Crowds and Party · 第 43 页

That the young people Turkle interviews express anxieties associated with autonomy and connection is not surprising. They are enjoined to individuality, told each individual is selfsame, self-creating, self-responsible: one is born alone and one dies alone; you can rely on no one but yourself. Yet the technologies that further individuation— smartphone, tablet, laptop—and the platforms that encourage it—Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr—provide at the same time an escape from and alternative to individuation: connection to others, collectivity.

Crowds

As I explore more thoroughly in subsequent chapters, Elias Canetti’s weird yet compelling anthropology of crowds (Adorno described it as a scandal) addresses an anxiety different from the one that concerns Turkle.⁵⁷ He considers not the fear of being alone but the fear of being touched: “There is nothing that man fears more than the touch of the unknown.”⁵⁸ The one place where man is free of this fear is in a crowd. “The crowd he needs is the dense crowd, in which body is pressed to body,” Canetti writes, “a crowd, too, whose psychical constitution is also dense, or compact, so that he no longer notices who it is that presses against him.”⁵⁹

Turkle thinks that people’s aversion to talking on the phone (as opposed to texting) and conversing face-to-face reflects their need for filters, for ways to handle sensory and information overload. They reflect, she suggests, not only a longing for solitude but also the way that in a stimulation and simulation culture we have become cyborgs.⁶⁰ Canetti suggests an alternative interpretation: we may be coming to prefer the crowd, the presence of many that opens us to collectivity and relieves us of anxiety. One-on-one conversations may feel too constraining insofar as they enclose us back in an individual form. Rather than part of a group, of many, we are just ourselves.

If this is plausible, then we have an alternative way to think about preoccupations with numbers of friends, followers, blog hits, shares, and retweets. They do not indicate personal achievement or popularity. They mark our absorption in the crowd, how densely we are enmeshed in it. So, to be clear, we can think of these counts in the individualist terms given us by capital. We can also recognize them as something else, as markers of belonging to something larger than oneself. In this latter sense, they reassure us that we are not unique but common.

For Canetti, the relief we feel in a crowd is paradoxical. It arises from a fear of others, a feeling that others are threatening, which “reverses into its opposite” in the crowd.⁶¹ In a discussion with Adorno, he explains that he believes that people like to become a crowd because of “the relief they feel at the reversal of the feeling of being touched.”⁶² From this vantage point, the craving for dopamine Turkle describes seems more like the relief we may feel when we shake off the fears associated with individuation—isolation, exposure, vulnerability.

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