"When I was growing up, my contact with the remote world was through television and magazines. These media gave us the sense that famous people lived apart from the rest of us. Meanwhile, the people of our intimate world lived with us and were like us. They were not on display."
That's not quite right, the roots go back a long time. The perceptions of expanding gap-bridging were already in motion with mass radio broadcast which could be heard in the intimate surroundings of groups together in the family home, consider FDR's "fireside chats".
But from the earliest days of television - around two thirds of a century ago now - it was recognized that moving recurrent fictional series involving developed characters onto the screen was an enormous advance in the direction of temporarily simulated emotions of intimacy, familiarity and inclusion, in which members of the audience could be made to feel more like the quiet member of the group than a mere spectator. It's not just that temporary "suspension of disbelief" one experiences when allowing the full mental transportation into the world and cosmology of a work of fiction, it's much more - the feeling as if one might be involved as a character oneself, of your own life progressing in line with their lives.
When people watched "Leave it to Beaver", they would vaguely and subconsciously feel part of the family. Hit comedy shows like Cheers and Friends and Seinfeld were crafted, arranged, and presented specifically to try to maximize the sense that one was just another friend on a couch. patron at the bar, or for various kinds of small-group-based procedural dramas, another member of the team. In Star Trek, it's like you're an ensign on the crew, or maybe you're an assistant prosecutor on Law and Order, and so forth. Notice the small modal number of characters. People came to "know" the lives of these characters better than they knew about the lives of their most intimate relations in the physical world.
The internet, social media, smartphones, and content streamable on demand were certainly multiple additional quantum leaps ahead of all that, especially given the possibility of interaction and the levelling of the modes of interaction such that one sees the presented lives of friends and celebrities in the same format. Nowadays the virtual has completely hollowed out the real, physical reality both can't compete, and it's far too much of a hassle to try to make it work.
If “Handle” is used to protect privacy, that protection also allows more honesty. Possibly more honesty than in the real world. I hugely appreciate the honesty, even tho it’s clear we don’t & won’t know each other. Thenewneo.com has Neo, with similar honesty but a very different POV with yet similar conclusions. [yes, I am a huge Handle fan.]
Intimacy requires honesty, which can increase vulnerability, so it also needs trust.
The online world that rewards betrayal of trust, so as to use the truth against somebody, like the DOGE guy Big Balls, tho also friend’s letters, that rewarding trust betrayal is bad but unstoppable.
"the real, physical reality ... can't compete [with the virtual], and it's far too much of a hassle to try to make it work." Yes, the virtual is more interesting/less boring.
Chalk up another reason why so many people don't get married and/or don't have kids any more.
Near the end of his life, Raoul Naroll, an anthropologist who specialized in cross-cultural studies, published "The Moral Order: An Introduction to the Human Situation" (Sage 1983). It was the first of three volumes he had planned to write in which he synthesized the last quarter of a century of work in cross-cultural study. While was unable to complete the other volumes, this first one introduced the concept of a moralnet, by which he simply meant the smallest level of social organization beyond the so-called nuclear family. The hunting and foraging band is the prototypical moralnet; within larger-scale societies we have the extended family. Most generally, such a group of kinfolk and friends is a necessary level of social organization in the large societies most of us we live in. Moralnets, Naroll’s research indicates, seem weakest in industrialized societies.
That post, in turn, became the introductory chapter to a small collection of essays I put together with Charlie Keil, an ethnomusicologist best known for "Urban Blues" (Chicago 1966). Our book is called "Playing for Peace: Reclaiming Our Human Nature." Here's the Amazon link: https://tinyurl.com/22hhjyaq That book is, in effect, about music and dance as vehicles for sustaining the intimate world.
"Moralnets, Naroll’s research indicates, seem weakest in industrialized societies." Surely, part of the reason is not necessarily industrialization itself, it is the ever-expanding encroachment of the state on civil society, the takeover by the state of so many functions that were handled by voluntary groups, mostly face-to-face by a mindless and faceless bureaucracy.
FWIW, Naroll had the highest regard for Norway. In the blog post I quote from a study of voluntary associations in Norway as an example of moralnets. I don't know a great deal about Norway, but it's my impression that state institutions are quite extensive.
I suspect much of the problem is that the young go to the remote world (i.e. social media) before their identity is solidified. As an older person who had a strong sense of identity before the rise of the digital world, I view it all with detachment. I find a "like" to one of my comments pleasing, but no big deal, and don't care at all whether the comment gets liked.
As another oldster, I do care if a comment is liked, but it's usually "no big deal". On the other hand, I get a little thrill whenever Arnold likes one :)
Me too - and it's because we know Arnold well from long having followed him and come to respect his knowledge and way of thinking. Indeed, I feel I know Arnold's thoughts and beliefs in general better than those of some in my intimate world. So maybe this is a case of the remote world becoming close to the intimate world.
It's not really about 'identity' so much, more about 'socialization' and how one is formed and re-molded all the time under the influence of the gestalt experience of exposures and interactions in the virtual world. Consider when and how you met and bonded with the most important people in your life. A lot of older people are leveraging the inertial social network and connections from a pre-virtualized era, and the virtual to them is a collection of potential a la carte supplements to their core social life. For younger people it's been the only thing on the menu their whole lives.
But it's not just how you see those others, but how it feels in the ways that others can now see you. You can -feel- like the prettiest girl in town or a microcelebrity with all the validation and likes and upvotes and followers, and you are your own celebrity brand manager and marketing team with the choreographed presentation of strategically curated aspects of your lived experience captured into media and uploaded to the whole world, as a kind of simultaneous performance of showing off and fishing for compliments but with the socially accepted excuse of the plausible deniability of 'merely sharing'. You can filter all the merely ordinary or unflattering bits of existence out of your presentation. If only for 15 minutes, people can feel the simulated thrill of the power of real influence as the leader of a virtualized "torches and pitchforks mob" when some complaint they make goes super-viral.
Amen to your sentiment. What memories do I treasure most? A week-long hike with my friend. My brothers laughing hysterically the time I said abdominal snowman. My grandparents talking at their kitchen table. I do not fondly remember online activity of any sort. I hope my brain keeps this MO.
Re: "the healthiest, happiest people tend to be connected with another as families, neighbors, and religious adherents. Once you notice that, you should adjust your aspirations accordingly."
As far as I can tell, personality plays a large role in happiness. To a large extent, personality shapes self-selection into family, neighborly relations, and religious groups. No doubt, these relationships then also have some impact on happiness (i.e., treatment effects).
Many youths mimic their peers (i.e., get caught up in sideward glances) is a self-defeating equilibrium. They find it hard to imagine their future happiness in middle age (myopia). Technology shock and delay of adulthood in ever longer education have disrupted entry into traditional relations and groups.
Emily Finley has a thoughtful essay in this weekend's WSJ, "The Real Reason Young People Are Anxious," about the pitfalls of "romantic" education since Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and the loss of education for wisdom:
I've always questioned my participation in this substack for reasons similar to the topic of today. Not sure if that's fair or not. It's seems there is also some benefit in finding others who see the world similarly.
I’ve spent more time on Arnold & his thinking over the last couple decades than on any IRL friend, but try to limit my comments somewhat. Especially in an attempt to be positive and add something, some other idea.
Commenting is kinda talking-like, yet very much not.
My new-ish hobby is karaoke, but that’s more to experience and enjoy rather than talk about.
Hans-Georg Miller @ carefreewandering's concept of 'Profilicity' is an interesting extension of this phenomenon.
My oldest child, mid-thirties, seems only slightly affected by social media. Youngest, mid twenties, seems affected but not overwhelmed. Younger children in my classroom were consumed by it.
I'm not sure how intimacy will be regenerated as those of us who once knew it exit.
"So far, as Evans and Carr point out, the remixing of the intimate world and the remote world has made our social lives more brittle. Our insecurities have been magnified. Our fears and animosities have been strengthened." As compared to what? Point to the "what" and someone will likely point to a major tradeoff in adopting the "what."
Fortunately, Arnold Kling doesn't want to go back to "what." He begins his next paragraph with, "Going forward..." He isn't overly conservative about the future.
"Going forward, I believe we need to find ways to regenerate the intimate world. If we look around, the healthiest, happiest people tend to be connected with another as families, neighbors, and religious adherents. Once you notice that, you should adjust your aspirations accordingly." Thank you. Regenerate is a great word describing the direction we should head. Perhaps we're in the same tribe after all?
It's cool when you have a friend whom you save up things to "tell". I do that; and I remember once a close friend of mine walked over during the pandemic. We sat outside in the front yard as was then the custom. After she walked home, I noticed a little piece of paper in the grass. It seemed to be a list, but of an odd sort I couldn't make out. Not a grocery list. I mentioned it to her later. It turned out it was a little shorthand cheat sheet of subjects she wanted to remember to talk about or things to tell me.
My nuclear family, into which I was born, has the interesting distinction of never having had an interesting conversation. Even with all the yelling. Bilaterally or all together. Outsiders have confirmed this. Since it dates to 1961, this is a record in which I now take some perverse pride. We did used to find the same things funny on TV though (long ago).
Mother once exclaimed over the fact that my husband and I "talk".
Even there, though, decades of marriage have taught me not to expect or anymore look for conversational "completeness" with a spouse. There are many subjects, and other times just moods in which a woman may get, that make talking to him like waves pounding the headland and being thrown back. And I think a good wife never gets to be that headland.
I think for some people - more "talk-y"? than others, more something? - there is always going to be a tension with what's on offer with one's 20 people or whatever it is - however necessary and irreplaceable and *ultimate* they are - falling short of what you may need to furnish your mind.
"Going forward, I believe we need to find ways to regenerate the intimate world."
Odysseus wanted to hear the sirens sing, but he knew their call was so tempting that no sailor could resist temptation and stop himself from diving into the sea. So Odysseus had his men tie him to the mast so he wouldn't be free to dive, and to plug their ears with wax, so they wouldn't even be tempted to respond to his orders, which they might if they could hear his pleas.
That's pre-commitment auto-paternalism, like putting a time-lock on the cookie jar.
That's pretty much what groups of people would have to do in order to generate the intimate world amongst each other, and without just avoiding the tech entirely.
Some employers give their employees smartphones for work purposes, and impose lots of additional security, surveillance, and limitation on those phones, which can include constraints on screen time, content, and even who you are allowed to contact and who can contact you - "mobile device management".
So, instead of getting your phone service from Verizon or ATT or whatever, you get it from some intermediary, like your church. And they put on the MDM. Maybe they can watch and intervene too. And you (and your kids) ... have to live with it. And if you want more intimacy than that, you've got to go get it from people in the real physical world, preferably those also tied up to the same MDM mast, who will need you as much as you need them, as you rediscover yourselves and each other in the sea of atomized screen zombies.
The flip side of Carr's point about overexposure, already implied, is the underexposure of remote world - so much of direct human interaction is subconscious, and remote interaction lacks all the subtle cues vital to bonding with others and orienting yourself in the social world.
"When I was growing up, my contact with the remote world was through television and magazines. These media gave us the sense that famous people lived apart from the rest of us. Meanwhile, the people of our intimate world lived with us and were like us. They were not on display."
That's not quite right, the roots go back a long time. The perceptions of expanding gap-bridging were already in motion with mass radio broadcast which could be heard in the intimate surroundings of groups together in the family home, consider FDR's "fireside chats".
But from the earliest days of television - around two thirds of a century ago now - it was recognized that moving recurrent fictional series involving developed characters onto the screen was an enormous advance in the direction of temporarily simulated emotions of intimacy, familiarity and inclusion, in which members of the audience could be made to feel more like the quiet member of the group than a mere spectator. It's not just that temporary "suspension of disbelief" one experiences when allowing the full mental transportation into the world and cosmology of a work of fiction, it's much more - the feeling as if one might be involved as a character oneself, of your own life progressing in line with their lives.
When people watched "Leave it to Beaver", they would vaguely and subconsciously feel part of the family. Hit comedy shows like Cheers and Friends and Seinfeld were crafted, arranged, and presented specifically to try to maximize the sense that one was just another friend on a couch. patron at the bar, or for various kinds of small-group-based procedural dramas, another member of the team. In Star Trek, it's like you're an ensign on the crew, or maybe you're an assistant prosecutor on Law and Order, and so forth. Notice the small modal number of characters. People came to "know" the lives of these characters better than they knew about the lives of their most intimate relations in the physical world.
The internet, social media, smartphones, and content streamable on demand were certainly multiple additional quantum leaps ahead of all that, especially given the possibility of interaction and the levelling of the modes of interaction such that one sees the presented lives of friends and celebrities in the same format. Nowadays the virtual has completely hollowed out the real, physical reality both can't compete, and it's far too much of a hassle to try to make it work.
If “Handle” is used to protect privacy, that protection also allows more honesty. Possibly more honesty than in the real world. I hugely appreciate the honesty, even tho it’s clear we don’t & won’t know each other. Thenewneo.com has Neo, with similar honesty but a very different POV with yet similar conclusions. [yes, I am a huge Handle fan.]
Intimacy requires honesty, which can increase vulnerability, so it also needs trust.
The online world that rewards betrayal of trust, so as to use the truth against somebody, like the DOGE guy Big Balls, tho also friend’s letters, that rewarding trust betrayal is bad but unstoppable.
"the real, physical reality ... can't compete [with the virtual], and it's far too much of a hassle to try to make it work." Yes, the virtual is more interesting/less boring.
Chalk up another reason why so many people don't get married and/or don't have kids any more.
Yes! Yes! Yes!
Near the end of his life, Raoul Naroll, an anthropologist who specialized in cross-cultural studies, published "The Moral Order: An Introduction to the Human Situation" (Sage 1983). It was the first of three volumes he had planned to write in which he synthesized the last quarter of a century of work in cross-cultural study. While was unable to complete the other volumes, this first one introduced the concept of a moralnet, by which he simply meant the smallest level of social organization beyond the so-called nuclear family. The hunting and foraging band is the prototypical moralnet; within larger-scale societies we have the extended family. Most generally, such a group of kinfolk and friends is a necessary level of social organization in the large societies most of us we live in. Moralnets, Naroll’s research indicates, seem weakest in industrialized societies.
I say more about moral nets in a long post at New Savanna: Thriving, Jiving, and Jamming Among Friends and Family, https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2021/08/thriving-jiving-and-jamming-among.html
That post, in turn, became the introductory chapter to a small collection of essays I put together with Charlie Keil, an ethnomusicologist best known for "Urban Blues" (Chicago 1966). Our book is called "Playing for Peace: Reclaiming Our Human Nature." Here's the Amazon link: https://tinyurl.com/22hhjyaq That book is, in effect, about music and dance as vehicles for sustaining the intimate world.
"Moralnets, Naroll’s research indicates, seem weakest in industrialized societies." Surely, part of the reason is not necessarily industrialization itself, it is the ever-expanding encroachment of the state on civil society, the takeover by the state of so many functions that were handled by voluntary groups, mostly face-to-face by a mindless and faceless bureaucracy.
FWIW, Naroll had the highest regard for Norway. In the blog post I quote from a study of voluntary associations in Norway as an example of moralnets. I don't know a great deal about Norway, but it's my impression that state institutions are quite extensive.
I suspect much of the problem is that the young go to the remote world (i.e. social media) before their identity is solidified. As an older person who had a strong sense of identity before the rise of the digital world, I view it all with detachment. I find a "like" to one of my comments pleasing, but no big deal, and don't care at all whether the comment gets liked.
As another oldster, I do care if a comment is liked, but it's usually "no big deal". On the other hand, I get a little thrill whenever Arnold likes one :)
Me too - and it's because we know Arnold well from long having followed him and come to respect his knowledge and way of thinking. Indeed, I feel I know Arnold's thoughts and beliefs in general better than those of some in my intimate world. So maybe this is a case of the remote world becoming close to the intimate world.
It's not really about 'identity' so much, more about 'socialization' and how one is formed and re-molded all the time under the influence of the gestalt experience of exposures and interactions in the virtual world. Consider when and how you met and bonded with the most important people in your life. A lot of older people are leveraging the inertial social network and connections from a pre-virtualized era, and the virtual to them is a collection of potential a la carte supplements to their core social life. For younger people it's been the only thing on the menu their whole lives.
"On our little screens, celebrities act like our friends, and our friends act like celebrities."
Excellent desription!
But it's not just how you see those others, but how it feels in the ways that others can now see you. You can -feel- like the prettiest girl in town or a microcelebrity with all the validation and likes and upvotes and followers, and you are your own celebrity brand manager and marketing team with the choreographed presentation of strategically curated aspects of your lived experience captured into media and uploaded to the whole world, as a kind of simultaneous performance of showing off and fishing for compliments but with the socially accepted excuse of the plausible deniability of 'merely sharing'. You can filter all the merely ordinary or unflattering bits of existence out of your presentation. If only for 15 minutes, people can feel the simulated thrill of the power of real influence as the leader of a virtualized "torches and pitchforks mob" when some complaint they make goes super-viral.
I just want to say thank you for sharing these notes - while I got it through remote world, it makes me think about way more about intimate world
Amen to your sentiment. What memories do I treasure most? A week-long hike with my friend. My brothers laughing hysterically the time I said abdominal snowman. My grandparents talking at their kitchen table. I do not fondly remember online activity of any sort. I hope my brain keeps this MO.
I fondly remember commenting here (some times).
Yes. This is very true.
Do you realise that you're a part of many people's pseudo intimate worlds?
I read your work regularly and have listened to you on a number of podcasts. To a certain extent I feel like I know you.
Re: "the healthiest, happiest people tend to be connected with another as families, neighbors, and religious adherents. Once you notice that, you should adjust your aspirations accordingly."
As far as I can tell, personality plays a large role in happiness. To a large extent, personality shapes self-selection into family, neighborly relations, and religious groups. No doubt, these relationships then also have some impact on happiness (i.e., treatment effects).
Many youths mimic their peers (i.e., get caught up in sideward glances) is a self-defeating equilibrium. They find it hard to imagine their future happiness in middle age (myopia). Technology shock and delay of adulthood in ever longer education have disrupted entry into traditional relations and groups.
Emily Finley has a thoughtful essay in this weekend's WSJ, "The Real Reason Young People Are Anxious," about the pitfalls of "romantic" education since Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and the loss of education for wisdom:
https://substack.com/home/post/p-156713380
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/our-kids-need-an-imagination-detox-anxiety-romanticism-377a9d95
I've always questioned my participation in this substack for reasons similar to the topic of today. Not sure if that's fair or not. It's seems there is also some benefit in finding others who see the world similarly.
I’ve spent more time on Arnold & his thinking over the last couple decades than on any IRL friend, but try to limit my comments somewhat. Especially in an attempt to be positive and add something, some other idea.
Commenting is kinda talking-like, yet very much not.
My new-ish hobby is karaoke, but that’s more to experience and enjoy rather than talk about.
Hans-Georg Miller @ carefreewandering's concept of 'Profilicity' is an interesting extension of this phenomenon.
My oldest child, mid-thirties, seems only slightly affected by social media. Youngest, mid twenties, seems affected but not overwhelmed. Younger children in my classroom were consumed by it.
I'm not sure how intimacy will be regenerated as those of us who once knew it exit.
"So far, as Evans and Carr point out, the remixing of the intimate world and the remote world has made our social lives more brittle. Our insecurities have been magnified. Our fears and animosities have been strengthened." As compared to what? Point to the "what" and someone will likely point to a major tradeoff in adopting the "what."
Fortunately, Arnold Kling doesn't want to go back to "what." He begins his next paragraph with, "Going forward..." He isn't overly conservative about the future.
"Going forward, I believe we need to find ways to regenerate the intimate world. If we look around, the healthiest, happiest people tend to be connected with another as families, neighbors, and religious adherents. Once you notice that, you should adjust your aspirations accordingly." Thank you. Regenerate is a great word describing the direction we should head. Perhaps we're in the same tribe after all?
It's cool when you have a friend whom you save up things to "tell". I do that; and I remember once a close friend of mine walked over during the pandemic. We sat outside in the front yard as was then the custom. After she walked home, I noticed a little piece of paper in the grass. It seemed to be a list, but of an odd sort I couldn't make out. Not a grocery list. I mentioned it to her later. It turned out it was a little shorthand cheat sheet of subjects she wanted to remember to talk about or things to tell me.
My nuclear family, into which I was born, has the interesting distinction of never having had an interesting conversation. Even with all the yelling. Bilaterally or all together. Outsiders have confirmed this. Since it dates to 1961, this is a record in which I now take some perverse pride. We did used to find the same things funny on TV though (long ago).
Mother once exclaimed over the fact that my husband and I "talk".
Even there, though, decades of marriage have taught me not to expect or anymore look for conversational "completeness" with a spouse. There are many subjects, and other times just moods in which a woman may get, that make talking to him like waves pounding the headland and being thrown back. And I think a good wife never gets to be that headland.
I think for some people - more "talk-y"? than others, more something? - there is always going to be a tension with what's on offer with one's 20 people or whatever it is - however necessary and irreplaceable and *ultimate* they are - falling short of what you may need to furnish your mind.
I'm glad I came up when books were that thing.
"Going forward, I believe we need to find ways to regenerate the intimate world."
Odysseus wanted to hear the sirens sing, but he knew their call was so tempting that no sailor could resist temptation and stop himself from diving into the sea. So Odysseus had his men tie him to the mast so he wouldn't be free to dive, and to plug their ears with wax, so they wouldn't even be tempted to respond to his orders, which they might if they could hear his pleas.
That's pre-commitment auto-paternalism, like putting a time-lock on the cookie jar.
That's pretty much what groups of people would have to do in order to generate the intimate world amongst each other, and without just avoiding the tech entirely.
Some employers give their employees smartphones for work purposes, and impose lots of additional security, surveillance, and limitation on those phones, which can include constraints on screen time, content, and even who you are allowed to contact and who can contact you - "mobile device management".
So, instead of getting your phone service from Verizon or ATT or whatever, you get it from some intermediary, like your church. And they put on the MDM. Maybe they can watch and intervene too. And you (and your kids) ... have to live with it. And if you want more intimacy than that, you've got to go get it from people in the real physical world, preferably those also tied up to the same MDM mast, who will need you as much as you need them, as you rediscover yourselves and each other in the sea of atomized screen zombies.
The flip side of Carr's point about overexposure, already implied, is the underexposure of remote world - so much of direct human interaction is subconscious, and remote interaction lacks all the subtle cues vital to bonding with others and orienting yourself in the social world.