Topic: Community/Culture

Through an array of newly emerging technologies the world of relationships becomes increasingly saturated. We engage in greater numbers of relationships, in a greater variety of forms, and with greater intensities than ever before. With the multiplication of relationships also comes a transformation in the social capacities of the individual – both in knowing how and knowing that. The relatively coherent and unified sense of self inherent in a traditional culture gives way to manifold and competing potentials. A multiphrenic condition emerges in which one swims in ever-shifting, concatenating, and contentious current of being. One bears the burden of an increasing array of thoughts, of self-doubts and irrationalities. The possibility for committed romanticism or strong and single-minded modernism recedes, and the way is opened for the postmodern being.

One detects amid the hurly-burly of contemporary life a new constellation of feelings or sensibilities, a new pattern of self-consciousness. This syndrome may be termed multiphrenia, generally referring to the splitting of the individual into a multiplicity if self-investments. This condition is partly an outcome of self-population, but partly a result of the populated self’s efforts to exploit the potentials of the technologies of the relationship … As one’s potentials are expanded by the technologies, so one increasingly employs the technologies for self-expression; yet, as the technologies are further utilized, so do they add to the repertoire of potentials … Someday there may indeed be nothing to distinguish multiphrenia from simply “normal living.”

Shoshana Zuboff suggests that the introduction of “smart machines” into businesses is blurring the distinctions between managers and workers. Managers are no longer the “thinkers” while the workers are consigned to the “doing.” Rather, out of necessity the workers now become managers of information, and as a result, they considerably augment their power.

The number and variety of relationships in which we are engaged, potential frequency of contact, expressed intensity of relationship, and endurance through time all are steadily increasing. As this increase becomes extreme we reach a state of social saturation … Formerly, increases in time and distance between persons typically meant loss. [Today] one may sustain an intimacy over thousands of miles … In effect, as we move through life, the cast of relevant characters is ever expanding. For some this means an ever-increasing sense of stress … At the same time that the past is preserved, continuously poised to insert itself into the present, there is an acceleration of the future. The pace of relationships is hurried, and processes of unfolding that once required months or years may be accomplished in days or weeks … As the future opens, the number of friendships expands as never before.

Politicians and economists have steadfastly refused to entertain a discussion of how we prepare for a new economic era characterized by the diminishing need for mass human labor. Until we have that conversation, the fear, anger, and frustration of millions of Americans are going to grow in intensity and become manifest through increasingly hostile and extreme social and political venues. We are long overdue for public debate over the future of work and how to share the productivity gains of the Information Age.