Sarah Perry recently wrote a fascinating post on the subject of technology as ‘de-condensation’. While I ended up demurring at her claims about our entering an ‘age of recondensation’, I believe the core thesis of the post provides an exceptionally useful lens through which to consider a number of cultural changes. The post also advances concepts that merit deeper consideration within the discussions around the phenomenon of ‘secularization’ in various quarters.
The Ribbonfarm blog has always been one of my preferred locations for imaginative societal analysis online. What Ribbonfarm offers, perhaps more than any other blog out there, is close attention to calibrating the lenses through which we can analyse the dynamics of our society. It is a blog that is frequently daring in its analysis, offering bold theories and frameworks where others give more predictable and unoriginal readings of our societal situation. For me, it is blogs such as Ribbonfarm that justify the continued existence of blogging as a serious medium.
Venkatesh Rao, the Executive Editor of the site, has a tremendous systematizing instinct and the ability to discern patterns and dynamics. I still refer to posts such as his ‘The Gervais Principle’, ‘Rediscovering Literacy’, and ‘Welcome to the Future Nauseous’.
However, more recently it has been the work of Sarah Perry, the site’s Contributing Editor, that has most attracted my attention. The following posts may help to explain why: ‘Gardens Need Walls: On Boundaries, Ritual, and Beauty’, ‘Weaponized Sacredness’, and ‘The Theory of Narrative Selection’. Perry’s work is characterized by a deeper attention to psychology and human nature and alertness to the ways in which social systems intersect with and engage with our psychology. In my estimation, both Rao and Perry rank up with Scott Alexander of Slate Star Codex as some of the most consistently thought-provoking bloggers out there.
Ribbonfarm is an example of the unique potential of blogging as a sort of sandpit of argument, a realm for more explorative thought to occur. In my own ways, I’ve often tried to take advantage of this same potential. At its best, blogging creates a space where ideas, understandings, and theories can be tried out, experimented with, and developed, without the same pressure of finality that comes with traditional forms of publication. It can be an intellectually lively and stimulating place as a result, encouraging readers to collaborate in a more open-ended process of thought and reflection. It is a site of creative, heuristic, and experimental thought, where readers can become active participants. Different participants can take the ideas being explored in rather different directions, but everyone benefits in their own ways from the collaborative space for imaginative and creative development of thought.
Sarah Perry recently wrote a fascinating post on the subject of technology as ‘de-condensation’. While I ended up demurring at her claims about our entering an ‘age of recondensation’, I believe the core thesis of the post provides an exceptionally useful lens through which to consider a number of cultural changes. The post also advances concepts that merit deeper consideration within the discussions around the phenomenon of ‘secularization’ in various quarters.
Perry argues that, in the past, ‘time, artifacts, institutions, and even people are more condensed.’ Entities within past cultures were bearers of multiple meanings, purposes, and functions and, as a result, were associated with deep values that often bordered upon or existed within the realm of the sacred. However, as human society became more settled and technologically advanced, the formerly highly condensed entities steadily lost their integrity as their purposes, meanings, and functions were separated and outsourced to various other technologies, domains, agencies, and entities. Perry writes:
Almost every technological advance is a de-condensation: it abstracts a particular function away from an object, a person, or an institution, and allows it to grow separately from all the things it used to be connected to. Writing de-condenses communication: communication can now take place abstracted from face-to-face speech. Automobiles abstract transportation from exercise, and allow further de-condensation of useful locations (sometimes called sprawl). Markets de-condense production and consumption.
Such de-condensing effects a breach or wound in the world order, which must somehow rebuild itself around this new de-condensed reality.
I am here reminded of Albert Borgmann’s discussion of the difference between technological ‘devices’ and more traditional ‘things’. For instance, the hearth represents the sort of ‘thing’ that has been displaced by technological devices such as central heating, cookers, and microwaves. These devices perform key functions of the hearth considerably better than the hearth ever could. However, it is easy to forget those things that were lost through the ‘de-condensing’ the hearth. The hearth was never merely a ‘device’ for producing heat. It was a focal point of family life, community, and practice, a site of often deep meaning. The hearth brought the family together. It represented their interdependence, as each family member had their own tasks of making and tending the fire, cooking with it, cleaning it out, gathering, buying, or chopping fuel for it. If a member of the family failed to play their part, all could suffer. It established shared daily rituals and structured the day. It required the development and passing on of skills and active involvement with nature.
It created a specific place, which ordered wider social spaces and itineraries (note that the hearth names the place primarily and the fire upon it only by metonymy). In many cultures the hearth had a deeply gendered meaning, being associated with the wife and mother at the very heart of the family. The hearth metonymically stood for the home and for domestic life and its relations as a whole.
Although people still have fireplaces in their houses, long after the development of central heating, these fireplaces are only a shrunken semblance of what they once were. No longer the site of condensed meaning and the necessary confluence of family activity, they now function chiefly as luxuries for our comfort and sentimental enjoyment. Freeing us from often onerous former necessities, the technological process of de-condensation gives us benefits of convenience, efficiency, ease, and comfort, but at the price of much meaning, purpose, social bonding, and embeddedness.
