Alone and On Stage: Andrew Sullivan on Technology and Society

Andrew Sullivan has written a couple of somewhat interesting reflections on the effect of technology on our sense of community (here and here). He laments the effects of iPods where people can have an entire world of music but are cut off, not only from other music, but from encounters with other people. This has the effect of shrinking people into smaller and smaller little solipsistic cocoons:

It wouldn’t be so worrisome if it weren’t part of something even bigger. Americans are beginning to narrowcast their own lives. You get your news from your favorite blogs, the ones that won’t challenge your own view of the world. You tune into a paid satellite radio service that also aims directly at a small market - for New Age fanatics, or liberal talk, or Christian rock. Television is all cable. Culure is all subculture. Your cell-phones can receive email feeds of your favorite blogger’s latest thoughts - seconds after he has posted them - or sports scores for your own team, or stock quotes of just your portfolio. Technology has given us finally a universe entirely for ourselves - where the serendipity of meeting a new stranger, or hearing a piece of music we would never choose for ourselves, or an opinion that might actually force us to change our mind about something are all effectively banished. Atomization by little white boxes and cell-phones. Society without the social. Others who are chosen - not met at random.

Increased solipsism, however, corresponds paradoxically to decreased privacy:

We live in some ways in a completely paradoxical new world. On the one hand, technology has enabled us to retreat into niches and personal spaces with protective precision. We can communicate more easily and more intimately than ever before - texting, emails, cell-phones, blackberries, cell-phone cameras, blogs, instant messaging, and on and on. But as we become more cut off from general social contact, our personal communications are increasingly completely transparent. We have rising social atomization with a collapse of personal privacy. We are alone. And at the same time on stage.

Sullivan’s arguments are worth pondering.

However, nothing he says is new. For the solipsism he laments is the result of the modern self’s attempt to have full control over his/her environment. Today it’s iPods. Yesterday it was Sony Walkmans. One can add the automobile, suburban layouts where houses are no longer built with front porches where neighbors can enjoy the company of other neighbors (now all activity is in the back, away from society, like houses found in the Arab world, whose inhabitants understandably don’t want the government’s prying eyes looking into only spheres of freedom).

Of course, what else are birth control and abortion than attempts to have full control of one’s inner environment, one’s body? Those “body” issues correspond to the desire to control one’s surroundings that goes along with low fertility rates as well as same-sex marriage.

Sullivan is a libertarian, though one leavened by the influence of Michael Oakeshott. His is an ideology that attempts to further the goals of the technological society by maximizing private liberty so individuals qua individuals may maximize their happiness. Margaret Thatcher, one of Sullivan’s heroines, once said that “there is no such thing as society.” With no society, is it any wonder that “public property” is whatever irresponsible bureaucrats say it is?

Sullivan’s chickens are coming home to roost.

UPDATE: Today’s NYT has a review of a book arguing that this possessive individualism has become a mental illness under the conditions of globalization:

People are biologically wired to want it, he contends. We seek more than we need because consumption activates the neurotransmitter dopamine, which rewards us with pleasure, traveling along the same brain pathways as do drugs like caffeine and cocaine. Historically, he says, built-in social brakes reined in our acquisitive instincts. In the capitalist utopia envisioned by Adam Smith in the 18th century, self-interest was tempered by the competing demands of the marketplace and community. But with globalization, the idea of doing business with neighbors one must face the next day is a quaint memory, and all bets are off.

Hat tip: Mirror of Justice