A Brain in Our Pockets: Arendt, Thinking, and the New Media

Abstract

Internet use changes our perception and our experience. It affects our sense of self and our thinking. In her work in the 1960s, Hannah Arendt explains what thinking is and discusses the consequences for society when its citizens do not think. Ahrendt describes thinking as a person being a two-in-one, which allows for a silent dialogue the self and this requires undistracted time alone. In this paper I will suggest that the new media: smart phones, computers, the internet, social media, etc. can interrupt or replace the solitude needed for thinking. I will use Marshall McLuhan's 1964 book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man as a basis for describing the new media. In his book, McLuhan shows how new media serves to extend ourselves. I use this idea to suggest that technology such as cell phones (due to the addictive way they are able to configure our awareness) have disrupted Arendt's idea of the two-in-one silent dialogue. Further I will discuss how technology has shaped the way in which we view ourselves. Social psychologist Sherry Turkle suggests the idea of a ‘second self' that only exists as an online persona. I will analyze how and why people do create alternate selves and how that process of second self construction also disrupts solitude. I will also pose a brief discussion of developmental psychologist Erik Erikson's work to explore how new media is affecting childhood and adolescence. I also discuss the difference between face-to-face conversation and its digital equivalents and how digital conversation can decrease one's ability with the face-to-face is emblematic of how thinking has been replaced. In an effort to give credence to the New Media, I also briefly discuss how these new media affect political activism through the research of Zeynep Tufekci's Twitter and Tear Gas whichis a study of what she calls networked protest. She lays out how the internet allows activists to organize more efficiently, creating an ‘adhocracy', where people take on responsibilities based on ability and willingness, as opposed to having been assigned the responsibility due to position in the movement. What I feel needs to be understood our cell phones and the internet are not just that they "rotting our brains" as many a parent has said to child since the dawn of the screen, but that the effects it has on the thinking of individuals, has greater societal and political effects. While technology and media in themselves are neither good nor bad, I feel that leaving their effects unexamined is what is dangerous.