Dead since 1832, Jeremy Bentham is a cadaver that has been living in public ever since, on display beside "Dapple," his favorite walking stick, in a glass-fronted wooden coffin at London’s University College. His coffin was coined as an “Auto-Icon” by Bentham, which is a neologism meaning "a man who is his own image." Below is an excerpt from Andrew Keen’s new book, Digital Vertigo: How Today's Online Social Revolution Is Dividing, Diminishing, and Disorienting Us, in which he describes recognizing the Auto-Icon as a symbol for the digital age.
I continued to gaze into the Auto-Icon for enlightenment. As the picture became clearer and clearer, my dizziness intensified and the room began to spin around me with more and more violence. Yes, I now saw, Bentham’s corpse did, after all, have something to teach me. The true picture of the future, I realized, had been staring me straight in the face all along.
In spite of my own feeling of vertigo, this vision -- a painful kind of epiphany -- grabbed me with an icy clarity. I froze momentarily, my mouth half open, my eyes fixed on the corpse. It suddenly became clear that I’d been peering into a mirror. Reid Hoffman was right: the future is always sooner and stranger than anyone of us think. I realized that the Auto-Icon, this “man who is his own image,” represents this future and Bentham’s corpse is actually you, me and everyone else who have imprisoned themselves in today’s digital inspection house.
Jeremy Bentham's "Auto-Icon" at University College London
Photo credit: Michael Reeve
What I glimpsed that late November afternoon in Bloomsbury was the anti-social future, the loneliness of the isolated man in the connected crowd. I saw all of us as digital Jeremy Benthams, isolated from one another not only by the growing ubiquity of networked communications, but also by the increasingly individualized and competitive nature of twenty-first-century life. Yes, this was the future. Personal visibility, I recognized, is the new symbol of status and power in our digital age. Like the corpse locked in his transparent tomb, we are now all on permanent exhibition, all just images of ourselves in this brave new transparent world.
Like the immodest nineteenth-century social reformer locked in his
eternal wooden and glass box, we twenty-first-century social networkers -- especially aspiring super nodes like myself -- are becoming addicted to
building attention and reputation. But like the solitariness of my own experience
in that University College corridor, the truth, the reality of social media, is an architecture of human isolation rather than community. The future will be anything but social, I realized. That’s the real killer app of the networked age.
We are, I realized, becoming schizophrenic -- simultaneously detached from the world and yet jarringly ubiquitous. Cultural critics like Umberto Eco and Jean Baudrillard have used the word “hyperreality” to describe how modern technology blurs the distinction between reality and unreality and grants authenticity to self-evidently fake things like William Randolph Hearst’s castle in San Simeon, the gothic building on the Californian coast made famous by Orson Wells’s 1941 picture Citizen Kane. Eco defines hyperreality as “a philosophy of immortality as duplication” where “the completely real becomes identified with the completely fake.”
"Absolute unreality is offered as real presence," Eco thus explains hyperreality.
But as I gazed at the Auto-Icon, an equally absurd neologism came to mind:
“hypervisibility.” The man who is his own image in the digitally networked
world, I realized, is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere, and the more
completely visible he appears, the more completely invisible he actually is.
Hypervisibility.
In this fully transparent world where we are simultaneously nowhere and
everywhere, absolute unreality is real presence, and the completely fake is
also the completely real. This, I saw, was the most truthfully untruthful picture of networked twenty-first-century life.
Chris, I'm not sure that the Internet isolates us in any way whatsoever. My life is enriched by a double handful of online friendships with people I would never have known without technological assistance. Indeed, I now have contact with old friends I haven't seen in 20-plus years, and that could only have happened via social media. Yes, I know many of our IT colleagues got into this line of work because they felt more comfortable conversing with boxes than with other human beings, but social media opens far more doors than it closes. As to whether or not we're "frozen" in our little boxes, I'd have to disagree with that premise as well. The icon you see next to my name isn't me, it's an image I have created to convey what I wish to be seen. That image is no more the real me than if I placed a picture of, say, Mickey Mouse in that space. The mystery remains....
This is a major point that, as I expressed to you in the chat earlier, I happen to agree with. In my view these types of arguments are similar to those which claim that violent video games increase violent behavior.
The behavior may be fed by certain things, as you said, but actually establishing cause? I would imagine that would be quite difficult.
I don't avoid it, and I don't feel imprisoned either. What about the subconscious factor? I believe the ones who feel imprisoned in the digital house is because deeply inside that's where they want to be.
Social media is just a tool. it doesn't force us to do anything. we can use (abuse) the tool, we can choose to isolate ourselves through the use of Social Media, but Social media does not have any power, in an of itself, to force us to do anything.
Now, are there personalities that are more prone to isolationism or addiction? Of course there are and the social media tool provides the means that enable their 'habit'. But humans were given free will. No one can force us to act in any way that we do not choose. Now, they can do things that might influence our choice, but the choice still rests with us.
It may indeed be the case that we are less connected to the people immediately around us now, but if that is the case, the question I would want to ask is: Why? Is it, in fact, social media which forces our withdraw, or does social media simply provide a means for us to withdraw? Personally, it seems to me that the desire to be connected to others is hardwired into us. Whether or not the connections we make on the web hinder our connections in real life is hard to say, but I certainly appreciate that the issue is being explored.
"this "man who is his own image," represents this future and Bentham's corpse is actually you, me and everyone else who have imprisoned themselves in today's digital inspection house."
Would the digital inspection house be a euphemism for social web?
I can't speak for anyone else, but I know I don't feel imprisoned by it. This may be because I avoid it like the plague, or it may be that with anything digital I try to practice moderation.
More awareness needs to be raised in terms of connecting to the reality you mention (neighbors, etc.). And it's tough to say how doing that will be easy in today's age. At least for a time you had to physically sit in front of a computer that had to be attached to a wall for power. Once you left that space, you reentered the "real" world. Now with laptops, smart phones, tablets--the technology you take with you--you never have to disconnect. It's a little scary to say the least indeed.
Ashish, yes. Andrew gives a really interesting overview of Bentham's wishes in his book Digital Vertigo. Highly recommend you read it! Also, for Ashish and anyone who missed it, feel free to check out our archived IE Radio interview with Andrew from earlier today. I had a great time talking with Andrew about these subjects. Hope you enjoy the interview.
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The following is excerpted from Andrew Keen's latest book, Digital Vertigo: How Today's Online Social Revolution Is Dividing, Diminishing, and Disorienting Us (New York: St. Martin's Press: 2012), which will be released this week.
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