Just You, Me, and Our Digital Mediators

What Kinds of Barriers to Digital Life Do We Need?

This is the inaugural post of the subscriber-only version. To see the full post, and to access the benefits laid out here, consider being a paid subscriber—the Mgmt.

**

This is a story about how a water park helps us to see how digital life ultimately mediates our lives, overcoming natural barriers that ought to remain.

One of our kids’ favorite places on the planet is three hours East of here: Great Wolf Lodge. Imagine a giant waterpark built inside of a hotel that is fully enmeshed within a hotel dedicated to the Development Squad for Disney animals, and you’ve nailed it. If you’ve ever been, you know that it’s the perfectly conceived ecosystem—all of your needs are provided for within a very carefully cultivated and self-contained system. Your wristband for getting inside the massive indoor waterpark is also your room key, which is also attached to your credit card. From a parenting perspective, it’s nice that you can buy food without having to find your wallet when you’re wearing your swimsuit.

It’s also designed for absolute maximum neural overload. The hallways of the hotel are dotted with stations for a built-in game which requires its participants to race from location to location to collect items to fend off the dragon enemy. To get to the waterpark, proceed past the giant arcade which blares noise at all hours of the morning. The lobby, containing artificial trees to the ceiling, is bracketed by an animatronic playhouse which performs shows throughout the day, and is next to the in-house Starbucks playing top-40. If you’re looking for a quiet vacation, this is not your jam, but if you’ve got young kids looking to burn a week’s worth of energy, this is your jam.

Like most other places during the pandemic, it took the downtime in which much of its operation was suspended to do some technological upgrades. It had been two years since we’d been, and greeting us were a variety of integrated QR Codes, automated launching pads for the marquis water slides, and new digital interactions for the kids. But given that the main thing it has to offer—an indoor waterpark—doesn’t play well with electronics, the waterpark itself was refreshingly device-free. Signage was all analog and absent any touchscreens, snack bars were in-person, and even the clocks had moving hands ticking along the hours. The roar of endless gallons of water cycling and recycling fills the ears, as you bounce from water slides to wave pool to kiddie pools to hot tub.

But even with all of the seamless integration which enabled people to not have their phones, along with the obvious problem OF WATER EVERYWHERE, the waterpark was filled with phones: phones around necks in waterproof pouches, phones tucked into the bands of swimsuits, phones documenting and emailing from deck chairs, phones finding answers to questions or streaming a video. I’m relatively cheap, and aware of the ways in which my own phone usage has ramped up over the last two years, and so I took this as a great chance to not have it on me.

It’s no great observation that digital devices now mediate a great deal of our ordinary interactions. My parents were with us for the trip, but then FaceTimed the day after; my mother-in-law kept us updated on her impending trip over text while we were at the park. It’s fairly common, across socioeconomic, racial, and gender lines: landlines are dying, and my kids routinely ask me what a “commercial” is when they have to sit through them on a hotel TV.

But the water.

The water, like in the first days of creation, stands as the final barrier against our technological incursions, the uncrossable divide which has no memory, no great passion, no moral compass. It does not care whether you scrimped and saved for your phone, or whether your phone is a mundane purchase, whether you use your phone for nefarious purposes or to remember the faces of your infant child. The water will devour electronic devices and not look back. Enter the waterproof pouch, capable of bridging the unbridgable, of pushing aside the elemental curse and allowing us to carry on with our digitally-saturated world, even in the presence of the one thing which can, without exception, undo them. The great tehom is pushed back, as in Genesis 1, and the great chaos is held at bay by a plastic pouch.

It is the crossing of elemental barriers that I want to draw our attention to here: the ways in which digital mediation and its attendant devices are increasingly drawn into spaces where they would otherwise not have been thought to be. Here is my thesis: there are some spaces where this mediation does not need to be. But why? The devices, at their core, do the work of augmenting the work our memories would do, press us into using them to gather information, keep our schedules, remind us of our lives and their obligations, and do so in more than a way of convenience. As many have argued, the difference between digital devices and other forms of convenience is that they make us different neurologically, emotionally, physiologically. They increase dopamine, shorten our attention spans, diminish our memory capacity, lessens our ability to listen carefully over long periods to another person. In making some things easy, they make themselves necessary, and increasingly easy for all areas of life.

What would it mean to banish them from some areas, like already happens in testing centers, doctor’s offices, movie theatres, church services? It would mean that there are some situations and encounters in which a digital device could insert itself, but that it would be fundamentally disruptive to, in that its convenience is recognized as not just unneccesary but in opposition to the space itself. Bringing a smartphone into the pool is saying, by contrast, the environment demands its absence, but we can fix that. The frontiers are endless, but we seem to know that there are spaces into which the sheer environment is not and should not be pliable to its usefulness.

Beyond the spaces of the pool, where the waters are, and we are clothed, there is the chance for the devices to enter into the intimacy of water where we are unclothed. And of course, we can do these things, but it’s not at all apparent why we should. To invite the mediation of digital life as a more efficient replacement for, say, a phone call, is one thing—though it remains arguable whether efficiency is a suitable replacement for the nuance of a phone call. But to invite this mediation into the shower?

This, of course, brings us to porn: the most intimate act which our bodies can perform, mediated through digital life, with the expectation that digital means should rightly be there. If the barriers of water are unable to phase us, then it is only true to say that there should be no environmental barriers whatsoever that digital mediation should not enter into, no reason to suspect that even sex couldn’t be augmented, enhanced, or surpassed by integrating digital life into it.

To posit that there is a barrier into which digital means should not be present is ultimately to call into question the utilitarian basis for the technology to begin with. And this, then, brings up questions as to whether the utility which these devices bear is all there is to consider. I’m willing to venture into normative territory in saying that, working backwards from the environmental barriers intrinsic to the device, there should be social barriers to their use far before the great tehom threatens to undo them. We recognize these frequently, such as in movie theatres, if only because the small screen competes with the large screen. But what if, more than screen competition, the relevant barrier (analogous to physical ones like water) is one of attention, that whenever the device fragments the fabric of a social world, namely the attention which a situation calls for, the device is being put out of bounds?

Discuss.