Two - (Head)Phoning It In

Summary

And to ask who the ‘real’ Donald Trump is, is to ignore the obvious. You already know who Donald Trump is. All the evidence you need is right there on your screen. He's half-man, half-TV, with a camera for an eye that is constantly focused on itself. The red light is pulsing, 24/7, and it does not appear to have an off switch. (Poniewozik, 2019)

Public space today is radically different from what it was only 15 or 20 years ago. I am sure I am not the only one who notices large groups of students waiting outside a lecture hall in eerie silence as they all stare into their personal hand-held screens. An entire new socio-technical machine has come into being that links us to electronic devices that are coordinated and enabled by digital technologies connected to the internet. While these devices are visual and affective in terms of how they physically feel in our hands or on our wrists and other parts of the body, they are also sonic devices. Our ears are often clogged with a device pumping in the sounds of our choice. Public life suffers as a result, as more and more people cocoon themselves while in public spaces. Withdrawing into a book or magazine, of course, could constitute the same mechanism. The difference is that books and magazines have a fixed content that does not automatically update or renew or offer portals onwards into infinity. Nor are they designed to necessarily ensnare you into divulging personal data that are then monetized for profit and turned back on yourself.

The spectacle, in addition to becoming more and more affective and emotional than has been previously acknowledged (Chapter One), has been interconnected and charged with today's digital technology. Instead of dying away along with the decline of certain retail formats (like some mega-malls), the spectacle has now fractured and dispersed itself into the digital landscape (Thatcher and Dalton, 2017). So much of consumer society is planned for in advance by a complex of financial, scientific, corporate and often technocratic politics. Under ‘surveillance capitalism’ (Zuboff, 2019), the spectacle is transformed into a more mundane experience of everyday life (Briziarelli and Armano, 2017).