Greetings, gentle reader!
If this newsletter weren’t called “Intermittent Signal,” it might be called “The Crisis of Representation.” Some of my students also really like “Signal to Noise,” which pretty neatly summarizes many of their predicaments.
Struggling with meaning is hardly new: isn’t that the human condition? More practically, the problem of representation, of how to embody meaning in sound, text, image — what form, right here, right now? — is central to any artistic endeavor. At least I think that is true, even tautological. And yet, at the present juncture, the problem of representation is insistent, and not just for young people and other artists. Consider, in no real order, fake news, meme stocks, ChatGPT, and social media generally. Like everyone else, I’ve been thinking about machine learning, LLMs, and the like, but writing about such things at the moment is like pissing in the Niagara from Goat Island, just above the Falls. So I’ll spare you, for now at least.
Below is perhaps the funniest picture I ever took. To start, Matisse’s The Red Studio is about painting, and the objects depicted, not in red, figure in other paintings. I encourage you to play from there. Modeling, fame, photography, expressing and capturing, times and nations, cultural capital . . . talk amongst yourselves, as Mike Myers used to say, staying in NYC and further dating myself.
Funny as this is, I don’t want to be harsh. I too was there, a pilgrim, easily mocked for thinking I could find meaning by standing and staring at something widely said to be genius, either true (in which case I wouldn’t really understand) or celebrated (in which case I’m merely a fan) and who could know?
Perhaps the best part about getting older, even better than compound interest, is the bloom of generosity. Like any flower, generosity is a complex thing, and its emergence has been genuinely and delightfully surprising. Some of it is me — a combination of recognition of my own failings, yet confidence, but more to give away, with more hope (and need to hope) for the young, less need to compete, I could go on — and some of it is others, the folks to whom I try to give, and how they approach me. For many years I have been mostly on the taking end of this, still am in a few cases, but many of those who gave are gone if present, and now I find myself giving more often than taking. These days, I look back at all the people who helped me, over decades, and I think I understand them better.
Among other things, people ask, want to talk, send me texts. It is profoundly touching. A very distant interlocutor sent me a heartfelt essay, “The Time of the Virtual Friend.” I like it very much, and so send it to you, lightly edited and with the author’s permission, of course. In speaking to the difficulties of representing oneself in a digital age, “Virtual Friend” continues, or is at least adjacent to, some of the themes in Spy vs Writer and Dispatches from the Cold. Like I said, a crisis of representation.
Apropos representation, most, but not all, of the images in this edition of “Intermittent Signal” are from “Signs,” a photo essay that I may or may not complete. There is a lot to say about signs, how they work, how they don’t, what they leave behind.
Enjoy, if that’s the right word.
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The Time of the Virtual Friend
by me for you, written this morning while you were sleeping.
An immigrant is a person who has lived for a certain portion of their life in a place long enough to consider it home, to learn how to operate in that home and establish a mode of life that can be sustained long enough to reproduce oneself socially, spiritually, materially, and culturally. They leave this home and go to another place which they come to call home. Often this includes moving to a different longitude of the world, and a different time zone.
Although living in a new place, the prior home is never fully abandoned in the immigrant’s mind, and their new home is always a home-in-relation-to the prior home. We live in one time zone, but mentally overlay the time zone and the simultaneous activities of that previous home onto the space of the new home, imagining simultaneous activity at the same time as the activity that we undergo. It’s as if we develop a new understanding of the world as a layered reality. Our reality is singular, but our focus and attention can be highly divided, confusing our “day.” When we wake up, people in our old home might be going to sleep. With social media, we can talk with them in real time as they are going to sleep and as we begin our day.
This layered reality makes it hard to fully immerse ourselves in our new space, and accept it uniformly as home. We can’t forget, nor can we fully let go of the reality we once entertained, and our manner of coping with that reality in our former home. In continuing to interact with that former home, we utilize techniques for living in that old home, albeit from afar, virtually. Therefore, our time and energy are not fully devoted to developing skills for coping with our new home. We are not as good at it as our peers in our new home, who not only may have been living there for their entire lives but who, if they were at least raised there, left, and returned, can also return to the foundational psycho-social/cognitive system for coping with their natal home with a natural and frictionless flow.
A transnational life might be thought of as constant movement, like George Clooney’s character in the movie Up in the Air, people who are stateless, refugees in transit, CEOs like Elon Musk or Ferdinand the heir to the Hapsburg Empire, who have no home but are constantly living with friends around the world, travelers, and seasonal migrants on a circuit. But I’d guess that it’s more common for transnationals to live in a single place, coping with the internalized technics and imagined realities of multiple homes at the same time, interacting with people who are situated all over the world, conceiving of one’s self as simultaneously existing in multiple places while physically located in one place.
The experience of time then is not jet lag, but a daily oscillation between being behind, being on time, and being ahead, every day. Day can never just be day and night can never be just night. It always is night-while-it-is-also-day, day-while-everyone-is-sleeping-at-night. While our circadian rhythm might be attuned to the diurnal coming and going of the sun in our new home, our social rhythm gives us a feeling like we are staying up all night, pulling an all-nighter during the day. We are not out of time but overly timed.
We then also miss a lot of things in our old home while we simultaneously are virtually present in online chats, and by reading the news, listening to local radio over the internet, or watching TV that is aired live streamed, but we aren’t there to experience it, to feel the world on our skin, to contact it and connect with it without mediation. This means we hear about it after the fact as it is relayed to us through summarized representations. Our understanding of our dual or multi-home reality then becomes one of experiencing the home where we are living in real-time with an imagined layered “reality,” that comprised of summary representations from other people. Such representations are mixed in with our interpretations of those representations from which we still attempt to interact with that old home through perceptual hedging, while you were sleeping/waking/whatever.
And for other people in our new home, we must be a person from that old home, embodying it as a representation of it (“I am an American”). We end up feeling both disconnected through representations of that old home, and like phony representations of that old home ourselves. We then are not really people from that old home, nor are we ever people fully part of our new home. And at the same time, there is no one else in our specific, individual position. We have no shared culture, even among other transnationals living in our new home, because of the manner in which we each experience our old home through representations or imagine how it is now unfolding without us. It's a psychological clusterfuck.
While we stay connected with people from our old home, our relationships are gradually reduced to text. We aren’t with them and as time marches forward in its daily behind-the-times and before-they-wake-ups, we are confined to staying in touch by writing alone. Sure, Zoom meetings are possible, and Facetime calls, but when there are kid school pick-ups here in our new home, afterschool activities, dinner, and bedtime routines, while those folks back home are starting their day in the morning, getting to work, and focusing on work, that’s not the best time to talk. Or should I wait until my morning, when it is 10pm at night in the old home, when they are exhausted and ready for bed?
In the end, friendships and family ties thin to text and largely text alone. Extra periods are added on to the trail offs … …. ….. …… ……… until there is no real substantial connection left and there isn’t much of a reason any more to call each other friends in any real sense. We might have once been friends, but living transnationally, even with all the allure of possibility in global connection, with relationships being maintained, is all really just a virtual fantasy.
Of course, this isn’t just an issue of transnationalism, but really pertains to moves away from home in general. Things like Facebook give us this manner in which we can hold onto people from our past, even when time and distance have clearly shown us that we are no longer truly friends. The platform allows us to keep up with a representation of people – the image they want to show to their virtually timeless community. It seems like we can then stay connected. There are people, however, that I haven’t seen or talked to in person for 20 years on there, and I haven’t looked at their posts or even chatted with them.
Sarah Snider is one of those people. The last time I saw her was at a mutual friend’s wedding, I remember speaking but don’t remember what about. Since then, we wrote an email or two when she was Editor-in-Chief of (X Magazine) because she had written and published an article on faculty unionism and I was organizing adjunct professors for a union. Aside from those two brief connections over the past 20 years, we haven’t seen each other or called each other. It’s not for any problem as far as I can see, but I think this is kind of a curious thing.
I remember her as such a nice person, hilarious, fun to spend time with, and brilliant. I remember meeting her in a coffee shop in [Midwestern US City] on the first or second vacation in our first year of college. She was home from [Ivy League University] and I was back from [Not Ivy League University]. She told me, “It’s strange to experience doors closing with every decision I make,” or something like that. She was talking about how in choosing her path, she was feeling the closure of paths that had always been hopeful opportunities for us as kids of white middle class professionals – her parents being judges and my dad is a doctor and my mother raised us kids. After the end of that first year, we came home for summer vacation and with two other friends got together one night, went to the campus of one of the local high schools and smoked pot while sitting on a large bronze school seal (the round kind, not the kind that eats fish). Of course, the nighttime sprinklers turned on all around us. As we were at that time all involved in student social justice projects at our universities, we jokingly formed a new group, the “Hot Teens for Social Justice.” We were barely still teens and not that hot, but branding is everything, right?
That was her then, and I can only imagine that she has become an even more wonderful person by now. And yet, yesterday, I decided to “unfriend” her on Facebook for the sole reason that I don’t actually think we are friends anymore. It’s been 20 years and the only thing truly holding us together is an incredibly brief connected history as friends in high school, some trailing offs in college, and this single virtual thread existing on Facebook servers. I don’t really know who she is now and I don’t think that I can even really say that “I’ve known her for 20 years.” Rather than assuming that our time apart, distance, lack of effort to stay in touch, yet connection on Facebook means that we are still always “friends,” I’d rather meet her again now as a new person, call her on the phone, and go see her. I wish I could again live close to her and actually be a friend to the person Sarah has become (I think, but I don’t know), but alas, I live in [European Country] and these virtual connections, and this sense of being out of time with my old home, I think is a major barrier to that.
It's even a barrier to being real friends with people who I once considered my “best friends” in my old home. Those who I have kept in touch with and visited occasionally over the past 20 years, we continue to consider ourselves friends, but I guess it begs the question, what really is happening to friendship in this world of global communication where I can live in one place, see people for only a few days every year, every two years, or every three years, send emails and text messages, and like photos, and we can continue considering ourselves friends? One of my closest friends got cancer and though I called and texted (after a period of really not being in touch at all), and went to visit her, it’s obvious that while we were once really close, and went through a really formative time together, distanced friendship can only get one so far. We don’t share a small world anymore, but rather a big one mediated by fiberoptic cables.
We are becoming more and more dedicated to something that we are calling friendship and it is serving as a crutch for actually being friends with people. But even if we were to dedicate more time to being with people in real time in person, can a transnational with a dual-home country reality truly be psychologically dedicated to friends in the new home, when those friends are not operating as such? When they expect your full presence and attention when together? That is, do they anticipate you operating within a reality dominated by only one home country’s cultural system?
Without a dedicated focus on the relationship in the present right in front of us, for instance, when we have our phones with our social media apps out, we sense that people would rather be elsewhere, are thinking of other people elsewhere, people who are not us, who the friend would rather turn their attention to. Boredom, a factor of all relationships, has become something to squash. Our virtual connections and the apps that facilitate them pull our minds into elsewheres that allow us to escape our boredoms, our relationships in real time, and which allow us to live in dual-home realities while situated in a single place in the world. It allows us to imagine better lives than the ones we are living, better places to be, better versions of ourselves to become, better things to do, because the people we are, the ones we are with, the friends who are challenging or boring or troublesome, are not worth our time, our effort, our limited energy. I’ve certainly made people I’m with feel this way. Virtual connections and representations of elsewheres are more frictionless, easy, consumable, and friendships there only involve clicks, pics, and quips.
I don’t think I’ve ever really been a good friend anyways, and I’m sure others do a way better job than I do of keeping in touch with those they love when they live somewhere else. I know that my parents certainly have stayed close with their siblings and a select number of their friends while living across the United States, visiting each other for holidays, calling each other on the phone. They were used to people being a pain in the ass, being boring, being fun sometimes and other times challenging. Moreso, however, they focus on friends who are right in front of them. Me, not so much.
There have definitely been times when I looked towards friendship on Facebook when I was depressed, when I went through my separation and divorce for instance, and career difficulties. In particular, over the years, I have been really comforted by an old co-worker of mine in [US West Coast City], who provided me virtual support over Messenger as a friend, who “read me,” well, at least read my texts, and responded when I was in my darkest moments while living in Europe and having no one here to really turn to for the support I was looking for. A year and a half later, I was surprised when I returned to the West Coast where he lives, for a long trip, and he didn’t make any time to spend together. I felt I had come a long way from Europe and after four years of being gone it felt like he didn’t really care. He was in the middle of selling his house and was stressed about that, but it made me realize the limits of this “friendship.” I realized how solely virtual our relationship really was. For what it was, it was important for me, but it was purely virtual.
Anyways, in light of all of the criticism of social media’s perpetuation of fake news and the political consequences, not to mention the psychological affects that it has on us to be constantly viewing primarily the positive representations of people’s lives that largely edit out the boredom, challenges, disfunctions, and failures, I am thinking that something more fundamentally problematic about social media is the way in which it allows us to “keep people” and keep ourselves in virtual networks looking backward nostalgically to the past.
The virtual networks that we create include that random friend from Sunday school from when you were 7 but who you largely never talked to after age 9. It includes professional contacts that you met with for coffee three times and then they moved away. It includes your Mom and your old boss, your cousins once removed that you have never met, and the people who were once your close friends, maybe even for significant portions of your life. Facebook is sort of like a Rolodex, but one that we feel like if we prune means that we are cutting someone out of our lives forever, putting us in an existential position where we have to take a stand on whether the person is socially alive or dead to us, should we decide to keep them in our virtual network or unfriend them. What will be their response to seeing that they can’t look at our photos of our wedding that they weren’t even invited to, or the birth of our children with our spouses that they have never met?
Over the years I’ve pruned the list and hidden nearly everyone from my news feed, so that if I really want to know about them, I have to go look it up. But even then, why am I looking into the lives of these people that I haven’t talked to in years? Why am I keeping them in my view and why are they keeping me in theirs? And am I really keeping them in view or just the picturesque version of them that highlights the good parts of them?
It seems to me that keeping them in a virtual network is largely about keeping a door or window to them open should I want to pursue that in the future, because solely relating to them by looking at their posts and pictures is not enough for me for an actual relationship with someone. In some cases, it is about keeping a door open for a laugh with them, a drink, a catch-up conversation, a conversation to solve a problem that I or they are having, or to help in my career somehow whether that is to answer a research question, to find a job, or advertise publications that I’ve produced. There are a select number of people that I stay connected to from afar because I love seeing them do well, love that they enjoy their lives and want to share pictures and posts about it, and enjoy seeing them grow older with those that they love. For those who I don’t live close to but still feel close to, this is important for me. But that is a very small number of people. This doesn’t mean that I am not happy for the successes of all the other people, many who I love, but I am not on social media to see the lives of those people. I am certainly not on social media to read news or to discover new research.
In the past, I have deactivated my Facebook account and wanted to keep up friendships with certain people who were in my virtual network by phone, email, and visits, but I am not good at that at all. I largely just wasn’t in contact with probably 95% of my virtual network when I did that. I returned to re-activate my Facebook account to show family my pictures of my kids to let them know that they were doing well even though I was putting the kids through a divorce, and I shared various policy reports I had published. I also kept up to speed with a group of parents from my kids’ school in a group I was added to, but other than that, I stayed off the platform. I used Messenger to stay in contact with various people as well.
But I think that it is finally time to not only deactivate my account but to dismantle my virtual network and delete it. This likely will mean that I will permanently lose connection with people, including people I once was close to, but I’m coming to realize that holding onto only their virtual selves is not really staying connected to them in the end. In a way, it’s more about staying connected to a web of hopes that I have about my life in relation to those people and where we can go together and what we can do together. It is however, like a security blanket for me, when moving forward here with people here seems like a dead end, or a mine field, my virtual network provides me a modicum of hope that I can at least move somewhere else sometime in the future after my kids are grown – moving forward by way of the past.
When we choose to end a situation in life - leave a job, move away to another place, go off to college, etc., where we will no longer be in the in-person web of bonds that we have created and sustained and that create and sustain us, we are effectively letting those bonds shrivel. They may still exist in some weak way over time but ultimately, we are taking an action where those roots to our lives will wither and potentially die. Facebook allows us to trick ourselves, to tell ourselves that that is not what we are doing. Those bonds to those people who we were connected to in life don’t have to shrivel – we can still stay connected to them. In a way it is letting ourselves off the hook of needing to confront an emotionally difficult thing that we are doing to ourselves and the people around us: saying goodbye once and for all, and realizing that we are killing a part of ourselves and a part of them. We do the ending work nonetheless by taking the action to move away or change jobs, but we keep virtual networks to conceal the full implication of this fact to ourselves, until a time, often years down the road, when it is no longer possible to deny the fact that what we had done, way back when, was end those real bonds. When Facebook-empowered denial and disavowal is no longer an option for us, when leaving people, bonds, situations, or jobs, as we “unfriend,” we are again faced with saying goodbye to them in real time, and facing social grieving as an immediate consequence of our decisions to leave.
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Is shouldn’t be surprising that everyone on the trams, in the subway, on the buses, and even (my God, please look up, you are going to walk into a pole) looks at their phone to check their own virtual networks instead of talking to the people sitting next to them on transit. Looking down into the phone gives us an excuse for not saying hello to the person passing on the sidewalk, protects us from their desiring eyes, creepy gaze, from their question for some change, for their request for directions, or…gulp… mere acknowledgement that they exist.
I’ve let my relationship with the world suffer, with friends, family, my kids, my colleagues, because I prioritize representations of people over people. I don’t really know what to do about it because I’m addicted to it. These representations keep me safe – I can watch an action movie but need not put my body in harm’s way for another. I can reduce my emotional expression to an emoji rather than cry in front of someone and be vulnerable, or harder still, be there for someone else who is crying and who needs support in person.
I’m an extreme case, I think, and I’m sure many live lives in person to a greater extent, but I don’t think I’m alone in having this psycho-social experience of relationships to people and to the world, or rather of turning away from it and into the representational world I construct for myself.
Here in [European Country], people spend a lot of time in person with their families and friends, going out to enjoy each other’s company, go on vacations, take part in activities of all sorts in and outdoors. It’s kind of like the ‘80s and ‘90s in the U.S. in that people live a more analogue life. Cell phones are certainly everywhere and kids’ use of them, at least from my impression, is pretty extensive, but virtual networks seem to support in-person networks rather than replacing them. Given that they have a particularly unique language here, and the society is more culturally conservative and closed, my impression is that people prefer to stay here as opposed to moving abroad, though many do move throughout Europe and to the United States, largely for work opportunities. But more often than not, I hear of people returning home to live here after time abroad.
My new home has its own dysfunctions and I can see the representational possibilities entering this country and over time eclipsing lived-in-person experiences. But for now, at least, people here still seem to live primarily in place and in the present. Worries and hopes about the future, especially given the nearby war in Ukraine and sky-rocketing consumable prices, not to mention the increase over the past 7 years in home prices, has certainly captured the minds and plans of the locals.
Whatever the case may be, whether we are in Europe or the US, we are all facing a new Twilight of the Idols, and this is my attempt to move forward into some sort of different reality, one that includes new "old" friends, and not just representations of them.
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Safe travels.
— David A. Westbrook