“Imagine a new cultural technique. People would sit together in each other’s company, completely ignoring each other, and absorbed in their devices with impunity. Lovers would retreat to the privacy of their rooms, preferring it over face-to-face presence… This technology is obviously writing (and not the Internet).”
— John Durham Peters, The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media
So Peters basically pulls a bait and switch here. He describes something that sounds exactly like every complaint people have about phones right now, people ignoring each other in the same room, couples choosing their screens over actually talking, private thoughts getting read by people who aren’t even there. Then he just drops it on you that he’s actually describing writing. Not the internet. Writing.
I read this twice because I didn’t believe it at first. But it actually reminded me of something specific. My girlfriend’s grandma is dead serious about no phones at the dinner table, to the point where she’ll take my phone away even if I’m just checking the time. At first I thought it was kind of extreme, but reading this passage made me think about it differently. She’s not really mad at the phone itself, she’s mad at what it does, which is pull you out of the room you’re physically sitting in. That’s the exact thing Peters says writing does too. A book does the same thing a phone does. It pulls your attention somewhere else, into someone else’s private thoughts, while your body stays at the table.
That’s kind of the whole point Peters is making without saying it directly: every time a new media technology shows up, people panic about it in almost the exact same way they panicked about the last one. If her grandma had grown up around books instead of phones, she probably would’ve been the type to say “no reading at the table” instead.
Where I’m Not 100% Sold
I don’t think it’s a perfect comparison though. A book doesn’t buzz in your pocket every ten seconds. It’s not designed by a team of engineers to keep pulling your attention back. Writing is slow and one-directional, you read it when you decide to. A phone is a lot more aggressive about getting your attention than a paperback ever was. So I think the speed and the intent behind the tech matters even if the basic anxiety looks similar on paper.
This connects to the Burke quote on our syllabus, “every way of seeing is also a way of not seeing.” Peters is basically saying our panic about new media is a way of not seeing that we’ve been here before. It also lines up with what we read from Kittler, once a medium exists, it just becomes part of how humans live, and we forget it was ever new or scary.
Honestly this passage made me think the real question isn’t “is this new technology bad for us.” It’s “why do humans always react to new media the exact same way, every single time.” Even grandma taking my phone for checking the time makes a little more sense now.