Information as Ritual: James Carey in the Digital Age

Introduction

The digital revolution has opened up countless new areas of inquiry within the field of social theory. There is much scholarly discussion, for example, on the implications of the new technology for privacy and self-sovereignty (Cohen, 2000; Solove, 2006) and for copyright and the law (Boyle, 2008; Litman, 2006), on whether cyberspace constitutes a true public sphere (Dean, 2003; Froomkin, 2003), on the nature of network society (Castells, 2009; Rainie & Wellman, 2012), and on the ultimate fate of cultures based on information processing (Kurzweil, 2006; Lanier, 2011). A particularly challenging set of unanswered questions has to do with the relationship that obtains between our offline and our digitally constructed online selves: Is the online self an authentic representation of our “real” one? Are the two selves structurally connected or are they autonomous? What sort of effects does the co-existence of these two selves have on our individual and collective lives? While recent research has begun to address these important issues (Baym, 2010; boyd, 2012; Papacharissi, 2010), there is still a great need for further theoretical exploration of the intricate relationships between self, communication, and society in the digital age. In such a situation, the classics of communication theory may have much wisdom to offer contemporary scholars. The work of James Carey is particularly significant in this regard, and it is the claim of this article that his celebrated ritual view of communication can be successfully “rebooted” to help shed significant light on the questions surrounding digital selfhood and its place in culture and society.

The article is divided into three sections. The opening section revisits Carey’s account of communication and culture to identify aspects of the ritual view that are pertinent to an analysis of digital selfhood. For Carey, communication as ritualistic practice was responsible for creating social reality and thus helped to bridge the gap between individual self and society. I want to suggest that ritual, understood in information-theoretic terms, can serve the same function with regard to another equally problematic gap—that between the digital and the actual self. The second section references the work of Claude Shannon to show how the rise of digital technology has given rise to an “informational milieu” predicated on the separation of information and meaningful communication. This “thing-like” aspect of information enables it to function as a ritualistic tool that helps shape our selves. I also briefly discuss Carey’s views on the information revolution and the Internet to show that in spite of his limited engagement with the issues emerging from the rise of digital communications, his theory of communication contained a template for analyzing contemperory culture in informational terms.

My intent in the third and final section is to show that the category of ritual assumes enormous value once we adopt this information-theoretic perspective. The protocols and practices of the digital domain are highly ritualistic in nature, and their function is analogous, I argue, to that of mass communication as Carey conceived of it. Thus, the ritual view can, I conclude, be of enormous value to scholars of communications in the digital age. Specifically, the very autonomy of information enables the formation of a domain of ritual (e.g., within social-networking sites) that in turn becomes instrumental in supporting and maintaining an offline self that is increasingly more self-oriented and under duress. In other words, information as ritual does for the contemporary self what communication as ritual does for society.

The Ritual View Revisited

The ritual view granted communications an extraordinarily large role. Strongly influenced by the Canadian thinker Harold Innis (and by his pupil Marshall McLuhan), Carey (1967, p. 7) shared his mentor’s view that “communication media . . . are literally extensions of mind,” and that consequently the history of the mass media was central to the history of civilization at large. This notion of communications was put to use in addressing one of the classic problems of modern social thought: If the human self is free and sovereign, how can one derive the determinate structure we call society? Given his philosophical leanings, Carey sought a humanistic solution to this problem, and the mentalist subject-based nature of communication made it an ideal candidate for serving as a first principle of social reality. As he memorably announced, “Communication is a symbolic process whereby reality is produced, maintained, repaired and transformed” (Carey, 2009, p. 19). The designation of communication as a prime mover of things was not an eccentric gesture in view of the “linguistic turn” that dominated so much of 20th-century thought. While Carey acknowledged and contended with the extra-discursive aspects of reality, his enthusiastic endorsement of the Weberian idea that “man is an animal suspended in webs of significance” (Carey, 2009, p. 43) tells us that his account of social being privileged the symbolic over the material. Granting this primacy allowed him to exult with Dewey “that of all things communication is the most wonderful’ and to make the brave ontological claim that ‘Society exists . . . in communication” (p. 11). Let me briefly summarize the ritual view for the purposes of the ensuing discussion: As humans, we are joined to others from the moment we begin to talk to each other. The union of individual minds through the agency of speech is a step toward building the social. The embodied encounter that is conversation can therefore be considered a proto-ritual. Rituals, in turn, can be considered a sort of upward sedimentation, rising up from an ocean of talk to congeal into the substance that is sociality and are of crucial import because they create the forms of relations that ground the social order. This chain of determinations demonstrates that communication as ritual is constitutive of human society.

Such a line of reasoning is very persuasive because it seamlessly connects a set of crucial categories—conversation, ritual, communication, and culture—into one holistic model of the human condition. The logic of Carey’s reasoning becomes clearer upon elucidating the notion of the human self he was operating with. In a remarkably perceptive critique of Carey’s well-known essay on telegraph, Jonathan Sterne (2006) has pointed out that Carey’s claims concerning the effects of the telegraph are “based on a hypothesized experience of a single individual standing in a single place,” and thus “the net effect of Carey’s speculative phenomenology of telegraphy is to orient our theory of communication around the scale of the individual” (pp. 120-121). I would extend Sterne’s observation to suggest that Carey not only operates methodologically at the scale of the individual, but that he also places the individual at the epistemic, moral, and ontological center of things. His corpus—which can be read as an extended plea on behalf of rational, deliberative, and ethical communication—presupposes what is generally referred to as the Enlightenment subject, albeit one shaped more by tradition and meaningful dialogue rather than calculation and rational choice.

Conversation, an activity that is voluntary, individualist, unstructured, open ended, and ephemeral would seem to be most natural pursuit for such a subject. It is therefore no surprise that the category of conversation plays such an important role in Carey’s system. As John Pauly (1997), one of his most insightful commentators work points out, for Carey there is “one communication metaphor without which we all cannot live: communication as conversation” (p. 13). Given this assumption, it would be reasonable to nominate intersubjective conversation as the ground of social reality following the lead of the symbolic interactionists (see Blumer, 1969). However, Carey’s (2002) criticism of symbolic interactionism as not doing “an adequate job in filling the space between symbolic and interaction via communication and culture” (p. 201) shows that he realized that intersubjective meaning was too flimsy a ground for sociality. Hence, we needed another category that would perform the same theoretical task as conversation. Given Carey’s conviction that reality was meaning based, ritual was the ideal candidate at hand.

Such a move was not without its price. Even though Carey (1997a) himself seemed not to distinguish very sharply between the two terms observing that “all ritual begins, then . . . in the gridless ambience of conversation” (pp. 314-315), there is in fact a considerable theoretical gulf between them. Consider one standard account of ritual as embodied in the work of Victor Turner, an anthropologist whose work Carey greatly admired. In the words of Catherine Bell (1997), Turner saw rituals as “part of the ongoing process by which the community was continually redefining and renewing itself” (p. 39). Here are some examples of rituals from Turner’s (1962, pp. 4-5) classic study of the Chihamba Ritual—a “cult of affliction” meant to cure victims—performed by the Ndembu tribe of Zambia:

How does the beheading of a white hen contribute to the renewal of community? We have to realize that the empirical event itself is unimportant, what the act really connotes is the formal mechanism that the individual is subjected to in the observance of the ritual. By dint of the decapitation, the afflicted person becomes integrated with the tribe from which he was estranged. What is missing in this whole scenario is any play of individual subjectivity: The actor does not choose to participate in the Chihamba as one would choose to consult a therapist. Rather, he can no longer be considered a Ndembu unless he undergoes the Chihamba. As Bell (1997, p. 94) has shown, this objective logic underlies all ritual action: be it the Jewish rite of the Seder or the daijosai ceremony where the Japanese emperor offers food to the 10,000 gods in two identical but separate chambers. In short, ritual is an objective set of actions and determinations that is imposed on individual selves to situate them within the field of the social. Thus, “ritual” as a theoretical term yields purchase if, and only if, its “oppressive” aspect is put to use. A classic example of such a maneuver can be found in Althusser’s (1986, p. 83) famous essay “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses”:

I shall therefore say that, where only a single subject (such and such individual) is concerned, the existence of the ideas of his belief is material in that his ideas are his material actions inserted into material practices governed by material rituals (underline added) which are themselves defined by the material ideological apparatus from which derive the ideas of that subject.

In this account, the individual is processed through the set of material practices and emerges as an interpellated subject who is the subject of ideology. Rituals, then, are constitutive of social reality because they are the implements that “objectivize” the individual, so that he or she can be a proper subject of society.

It would be philosophically improper to demand that the free Enlightenment self submit to such external imperatives. Carey’s turn to ritual is thus inevitably compromised by his simultaneous allegiance to the idea of an unencumbered self. His famous assertion that reading a newspaper is like attending Mass is questionable because the consumer of mass media is hardly the strict equivalent of the subject of faith. Nor did he develop a satisfactory account of how ritual operates at the level of the social formation. As Nick Couldry (2003) has pointed out, “What, however, Carey’s ‘ritual’ analysis of communication lacks is a detailed model of the structured patterns through which we live with, and even accept, the concentration in media institutions of the power to define reality” (p. 19). Carey’s dual commitment to ritual and conversation creates a fundamental antinomy in his system. If we prioritize ritual, we end up with an extreme version of objectivism that leaves little agency for the freethinking individual that Carey so cherishes. If, however, we start with conversation, we find ourselves in a sea of subjectivism that is incapable of “producing” society. It is hard to bridge these two polarities; consequently, the ritual view of communication is severely compromised by a vast empty quarter in its middle separating a free humanist subject from those objective determinations that make society more than a random construct.

As it turned out, an alternative approach offered a different solution to this problem by introducing a theory of the subject created in and by language, while conceiving of communicative structures, processes, and institutions as arising out of power relations and therefore motivated by a struggle over meaning and signification. This other culturalist approach—originating from the work of Stuart Hall and others—proved more persuasive insofar as it offered a plausible account of subject formation in terms of material causes that were more specific than ritual. Regardless of Carey’s (1997b, p. 276) allegation that “culture is now reduced to ideology, and ideology in turn reduced to race and gender,” the vast majority of critical scholars found the analytic framework of cultural studies to be the ideal instrument with which to analyze media, culture, and society.

In spite of these shortcomings, the ritual view can be of great value in understanding the relationships between communications, self, and society in the digital age. Carey’s system, as I have just argued, posited a wide gap between the subjective (conversation) and objective (ritual) aspects of reality. This schematic provides a stunningly accurate description of the situation today when we are simultaneously deluged with objective cultural forms—networks, databases, algorithms, social bots; as well as subjective manifests—i-Devices, social media, first-person games, Do-It-Yourself (DYI) processes. This dramatic oscillation between the objective and subjective dimensions of existence calls for new ways of thinking about self and society. Carey not only provides us with an earlier version of this problem, but he also, I want to suggest, provides us with the theoretical tools necessary for tackling it. I have argued earlier that Carey’s use of ritual was hampered by the fact that the structures and processes of modernity were in fact too compromised by the currents of change and progress. The formalism of the digital age has changed this state of affairs. To enter the digital world is to be subject to a set of material conventions, codes, and protocols that are impersonal, constant, and unyielding. The work of Lawrence Lessig (2006) brilliantly illustrates how code functions—both above and below individual consciousness—to govern social transactions and human behavior. In other words, the digital imposes its logic to process the self in a manner that resembles the workings of ritual.

The Autonomy of Information

The binary nature of Carey’s model makes it an ideal instrument with which to analyze the dyadic complex involving online and offline selves. As ritual plays a key role in this scenario, my purpose in this section is to establish how and why ritual can take hold within the digital domain. The key category here is “information.” The ceaseless processing of information that underlies all digital activity, I argue, enables a set of ritualistic operations that are crucial determinants of the nature of our selves. I begin the section with a discussion of Claude Shannon’s seminal argument that information needs to be thought of as autonomous of meaning and culture. I then bring out some of the implications of this thesis for media and communication studies. I conclude the section by reviewing Carey’s take on the information revolution to show how his philosophical commitments prevented him from realizing the potential his own theory had for an understanding of digital life. By taking this “blindness” into heed, we can employ the ritual view to greater effect.

In his landmark work on communication theory, Claude Shannon (1949) announced the revolutionary thesis that the semantic aspects of communication were irrelevant to the conception of information. In other words, information is not what one says (in which case it would be a function of meaning) but rather as Warren Weaver (1949)—Shannon’s co-author and popularizer—explains, it refers “to what you could say . . . That is, information is a measure of one’s freedom of choice when one selects a message” (p. 5). By becoming defined by the act of choosing between messages, information becomes a quasi-physical entity whose amount can be measured. Consequently, Weaver continues,

The concept of information developed in this theory at first seems disappointing and bizarre—disappointing because it has nothing to do with meaning, and bizarre because it deals not with a single message but rather with the statistical character of a whole ensemble of messages, bizarre also because in the statistical terms the two words information and uncertainty find themselves to be partners.

The suggestion that information has “nothing to do with meaning” goes against the grain of recent social and cultural theory. Carey himself contested the claim that computer technology would act as a democratic agent and weaken the monopoly on information, by arguing that the control in question is not over particles of information but rather the entire system of thought that defines what it is that can be accounted for as knowledge. Knowledge must be granted primacy over information because while “there is no such thing as ‘information’ about the world devoid of conceptual systems that create and define the world in the act of discovering it,” therefore the idea of information as an autonomous entity was just “another way past the real political factors of class, status, and power” (Carey, 2009, pp. 149-150). Carey was not alone in taking this stance; even scholars more scientifically minded than him had trouble reconciling with Shannon’s views. Thus, after strenuous efforts to apply the new theory to mass communication practices, Wilbur Schramm (1955) confesses that

finally we must admit frankly the difficulty of bridging the gap between the formula’s concept of information (which is concerned with the number of binary choices necessary to specify an event in a system) and our concept of human communication (which is concerned with the relation of a fact to outside events—e.g. how informative is it?). (p. 144)

The “information theory” that is implicitly assumed by humanists alike (and perhaps by many social scientists as well) is tantamount to the following: Information exists only when it is in the possession of a human subject. In other words, all information is information-as-knowledge. Such knowledge can only exist within the frame of a conceptual system, and this paradigm, in turn, is constituted by the entire set of relations that make up a culture. In short then, information is not ontologically distinct from cultural conversation and has no existence outside of the web of meaning that constitutes the totality of our existence. Therefore, a construct like the World Wide Web is merely an extension of the web of meaning (brought into being by communication) that constitutes the common culture. The study of new media is therefore no different from the study of other cultural texts as both the digital and the analog worlds spring from the same principles of organization.

Such a perspective is limited insofar as it causes us to ignore the truly revolutionary changes brought about by the digital revolution. Recall that in Shannon’s formulation information—being a measure of uncertainty—is quite independent of meaning and therefore of human agency of any sort. We may call this the strong version of the autonomy. It is possible to posit a weaker version as well. New modes of information processing such as searching, recommending, blogging, tweeting, sharing, networking, data mining, and cloud computing are often far removed from individual intentionality and consciousness, and point to a realm that is not reducible to human subjectivity. The weaker version of the autonomy thesis, then, would be something along these lines: Although any piece of information in digital space originates from a human author, once uploaded it is subject to manifold processes of manipulation and dissemination, such that it no longer retains fealty of any sort to its origins. The processing of information is thus an autonomous activity that creates, in the words of Tiziana Terranova (2004), “the milieu which supports and encloses the production of meaning” (p. 9). This “informational milieu” is also a breeding ground for ritual. First, activities in the digital domain take on a regular and repetitive aspect that is central to all ritual. Digital acts such as searching, liking, tagging, or retweeting are automatic and sometimes even automated (as when performed by social bots). Second, as I hope to argue in the next section, the consequences of these acts also resemble those of ritual in that they consist of external impositions on the individual that he or she has no control over.

To better understand why ritual and the ritual view can be of great benefit to new media studies, let me briefly discuss Carey’s own writings on the information revolution. In an early essay co-authored by John Quirk, Carey (2009) argues that “electronics is neither the arrival of the apocalypse nor the dispensation of grace. Technology is technology; it is a means of communication and transportation over space, and nothing more” (p. 107). Therefore, he continues that the “third communications revolution” is not a portal to an egalitarian utopia but rather an invitation to “the public to participate in a ritual of control in which fascination with technology masks the underlying factors of power and politics” (p. 150). Thirty years later, Carey’s views on the potential of the information revolution were no less critical. After noting that the literature on the Internet contained “three fatal flaws”—it was not sufficiently historical, lacked comparative perspectives and was insufficiently embedded in the real world—he goes on to contend that

to “think technology” as something operating abstractly, outside of history, outside of the political and economic moment in which it is born, is to misunderstand both the possibilities and limitations of any given technology. That lesson was largely forgotten in the 1990s, swallowed in the metaphors of a new economy, a new society, a new world order and a new human personality born with a dispensation from the past. (Carey, 2005, p. 446)

Very few with demur with Carey’s judgment that the early literature on the Internet was overblown in the claims it made for new media, nor would anyone question his observation that technologies of communication need to be put in a proper historical context. Yet, I would argue, his unwillingness to conceive of informational culture in anything other than a humanistic sense render his deliberations on the digital world less than comprehensive. Hence, he could write an essay on the Internet that talked a lot about musical notations, immigration in Sweden, and gated communities in California but made little mention of the World Wide Web, chatrooms, blogs, search engines, or Multi-User Domains. My purpose in the concluding section is to expand the ritual view beyond Carey’s self-imposed limits. My method here is—to borrow the title of a recent publication (Packer & Robertson, 2006)—one of “Thinking with James Carey.” That is, I try to view the relation of the digital to the “real” from a vantage that Carey himself would have probably employed, pose the sort of philosophical questions that he would be vexed by, and provide answers that are consonant with his theoretical vocabulary. This speculative and open-ended thought-exercise hopes to demonstrate the ritual model’s continuing relevance for social theory and media studies.

Information as Ritual

The digital world is, at first glance, far removed from the landscape associated with the ritual view. The main elements of ritualistic communication—face-to-face interactions, embodied conversations, common tongues, long-standing traditions—are notably absent in today’s virtual culture. At the same time, new media practices appear to be quite unrelated to the traditional workings of ritual. It is my intention in this concluding section of the article to argue that ritual plays an important role in the digital domain, and that a return to the ritual view can yield powerful insights into its nature and constitution. As I pointed out earlier, contemporary new media studies are animated by a series of questions that address the fraught relation of the digital to the actual: Is the Internet a true public sphere? Does connectivity build community? Does the virtual domain change our notions of selfhood? All these concerns arise, to some extent, from the fundamental divide between the online and offline worlds, and there is thus an urgent necessity to theorize the relationship between these two modes of existence. It is here that the ritual view can be of great value in analyzing the “binary code” that underwrites life in the digital age.

Socially networked selves are “born” when an individual voluntarily joins a digital platform to be connected to other like-minded subjects. While it is natural to think of the online self as merely a mirror of the “real” self, these two entities have very distinct personalities. The differences in question can be as shallow as that pertaining to nomenclature—username versus proper name—or as deep as that centered around ontology. Examples highlighting the latter would include Sherry Turkle’s (1996) classic formulation, stating that cyberspace promotes multiple or fragmented selves, and Mark Poster’s (2001) claim that “interactions on Internet would tend to dissolve ethnicities to the extent they are based on . . . presence in space and on ancient, common rituals” (p. 166). One significant difference has to do with the degree of privacy and publicity that attach to each of these two modes. Although technologies such as closed circuit television, cookies, and global positioning systems may make the matter moot, most of us still continue to adhere to the belief that the individual is entitled to his or her right “to be let alone.” This normative dictum—enunciated first in a landmark article by Justices Brandeis and Warren (1890)—implicitly assumes that privacy is a non-tangible property of the self. Whether that is really the case, it is clear that no such supposition can be made for the online self. Unlike in real life where the individual self—in the manner of a Thoreau—can retreat to solitude and thus be thought of as ontologically distinct from the society he or she inhabits—the self in cyberspace is always conjoined to the networked public it belongs to. One is always in public view on the network and can always be liked, tagged, or retweeted; in other words, the individual is continuously and inextricably lodged in the public domain. It is in this context that Sun CEO Scott McNealy’s harsh observation that “you have zero privacy anyway. Get over it,” or Oracle CEO Larry Ellison’s condescending remark that “the privacy you’re concerned about is largely an illusion” begins to make sense (Crovitz, 2008).

This radical condition of “public-individuality,” located in an amorphous space between the traditional domains of self and society, is yet poorly understood. Scholars have typically tackled this problem by thinking of these two entities as distinct and autonomous from each other, and then attempted to determine the relation between them: Is the online self a true reflection of the offline one? Or, do online practices harm or hinder the real self? Commentators like Turkle and Poster, as we just saw, have answered the first question by arguing that the cyber self is radically different from the offline version. Others (Kennedy, 2006; Robinson, 2007) have opposed this distinction, claiming that online identities are continuous with offline selves, and that virtual representations reinforce the meanings of the physical world. Again, by thinking of these two selves as quite separate it becomes possible to talk about the effects one has on the other. To take two recent examples, in a recent work Sherry Turkle (2011) has suggested that constant networking leads in fact to lonelier lives, while Ben Agger (2012) has argued that “oversharing” by means of digital technology creates a situation “where nothing important is being said.” It is however unlikely that Carey would subscribe to an analytical strategy that imposed such a sharp division between these two aspects of the contemporary self. As Steve Jones (2010), a scholar deeply influenced by Carey, has observed, “It is no longer (and may have never been) possible to distinguish unmediated relationships from technologically mediated ones” (p. 210). The right approach to the problem, in my view, would be to repose it in terms of functionality: What does the online self do for the offline one? And, what does the online self do for the offline one? Such a strategy dispenses with the unenviable task of judging between what is authentic and what is not, and instead pursues the more modest goal of mapping out the structural links as well as the lines of interaction and implication between the two faces of our contemporary selves.

To belabor this point, we cannot conceive of the online and offline selves as autonomous entities. The very existence of journalistic pieces (Miller, 2013) with titles like “I’m Still Here: Back Online After a Year Without the Internet” reveals that the desire of a purely offline existence can only be fantasy. For the approximately 2.5 billion users of the Internet in the world today, the idea of a self that is solely offline is simply not tenable. What that means in a philosophical sense is that the pristine, self-grounded, and sovereign entity that was the basis of the ritual view is now irrevocably compromised by being attached to one or more networks that are composed of similar hybrid selves (other nodes) interacting by means of strict protocols (themselves underwritten by layers of abstract code). In other words, the self in the digital age must be thought of as a composite entity consisting of two interlocked parts—a Cartesian kernel that perhaps could be called the “real” me (and this essence would largely correspond with Carey’s Enlightenment vision of what the individual self is) as well as the publicized outer shell that is bonded to and bounded by the networks it is placed in.

Carey’s ritual view provides us with an excellent framework for analyzing this double-headed self. Recall that the original ritual model oscillated between subjectivism (the subject of conversation) and objectivism (the subject subjected to ritual). Can this dualism be employed in the case when the self is distributed over the real and digital worlds? The ritual model, as we saw, harbored a benign version of the Enlightenment subject with the basic premise that the human individual was characterized by care, compassion, and fellow feeling. It was further marked by its absolute need for commonality and community. If Carey were able to survey the contemporary condition, he would agree with the observation that the self in view today is far more unitary and self-ish than that presumed by him. An array of institutional, cultural, and market forces have led to what a recent publication (Twenge & Campbell, 2013) has termed the “narcissism epidemic.” A spate of recent stories in the popular press (Harvey, 2010; McArdle, 2013; “Why Gen Y Yuppies Are Unhappy,” 2013)—“As College Graduates Hit the Workforce, so do more Entitlement-Minded Workers”; “Why Generation Y yuppies are unhappy”; “Hey Millennnials: You Got a Raw Deal. Get Over It”—all echo the sentiment that the young today are self-oriented to a degree not seen before. Or as Jean Twenge remarks (Healy, 2012), “The trend is more of an emphasis on extrinsic values such as money, fame, and image, and less emphasis on intrinsic values such as self-acceptance, group affiliation and community.” While such accounts of the new narcissism often resort to psychological generalizations—the millennials feel entitled, they are delusional and so on—my use of the term is based more on structural reasoning. The contemporary narcissistic self is less a product of psychological (or psychoanalytic) factors than a function of a set of objective determinations that flow from current technology and organization of social life. The construction of what might be termed a dense subjectivity, that is, a subject impelled and compelled by its own gravity, has been made possible by digital practices like customized marketing leading to what Joseph Turow (2011) calls “the daily you,” self-monitoring devices like Moodpanda, a device that records daily variations in the user’s moods, tweeting random thoughts, “vining” one’s immediate locales, or blogging one’s opinions—all of which have redefined communication as a means to be self-referential, self-gratifying, and self-affirming. In other words, the practices of the wired age and their concomitant social conditions create an environment where the self becomes progressively more subjective and self-oriented.

Insofar as the online self is “broadcast” by its offline counterpart, it may appear that it, too, is subject to the same tendency. After all, it is I who tweets my thoughts, instagrams my images, posts my likes. So, if the offline self is deemed narcissistic the online self must be even more so. But such a conclusion is valid only if my sayings and postings are seen from a semantic perspective, that is, as communication emanating from a meaningful subject. Yet, even as my digital record is an imprint of my intentionality and consciousness (and therefore subservient in an ontological sense to its offline master) it is at the same time an informational ensemble. In other words, my secondary self that dwells exclusively and permanently in what danah boyd (2010) has termed the “networked public” is a digital creature composed of bits and bytes, subject to the imperatives of forces other than myself, and therefore autonomous, in some ways, of its creator. Yes, I may choose what information regarding myself I upload or post. But once that deed is done, others operate on me in a myriad ways that are out of my control: cutting and pasting, liking, retweeting, tagging, photo-shopping, mashing. To play with Nicholas Negroponte’s (1995) famous remark that “being digital” was a matter of the difference between bits and atoms: My bits are not my atoms, once digitized I belong to the network and am subject to its logic of combination and dissemination. The contemporary self may then be pictured, then, as a complex consisting of an offline self that tends to a dense narcissistic kernel of subjectivity, and a digital ring of objectivity that is information based and subject to the vicissitudes of the network. This latter domain—an informational expanse that is both “by-me” and “about-me”—constitutes what may be termed the secondary realm of the social. Thus, though our “real” lives continue to be conducted within what we call the real world, for many of us, the secondary realm of digital sociality functions as an equally important determinant of our selfhood. As the title of recent publication (Brouwer & Mulder, 2007) on digital networks puts it, “Interact or Die!”

How are we to conceive of the relation between these two halves of the self that I have just described? At first look, it appears that the offline and online selves have very different, even conflicting aims. Whereas the first is constantly self-attentive by means of recursive subjective loops, the second ceaselessly manufactures subjective bits to disseminate them along the objective, informational grid of the network. I want to argue that this supposed contradiction is superficial, and that the two halves are functionally complementary and supportive at a deeper level. Let’s start with the real world or offline self. In my description this self is radically I-centric, hence my characterization of it as dense. At the same time, it is far from stable since a subject composed purely out of self-directed vectors is unlikely to be sustainable. Carey’s philosophical anthropology—based on the equation of communality and humanity—would provide support for the claim that narcissism is forever in danger of collapsing into a precarious and insubstantial state. The notion of a depleted self has featured in the work of other contemporary thinkers as well. In his influential piece on the “control society” (a society, incidentally, that can only be enabled by the computer), Giles Deleuze (1995) claims that the individual in the modern era needs to be reconceptualized as a “dividual,” that is, as an entity that is never complete and therefore in eternal need for attachment. In other words, it is now impossible for the individual to exist as a self-subsistent entity. To which I would add this proviso—this ion-like self displays a puzzling complementarity in that it is simultaneously filled to the brim and utterly empty. Hence, we find the paradoxical co-existence of extreme self-involvement (the narcissistic self) with the ceaseless quest to connect (the dividual).

It is at this juncture that we can profitably turn to the ritual view of communication. The lack in the self cannot be filled within the context of real life: The dissolution of place, the impossibility of embodied speech, and the erosion of a common culture have rendered us asymptotic with the Other, making it futile to search for a deep play of culture that will unite scattered selves into coherent communities. Instead, the panacea we are looking for may lie in precisely the place so dreaded by Carey—the technologized and dehumanized space of digital connectivity. This digital domain, as I have argued, is informational and resolutely objective: My face in Facebook does not stare at or talk to another face, instead it records, comments, tags on a stream of informational objects put out by other “faces” and by itself. What we have here is an ecology in which the self-ish offline self is constantly drizzled upon by a gentle rain of otherness falling from a networked sky. Contrary to the culturalist claim that information only has value when it is humanized as knowledge, it is the very “thingness” of digital sociality that enables it to provide the narcissistic self with the comfort it requires. Such a self is unable to find relief in the cold and unyielding terrain of the real world, the unending coverage of how the millennial generation has major issues adjusting the workplace is a case in point. The digital domain promises a far more hospitable home, for by objectifying itself as information the self is able to get back applause and plaudits from a reconfigured societal field. Life on a networking site is an endless sequence of action and reaction to an array of informational objects that admits neither to conclusion nor to closure. Each of these actions (outputs) or reactions (inputs) serves to implicate and imprint the self in a cybersocial space that is both unbounded and yet intimate. As advertised by the proponents of this exercise (Christaki & Fowler, 2011; Shirky, 2009), the point of all these activities is to stay “connected,” and thereby enjoy the fruits of “How Change Happens When People Come Together” or “The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks.” But there is more than utilitarian value to the connected life. The daily transactions involving objective bits of me with objective bytes of others provide the self with comforting and graspable pathways that display little of the friction and discord present in the real world, and act as ballast that keeps the self whole and afloat. In other words, the dense subject finds the offline existence increasingly unrewarding, and thus needs a surrogate socius to inhabit and prosper in. The world of networking can then be thought of in terms of a culture medium—an agar plate for the soul—in which the narcissistic self is nourished and grown on a diet of information that is objectively distinct and yet directed toward it. To repeat what I said earlier, this secondary sociality is strongly ritualistic in its mode of functioning. We click on buttons as automatically as the devout count beads, and furthermore the ritualistic behavior of countless others implies that the individual is subjected to a process that is impervious to his own will. In other words, the autonomy of information allows others to continually manipulate, disseminate, and broadcast “me.” Just as ideology was a function that mapped the pre-social individual onto a specific social formation, information allows the non-digital self the wherewithal to acquire the image and the shape appropriate for a networked world. To “update” Carey’s classic formulation then, the information milieu at the heart of the digital universe enables a process by which the offline self is produced, maintained, repaired, and transformed.

Conclusion

Carey’s ritual view was a notable attempt to construct a meaning-based account of society that would provide us a richer account of communication than what he thought was the sterile causal accounts of positivist social science. In spite of the many remarkable insights it contains, it does not work as a satisfactory theory of culture and communication. The idea of ritual and of the constructive power of ritual can however be applied to a context that Carey himself had little interest in theorizing. The world of social media starkly exemplifies the extreme subjective-objective binary that was at the basis of the ritual view. If, on the one hand, the culture encourages the flourishing of a hyper-individualistic self, it provides, at the same time, an objective space characterized by ritualistic practices that enables this self to sustain itself. Carey himself may not have approved of such an appropriation of his ritual view. That certainly is the irony that all thinkers of worth are subject to.