December 2016

Thesis, Pitzer College, Media Studies Major

Dearest global community,

Today we are at a crux. A turning point, one that could have repercussions for every living being on this planet. I write to you today to declare that the newest tool of cultural imperialism takes form in the device many cling to every day. The iPhone, its hold, it’s superficial mold, has left an indelible mark on society’s fold. Left unexplored, I fear the human condition will falter under its massive might leaving us stale, empty and cold. Remnants of what we used to be. The human—the source for innovation and exploration; the progressor, the challenger, the dreamer too…have we finally discovered the device that could put us to sleep without having meant to? The attraction to this research began from an investigation of the growing divide between generations while spending last year traveling abroad, which was what lead me down the path of finding this device as the culprit. That as well as a personal revolution, revolving around taking a stark look at the fervency of my technological engagement.

Growing up in the first generation with a cell phone in their hand by age 8, my worlds emerged both online and off and intertwined into a reality I never even knew to question. Identities grew simultaneously, languages merged, one became the other and the two aligned in a beautiful marriage that I figured was my self worth. It wasn’t until I left the country, that I realized that this had any consequences or even undiscovered novelties. I carried out each day without voices in my head, without unlimited data I was left to fend. Spending a year at age 20 getting to know myself was truly a humbling ride, but all the while keeping my media lens strongly by my side. Once gaining full reign over my internal compass, the notion of presence twirled around every moment. Obsessively engaging with every minute, alive with every fiber of my being, I had never felt so full—all the while being truly alone for the first time in my existence. My legs stopped jittering, my mind reeling, my fingers pattering…my physical and mental states reverted to a calm and quiet place, one I had forgotten completely. The sun felt warmer, the sunsets more beautiful, every bloom smelled sweeter as I passed, the external world began informing my walk through life far more than it ever had. While living in homestays, and speaking to elders, I engaged in conversations, wondering about the younger generation that I felt were similar to the ones I knew from the states. Without fail, every conversation revolved around the same stark comment, the younger generation felt unfamiliar—a new cultural identity emerging altogether. This at first intrigued the notion that these technologies really affect those that grow up with it, but upon going to Paris and seeing how much the richness of the culture had dissolved in recent years, I realized the problem was bigger than just taking hold of those who are born into it. People constantly mused that nothing had extinguished the culture quite as much as the changes that have taken place in the last few years. This drastic increase in the bewilderment of the locals caused an upheaval from deep within. What a tragedy to watch culture disintegrate by the pace of losing some every minute. Upon returning to the states, I realized how much our culture was seeping out of our walls, impeding on ones that have been alive for far longer than our own. This passionate plea goes out to the nations and societies far from this land, the ones getting roped into a value system that supplies an alternative from what has always meant to stand.

Cultural imperialism, at first glance, seems a contradiction on its own. ‘Culture’ after all, speaks to those aspects of human life that shape and define us. Culture engages our language, social practices, our values and even ideals. To be ‘cultural’ is to be human. ‘Imperialism’ by contrast, suggests the destruction of some way of life by another. It evokes the notion of one group of humans interacting with another not in cooperation but in conquest. Since the 1970s those utilizing the term have focused on the U.S. as a new kind of global power potentially capable of dominating not just the world’s economic and political life, but the cultural lives as well. There’s concern that due to America’s global reach and appeal being so forceful and fervent that other societies would see their distinctive cultures replaced by some Americanized alternative...concerns that have only multiplied exponentially in the context of contemporary globalization. Cultural imperialism is also often defined as the conscious and organized effort taken by the Western, especially U.S. media corporations to maintain commercial, political and military superiority...thus saturating the cultural space of most countries in the world. It’s already been claimed that cultural imperialism has already eliminated and destroyed a plethora of local cultures and empirical studies seemed to confirm this early cultural imperialism thesis by showing the one-way flow of goods from Western to non-Western countries (Jin, P. 149). The pinnacle of all the fear building from this would be one globalized version of the U.S. in language, economy and social norms (Steger, P. 166-167). By participating in the consumption of the iPhone, one must have the awareness that it is the perfect tool of cultural imperialism because even if economies don’t choose to have capitalist motives or even develop their international economies, this device crosses over and acts as a bridge that infiltrates the cultural construction that previously existed.

Another term that has emerged from these conversations about the structural power of these forms of media entitled is ‘platform imperialism’. As defined by Dal Jin, platform imperialism is a continuation of the cultural imperialism model, but utilizes the notion of targeting the U.S, as having previously controlled non-Western countries with its military power, capital, and later cultural products, which now seems to dominate the world with platforms, benefitting from these platforms, mainly in terms of capital accumulation. (Jin, P. 145). This new trend raises the question of whether the U.S., which has always utilized its imperial power, not only with capital and technology, but also with culture, to control the majority of the world actualizes the same dominance with platforms. Right now, we are experiencing “a new notion of imperialism by mapping out several core characteristics that define platform imperialism, including the swift growth and global dominance of smartphones” (Jin. P. 146). The iPhone completely becomes the pinnacle of this shift for many reasons, but simply because “of its advanced technologies protected by intellectual property rights and the technological domination of U.S. based companies” (Jin, P. 155). Apple’s iPhones have been successful influencers of subsequent smartphone makers and designers to the point of usurping the vast majority of the smartphone industry…squandering many possible competitors also by imposing their strategic copyright laws. This is incredibly important to utilize and keep ever present throughout the following text, and keeping in mind the importance of the platform itself rather than the content is pivotal. Content will be content, but the argument here is that the device itself serves as argument enough that it functions as a tool for imperialism.

This tracks back quite a way, I’m not saying this started today. It began with the capitalist note, the one that forced us towards a monetary minded mode. Success comes with a price, and everything to do has its own dollar sign hanging by its side. A premium placed on living, a capital placed on self worth. A society functioning around material, anything existing outside of the boundaries of the inner works. A language of markers, a giant game of tag, the quiet acknowledgement of judging just about everything that one can. Placing and organizing people into categories, everything from address to a dress, it all culminates to create a picture, who one is by what one does. An image based society, one cultivated and defined by these external indications of one’s ‘place’, a “symbolic environment” (Postman, P. 28) replacing one based on any grounded meeting of interactions taking place in the present. Without meaning or needing to, the average American is taught to acknowledge and order all that they see, advertising seeping into every aspect of being.

“an earlier stage in the economy’s domination of social life entailed an obvious downgrading of being into having…the present stage, in which social life is completely taken over by the accumulated products of the economy, entails a generalized shift from having to appearing…the spectacle is capital accumulated to the point where it becomes an image” (Debord, P. 24)

These principals began to take hold when the cultural industry became an integral part of the advanced capitalist system in the 1930’s, and it has long played an architectonic role in the transformation of human and natural potential into the modern barbarism of late capitalism. The U.S. government’s initiative and support for its culture industry has a long history, and this strategy emphasized the importance of information-based products, making the U.S. State Department a powerful government agent on behalf of the cultural sector. The extension of capitalist social relations, using the link between the governmental agenda and commodity values tied to the production, distribution and consumption of a cultural good, not only destroyed the emancipatory possibilities traditionally harbored by art and culture, but thus sabotaged human capacities for experience and critical thought (Jin, P. 148). The iPhone only furthers these diverging relationships between the user and the imagined and signified world that’s now been created, the image-based culture is impeding on every single one that had existed before its domination.

Technology’s culturally manipulative power started to illuminate itself in the 50’s, when television (and thus advertising) took its rise, and when all that was being consumed was what was trusted to buy. What they were selling came with a steep price. The nuclear family, big house, white picket fence, two kids and a beautiful wife. All plastered with smiles, all grinning with glee, regardless of the emptiness that invaded the house, is what really exists on the inside, is what you get to see? All at once, the American model began replacing food with chemicals, relationships with commodities, and conversation with television. We gathered around screens rather than fires, we spoke of bags and golf rather than our histories or where we stand. Karl Marks explores the principle of commodity fetishism as the domination of society by ‘intangible as well as tangible things,’ which reaches its absolute fulfillment in the spectacle, where the tangible world is replaced by a selection of images which exist above it, and which simultaneously impose themselves as the tangible (Debord, P. 36). The spectacle has given way enormously to the rise of the iPhone’s power, prevalence and dispersal, and is now aiding in giving esteem to the possession of one.

The hazardous device that Americans, unbeknownst and without fault, have fallen victim to is now spreading beyond our borders. It has seeped out of our walls, begun to protrude into every corner of the man-made scope of the world, inviting us to succumb to it’s enthrall. With a device this powerful, yet one so small, so portable, connective and utile, what could have been an easier sell or appear so seemingly useful? “A decade ago almost no one had a smartphone. Now the average American spends five and half hours a day with digital media, and the young spend far more time” (Brooks). Another way that the spectacle comes into play here is through the branding and marketing done by Apple. The sensationalized way that the Apple brand usurped the global technological economy is unprecedented, and “the primary economic model of colonial media is to enclose the cultural commons through monopolization, and control of the technological infrastructure” (López, P. 42), which the iPhone clearly has taken. Regardless of any one country’s own choice to participate in capitalist economic practices, this device overrides that decision and enraptures the consumer in it’s own maze of capitalist mindsets. Although rejection of white collar capitalism has been widely considered—even revolutionary movements sprouted up in order to keep it away…this technological invention has geared up to go beyond any national fold. It inherently denies any one country the right to reject it, rather positioning itself right in the hands of those who behold its presence. To look at this from an economic standpoint, it’s become clear that,

“Modern economic production extends its dictatorship extensively and intensively. In the least industrialized places, its reign is already attested by a few star commodities and by the imperialist domination imposed by regions which are ahead in the development of productivity. In the advanced regions, social space is invaded by a continuous superimposition of geological layers of commodities… where commodity production met the social conditions of large scale commerce and of the accumulation of capitals, it seized total domination over the economy” (Debord, P. 40-42).

While it’s true that economic growth frees societies from the natural pressure which required their direct struggle for survival (which is the exact argument that led to the rise of capitalism), it is at that point that from their liberator, they are not liberated. The independence of the commodity is extended to the entire economy over which it rules. (Debord, P.40). The economy transforms the world, but transforms it only into a world of economy.

In an alienated world, culture has become a deformed and deforming product, and in order to impose itself, cultural imperialism needs to convince the people under its wrap of their own inferiority. Sooner or later, the inferior man recognizes Man with a capital M; this means the destruction of his defenses and is no longer a master of understanding his own senses (Solanas and Getino, P. 4). This sensation is truly horrifying, especially when considering the vastly global outreach this product has, and the way in which even owning one at this point has its own esteem tied to that fact. Not only does it point to a financial success, giving way to creating implicit class indicators, it starts to breach the global sphere and creates commodity fetishism outside of the borders of the U.S. “When economic necessity is replaced by the necessity for boundless economic development, the satisfaction of primary human needs is replaced by an uninterrupted fabrication of pseudo-needs which are reduced to the single pseudo-need of maintaining the reign of the autonomous economy” (Debord, P. 51). Apple’s franchise and monopolization of releasing different models of the iPhone every 6 months, instills an implicit desire in its consumer base to continue to consume at a rapid pace. The technology seems to develop as well as the functionality along with it, and even though the company has the capability of advancing the devices at a much more rapid pace and at a reduced price, the elongate the process in order to take extreme advantage at the customer’s expense. Continuing to profit off of those who can’t necessarily afford to continue to update, revamp, restyle, and keep up with the pace of production. As Fanon discusses, “values are, in fact, irreversibly poisoned and infected as soon as they come into contact with the colonized” (Fanon, P. 7), and that the “colonized subject casts at the colonist’s sector, a look of envy. Dreams of possession. Every type of possession...the colonized man is an envious man” (Fanon, P. 5). By capitalizing on this framework of the human subject being an envious even jealous creature, Apple takes deep advantage of all it’s users; all the while usurping all of the profit from their pockets.

The iPhone has set out on a permanent path, one that brings the outside world, entire countries and groups of people that never functioned around a material form, to put their heads down and follow America’s mold. One that operates around a device, a material good, an imagined communicative space, a portable entertainment cubicle—a vehicle for deceit, one that appears to mimic all that reality could. After this switch has begun to sink in, navigating the way value gets placed in this new imagined universe unveils itself, unabashedly leading us into a Pandora’s Box. “The goal of colonization and its key implication for media is that people have to be trained to take on an alien perspective as their own.” (López, P.16) In one prominent example of this that takes place every day in many colonial countries that the great anticolonial writer Frantz Fanon describes is deemed a psychological condition as having black skin with a white mask. Thus adapt the mentality and belief systems of colonization as a mask, with media encouraging the acceptance of the exploitation as normal, even desirable. To deny one’s own heritage, traditions and culture to instead ride on the capitalist consumer train and benefit those that make money from that transitory space of internalizing a foreign identity is truly heartbreaking. This process will unbeknownst to the user and consumer of the iPhone begin to occur, an unfortunate resounding denial of these external influences must be taking center stage.

To take a jaunt to understand the more overarching stimuli at play, let’s examine media in general and the malleability of man that gets politicized and capitalized on today. “To those who flirt with the notion that technical artifacts have political qualities: what matters is not the technology itself, but the social or economic system in which it is embedded” (Winner, P. 122). The iPhone itself isn’t a necessarily political device. Although how one utilizes it definitely bends that idea, especially if interacting with informational media and the fear mongering skills that supersede one’s ability to take what they read as simply entertainment and commercial appeal. The format of the device itself though, provides simply a platform to carry American ideologies along with it. Neil Postman claims that every medium of communication has resonance; because of the way it directs us to organize our minds and integrate it into our experience of the world. It thus imposes itself on our consciousness and social institutions in myriad forms, which has the power to become implicated in our concepts of piety, or goodness, or beauty. But it is always implicated in the ways we define and regulate our ideas of truth (Postman, P. 18). This is absolutely pivotal due to the ways in which this tiny device has the power to reimagine the sociocultural and capitalist models that even if aren’t in play in a country whose citizens obtain an iPhone, it still has the means and the methodology to rewire the user experience to act like a citizen living under capitalism. “Media, by altering the environment, evoke in us unique ratios of sense perceptions. The extension of any one sense alters the way we think and act—the way we perceive the world. When these ratios change, men change” (McLuhan, P. 41). Due to the rapid pace that the iPhone has gained sociocultural acceptance, and has invaded every space, the normative culture has told us to stop questioning its existence and accept its inclusion as a standard practice. The device certainly carries out sociopolitical ideals and ideologies that are embedded within the structure itself, and rather than examining the content, what’s significant in this discussion framed by imperialism, is the product.

America allowed corporations and capital accumulating politics to dictate its nation, and its citizens stood by punching numbers until the numbness spread to their daily lives. How many reach for their Advil and coffee for their morning concoction, (not to mention the prescriptions) aiding the daily monotonous flow, clock in clock out, cook dinner, watch TV, repeat. Giving synthetic and intermediary solutions, bandages placed upon the body’s need to sleep and the mind’s need to rest. Entertainment became a must, simply to keep up a smile, our minds so obstructed and distracted, we’re mummified before we live the full length of our lives. “North Americans may well be the only people in the world who go outside to be alone and inside to be social” (Bull, P. 105). People wake up in their 50’s only to realize their mistakes, and find out the time has already evaded their grip and has gone away.

“Of course, no individual can ever be shopping, gaming, working, blogging, downloading or texting 24/7. However, since no moment, place or situation now exists in which one can not shop, consume or exploit networked resources, there is a relentless incursion of the non-time of 24/7 into every aspect of social or personal life…almost no circumstances now that can not be recorded or archived as digital imagery or information.” (Crary, P 30)

It takes a great amount of audacity to break the flow, to live in solitude in your betrayal of the status quo, to get worried looks and saddened calls by family and friends wondering where you went wrong. Alas, the wrongdoers and the impatient violators of the normative monotonous flow saw light in spite of all the narrations they had been told to follow. To write their own paths, and follow their own course, to create a life for themselves that exists outside of the books. I write today to prevent this vicious cycle from reinforcing its tightly wound grasp, the material hold is now spreading, and is spreading quite fast.

Out of the connective spaces America curates today, the iPhone has now permanently permeated every possible location. Even sitting in class, the vast majority of students keep their phones face up sitting on the desk in front of them—no longer hiding the depth of their distraction. Rarely ever fully present, the mind rather existing in a multitude of places. Text conversations that have spanned for years, incessantly keeping up alternative realities in these imagined spaces.

“But when technology engineers intimacy, relationships can be reduced to mere connections. And then, easy connection becomes redefined as intimacy. Put otherwise, cyberintimacies slide into cybersolitudes. And with constant connection comes new anxieties of disconnection, a kind of panic.” (Turkle, P.16)

The constant communication, takes one away from their truth—the vision of what’s in front of their eyes thus becomes the blur. Always having the option to speak to another being, diminishes even realizing how few of the decisions that one makes is their own intrinsic opinion. The reality becomes the documentation, rather than the experience or even just feeling the sensations. The moment there’s silence or a lull, something so pure, we disrupt it to fill our minds with alternate conversations or sedate ourselves with a temporary cure.

“Sociologist David Reisman, writing in the mid-1950s, remarked on the American turn from an inner-to an other-directed sense of self. Without a firm inner sense of purpose, people look to their neighbors for validation. Today, cell phone in hand, other-directedness is raised to a higher power. At the moment of beginning to have a thought or feeling, we can have it validated, almost pre-validated. Exchanges may be brief, but more is not necessarily desired. The necessity is to have someone be there.” (Turkle, P. 176-177)

Whether music or other voices flood our ears in order to make the world feel less lonely, they translate instead a completely different story. Our lives become reminiscent of a movie, we entertain our way through the day, we travel from place to place not engaging with our surroundings but instead just getting more stuck in our heads, letting our narratives get in the way.

Today, multitasking has become the norm, consuming multiple things at once, never really internalizing a situation but rather inputting an insane amount of information. The silence we’ve cut out, this internal grace and time to pause, has brought us so far from our natural state of calm. “Silence in modernity became, over the centuries, an anachronism, even a symbol of the useless superstitions we had left behind” (Sullivan). No wonder the depression and anxiety levels are climbing through the roof; we never give our poor brains a minute to reboot. Even the rhetoric around iPhone comes in here, a way of explaining away the condition we’re quickly undertaking. Rather than fully ever going to rest, like our iPhones in ‘sleep mode’, we are always ready to jump to the test. The notion of an apparatus in a state of low-power readiness remakes the larger sense of sleep into simply a deferred or diminished condition of operationally and access. It supersedes an off/on logic, so that nothing is ever fundamentally ‘off’ (Crary, P. 13). There must be a global pushback that allows for a peaceful way to reintegrate disconnected time and space into that which is accepted.

What we’re losing is time, intimate, profound, uninterrupted space as it used to be in its abundance. Through the commodification of time, we have limited our time for interpersonal relationships and increased the productive workspace. In this hyper-capitalist model, work and the labor value gets placed literally above any space or time for one’s private life. This is the pinnacle of a cultural imperialist caste, claiming any one human less valuable than the production that comes out of them.

“Networked life takes on a new cast. We imagine it as expansive. But we are just as fond of its constraints…technology ties us up as it promises to free us up. Connectivity technologies once promised to give us more time. But as the cell phone and smartphone eroded the boundaries between work and leisure, all the time in the world was not enough. Even when we are not ‘at work’, we experience ourselves as ‘on call’; pressed, we want to edit out complexity and ‘cut to the chase’ (Turkle, P. 13)

As our sense of time changes, the same occurs with our sense of sociality. Social lives therefore become a task, get scheduled into smaller time frames. Get dipped in and out of, rather than steeped in. The state in which producing, consuming, and discarding (as they do today) occur without pause, we hasten the exhaustion of life and the depletion of resources faster than we can formulate honest words or deep communication.

“And I realize that this is, in some ways, just another tale in the vast book of human frailty. But this new epidemic of distraction is our civilization’s specific weakness. And its threat is not so much to our minds, even as they shape-shift under the pressure. The threat is to our souls. At this rate, if the noise does not relent, we might even forget we have any.” (Sullivan)

When drawing parallels throughout history and seeing the repetitive nature of humans taking things extremely far before being able to reign in and learn their lessons, there is hope to be drawn that we could be close to a rejection of this flow and revive to a state of a plethora of human interaction. The other hope resides in the plea that humans don’t push their luck beyond repair this time.

Another aspect to this intricate stage of understanding the iPhone’s potential to create heavy divides is through the individuation process itself. It has become the mirror into our souls, it’s light casting a reflective haze onto our faces, numbing the way we interact with the world around us. The virtual realm overcasting the physical one. “Technology proposes itself as the architect of our intimacies…technology is seductive when what it offers meets our human vulnerabilities” (Turkle, P.1). The iPhone becomes the platform to indulge in the innermost desires and intrapersonal workings of the human being. Advertisers and corporate conglomerates thus feed and manipulate the inner workings of humans, making their needs easier to satisfy. The human willingly surrendering their innermost personal desires, and without a screening process their most vulnerable selves—making themselves open and available for being taken advantage of. Not only that, but this has a dangerously high cost to communities and communal values as well. “The fear of social isolation is resolved through the use of mobile sound media…the mobile iPhone connects users to absent others representing an island of communicative warmth within an ocean of urban social chill.” (Bull, P. 107) If a person walks into a grocery store and is at the checkout with headphones in their ears, the likelihood of engaging in pleasantries with the grocer become slim, and human contact as we know it is diminishing every minute.

The use of text messaging as the normative way that people communicate using the iPhone, has a deep infringement on human dialogue. “The clearest way to see through a culture is to attend to its tools for conversation… [and] each medium, like a language itself, makes possible a unique mode of discourse by providing a new orientation for thought, for expression, for sensibility” (Postman, P. 8,10). An invention that came out of the Enlightenment that completely altered the modern world is the printing press. “The resonances of the lineal, analytical structure of print, and in particular, of expository prose, could be felt everywhere”, and to “be confronted by the cold abstractions of printed sentences is to look upon language bare, without the assistance of either beauty or community” (Postman, P. 41, 50). To engage with the written word with such validity and conviction, means that one is following a line of thought. This linearity and analytic thought though is often times very detached, blasé and generalized. Thus, reading and writing alike becomes an essentially rational activity. This is not only dangerous to the “individuals mind but to the predispositions of a cultural mindset. In a culture dominated by print, public discourse tends to be characterized by a coherent, orderly arrangement of facts and ideas…with serious, logically ordered content” (Postman, P. 51). The way in which transferring many of our personal relationships to a platform that transpires solely with the use of the written word, it creates an inherent distance from honest communication. The simple act of having to go slowly enough to translate from your mind to your thumbs the words that you want to say is intrinsically constructed. Not only that but then one has unlimited ways to edit what they’re saying. This creates a dishonest form of communication, and often times today, relationships transpire more over this medium than they do in real life. People text each other all day long, while being thousands of miles away. Keeping up with each other, but perhaps not delving fully at all. “We don’t as the open ended ‘how are you?’ Instead, we ask the more limited ‘where are you?’ and ‘what’s up?’ These are good questions for getting location and making a simple plan. They are not so good for opening a dialogue about complexity of feeling” (Turkle, P. 19). When we carry out a comparable amount of communication using this medium, that ultimately leads to a trivial nature that exploits most of our conversations.

One nuanced aspect of this device that should be noted is the way it has the ability to act as a tool of self-governance. The Panopticon, created by Jeremy Bentham, is a circular prison structure, whose entire backside is backlit thus illuminating the entire inner sphere so one can observe one another; and all this surrounds a darkened tower in the middle. The tower represents that someone could always be inside watching, thus creating habitual self-regulation due to the fact of never knowing when you’re being watched. Bentham’s creative force behind this structure resided around the theme of autonomous discipline. A disciplined participant minds the rules, simply by being unaware of the presence of a viewer but the possibility that one might be being watched. This self-regulation provides context with which I would like to apply his structure to analyzing the iPhone. “The relevance of the Panopticon as a metaphor begins to wither when we start thinking about how contemporary types of visuality (effectively digital and data-driven) are analogous to the central tower concept (McMullan)” in practice rather than in theory. There is a process of normalizing the way the Panopticon was intended to correct behavior, and it is fervently spreading throughout the majority of modern society. The structure revolves around an almost imperceptible restriction of the emotional and natural impulses of human behavior. It does so by replacing verbal communication with one of a corrective nature, a thought out, and calculated one: messages written by text.

“On the internet it’s almost as if everything you say were being tape-recorded…one sees a new regime of self-surveillance at work. As toddlers, these children learned how to type online, and then they discovered it was forever. We see a first generation going through adolescence knowing that their every misstep, all the awkward gestures of their youth, are being frozen in a computer’s memory.” (Turkle, P. 259)

By putting such a deep responsibility and emphasis on language (the literal words of it) we extract meaning from them which are personally inflicted, and take the languages that are spoken today and use them in their least expressive and most basic forms. In a damaging way, we are in effect simplifying human narratives, and truncating the human voice. As Foucault deems, “He is seen, but he does not see; he is an object of information, never a subject in communication”, and “in many ways, the watchtower at the heart of the Panopticon is a precursor to the cameras fastened to our buildings – purposely visible machines with human eyes hidden from view" (Foucault). The Panoptic model serves as a prominent perspective with which to harbor reservations about the fragility and malleability of the human figure.

Another reason we need to be aware of the panoptic sphere in this discussion is to be aware that not only is being under surveillance a self-governing tactic, it is also a corporate and sociopolitical one. Corporations are constantly watching to keep an eye out for opportunities to capitalize on it’s user’s vulnerabilities, coding to find what they’re looking for and swipe the opportunity to sell what the computer tells them the user needs. In a governmental manner it wasn’t until Edward Snowden leaked the scale of NSA operations in 2013, and the extensiveness of the information they garner on each and every citizen became known. This arguably makes the system more panoptic post-Snowden, simply because we are aware of it, but it hasn’t been the official rhetoric nor have we as citizens undertaken any means towards changing our conduct (McMullan). The original emphasis, and still the emphasis today, hasn’t been on correcting behavior but on providing security, thus the government is banking on fear mongering tactics in order to keep close tabs on each and every American citizen. As Turkle explores in Alone Together, the Panopticon serves as a metaphor for how, in the modern state, every citizen becomes his or her own policeman. Force becomes unnecessary because the state creates its own obedient citizenry. Always available for scrutiny, all turn their eyes on themselves. By analogy, on the Internet, someone might always be watching, it doesn’t matter if, from time to time, someone actually is. As long as you are not doing anything wrong, you are safe (Turkle, P. 262). The importance of this is inextricably tied to the type of narratives previously discussing being worried about disappearing. The only way we’ve seen progress in this world is through the active dissident voice. Turkle eloquently explores that,

“Accepting the idea that the Internet has fulfilled the dream of the Panopticon and summed up his political position about the net as follows: ‘the way to deal is to just be good’…but sometimes citizenry should not simply ‘be good’. You have to leave space for dissent, real dissent. There needs to be a technical space (a sacrosanct mailbox) and a mental space. The two are intertwined. We make our technologies, and they, in turn, make and shape us…In democracy, perhaps we all need to begin with the assumption that everyone has something to hide, a zone of private action and reflection, one that must be protected no matter what our techno-enthusiasms… opening up a conversation about technology, privacy and civil society is not romantically nostalgic, not Luddite in the least. It seems like part of democracy defining its sacred spaces” (Turkle, P. 263-264).

It is noteworthy to mention all of this because while we believe that we may be globalizing and spreading democratic ideals, it calls into question whether or not the system we are spreading is even truly democratic. Have we strayed from the original points from which democracy hails? If we continue down this path of complacency and passivity, we have the potential to wipe out and forget the richness of potential of the human condition, and endanger all of the resources from our planet by incessant consumption (which our planet might have been able to take if it was just America’s model). As Edward Said explores in the Public Role of Intellectuals, it is now the writer’s duty to speak the truth to power, be a witness to persecution and suffering, and supplying a dissenting voice that conflicts with authority. Utilizing this platform, in hopes of not solely disseminating further into darkness, but to try to offer a way to trudge through and enter into states of collective light. Global users if equipped, can begin to reject this form of autonomous discipline, serve to disrupt the dominant discourses, as well as strip themselves from this imperialist model thrust upon them.

The Enlightenment or the Age of Reason, as it’s so dotingly called, is the catalyst for this invention to have any prevalence at all. A time that took place from the mid 17th century through the 19th, filled with science, the printing press, an abundance of knowledge, and above all the creation of the individual and the self-succeeding prophesy. America itself was founded as an Enlightened country, and one of, by and for intellectuals. Differentiating itself from the anarchical model, America proved to be different by deeming every human the right to freedom based on their human-hood. Meanwhile, many of the Founding Fathers owned abundances of slaves, laboring away in their vast crop plantations. An intellectual often times forgets the other, more important part of a lesson, the marriage between the intellect and the practice. Even as I write this doctrine, my iPhone sits quietly next to my computer. The truest form of seeing and thus interpreting and internalizing, is to create the change within yourself; and that is something that I’d say America and its citizens struggle with immensely. Hypocrisy runs deep in our blood, quiet lies that we tell ourselves permeate throughout, and whose ripple effects are being felt now. It’s no wonder that with the rise of the iPhone, we’ve now elected Donald Trump to be our next president. Being wired and connected 24/7 means that Americans needed a spectacle to rise to the challenge.

“When Galileo remarked that the language of nature is written in mathematics, he meant it only as a metaphor. Nature itself does not speak. Neither do our minds or our bodies or, more to the point...our bodies politic. Our conversations about nature and ourselves are conducted in whatever ‘languages’ we find it possible and convenient to employ. We do not see nature or intelligence or human motivation or ideology as ‘it’ is but only as our languages are. And our languages are our media. Our media are our metaphors. Our metaphors create the content of our culture” (Postman, P. 15).

Thus, Trump’s utilization of the medium that our culture is massively adhering to, granted him access into the most coveted position that exists on the planet. By constantly consuming the outrageous, even “our politics, religion, news, athletics, education and commerce have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even much popular notice” (Postman, P. 4). What happens when a culture becomes so alienated from it’s own destruction that they can view it as entertainment? It came as no surprise that Reagan won during a height of Hollywood’s rule, and now with the reality television craze, this is what manifests before our eyes. Neil Postman poignantly explores that,

“Technological changes in our modes of communication are even more ideology-laden than changes in our modes of transportation. Introduce the alphabet to a culture and you change its cognitive habits, social relations, notions of community and history... Introduce speed of light transmission of images and you make a cultural revolution. Without a vote. Without polemics. Without guerrilla resistance. Here is ideology, pure if not serene. Here is ideology without word, and…all that is required to make it stick is a population that devoutly believes in the inevitability of progress” (Postman, P. 157-158).

Postman’s stark and startling words bring a to light a pivotal cultural signifier and bring it into the conversation. With the term ‘progress’, which begs many questions, but then to tie that to the term ‘inevitability’, this is the largest signal of the way that humans (particularly Westernized ones) believe that humanity is something that had never existed until we created it. Rather than an impulse to find answers to the unending plethora of questions our culture begs each day, we could learn to quiet ourselves and get in touch with the natural patterns of the ecosystem—the one that’s been alive far longer than we have. Utilizing this rhetoric and esteeming humans as the propagators of knowledge and wisdom has intrinsically ripped us from the deep-rooted intelligence that the planet has functioned around for billions of years.

The dire plea I impart to you, comes with a warning too. I ask that we glance around the current climate of the world. Our President elect, and the fact that the fight for water—the last natural right to all living things—has ensued. We have taken a dangerous turn, if we decide to override our last natural resource on the planet, I know surely it is too late. But I still have faith, call me an optimist—what have you—I believe in the human condition enough to know we can overcome this if we act with our wits about us.

“Unlike the alien-like mentality that permeates the world system, as earthlings we have an innate ability to empathize, feel love, experience beauty, seek connection, and desire wholeness. Our capacity for war, greed, destruction and delusion is not unnatural, but neither is it normal or inevitable. It is the result of conditioning, manipulation and trauma…ancient cultures, believed in the anima mundi—world spirit. It is common for indigenous cultures to view the universe and all its creations as alive. So instead of the modern Euro-American cultural assumption, ‘I think, therefore I am”, they believe ‘it all thinks, therefore I am”. They live in a participatory and reciprocal cosmos as opposed to a vertically controlled, hierarchically structured system of reality” (López, P. 20)

In the same way that the British colonizers infected the Native Americans, we are now in danger of making the whole world decide with their pockets instead of their intuitive voices. There is a way we can reintroduce these non-linear, non-textually evidential narratives into the grander scope of education. We are on the verge of an ecological collapse, and if we don’t our heads and engage with the political and environmental climate, we could see a crisis emerge that is much more severe than losing our empathic and emotional capabilities.

Apple’s production model in and of itself is the perfect exemplification of cultural imperialism taking place. On the surface, new media are participatory and emancipatory, but the fundamental economic model of traditional and emerging media systems alike is the same: if it’s free, you are the product.

“Given a choice, they’d rather sell you an app for democracy than actually build a democratic society that is ecologically just. Consider the typical smartphone, with its environmental and labor costs externalized and borne by folks less lucky than the average user.”

These phones are made possible through the extraction of conflict minerals (such as coltan or tantalum) in Africa, which fuels civil war, rape, and child labor. Its components contain highly contaminating chemicals which are then shipped promptly to China. After being assembled in China by humans that have been essentially turned into machine parts living in a town called Shenzhen (purely built for production of Apple’s products), it is shipped overseas with incredible atmosphere-contaminating emissions. Its components, when disposed of, poison workers and water supplies and cause air pollution. (López, P. 43) As a portal for our attention, we pay a heavy financial price…and environmental and worker concerns were often rejected for the sake of expedience. Yet these devices are marketed as something pure, a force for good, a means to connect with one another, a form of personal expression, a conduit of cultural citizenship, a necessary product for the advancement of civilization. “All of these cultural by-products are certainly meaningful, but decontextualized from the circuit of energy consumption and waste, these cultural attributes become moot” (López, P. 44).

When Apple’s brilliant marketing team dreamed up selling the product as one that facilitates creativity, media engagement, and improves communication, often times they sidestepped their responsibilities to uphold such values for their own company. Deepening the discrimination between consumers and workers, as well as technology versus the planet.

The solutions are something that have been swirling about my mind and are not quite as concrete as I would’ve hoped, but I would hope that they can serve as starting points from which we can emerge from this seemingly linear road. The first asks for a revamping of our education, and the necessity of teaching the effects and consequences of technology is more imperative than ever. It is the very principle of myth, as Roland Barthes pointed out, that it transforms history into nature, and to ask of our schools that they engage in the task of de-mythologizing media is to ask something the schools have never done…our schools have not yet even got around to examining the role of the printed word in shaping our culture (Postman, P. 162). A utilization of media studies for high school level classes is absolutely imperative at this point—especially considering the outcome of the election. Media is at the forefront of normative communication and information flows, and the youngest generations are the ones who will be confronted by it most. Without having tools to combat these forces or even be told to question them is definitely the first step towards unlocking their hold.

A modern version of heroism is regaining control of social impulses, saying no to a thousand shallow contacts for the sake of a few daring plunges. We are self-reflective beings, and are empathic by nature. If we utilize these tools of communication that have emerged that include a fuller form of connection, such as Facetime, communication could increase, and cross cultural understanding can aid in creating endeavors that produce ecologically and ethically sound infrastructure and businesses. For families that live globally, because that is the world that we now inhabit, Facetiming is an inherently beautiful invention…and the hope is that if people choose to communicate via telecommunications they would choose the one that allows for the most honest representation. It would also be a far reach indeed but to suggest simply spending more face to face time with one another. Perhaps a resurgence of coffee house culture, social hours that don’t revolve around alcohol, or simply a type of community building that people are so desperately searching for. Creating outlets for honest community in real time and in real life will aid in people’s need for searching out meaningful contact that takes place in the imagined space of telecommunication.

In the past, the consumer has not had the finest track record of holding its monopolies or conglomerates responsible for the footprint they leave on not only themselves, but on the planet as well. It is our duty to now hold them accountable for their actions, and check their consumption—do the jobs that our government refuse to carry out, truly care take for the population as a whole. My dearest global community, that includes making sure there will be not only a critically engaged human narrative, but a commitment to continuing to fight for and protect this planet we call home…as the visitors we truly are.

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