community
seem pretty lonely. What happens when the IM user signs on at four in
the morning to discover that – the horror! – none of her contacts
are online? Her buddy list is empty, except for her own screenname. This
hypothetical situation calls to mind Heidegger's suggestion in "The
Question Concerning Technology" that everything man encounters exists
only insofar as it is his construct. "This illusion gives rise in
turn to one final delusion: It seems as though man everywhere and always
encounters only himself" (27). But what happens when the user double-clicks
on her own screenname and attempts to send that buddy – herself
– an instant message?
parannieoia (4:30:37 AM):
hey
parannieoia (4:30:37 AM):
hey
parannieoia (4:30:48 AM):
what?
parannieoia (4:30:48 AM):
what?
parannieoia (4:30:56 AM):
STOP IT!
parannieoia (4:30:56 AM):
STOP IT!
No matter the reason "parannieoia" has messaged herself (to
"find herself"? because she feels lonely? just to see what would
happen?) – the need was apparently there. The call has been placed
by her and to her – literally, the call comes from her and yet from
beyond her. She has effectively made herself as paranoid as her screenname.
But the contact from the user to herself is not real. It's automatic –
as soon as she clicks "Send," the message duplicates in her
own window. According to the timestamp, the response is not even made
after the message; instead, it is a mirror. The user has engaged in technology
and encountered herself, like Heidegger predicted. Yet there is no essence
to the self in the arena of IM. The mirror-messaging is indeed a delusion
– as Heidegger continues, man ultimately "fails to see himself
as the one spoken to … and thus can never encounter only himself"
(27). Of course, this doesn't mean the user will stop instant messaging
herself. It's something to do, and despite its predictability, it's kind
of fun. As Ronell suggested during her first lecture, sometimes the ghost
that doesn't belong, that doesn't quite fit, offers a familiarity more
proximate and intimate than anything else. Could such a ghost be oneself?
At four in the morning, better to encounter the ghost head-on and harass
the only online persona you know can take it than wrestle with the unfamiliar,
non-haunted voices outside of your own mind.
Back it up a little. That the user almost always adds her own screenname
to her buddy list (and usually right at the top) seems pretty ridiculous.
The user knows she has just signed on – why should she need reassurance
that her
shows up next to all the others? We could blame mere narcissism, which
plays a huge role in IM, but the self-centered buddy list phenomenon is
also suggestive of Ronell's idea of the "doubling, ghostly, or phony
self inhabiting scihzophrenia" and of R. D. Laing's arguments in
The Divided Self. By putting herself on her own buddy list, the
IM user can be assured of her double, the phantomization of the self –
the self "distinctly boundaried outside and inside (i.e. 'inside'
[me], 'outside' [not me])" (Ronell, 140). If the self is the IM user
at her desk, the false self is that online persona which must be visually
reaffirmed once the user signs on.
In fact, Laing's discussion of how the schizophrenic interacts with other
people reminds us almost exactly of the IM atmosphere: he "treats
the other not in terms of any awareness of who or what he might be but
as virtually an android robot playing a role or part in a large machine
in which one too many may be acting yet another part" (Laing, 47).
When we are online, our buddies correspond to real people but as far as
we can tell on our computer screens, they are more like "android
robots" than human beings, "virtual" instead of physically
accessible. IM is the "large machine" in which one too many
(including our central user herself) may be "acting yet another part."
It is easy to "perform" when using IM, which only adds to the
schizophrenic atmosphere of the program. Sometimes the multiple voices
(or instant messages) are unintelligible enough when considered as a group;
throw in the possibility that many buddies can constantly be "putting
on acts," pretending to be different people or deliberately altering
their personalities (why not? it's harder to get caught) and things become
even more manic.
It's about time to sign off. But can I? As Ronell suggests, are we ever
really able to disconnect from a call? Like the traumatic act of hanging
up the telephone, when the user signs off of IM, "the break is never
absolute" (20). After being sucked into cyberspace, the user feels
compelled to "stay with the call that seeks to pull us in" (R,
83). Even if the user's engaged buddy signs off, there is a traumatic
hesitation felt right before the user's own disconnect. IM has become
an obsession. Luckily, the schizophrenic nature of IM often takes care
of signing off for her. "Schizophrenia seems to disconnect quite
haphazardly," writes Ronell, "sometimes cutting simple threads,
sometimes an entire group or large units of thought" (112). It is
the same way online. Small blips in the radar – a lost connection
on the user's end (the simple thread), perhaps, or a system-wide temporary
breakdown that automatically signs thousands of users off at once (the
large units of thought) – make IM a supremely haphazard environment.
At any time, in fact, this paper could end… the user could sign
off or "get kicked off" and leave her buddy in the dust…
oh, the suspense is absolutely haunting, isn't it…
Works
Consulted
Clancy, Heather.
"Flip Open That Cellphone: It's IM on the Move." The New
York Times
7 Oct. 2004.
Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and
Edward Robinson. New
York: Harper and Row, 1962. Quoted in Telephone Book.
Heidegger, Martin. "The Question Concerning Technology," in
The Question Concerning
Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt. New York: Harper
and Row,
1977.
Jung, C. J. The Psychology Dementia Praecox, trans. R. F. C.
Hull, in The Collected
Words of C. J. Jung. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974.
Quoted in
Telephone Book.
McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media. New York: Signet, 1964.
Laing, R. D. The Divided Self. New York: Penguin Books, 1965).
Quoted in Telephone
Book.
Ronell, Avital. Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric
Speech. University of Nebraska Press, 1989. |
