The Internet, Construals, and Binary Reality
are symbols the new real?
Posted May 25, 07:43 pm in epistemology, human nature, hyperreality
This year marks the 16th year I’ve been using the internet. During this time, I’ve seen it grow from a very obscure resource that only weirdos and college students used to something that nearly everyone uses, and on a daily basis. It’s been one of the most remarkable shifts in our technological lives, and it has proven itself to have facilitated some of the greatest shifts in our inner lives as well.
One of the biggest revelations of the internet for me is the concept of construals. And though it’s certainly not unique to the internet, I’ll explain it via an example that relates to the internet. Here is a process I’ve witnessed hundreds of times:
1) Someone on a discussion forum (message board) makes some kind of comment.
2) A number of people take issue with the comment.
3) People who either disagree with the comment or otherwise don’t like the commenter dissect the comment, and the person who made the comment.
4) They cast all kinds of aspersions about the individual, his personal and political beliefs, and what kind of person he is, extrapolating all kinds of information from the short passage the OP (original poster) wrote.
5) A giant flame war/train wreck ensues.
This process may not seem all that remarkable to you, but I find it very interesting because it demonstrates that words someone types on the internet, perhaps quite casually, creates to third-parties what appears to them to be critical insights into the writer’s mind. The analysis of words has a tendency to take on a highly deconstructionist approach that attempts to profile the individual in question in a manner that reads too much into words that were either carelessly penned or which were written in a conversational manner that didn’t really imply a fully developed argument. The interpretation of these words comes to conclusions that while they may literally match with the words stated, usually denies the writer the benefit of any contextual meaning, complexity of thought, and expects complete resolution of all internal intellectual conflict or attitudes. This problem is further exacerbated by the general dearth of words that an individual typically writes online compared with the number of words the same individual would speak in a typical conversation in order to convey the same message, and the lack of a developmental dialogue between the speaker and the listener that clears up questions about the speaker’s comments; therefore, fewer words are being used as the basis for interpretive conclusions by third-parties.
As such, I’ve noticed that often these third-party analyses come to the conclusion that the person in question— who in real life is probably not a particularly controversial figure— is prejudiced, a bigot, a racist, an ideologue, a moron, irresponsible, etc. But it’s not the off-the-wall character assessments that I find curious so much as it is the idea that something very large, complex, and with serious implications gets fashioned out of something— a simple message board comment— that is typically very small and rather insubstantial. The few words that someone says are used by outsiders to construct that person’s entire personality and worldview.
This highly limited simulcrum of the poster is considered by the third-party who created it to be an accurate representation of the real person behind it. Implicit in this is that there is absolutely no divide between the corporeal world and the condensation of it into representative symbols (words); here is a world where people take symbols as more than just vague indicators of reality, and instead expand them to be just as whole and real as the real thing. This is a construal.
Though this concept became apparent to me through the internet, in reality this behavior is not really a function of technological change. As humans, we often use small pieces of information to inform our behavioral heuristics, and we always have. If someone’s resume says they are highly educated, we may be more likely to higher them for a job that we perceive as demanding a higher intellectual reserve— even if their degree has nothing to do with the job. We set floors on educational backgrounds, effectively screening out those who don’t have a piece of paper saying they have a degree. We assume, inaccurately, that educational background proves the intellectual qualification of an individual; it is, however, an informed guess that more often than not is a winning strategy.
Evolutionary psychology suggests that we need to constantly calculate ‘most likely’ scenarios from the least possible amount of available information; it helps us make decisions quickly. Otherwise, we might be putting ourselves at potential risk while we amass enough evidence to make completely informed decisions. This preserves our well-being in hostile, unpredictable, or uncertain environments— which, if you think about it, pretty much describes any environment in life.
So clearly, construals are not a new phenomenon, but it seems especially salient now given that the written word (internet/email/text messages) is becoming increasingly central as a form of interpersonal communication. Here, it is much easier to lose the context, the tone, the body language, and the personality behind messages; perhaps we might even say that the complexity of sentiments is not present, having been stripped out by technological limitations imposed by the medium.
Think about how this chain of events might affect perception of a message you write. Imagine, for example, that something you send jokingly to a friend is retrieved by an unintended party at a later time than when it was sent. Depending on what you wrote, the results could range from humorous to potentially devastating to the perception of your character. Likewise, something that someone wrote online years ago without much thought can now be retrieved for eternity, and can come to negatively define an individual because of the ‘set in stone’ quality of online writing, where the exact same thoughts stated out loud in a conversation would not create much controversy or elicit so much scrutiny. As my friend Dominik once quipped, “the internet never forgets.” But more than that, it also has a way of distorting.
Following this? Let’s make it even more tangible. Say you are applying for a job. You put in an application, they seem interested, and everything looks good. Then, someone from the company starts searching around the internet and finds your Facebook page. On it, there’s a picture of you drinking beer and looking inebriated. Also you use an expletive in a comment to someone.
You discover later that you didn’t get the job. You find out somehow that it’s because of the Facebook page. Okay, so now the company representative is no longer interacting with you or directly interpreting your character through personal interaction with you. The context is gone, the tone of your character is gone, they have no idea what you’re like in person. All they are doing is reconstructing a ‘you’ out of fragments of conversation and snippets of speech which have themselves been condensed down from real life into brief snapshots (words, photos, emoticons), and placed online. These snapshots represent mere seconds in time, yet they now define you despite the fact that they are but tiny, tiny fractions of your life.
The employers are now taking those snapshots and building 3D models out of them about who you are and what you’re like. They are not interacting with you, but instead with some simulacrum of you, believing that this simulacrum is equivalent to, or highly likely to be faithfully representative of you.
But it’s more than likely not.
Of course, the more evidence one has, the more easily one could make some sort of conclusion about who you are. But according to Nicholas Carr’s argument in his troubling article “Is Google Making Us Stupid” (synopsis here) the internet has been reshaping our minds to avoid drawing thoughtful conclusions. Instead, he argues, it encourages us to come to conclusions quickly so we can move on to some other distractions.