Technology And Presence

Technology and presence
Jacques Derrida "To write is to produce a mark which will constitute a kind of machine that is in turn productive... The writer's disappearance will not prevent it functioning", and "All writing, in order to be what it is, must be able to function in the radical absence of every empirically determined addressee in general... This is not a modification of presence, but a break in it, a 'death' or the possibility of a 'death' of the addressee".

I would like to paint a picture: imagine that I work from home. Unbeknown to my employer, I die. Someone with access to my emails goes back over the history of what I have said, picks up my workload, and so far as my employer is concerned I have not died.

Another: whilst a female friend is away on holiday they ask me to maintain their (female) online character (to gain experience), I log on as them and bump into one of their friends, who says 'Hi'. How do I respond? Do I maintain the illusion that I am them? Am I (simply by virtue of being that character) actually them anyway? How do I say 'I am not this person who I seem?' - isn't this eerily similar to real life?
I suppose that what I am getting at, is that in Derrida's terms, technology is an extension of writing: i.e. it is all about absence, not presence. And I suppose this represents a fundamental and subversive shift in phenomenology and meaning of the kind which prompted Nietzsche to write 'God is dead'.

Over-intellectualisation? I don't think so: podcasting is all about not 'being-there' (Dasein), homeworking is all about not 'being-there', email is all about not 'being-there'. Technology 'exists' in a way which subverts my existence so that something which we (I) took for granted - my being - is now something that can be messed with, displaced, even hijacked.

How did it become meaningful, for example, that today we can talk about 'identity theft'? Perhaps you think this has something to do with credit cards and dodgy garages? Think again: due to the crude nature of the SMTP protocol used to transfer mail, it is easy for me to send emails as you... think on it; in the next five minutes I might send emails to your friends, family, co-workers, lover, boss etc. which would unquestioningly be accepted as having come from you. Most likely this email might read '...because I am going to be working out of the office over the next few weeks, please use my email at insert_yourname_here@hotmail.com to stay in touch...'. It is a trivial task to send emails as bill.gates@microsoft.com, god@heaven.com, or even mark.thompson@bbc.co.uk.

Traditionally philosophy dealt with binary oppositions: good/evil, god/satan, being/nothingness, right/wrong - and most people still think in these terms. It has been one of the great advances of philosophy in recent years to muddy the waters, to show that there never really was clarity after all - so that, for example, even in the good old days it was possible to wonder if a person was really 'there' or if they were merely 'in disguise' or a 'ghost'. So what I am pointing to with technology is not a complete reversal in crude terms - 'suddenly absence takes the upper hand', but rather a radicalisation of absence - a poisoning of being by absence, in the way in which (Socrates reports) the egyptian god Thoth was judged to have offering his invention of writing not as a supplement but as a poison to speech. I find it interesting, I suppose, that technology - the extension of writing - has ultimately fulfilled the prophecy made in Egyptian times, that it would poison being/God, and bring about a kind of death.

If we look at future trends it is curious how being/presence is poisoned by technology; 'presence-based technologies' - such as SIP (session initiation protocol) which, combined with technology such as RFID tags, will effectively enable communication technology to locate 'you', know 'what you are doing', and adjust accordingly. Of course, in fact 'you' could be dead - so long as someone is wearing your tag and answering your emails it matters not a jot to technology.

After all, that is the beauty of txt: you can pretend to be something, you can pretend to be somewhere, you can control your presence so much more carefully. But a malicious person with your phone may cause havoc.
Not long ago many things required your presence; meetings, conversations, chairs in offices - but soon there will soon be very few things that require your presence: sex (possibly not even this), eating, the lavatory.

It is interesting also, I think to trace this corruption of being through production technologies. Begin with the live performance - trace a line through the record (sender absent in time & space), through the live broadcast (receiver absent in space), join them at the recorded broadcast (sender absent in time, receiver in space), continue onwards through film and end with the podcast (all absent in time and space) - where even the broadcast no longer requires your presence. Imagine an assasin tracing your movements: previously he might note that you always stopped to listen to the archers at five past seven, to the today programme at six thirty am. Now he notes only that you eat and sleep at roughly the same times - all else is negotiable - because its presence is negotiable. And so, ultimately, is yours.