Getting the full context

Postal Portals #7

This letter is a response to Different Selves, a letter from Spencer Chang to me. You can find a history of our correspondence here.

Spencer, 

I’m sorry to hear of your recent dental trouble; I know how discouraging hearing bad news at the dentist’s office can be as I myself have had about 20 cavities filled (yes, more than half my teeth have fillings). There’s something about how bad dental news is delivered that makes it particularly inconvenient and uncomfortable - I think since the checkup and then filling procedure often occur back to back there’s no time to plan around it; you go to the dentist, learn you have a cavity, and then the rest of the day is ruined when you’re sent home with a numb, sore mouth. Maybe it’s a stretch of the metaphor, but a visit to the dentist strikes me as a physical example of the atomized self: we both live pretty healthy lives, brush our teeth regularly, but then suddenly a tiny part of us is thrust into the spotlight and we’re not so healthy after all. 

Your recent time in New York sounds fruitful. I’m still a bit surprised that when you’re in San Francisco you don’t feel a similar energy to that which you felt in New York. Perhaps in my third-city perspective, the energy levels between those two dense metropolises seem comparable, but to someone adjusted to the pace of SF, the higher energy of New York might be perceptible? 

You may recall I had a stint in Los Angeles after I left Taipei and before I returned to Houston, so I tend to view that transitory summer as a triptych featuring all three places, rather than direct move from Taipei to Houston. Part of the challenge of moving back to the US is adjusting to the lack of public transit. In Taipei exploration was easy. I could visit three or four new cafes a week at no extra cost (in terms of travel time, planning time, monetary expense). At my fingertips sat dozens of cafes, restaurants, bars, museums, friends and more. Life in Taipei was a life of convenience (admittedly, a privileged convenience of the American expatriate-student), whereas life in LA included more … challenges. Maybe surprisingly, my life in Houston has been more conducive to exploration than my stay in LA. I live in an area with easy access to public transit and with many excellent restaurants, bars, cafes, and cultural destinations within walking distance. Add my existing friend circles and you can see a clear reason why I felt better about returning to Houston after LA than I did about moving to LA from Taipei. 

But what you’ve described as the emergence of the atomized self, prompted by location, resonates with me. We respond and adapt to what a city offers us. When we have ritzy cocktail bars, we drink cocktails. When there are breweries, we drink beer. When public transit is available and a city offers an abundance of cafes and bars, we go out. When we face gridlock and sprawl, we stay in. But even more than the city at large, our direct environments do so much to stimulate the self we present, and determine if we’re able to present a holistic self at all. For me, what’s often the key sign that I’m in a safe space is whether I feel like I can test a new line of thinking or to address uncertainty. I’m thinking along the lines of conversation and intellectual safety here obviously, rather than physical safety per se, which is of course a prerequisite for the kind of safety I’m speaking of. When those criteria are met (which are hard to enumerate explicitly), I can see my holistic self emerge. I don’t feel like I need to cover up the gaps in my knowledge or the gaps in my arguments or thinking or ideas. The vulnerable parts of my worldview are on display. 

I’ll tell you one place where I almost never feel safe to present my authentic self: online. I can’t remember which, but a recent episode of The Ezra Klein Show addressed how the internet encourages atomization of the self much more than in-person conversation does. I’m paraphrasing, but the argument was along the lines of spontaneous in person communication leaves no time or space for filtering the self, at least not near the scale that a facebook post or tweet edited over the course of hours does. When we post online we make deliberate, calculated decisions about the self we present: do we present as a hardline believer in a political cause? Or someone who straddles a political divide? Do we engage with this topic or that topic? Do we follow this person or retweet that person’s claims? All of this is deliberate, highly planned, and on fairly public display. 

You present a challenge that has a good analog in the physical world:

“when these contexts collapse onto each other when people of differing personas interact at the touch points. As the number of platforms and the overall internet presence of people continues to increase, I think our relationship to and characterization of our holistic selves will only become more important in having a solid foundation to hold onto in the storm of context collapse and identity fracturing that the Internet undergoes at every moment.”

What do you have when the contexts collapse into a singularity? You have the physical world. When we bring ourselves to a space in which we feel safe, our contexts align and we’re about as close to the holistic self as we can get. Sometimes it’s easy to forget just how specific the context we have about others is when we’re online, and it’s not necessarily because of the ‘physical’ aspect of physical world interactions. Think about this: when you engage with someone in a Twitter thread, how often do you go off topic? Is there small talk within the thread? What restaurants or bars did they go to recently? How’s their family? I know that sounds contrived, but it’s part of the idea that there’s much more to communication and social interaction than the linguistic component, that the full conversation, the full context, is multimedial. In the physical world even an adversarial conversation has gaps. Not every second is on topic like in online interactions that have narrow contexts. There’s an inherent social exploration that is natural to verbal conversation and that makes a substantial difference in context construction. 

I’ve also worried about the erosion of ‘truth’ over the last few years, particularly with regards to our political system and social media. But when you really think about it - there hasn’t ever been a universal truth, or at least not what I would think of as a universal or shared truth. To borrow a turn of phrase from Sam Lipsyte’s short story “My Apology,” we have never been experiencing different versions of the same story, but rather we each experience entirely different stories. What the internet has done is provide a shattered piece of glass that refracts parts of each person's story in obscene ways so much so as to render the stories unrecognizable. What I wonder is this: can we replace our broken glass with a clear window? Or do we need to remove the glass entirely…

Yours,

Avery