Elegy to tech that calls back the past
Selfies are nothing more than a new way of doing an old thing
● As he wandered down a muddy Lake District lane trying to frame that perfect sunset shot, Thomas Gray was a little too fixated on the image caught in his handheld device.
He tripped in the dirt, grazing his knuckles, but, as he recalled in his memoir, managed to capture the sunset “in all its glory”.
That was the late 1700s, but the scene is familiar today, when selfies have been implicated in innumerable accidents and even some fatalities.
Instead of a smartphone, the technology that the English poet Gray was balancing in one hand, with his back to the view, was a “Claude glass” or black mirror. Named after painter Claude Lorrain, these small pocketsized mirrors were part of the 18th-century trend for “picturesque” tourism, and smoothed the surrounding landscape into a dim-tinted frame.
I learnt of the Claude glass in The Social Photo, a new book by social media theorist Nathan Jurgenson in which he puts today’s technological predicaments in historical context. It is a refreshing respite from most of the commentary streaming from our devices today. “Turn this off,” exasperated experts plead, “just as soon as you’ve finished this article on the tyranny of the screen.”
Despite sometimes contradictory research on the matter, warnings that social media and smartphones are ruining our children, our relationships and our health are everywhere.
Commentators have, of course, always enjoyed taking their audience on a guilt trip via the scenic route. The problem right now is that the counterpoint on tech’s benefits is rarely expressed.
The Social Photo, based on a series of essays Jurgenson wrote before and during his time at Snap, Snapchat’s parent company, makes the case that smartphones in general — and picture messaging in particular — are an important development worthy of closer study.
Though many of the photos shared on social media may not be interesting artistically, Jurgenson argues that the streams of images “transmit a general alertness to experience rather than facts” — much as the view from a speeding train brought a new way of seeing the world when railways were the disruptive technology.
The more widely a technology is adopted, the more it will mirror the real world — both the good and the bad
Social photo-sharing has more in common with oral storytelling traditions, he suggests, than with the precise depictions that we associated with photos when they were a physical and, therefore, scarcer resource.
Jurgenson also rails against the handwringing over screen addiction and the supposed salvation of a digital detox. “In the future, will we still remember how selfsatisfied we were about any time spent away from the screen?” he asks. “It is incorrect to say IRL [in real life] to mean offline: the internet is real life.”
He argues that trying to extricate technology from our lives is just as artificial, with smartphones so pervasive. For many people, sending a selfie to a friend is not so much narcissism as another form of conversation.
Jurgenson is not a lone voice. A recent research paper from McGill University in Montreal argues that “screen addiction” is, in fact, just the latest manifestation of “the human urge to connect with people, and the related necessity to be seen, heard, thought about, guided, and monitored by others, that reaches deep in our social brains and far in our evolutionary past”.
That is not to say that excessive smartphone usage is without harm. But instead of drawing a binary distinction between the digital and the physical, it’s more important to consider what people are doing on their phones. Technology is, for the most part, a neutral tool. The more widely a technology is adopted, the more it will mirror the real world — both the good and the bad.
The problem with Silicon Valley is that it typically sets utopian expectations for what its creations can achieve — and is then too slow to deal with the inevitable fallout.
The story of Gray’s “black mirror” should remind us that even if we can reach an equilibrium in our relationship with the screen, it won’t be long before another new invention opens up the same questions all over again.