Philosophical Reflections on the Age of Ephemera
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sprung up (such as Pandora, which pushes music to you based on what you have
already said you like). More will follow: we will comport ourselves to the new
world. A similar problem confronts users of the new communications
technologies. Used to the letter-like formalities of email exchange, I have asked
my son how one ought to end an instant message exchange. It seems wrong
simply to stop responding to a communicative act, even if the last act was the
barest “LOL.”
Disposable Me
The overabundance of media has had unexpected consequences, not
just for the publishing industry or the movie or music industries, but for the
meaning of ownership itself and for the person who would have owned before
but who now accesses. We can see this in a general way: several generations
grew up with a defining collection of non-ephemeral, non-digital materials:
books, LPs, VHS and even DVD movies (for a time). Crates of materials were
U-Hauled from one phase of life to another, because, in a very personal sense,
they delimited a continuous person and an historical passage of the continuous
person through time. Here is a dramatic life change, and yet this is the person
who liked R.E.M. before R.E.M. was cool; or this is the hedge fund manager
who, years after college, still has a copy of Das Kapital on her bookshelf for her
guests to see and note. A choice to own one album or book over another, of
course, was a material decision of some consequence.
Psychologists tell us that ownership serves several psychological
functions, including the competing functions of socialization and
individuation.20 Put another way, we buy what we are expected to buy because
we want to meet the expectations of others; and we buy what we are not
expected to buy because we want to “be ourselves.” The suggestion is that
ownership is outward-looking, so to speak: it is a representation of the self,
primarily directed toward others. This is surely true, and yet the notion of an ego
that is fully formed, making ownership decisions in light of a careful evaluation
of what others will think, is suspect. We want and we are the one who wants
simultaneously. We do not like Led Zeppelin because we see that others like
Led Zeppelin; we like Led Zeppelin, like others who also like Led Zeppelin, are
liked by others who also like Led Zeppelin, like Led Zeppelin all the more for it,
and so on. As time passes there is a stickiness to this “liking Led Zeppelin.” It is
difficult—though, tellingly, not impossible—to stop liking Led Zeppelin. This is
our immediate experience, and Husserl puts it more formally: we take stances or
positions in the world.21 We attend to this, we ignore that; we like cats but not
dogs; we are happy to see him but we despise her. The positions we take give
shape to the world as a world for us—we bring meaning into it. Thus for
Husserl, while the location of trees and roads and the height of tables and the
distance to the nearest gas station are more or less fixed for us, the world is
nevertheless constituted to some extent by our personal stances. It’s hot and I