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Abstract

Technological Sophistry and its Contribution to Isolation and Alienation in Society.
This study identifies technologically facilitated sources of alienation and isolation in our society. The aim is to test the hypothesis that a tendency towards embracing imagistic notions of technology as an extension of the self is a factor contributing to isolation and alienation.


Question:
Has the technological extension of the self been distorted to reflect predominantly individualistic and economic metaphors (technological sophistry) of worth and being? If so, have these distortions undermined more holistic notions of relational and communal dynamics?


Theory:
This study draws on the techno-psychology research of Derrick de Kerckhove and other scholars associated with the Toronto School of Communication. The focus will be on the aspects of the theory concerned with the primary role of language, when considered as a technology, in shaping notions of individual and social being. Findings from social anthropology and psychology will also be brought to bear on the analysis.


Method:
The study looks at the structural properties of language and the construction of self and the alignment of self with the consensual social reality. A general look at the notion of technology as a concrete representation of an internal reality and its influence on this process is also considered.

There will be a particular focus on comparing trends in social organization and cohesion that developed concomitantly with the three key communication revolutions posited by Marshall McLuhan (Orality to Literacy, Literacy to Print and Print to Electronic Media) and how these trends effected notions of self in relation to others (community) at the transition points (break boundaries) of each epoch.


Model:
Alfred Toennies’ model of trend analysis in social organization (Gemeinschaft versus Gesselschaft) will be used to characterize gross changes in social structure. Lewis Mumford’s assessment of the subjugation of the human creative response by coercive, hierarchal, class systems (Megamachine from “The Myth of the Machine”) will be employed to characterize changes in the valuation of human worth according to functional and economic paradigms. Plato’s views on sophistry as anathema to true knowledge will be used to both define Techno-sophism and to explore the inherent limitations and biases of external technologies of communicating internally held truths (writing).

All of creation exists in the context of an infinite cluster of relationships. Popular notions of localized, "concrete" forms of being linked by linear causal connections neglect this complexity and are convenient oversimplifications of the dominant material-object discourse promoted by the modern, western scientific point of view. This perspective has, according to Marshall McLuhan, evolved as a consequence of our adoption of the Greek phonetic alphabet as a communications technology.

I would contend that the structure of language itself naturally lends itself to this process of abstract representation and that technologies in the whole are extensions of this motif. Language possesses a natural exteriority of internal representations that are generally flexible in order to accommodate the constant flux of data from the exterior environment. However, when symbols are negotiated and shared, they tend to become fixed, dominant and inflexible metaphorical ideologies. This fixing of point of view, although it engenders a sense of stability, is antithetical to the communicative and creative response that is the raison d’être of language and underscores a trend towards artificially fixing and stabilizing a process that is inherently fluid.

What is problematic, in my estimation, is not that technologies influence us, rather, that they have been held up as salvific—that they possess an intrinsic power to transform us. What is neglected in this view is our innate power of choice that has been swayed in favour of forms of technological determinism. Technologically determined notions of the “self” and the “individual” are legacies of thought that serve to distance us from the environment from whence we came. Our inability to reintegrate ourselves with our social and biological environs has had and will continue to have grave consequences for all of creation. These sentiments are echoed in the words of Daniel Chandler, Biases of the Ear and Eye:

“We need to consider the overall ecology of processes of mediation in which our behaviour is not technologically determined but in which we use a medium and can be subtly influenced by our use of it.”

Humans mirror and extend the underlying complex of radical interconnectedness in their construction of “self” in a social framework. We are naturally gregarious and social to such an extent that if we are deprived of rich sensory, psychic and social interaction with the world around us we fail to develop to our fullest potential. Processes or points of view that limit or mediate our level of engagement with the world around us limit our capacity to wholly integrate our activities with our environs.

I propose to reflect on the structure and process of low-level symbolic language and cognitive processes and extrapolate these models into a social setting to see how their key themes manifest themselves in these more complex schemes. I will focus on how this structuring and enculturation of language modes effect the formation of individual and collective senses of identity with a view to understanding the role that technology plays in this process.

Aldus Huxley has proposed a model of cognition wherein humans are engaged in a dialectic that conjoins social (external self) and individual (internal self). In this paradigm, humans construct/define their sense/conception of the self as an individual in relation to others in a continual recursive spiral of SENSE—APPREHENSION—PERCEPTION—MEMORY—ANALYSIS—KNOWLEDGE—ACTION. This spiral brings self and others into a state of mutual fruition in the fullness of time: our knowledge informs our perceptions of the world around us and provides the data and the point of view on which subsequent actions are predicated. Human beings have evolved finely tuned feedback mechanisms for framing the cause and effect of our actions, which continually, through the mediation of memory, add to and update our notions of our place and our effect on the world we inhabit.

Society exists at the intersection of the internal and external domains of being. The individual, or “self,” as it probes the external for experiential data, is brought into relationship with that which it encounters via its sensorium. Beings engage in this process in a fully embodied state where the internal construction of meaning and significance of the events from this shared domain of "experience" or "event" gains expression and where external influences are apprehended for interpretation and contingent action.

Language is the means whereby sentient beings, party to an event, correlate the concordances of these experiences with their counterparts and negotiate the rhythm of mutual existence—providing a symbolic lexicon of experiential accord that serves as a map to the crossroads of experience.
This map can be sequential (if one is of Western, alphabetic bias) and can serve as the foundation stone of history—an artefact of experience to be given existence in its own right and to be passed down for consideration in posterity—the artefact taken as a tangible substitute for experience—the birth of history and tradition.

Plato was profoundly aware of the inherent problems of fixing conceptions of “reality” in symbolic form. The Cretan paradox revealed the logical inconsistencies of using language to represent itself. The requirement for a meta-language to frame a lower-level language was evident and became the basis for the explorations in logic by Kurt Gödel (Incompleteness Theorem).
Plato saw the limitations of writing as a way of recording experiential data and saw the Sophist as a mime who merely propagated oversimplified, fixed notions of knowledge—they lacked the open, responsive and malleable approach that a search for truth required and merely parroted dominant, ideological and historical notions of knowledge. Like Plato, logicians such as Alfred North Whitehead, Bertrand Russell, Kurt Gödel and Douglas Hofstadter have ruminated extensively on the problem of fixed symbolic representations of the world and their inherent limitations that arise as a consequence of their own rigidity.

One of Plato’s responses to this trend of fixing knowledge was the dialectic method of question and answer. This represents and open-ended approach to probing the truth that branches off into a possibly infinite array of sub-inquiries. Reflections on Plato’s approach to true knowledge is brought forth in this passage from Diogenes Laertes, Book III:


“…Plato asserts that the object of sense is that which never abides in quality or quantity, but is ever in flux and change. The assumption is that the things from which you take away number are no longer equal nor determinate, nor have they quantity or quality. These are the things to which becoming always, and being never, belongs.
But the object of thought is something constant from which nothing is subtracted, to which nothing is added. This is the nature of eternal things.”

Here, through a shared, inherently incomplete symbolic language, the self emerges, draws from and contributes to the continuity of this shared historical tradition. We are contingent upon the exigencies of history and its linguistic and social conventions and are consequently shaped by its dominant and prevalent metaphors—effecting the construction of our internal and external realms of existence. A dynamic and constantly evolving interplay or percolation of ideas and symbols between these two realms is constitutive of an integrated and responsive social being. Forces that favour one aspect of this dynamic over the other have the effect of debilitating the fully integrated and responsive social being (self). Fixing notions of the self with respect to symbolic institutions may have the effect of subjugating the notion self to an artificial, mimetically constructed image that is merely a farcical semblance of normative social values, or it may result in an antithetical rebellion that nurtures socio-pathic and narcissistic tendencies that fail to accommodate the reality of inter-relatedness that underpins their being. When the equilibrium between the social self and the individual self is compromised feelings of estrangement dominate the psyche leading to a sense of alienation and isolation.

A move towards integrating all aspects of cognitive conceptions of reality that realize the inherent biases of linear, hierarchal, taxonomic scientific thought and give serious consideration to the roles of myth and belief in informing one’s construction of individual and social self will be of significant worth in a world who’s new environment mirrors the underlying and intractable nature of reality—that being that everything is connected to and influences everything else. Science has limited the infinite regress that this macro-view invites by confining its enquiries to local and “efficient cause” rather than the global, final cause that is the object of philosophy. This view holds up the material, object-level discourse as the only reality—a view that is uncritical of the fact that this represents an unique cultural value with limits and biases. Technology, in general, has been a significant aspect of this material worldview and has been held up as a means whereby we may impassively and objectively observe and quantify the reality that we inhabit.

To understand the nature and roll of technology in this process of imaging the self it is important to start with a working definition. The root of the word is derived from the Greek techne, which encompassed art, craft, skill, technique, and profession.

I would put forth the following definition of technology:

The extension, augmentation, magnification and/or amplification of an internal state in order to enhance the apprehension of, or the effect upon, external environments and their inhabitants.

There are some problems with this notion in that the externalization and mediation of internal states necessarily invites translation. The will, when expressed via external modes often differs widely from the internally conceived idea that is being signified. The communicative aspect of this modality is further limited when bound to specific cultural contexts. Furthermore, the leveraging of the will via material objects gives rise to the idea that the will or intention of the individual can be translated into and conveyed by this mode. This implies that material objects possess the uncanny ability to hold and or represent the internal domain of the sender and that this medium has the capacity to transmit this message: An arrow shot from a bow in the hands of an enemy may well communicate the hostility of an adversary with chilling efficacy yet, is the arrow head culpable in the act? This efficacy of transmitting internal states to the external realm via material objects cannot be under-estimated; yet, it gives rise to notions of contagious magic (Frazer, “The Golden Bough”)—that material objects can contain the will.

It is not difficult to see how easily technology is embraced and personalized and how they become dominant metaphors that help shape who we become. When technology as an extension of who we are becomes a dominant metaphor used in the service of propping up hierarchal institutions and powers, and we accept it as an inevitable consequence of who we are, we have enslaved ourselves to an ideology that neglects our innate capacity for choice and cooperative, creative response. This imagistic notion of technology is a form of idol worship that projects power to the inanimate and forms the basis for what I call “Technosophism.”