This week, I found Margaret Morse’s description of the state of “distraction” that arises from a shift towards “mobile privatization” to be extremely compelling. As she describes it, in our postmodern state of distraction, we are split between “two planes of language”: between “discourse,” which Morse defines as “the plane of the subject in a here and now,” and “story,” which she defines as “the plane of an absent or nonperson in another time or elsewhere” (194). Writing in 1990, Morse identifies three phenomena of mobile privatization that fracture our consciousness in this way: the freeway, the mall, and television. When we engage with these three technologies, we are split between our presence in an actual plane of discourse and a virtual plane of story. The former is our presence in a “real” space: the living room where we watch television, the geographies that the freeway crosses, and the physical space of the mall. But we also gain entry into a virtual, “derealized” realm (195), whether the story-world of television or the privatized non-space of the freeway (we are not in Iowa, we are driving on top of it). In her book Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern, Anne Friedberg has described this postmodern condition as a split between one’s “actual” body and “phenomenal” body, the latter being the virtual subjectivity that experiences mobility that exceeds one’s corporeal position (Friedberg 143). Morse emphasizes that the mobile, privatized non-spaces of the freeway, the television, and the mall structure our navigation of these different planes of story and discourse through the “dualism of passage and segmentation” (194). These postmodern phenomena both divide or segment public space into private realms—from our cars on the freeway to our individual television sets—and “reintegrat[e]” fractured space by providing passages to virtual participation in a public, thresholds like the television screen or the car radio (201).
Morse’s piece—particularly her concept of “mobile privatization”—was extremely prescient when we consider the digital era. As I was reading, I was constantly thinking of examples of how I am often “copresen[t] in multiple worlds” (206), split between actual and virtual planes. For example, when I am walking on campus and listening to music, I get caught up in the "story" plane of my music, my attention divided between the virtual and the "actual" as I navigate around reckless skateboarders and bikers. Sometimes, I am reminded of my distracted state when my privatized virtual space is shattered by a sudden change in my immediate environment; for example, a skateboarder cuts in front of me and I am forced out of my contemplative distraction. With our smartphones, the experience of "mobile privatization" encompasses nearly every waking momennt. We are in line at the store, but nearly every person in line is in their own private bubble, scrolling on Instagram, texting someone, or sending an email. We are constantly passing between planes of discourse and story, oscillating from pictures of friends’ weekends to a conversation with the cashier. The duality of "passage and segmentation" that Morse argues structures television’s form operates at warp speed on our smart phone apps. For example, on Tik Tok content is segmented into stories that often last less than 30 seconds; we are crossing the threshold between stories and virtual planes each time we scroll, so that our experience of these apps is increasingly dominated by the experience of passage rather than immersion, by scrolling rather than watching or reading.
In sum, I think Morse’s thesis is crucial for thinking about the pervasive state of distraction through which many of us navigate today’s digital world. We are engaged in a "constant alternation" between ever-expanding planes of non-space (203), forced to divide our "copresence" between a proliferating number of virtual realms (206). What seems most dire to me about the rapid privatization of public space is Morse’s idea that this constant alternation works because the shared form of passage and segmentation across all of these derealized spaces “symbolically link[s] incommensurabilities of all sorts” (207). As we toggle between virtual realms, they are condensed into commensurable planes of existence. This suggests to me that the person we chat with Hinge, the friend we text, the anonymous user whose comments we read on Reddit, and the AI chat bot we interact with are made fungible and thus become equally real or, rather, unreal. I don’t want to be dystopic, but I do fear how our constant alternation between realms, our continual dividing up of our presence, might make “real” interactions feel increasingly “virtual.”
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