The history of screen technology can be roughly described as a process by which Californians slowly move screens closer and closer to everyone else’s face. From the movie theater, to the living room (where children were once warned, “Don’t sit too close to the TV!”), to the smartphone held a foot before our noses, to the innovations of these latter days—in which Apple et al would inch the screen past the nasal frontier and place it in front of our eyes, while Musk and his futurist cohort would stuff the thing even further into our heads—it’s all one, slow, move-in for a weird and uncomfortable kiss.
There is some slight trouble in all this, a problem unintended by the designers of the screened life, but nevertheless niggling: things brought close to the face are usually secret things. Cards held close, notes and books of juicier content, a lover vis-a-vis the beloved, a mother sternly taking her child’s chin in a public space: bring something close enough to kiss and you’ll mask your face and produce a symbol of privacy, of a deliberately closed world.
Our world never really intends its symbols. If our age were endowed by God with the power of speech, it would say something like, “Look man, I’m just trying to sell phones here.” And if the world really were a flat, meaningless, expanse, then the utilitarian intentions of our California “creatives” would produce no surplus of meaning, no symbolic residue.
But the world isn’t boring. It’s real. And in this real world—in which people blush, God was crucified, and Pompeii erupted—things signify. Cars, for instance, will signify whether we would like them to or not. They will reference a history of people put in cages. They will bring up the motif of the animal behind glass. We will all imagine them as having scowling faces. We will project our image of “the enemy” onto them as they wax large in our rearview mirrors. They will provoke irrational surges of joy and rage because, whatever Ford and Toyota would like the car to be, they are also symbols of frustrated divinity: the feeling of operating a superhuman reserve of power (gasoline) while being legally and socially barred from ever realizing this reserve’s capacity (speed limit) is inevitably a symbol of Adam, the man who would be “like God” and so ends up as a slave to the earth.
Likewise, you can’t just wrap every commodity in plastic—for entirely utilitarian reasons!—without plastic coming to “stand for” alienation, coldness, and the clinical separation of body from body. The pandemic was a petri dish for this problem. Here, a willfully symbol-blind class of bureaucrats wielded the law to enforce a purely functional action: “wear a mask to stop the spread.” They were shocked to find that their reasonable recommendation produced an unreasonable glut of symbolism. As it turns out, masks don’t just do, they also mean, and what they mean is fraught: they mean individualism, the private sphere, the dog-muzzle, the bank-robber of the Wild West, the hijab, the Ku Klux Klan, the sarcophagus, pantomime, carnival, the authority of the dentist, the twelfth night of Christmas, and the special forces units of most modern militaries. People cannot just “mask up” without invoking the nature and history of masking, and for this reason among others, mask mandates—serenely promulgated for ahistorical, utilitarian purposes—were a trash-fire in the uptake.
But mask mandates merely rushed the covering of the face that the slow approach of the screen portends. The brief obscuring of the mouth and the chin was an overeager anticipation of Apple Glasses' bid to obscure the eyes and the brow. In both cases, the symbolic residue, regardless of our best intentions, is secrecy.
Should we be surprised? Screen-technology has led us to live out our days operating devices once only afforded to James Bond (tiny cameras, wireless earpieces, and watches that communicate), devices typically invented for military use before becoming commercial products (internet, GPS, drones). Of course, we have come to look like spies (furtively withdrawing mid-conversation in order to text personnel unknown). The screen is not a neutral mode of communication any more than the car is a neutral mode of transport. It has contorted our bodies, through the decades, into increasingly private positions (from watching in public, to watching with the family, to sitting hunched over a personal device), the net result of which is that no one knows what their fellow screen-users are doing.
The difference between looking at a phone and looking at a book is that the latter object gives an indication of your activity to your neighbor: he knows you are reading; he even has some inkling of what you are reading. But put down the book and pick up the phone and you only may be reading—you may also be shopping, or bullying someone, or locating Princeton, or watching someone die. Our actions usually shape our bodies into a message, a sign of what we are up to—and this is good because it aids the work of justice. Giving each their due requires a world in which what is due to others can be seen and known without too much difficulty. The unity of expression and action—however subtle—shows what is due to us. But screen-use is a form of “getting things done” which rarely displays what we are doing, and indeed, tends to shape bodies enacting even the most diverse intentions into the same, guarded position as every other.
Like most digital advances, social media is a solution to a digital problem. By virtue of its closeness to his face, the screen alienates its user from any clear display of what he is up to, producing an unintentional air of secrecy around every mundane communication. Social media promises to heal this wound through the careful application of a commodity, one that allows the screen-user to tell his neighbor “what he is up to.” Problem solved?
Problem compounded. The person posting what he is up to is no longer manifested in his acts. His body is no longer shaped by the particularity of his actions in a manner that gives “what he is about” to the senses of others. He provides others with what he is up to—extrinsically. The salve to the secrecy of the phone has become an opportunity for greater suspicion, as in, “yes, you tell me you are happy, that you are blessed, that you are reading Henri De Lubac, but are you really?”
The net result of the screen’s proximity to the face is a world of once-public, once-civic spaces in which everyone now looks a little furtive, withdrawn into actions unknown and without bodily expression beyond what moving thumbs can produce. If it is true that we are made for communion with each other, this diffuse atmosphere of secrecy is not and cannot be a merely neutral fact, but one which causes great anxiety: this seems evident in that we trust each other less, that 82% of Americans admit to snooping through someone else’s phone, and that the feeling of being drawn to look over someone’s shoulder at their smartphone is, apparently, a universal one.
The Scriptures regularly distinguish between deeds done in darkness, and deeds done in the light. No one good, they reason, would seek to act in the darkness, which obscures the outward expression of their good character. For this reason, Christians are to be “children of the light” and “of the day.”
But the age of the Very Close Screen is an age cast into deep darkness, not by virtue of any solar eclipse, but by a more global eclipse of the expressive body, now shrouded in shadow, its gestures and messages confined to minuscule and barely-visible motions as it acts through characterless and homogenized activations of repetitious devices. With what difference, with what diversity of expression would one consult a map to locate himself; read of a terrible earthquake; tell someone he loves her; watch his child napping, and so on. Now, by being mediated through one and the same commodity, each “act” produces the same body-in-act: head down, face blank, thumb-twitching, screen-use. Apple Glasses complete the gradual movement by which the screen smothers whatever little twitches and ironic snorts are left of the expressive face, covering it for good.
A body that does not give the person to his neighbor is to that degree in darkness. Even good actions, performed in this darkness, are suspicious—held too close to the other’s face to be seen. It is for this reason that screen-use tempts to pornography, not because it occasions its “access,” but according to its very form. Pornography presents the regular, alienated screen-user with an object that fits the form of life mandated by screen-use. It makes sense of screen-use. The screen shapes us into secretive people; pornography gives us the secret to keep. The screen moves so close to our face as to alienate us from our neighbors, and pornography gives us the dirt we would like our neighbors not to know. The screen hides the face, pornography gives us a reason to blush. For a nation which must shop, evangelize, entertain itself, and express its innermost life through a medium which makes all these things look secretive, pornography serves a basically medical function, relieving our society from the ambiguity of screen-use by providing a secret object to fit our increasingly secretive form of life.
Obviously, this is not the only way that pornography is a temptation arising from the form—and not necessarily the particular content—of the screen. We might consider the obvious way that the pornographic image—and really, any “arousing” image—seems to heal the basic loneliness that comes with a life mediated through screen-use. In a world in which everything is available to our gaze, but nothing touches us, pornography serves as a cheap substitute for the real: here is an image, amidst a million lifeless images, that does seem to reach out and affect us, touch us, to affirm us as being real and present as only touch can. We might also consider how pornography binds a world of screen-users into something like a common, guilt-inducing ritual: it is the thing that everyone uses their screens for, but no one admits to using their screens for, and thus pornography provides a negative simulacrum of the very community and mutual belonging that screen-use destroys through its proximity to the human face. Taken together, these sources of the “will to pornography” should awaken us to the possibility that it is not merely the content of our screens, but the very form of screen-use as a mode of life that degrades the human person and sends him seeking peace, not as God gives, but as the ancient gods and their temple prostitutes once gave.