I feel like when you do sociological analysis like this, people feel like anything goes and it’s “just a theory”. Or whatever. But it’s not. No matter what angle you come at this from, there is a problem. I tend to come at things from a philosophical / polemic / rhetorical angle; partly because it includes an affective dimension that, in its performance, signals the missing sensuality I’m complaining about; and partly because that just comes naturally to me. But what you gain in affect, you sometimes lose in vigour.
Certainly, the article I wrote that @Jamal mentioned (“Faciality and Pathology”) could be criticized for tending towards florid assertion rather than solid science. But the boring solid science on this is right there for anyone who wishes to look for it and can look past their immediate misunderstandings—one of the most egregious of which is that what is being posited is that there was a “good old days” before technology with less violence and that we’re on the conservative nanny bandwagon here. As @Jamal pointed out earlier, it’s almost the opposite of that.)
So, let’s interweave the actual science here to give more grounding to the claims. First of all, we claim a kind of desubjectivization, a degrading of subjective presence, due to increased technological mediation of communication. And that might sound a little bit vague and hard to pin down. But it has a direct neuroscientific corollary as follows:
When you look at what happens to our neural hardware when we move from face-to-face to digital interactions, there is an identifiable suppression of neural activity. And as long as you accept the connection between neural activity and a sense of self, which is hardly a matter of debate, the grounding for the claims of those like @Jamal and I becomes quite clear.
Here are a couple of studies to be getting along with.
- Yale: Neural “Suppression” on Zoom
Yale researchers compared brain activity during in-person versus Zoom conversations.
They found brain activity was “substantially suppressed” in the online interactions. By contrast, face-to-face encounters resulted in a rich web of neural interactions that remained dormant when replaced by their online counterparts.
This corresponds to the idea that the subjective experience in its full viscerality (and, by extension, subjectivity itself) is “thinned out” by technological mediation.
Link: Yale News: Zooming in on our brains on Zoom
- The Oxytocin Gap: Seltzer et al.
Another study at the University of Wisconsin-Madison) examined how stress and bonding hormones are affecting by different forms of communication mediums.
(This is highly relevant to the OP because oxytocin is considered the “empathy” hormone. So, before I introduce this evidence I want to qualify the role of oxytocin in a way that I think also helps to disambiguate the general thesis here from the “tech media causes violence” misunderstanding. So, what’s important about oxytocin is that it not only increases empathy but can actually also increase tendencies towards violence. This paradox can be dissolved by understanding that increases in empathy towards those we know or consider as kin (in a loose sense) make us more likely to be protective of them when they are threatened. What oxytocin does then is deepen our interconnectivity in a way that makes us feel more about others but not in a way that straightforwardly leads to more empathy for everyone we might encounter. The context decides.
Studies that look at empathy in an “objective” generalised way are unlikely to be able to easily account for an increased level of viscerality that aligns with an intensity in our relationship to others which, though it can and often does translate to empathy, may also result in violence. So, interaction with tech media, while hollowing out our empathy hormones and desensitising us to violence towards others may also reduce violent behaviour as a side effect of increasing apathy towards one another.)
So, on with the University of Madison-Wisconsin study:
It found that stressed children found relief (through oxytocin release) when interacting with their mothers in person or only over the phone (audio). Communicating using instant messaging (text) resulted in no oxytocin production and no significant stress reduction.
I.e., it doesn’t matter how many smilies you stick in a text, they cannot replace emotion, they simply simulate it in a way that, when this simulation becomes naturalised, is destructive.
Link: PMC Study: Why we still need to hear each other
- Brain-to-Brain Coupling)
A recent study in Nature on Neural Synchronization shows that when we are in face-to-face interactions, there is a higher rate of "inter-brain synchrony”, i.e. our brain waves oscillate at similar frequencies. When interacting through digital interfaces, this rhythm is significantly disrupted.
Link: Nature: Synchronization of brain activity in face-to-face vs. online
- Mirror Neuron System (MNS) Efficiency
Again, directly related to empathy, a study by Diclkerson et al into the Mirror Neuron System suggests that our intuitive understanding of others as measured through the activity of the MNS is significantly disrupted / suppressed by technological intermediation.
Link: PMC: Mirror Neuron System in a Digital World
In order not to go on too long, I won’t even go into studies concerning the brain’s Default Mode Network (DMN) and the importance of being able to withstand boredom (away from the distractions of tech media) for extended periods as it represents experientially crucial background brain processing.
Anyhow, to reiterate, scientific studies paint a picture that is in synchrony with the philosophical and sociological analysis presented in the OP and elsewhere. So, we can look at things rather abstractly, in terms of the action of a “faciality machine”, a technologically supercharged social communication mechanism that pushes technological mediation and in doing so steals the energy inherent to face-to-face communication, processing it through the mechanisms of the market into its own reproduction, i.e. we can posit in a philosophically abstract way an increasingly efficient monetization of human presencing, of subjectivity itself. Or we can just look at the science and combine it with what we already know about basic economics and draw the same conclusion.
Which we can sum like this:
Tech companies, in pushing technological intermediation, degrade social life in a way that can be measured right down at the neurochemical level, and they do so in order to create in us an emptiness that we then try to buy back from them through more engagement with their platforms.
This is like drinking Coke to avoid being thirsty, while only dehydrating ourselves further. The trick is to pass off the empty for the substantial in order to keep the difference. Worse, with social substance, to be deprived of it—to be deprived of ourselves at a visceral level—makes us less likely to be aware of what is happening.
If visceral presence, the root of subjectivity itself is the resource, tech media is the extractive industry and you don’t need philosophy or sociology to figure this out, the science and the economics do the basic work for you.
But for those who are really interested in the philosophy of it, the mechanisms are no great secret. The OP touches on it and contemporary philosophers like Berardi, Stiegler, Byung-Chul Han, Donna Haraway, and many more lay it out in detail.
Anyway, I hope @Jamal, you write your article because if anything is important, this is.
Personally—and I may write more on this myself—I think what we need is a “Boring Revolution”. Just to stop. To stop mediating everything through the technological. Put the tech away. Forego the video call. Forego the emoji laden texts. Wait until we meet that person in person to do our socialising.
But if we do, and we still can’t put our phones away—if our visceral connection to the other has been so degraded that we’d prefer to make money for Musk and Zuckerberg than look that person in the face, then—I have no hesitation in claiming—we are doomed.
