Detach or Engage - Our Choice
The screen in our hands creates a "flat" context for understanding, opening us up to manipulation, confusion, and isolation. How
A Life of Engagement
In June, I attended the monthly meeting of the Start Up High Country organization in Boone, NC. As I was talking with people, these two guys (pictured above) walked in. They are Daniel Baraka of the Democratic Republic of Congo and Stephen Katende of Uganda. They were part of a contingent of young African leaders who are part of the Mandela Fellowship for Young African Leaders. Over the next month, we met three times to talk about their work and how the Circle of Impact model can help them.
I am confident that the time together was far more beneficial because we were physically in the same place.
I spend a lot of time looking at the screen of my phone and on my computer, talking to people on Zoom. While these encounters have an infinite fascination for me, I also recognize their limitations.
There is a real detachment that I experience that is unsatisfying and unsettling. I long for more direct experience. The complexity of the world post-COVID has made it more difficult to directly engage with people and their worlds. Prior to the pandemic, I traveled all over the world. As of today, I have not flown anywhere in three years. If I travel, I drive. The freedom to change course means more engagement and less hassle.
Perspective for Engagement
If you have been reading my writing here at The Future of Leadership with Ed Brenegar and watching The Eddy Network Podcast episodes, you know that I view the world through two interpretive lenses.
One is The Spectacle of the Real. This perspective distinguishes between the simulated reality that is the culture of politicians, corporate marketing departments, and global media. The product of this culture is a passive, compliant populace absorbed by the reporting and commentary on global crises. As I wrote a decade ago,
“Fueled by a 24/7 news cycle, actual news - a statement of "facts" that an event, an accident, a death, an agreement, a visit or something has taken place, described in the traditional journalistic parlance of "who, what, when and where" - is transformed into a spectacle of opinion and virtual reality driven by the images of faces speaking words of crisis, fear, and self-righteous anger. Televised analysis - more important than the "facts" of the story- drives the news through the ambiguity of the visual image and is its source of validation.
…
These televised events aren't conversations seeking truth, but, rather, people talking at and past one another in a game of leveraging images for social and political influence. We are drawn to the image on the screen of these "experts" having something to say that is meaningful, hoping that at some point some sense of the moment will be revealed, bringing reality into view.”
The other perspective is the Two Global Forces framework (see below), which serves as a working map for navigating the culture of spectacle. From this perspective, the dividing line is not between the political left and right but between those who focus on global issues and those who focus on the issues in their local communities.
My map shows that when we shift our focus away from that which divides us into warring camps, it is possible to work together to overcome the obstacles that we face where we live. The cumulative effect of local solutions is that knowledge and resilience grow from the ground up. It rarely does top-down.
Simply put, the relationship between the Global and the Local is one between a Simulated Reality of centralized power presented to us on our digital screens and the Direct Experience Reality that we experience with our families, friends, neighbors, co-workers, and local communities. For this reason, we should be skeptical of the messages embedded in the moment-to-moment “Breaking News” and the 15-second video clips that serve as distractions from where our real responsibilities are.
Random Engagement
In seeking direct engagement it means that I wander off known roads to discover new destinations. Last spring, I took a turn off Interstate 80 at the border of Wyoming and Nebraska onto Wyoming Route 215. This drive through miles and miles of pastoral ranch land led me to the Bear Mountain Stage Stop on US85 near LaGrange. On the door of the store was a sign that said, “An Inconvenience Store.” I walked in and met Dave and Judy, the proprietors of this little out-of-the-way haven of civilization. Immediately, we became three people engaged in an ever-deepening friendship that continues today. On my way to Denver two days later, I stopped and spent four hours with Dave and some ranchers from the area. New paths bring new experiences with new insights from navigating in our world.
When I began The Eddy Network Podcast, I had the same purpose in mind. I wanted to engage with people, even through a digital screen, to discover what is interesting about them. Less than a third of the 90 interviews that I’ve done this year were with people that I have known. In every situation, we are talking about how our lives are lived out in the place where we live. We are NOT doing opinion commentary. We are talking as two human beings whose lives have crossed paths for this moment in time.
As a result, we need to ask the question,
How do we engage with one another in meaningful ways that transcend the digital context of daily living?
A Flat, Shallow World
Direct experience is an embodied one. Engagement with people directly, in person, is different than connecting with them through text messages and the ordinary Zoom call.
Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa, in his book The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and The Senses, writes,
“… I wished to express the significance of the tactile sense of our experience and understanding of the world, but I also intended to create a conceptual short circuit between the dominant sense of vision and the suppressed modality of touch. … The significant of the tactile sense in human life has become increasingly evident. The view of Ashley Montagu, the anthropologist, based on medical evidence, confirms the primacy of the haptic realm:
‘(The skin) is the oldest and the most sensitive of our organs, our first medium of communication, and our most efficient protector … Even the transparent cornea of the eye is overlain by a layer of modified skin … Touch is the parent of our eyes, ears, nose, and mouth. It is the sense which became differentiated into the others, a fact that seems to be recognized in the age-old evaluation of touch as ‘the mother of the senses’.”
It is this tactile experience that is missing in The Spectacle of the Real.
The other day, I watched a video of a man being beheaded. It was like watching a crime series on television. Even though it was gruesome, and I knew it was real, it wasn’t real to me. I watched with a detached, even clinical fascination as if I was watching an autopsy being performed.
I am well acquainted with death. I have sat with people in their hospital rooms as they died. I stood with my sisters as our father breathed his last breath. I’ve conducted funerals and comforted the families of the deceased. The ending of life and the loss to loved ones is real to me.
The image on the screen of the beheading was just an image, no more real than the thousands of hours of Zombi films that play with our detachment from the reality of death. Ironically, the rise in the unexpected deaths of children and young adults has begun to bring reality back to our lives. I wonder how this will influence movies and television series over the next few years.
As Guy Debord wrote,
The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.
Juhani Pallasmaa provides some context.
“The computer is usually seen as a solely beneficial invention, which liberates human fantasy and facilitates efficient design work. I wish to express my serious concern in this respect, at least considering the current role of the computer in education and the design process. Computer imaging tends to flatten out magnificent, multi-sensory, simultaneous and synchronic capacities of imagination, a retinal journey. The computer creates a distance between the maker and the object, whereas drawing by hand as well as working with models put the designer in haptic contact with the object, or space. In our imagination, the object is simultaneously held in the hand and inside the head, and the imagined and projected physical image is modeled by our embodied imagination. We are inside and outside of the conceived object at the same time. Creative work calls for a bodily and mental identification, empathy and compassion.”
If all we know is what we see on a screen, then what do we truly know? Then, Guy Debord’s defining statement becomes more pertinent for understanding the context of our engagement with the world.
Differences That Matters
In her book, Simulation and Its Discontents, Sherry Turkle tells about a MIT study into the effect of computer simulation in the university’s curriculum. She tells of Professor Ted Randall of the Urban Planning Department's response. He says,
“You love things that are you own marks. In some primitive way, marks are marks … I can lose a piece of paper in the street and if (a day later) I walk on the street and see it, I’ll know that I drew it. With a drawing that I do on the computer … I might not even know that it’s mine … People do analyses of their plan (on the computer) but they only fall in love with the marks that they make themselves.’
Turkle continues.
“In the 1980s, the final products of computer-added design programs lacked the artistry and personality of hand-drawn work. Some faculty were so demoralized by the aesthetics of computer printouts that they encouraged students in artisanal ‘compensations.’
Back to Ted Randall’s perspective.
“Randall was wary of simulation because it encouraged detachment:
‘Students can look at the screen and work at it for a while without learning the topography of a site, without getting it in their heads clearly as they would if they knew it in other ways, through traditional drawing for example. … When you draw a site when you put in the contour lines and the trees it becomes ingrained in your mind. You come to know the site in a way that is not possible with the computer.”
Randall tells the story of a student who left a contour line off of a drawing that he was creating.
“It was only one contour, but (in physical space) that contour was twenty-five feet. The computer had led to a distortion of the site in the student’s mind. He couldn’t put more contour lines on the drawing, he said, because it was ‘too confusing.’ He said, ‘I couldn’t work with that many contours … I can’t tell the lines apart any more.’”
Here, we see how “the map is not the terrain.” It is a partial, incomplete, and possibly defective image. Yet, we may treat the image on the screen as more real because we are not present at the physical site of the subject of the image.
Sherry Turkel writes,
“(Randall) believes that there will always be something in the physical real that will not be represented on the screen. Screen versions of reality will always leave something out, yet screen versions of reality may come to seem like reality itself. We accept them because they are compelling and present themselves as expressions of our most up-to-date tools. We accept them because we have them. They become practical because they are available. So, even when we have reason to doubt that screen realities are true, we are tempted to use them all the same.
Randall saw screens as shifting our attention from the true to what we might think of as the ‘true-here,’ the true in the simulation.”
A Detached Context
The flat screen problem is the loss of physical context. We only see what is on the screen. We don’t feel, smell, taste, or hear what is on the screen. We may hear something attached to the image, but we are not hearing the ambient sound that exists in physical space. It is data and information condensed for quick distribution and prepurposed analysis. It misses a real-world context for discovery. We are presented a story in a global context detached from our direct experience.
It is easy to see how presenting the global story of Ukraine or Israel/Palestinian conflicts feels relevant to us. But is it? Why is it important to be informed? I am not being contradictory. I am asking a serious question. Why should people anywhere on the planet care about what is happening in those warring places?
My answer is that the reverberations from those global conflicts are having an effect on our local communities. Should these conflicts in the Ukraine and the Middle East have their counterpart in our local communities? They are because the attitude of The Spectacle of the Real is that the Global defines the Local. Global interests do not serve our Local communities’s interests. They only make life harder for the people who already are living a marginal existence. This has been the structure of modern society for over one hundred years.
The context of detachment is the environment that encapsulates the world of experience. If your experience is only through your eyes, received only as manufactured sound and light images, then your context does not include you. As Professor Randall notes, there is a distance that results. The greater the distance, the less awareness we have of our local situations and the less chance for us to create the impact that should come to define our lives.
You may have seen the same video that I did of the man being beheaded. It probably struck you just as gruesome and inhuman, which it is. And, within a matter of a few seconds, you were on to another video that captivated your attention long enough for the image of death to be reclassified as a political atrocity.
Our detachment causes us to interpret the scene from the perspective of the political conflict in the Middle East. We choose sides, feel justified in our opinions, and find ourselves sequestered into an ideological cul-de-sac. As a result, we are forced to defend our position based on images that we have seen with no broader context other than the ideological conflicts presented in the media.
This is why The Spectacle of the Real has such a damaging effect on us. The young man, who was brutally killed, is someone’s son, brother, and possibly the husband and father in his own family. The man who struck the blow is also the son of a mother and his father’s son and is pilloried as the incarnation of evil. Is he evil, or is he the product of an evil culture of detachment that fuels the Global crises that have captured our world? Neither one of these men is viewed as persons but rather as representations or symbols of our Global political ideologies.
If you follow where I am going, you’ll see that almost everyone who comments on television or through social media speaks from a cognitive bias based on their detachment as objective observers. The result is the loss of a real-world context.
Learning To Re-Engage
At the beginning of the COVID pandemic, I wrote a short book called All Crises are Local. There, I suggested that all global crises are really local ones because the effect - the impact - is not primarily felt Globally, but Locally. It is the local leadership of people like you and me that ultimately matters as these global crises grow in number and cost. The resilience needed to survive a global conflict is found at the local level through our engagement with one another.
There are two things to remember in this regard.
The first is that “all leadership begins with personal initiative to create impact that makes a difference that matters.” We begin by being clear about the values that define us and how those values help us to create local networks of relationships of shared purpose and initiative. This is how we can create a local conversation about the activities and projects we do to help our community. When you order your life toward impact, instead of passive attention to the screen in your hand, you will gain perspective that cannot be found any other way.
The second thing to remember is that wherever you have direct relationships with people, when you work together, engage in problem-solving, support individual projects, and gather socially, you are creating and extending a particular kind of culture that is difficult to achieve online. We create “a persistent, residual culture of values that persists because it resides in the relationships of the people.” This is not the programmed culture of corporate initiatives. This is a social structure that we know as community.
These principles are the foundation of the networks of relationships that we form. Remember, the difference between a Global relationship and a Local one is not where you live but how our engagement with one another matters where we live. In this sense, all our relationships are local ones.
I found myself nodding in agreement throughout. Yes and yes, and yes.