For the official version of record, see here:
Lee, R. L. M. (2024). Affinities of Affectivity: Entanglement, Contagion and Exploitation in Smartphone Society. Media Theory, 8(2), 63–84. https://doi.org/10.70064/mt.v8i2.1118
Affinities of Affectivity: Entanglement, Contagion and Exploitation in Smartphone Society
RAYMOND L. M. LEE
University of Malaya, MALAYSIA
Abstract
The smartphone is still the reigning fetish of everyday communication. In fact, it has become the fulcrum of all interactive agencies in daily life. Yet, what is generally unnoticed about it is a screen-induced inter-subjectivity that supports a significant level of exploitation in communicative linkups where affective contagions are rapidly propagated. Through the entanglements in interactive communication that technological innovation promotes, smartphone users can become vulnerable to new forms of predatory economic relations not immediately visible in their daily routines. It can be proposed that the techno-hegemonies have tapped into these entanglements to inculcate contagious behavior as fundamental to the operational enterprise of affective capitalism. This is a capitalism that relies on collective social relations as a springboard to mediated relations of production. However, there are indications that these relations of production may be reaching their limits in the growing numbers of courtroom challenges.
Keywords
Affect, capitalism, contagion, entanglement, exploitation, inter-subjectivity, Serres, smartphones
Introduction
Very few people in the world today are not users of smartphones. The majority are regular users whose lives have become fully dependent on smartphone ownership which interlocks them into myriad networks serving as the principal determinants of how the world is perceived and how relationships are defined and activated. Merrin (2021: 18), for instance, addresses smartphone users as “empowered producer[s] of content, messages and imagery” by recording the details of their own and other people’s lives in a “mass self-paparazzization whose crowd-sourced production of the real makes the previous broadcast era … look like a decidedly amateur affair”. What he means by self-paparazzization is the way users promote themselves by becoming enmeshed with one another through the features of potential capture and shareability found in smartphones. Just think of the millions, if not billions, of photos or texts kept and shared by users throughout the phone-centric world. But these are not just photos or texts; they are self-generated data that tie into the profile-functioning of people’s lives. Even in war zones, soldiers have come to treat their phones as indispensable in conveying the meanings of their combat profiles to family members, friends and acquaintances. Horbyk (2023: 1) in his discussion of the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine outlines “the difficult frontline history of the mobile phone [that] became indispensable for the [Ukrainian] military as its informal communication system, combat tool and entertainment station”. By connecting their homes via the phone to the frontline, the soldiers were able to maintain constant touch and not lose their interactive networks so vital to their identities and survival. In war (and peace), the mobile or smartphone is not something incidental but a real tool with actual features and characteristics that provide users with an enhanced ability to communicate, interact as well as imagine omnipresence at any given moment. It is a multifunctional, all-weather communicating and relaying device par excellence.
One could say that practically every country in the world today is by definition a smartphone nation because its citizens in general cannot function without smartphones. Yet, their taking for granted the ubiquity and indispensability of smartphones may render them susceptible to concealed influences from external agents capitalizing on users’ non-awareness of the affects generated through smartphone connectivity. These are influences that cannot be readily traced or made explicit as to their origins and intentions. As a conveyor of these influences, the smartphone may be considered the ideal connector that provides the multiple linkages prompted by the wide array of apps available to all users who can share and spread affect this way as if they are centrally orchestrating the connections without any awareness of the inter-subjectivity generated from the various channels of audio- and image-flows.
This is what Serres (1982: 39) meant by his metaphor of the parasite, a seemingly autonomous organism living off the nutrients and flows of multiple connections; or in his own words “a relation to the relation, a tie to the tie … [which] is nothing but a position or situation”. In other words, a user’s subjectivity can only be qualified by an intermediate position or the ‘third man’ which is the parasite (Serres, 1982: 57). Smartphones are therefore parasites concealing the inter-subjectivity of mobile communication while enhancing the apparent subjectivity of individual users in their dependency on a high-tech wireless tool in the conduct of everyday life. Because smartphones are ubiquitous, we could even say à la Serres that objects (phones) have in a way become subjects (Crocker, 2021: 188) to emphasize the intermediated nature of the subjective self who, no matter how autonomous it thinks of itself, cannot address and act on its own reality unless it is ensconced through the phone in networks to generate the inter-subjective condition that constitutes the core of all its communications. This condition underlies the interlinking power of the parasite, a power that can be readily tapped by external agents for purposes unbeknownst to or concealed from the multitudinous users.
In discussing the utility of smartphones in transforming the conduct of everyday life, Canpolat (2021) looks at how the parasitical nature of smartphone connectivity becomes the basis of multimedia exploitation where users treat the essentiality of daily phone use without any inkling of the extracted data and labour concomitant with their mobile communication routines. In his words, “smartphone users … become the object of a series of economic relations that are embedded in social relations but do not present themselves as such at first glance” (Canpolat, 2021: 434). Their labour in generating covert data has replaced that of audiences who seek or view data overtly in capitalist relations of production (Fuchs, 2013). Thus, focusing on economic relations in high-tech communication has made plausible the exploitability of parasitical connections as an outcome of daily mobile phone use. By behaving like herds hung up on mobile connectivity, users unwittingly render themselves vulnerable to “a medium of communication in which labour is invisible in everyday life” (Canpolat, 2021: 428). Yet, we can also ask why and how smartphone users allow themselves to become fodder in a newly digitalized mode of capitalist production? Here, we would need to refocus on the social relations of smartphone usage as a vital appendage of the ensuing economic relations that are shaping the new dimensions of digital production and consumption.
Unlike the old landline phones that are limited in generating multiple linkups across space and time, smartphones come with features that create affordances and conveniences for instantaneity and simultaneity in any type of connectivity to qualify for the term meta-media (Humphreys, Karnowski and von Pape, 2018). What this means is that smartphones can perform beyond telephony and photography as a device of surveillance, extraction, and exploitation in ways that can evade the consciousness and awareness of users. Ensconced in their daily routine of staying in constant touch (Agar, 2013), users are rarely besieged by questions that concern the profundity of meta-media as an instrument of control. Instead, they tend to worry more about the speed and range of mobile phone connections. This type of distraction may allow “[a]ll the gadgets with which smartphones are equipped … to increase capital accumulation [where] companies can more easily reach users’ personal information … for commercial purposes” (Canpolat, 2021: 434). But the question of why and how such distraction can occur needs to be scrutinized because it relates to the intensification of collective social relations through smartphone usage as a means of greater economic domination.
My purpose here is to propose a theoretical approach to collective social relations by way of three concepts – entanglement, individuation, and contagion – that may explicate how technological innovations can promote interactive communication to sustain widespread affective influences. These three concepts may be considered specific aspects of inter-subjectivity because each is affiliated with the notion of collectivity as the basis of all interactive realities. Inter-subjectivity cannot be arbitrarily removed from any group or network entanglements or from the processes of individuation and contagion. Thus, through frequent phone usage, we may speak of contagion as arising from the screen-induced inter-subjectivity which makes possible individualized receptivity to affective influences within the framework of ‘action-at-a-distance’ (Thrift, 2008: 230) where subjects are “deterministically produced [by] forces … that leave no room for spaces of resistance” (Lara et al., 2017: 34). Consequently, users become objects in the ‘cool universe of digitality’ (Baudrillard, 1993: 76), dislocated and disempowered by “the experience of an entanglement of processes … which are related to a process of becoming unconscious” (Blackman, 2014: 371). It simply means that users’ entanglement in smartphone usage presents a paradoxical situation where subjects appear to be consciously communicating with one another but unconsciously exploited in the inter-subjectivity of their multiplex relationships. To unravel this situation would necessitate a discussion of entanglement in relation to the processes of individuation and contagion that are also central to the collective formation of communicative networks.
Entanglement, individuation and contagion
Entanglement is a word for describing knotty relationships, the way ropes and strings bundled together become intricately interwoven and difficult to pull or tease apart. In social and media studies, the word has come to be used as a term of interconnectedness contingent on the construction and reconstruction of relationships across space and time. This interconnectedness is not just one based on traditional ties, work relationships, or casual acquaintance but connotes a type of loosely structured network that Ingold (2015) calls meshwork, characterized by multiple interweaving lines of past and ongoing activity. Individuals locked into a meshwork are therefore moulded inter-subjectively by participation in multiple lines of continuous activities within a physical or digital context “in which one exists simultaneously as ‘one and more than one’” (Tucker, 2018: 37). Such participation would suggest the need to look at interconnectedness as a process of interrelated individuations where the “experience of being ‘more than one’ … cannot be resolved solely at the individual level [because] there are conditions of emergence … within which emotional activity unfolds [to involve] multi-layered processes, through which individual and collective life emerge” (ibid.: 37-8).
The idea of interrelated individuation comes from Gilbert Simondon (see Combes, 2013; Scott, 2014) who argued for an understanding of the individual as a collectivized phenomenon. This would imply that individuation is not just concerned with individual cognitive states but must be treated as a process linked to collective conditions of emergence, or as Tucker (2023: 5) puts it “the process through which individual life individuates” in relation to information acting as an operating force. These conditions may involve the spread of information as “the operation of relationality, rather than the operation of binary information in digital technologies and systems” to suggest that “the relational-processes through which living beings persist as individuals operate through data” (ibid.). Thus, individuals are not simply formed by self-experiences with others in specific social and cultural environments but through an inter-subjectivity arising from multiple entanglements in digitalized systems that may render them as both ontologically creative and vulnerable users or units. They can be construed as creative because individuation involves acts of becoming through thinking and self-reflecting as if each individual is in possession of a ‘subjective inwardness’ (Barrett, 1991: 112). Cognitive states of individuals are therefore the sources of creativity that provide the sense of individuation as an interdependent agency of self-consciousness and productivity. Yet at the same time, they are also exposed to the sources of movement and pressure that make them susceptible to ‘external contingency’ (ibid.), thereby rendering their judgment and thought open to discontinuities.
By discontinuities is meant a type of multiplex (or even schizophrenic) involvement promoted by smartphones as polymedia (Madianou, 2014) in which users may construct variable identities that cannot be made out to be always cognitively and behaviorally consistent. Instead, the discontinuous subject becomes unwarily exposed to the implosive forces of digitalized entanglements that inexorably facilitate and intensify all types of contagion. How does this happen? In these entanglements, subjects are not just trying to process incoming information and data or struggling to maintain a semblance of rationality in keeping up with myriad messages that may cause cognitive dissonance. They are constantly dealing with their emotional responses in information or data-saturated situations that constitute part of a broader set of affective relations arising through the entanglements in the first place. Tucker (2023: 3) argues that it is not only affective relations that form the parameters of individuation but “the inter-connectedness between data and emotion in processes that constitute individual subjects”. What this implies is that the affectivity of entanglements provides a medium from which individuation proceeds in tandem with emotions occurring as “feeling with data in fluid processes of co-creation and becoming” (ibid.: 9). In this sense, emotions are not treated as something occurring naturally or instinctually but as the potential of affectivity “entwined [with data] in the unfolding of the metastable relations that constitute the living being” (ibid.). Hence, emotion “operates as the tension of meta-stabilizing affections that are by necessity unspecified, multiple and more than the individual subject being” (ibid.: 10).
The tension of these affections is reflected in the forces of digital culture where “emotion as a social adhesive is resonant with wider socio-political issues that transcend the individual” (Döveling, Harju and Sommer, 2018: 4). Transcendence or trans-individuation of subjects would suggest a type of bonding or belonging in which “global flows of emotion condense into pockets of cultural, social, and ideological intelligibility” (ibid.). The process of condensing these flows can be considered a form of ‘collaborative evaluation’ between digital users who are constantly exposed to affective contagion as they “continually negotiate the flow of emotion online in a relational and reciprocal manner” (ibid.). In this mutual exchange of emotive signals, contagion may reflect “an affective state of transindividuality” (Sampson, 2017: 73) where collaborative evaluation or unimpeded collective sharing can produce an inter-subjectivity working below the surface unconsciously to “‘get under the skin’ in ways which exceed cognition and the self-regulating capacities of distinctly human subjects” (Blackman, 2014: 366). It is at this level of global flows of emotion that we may plausibly speak of an entangled collectivity open to and facilitating multiple contagions to empower affective conditions in steering the actions of most or all users. As these flows penetrate the skins of smartphone users, not only do they produce “a sense of self experienced in the reverie of social associations” (Sampson, 2017: 66) but they can also induce non-ionizing radiation to enter bodies that may become vulnerable to oxidative stress caused by interference to their natural repair mechanism (Havas, 2017).1 Thus, we can speak of contagions in smartphone entanglements as both conduits of risky radiation and carrier flows of information, emotions, and affective forces impacting on users’ outlooks and orientations.
Today, what we are seeing in this digitalized world where people and phones have merged is the continued production of an inter-subjectivity (through individuation) that mediates the flow of contagions with significant outcomes for power and agency. Through collaborative evaluation and online sharing, mediation has become an inter-subjective space for contagious flows and effects. In short, the spread of affects in smartphone usage is conditioned as an automated response to the sense of collectivity experienced through remote interactions in a meshwork interweaving multiple lines of communicative activity, which Tucker (2018: 37) describes as capturing the “notions of entanglement, movement and connection without requiring a distinction between human and digital in advance”.
In treating this new sense of collectivity as generated by the entanglements of smartphone usage, we would need to ask how it becomes a source of predatory economic relations that sets up the user as both consumer and fodder in networked environments of rapid exchanges and interchanges. But first, I will address the affectivity of smartphone connections in terms of contagions spreading across social and digital media through individuating entanglements that are both cloistered and creative. This will be followed by a discussion on why contagions spread as a result of ubiquitous smartphone usage within the context of an affective capitalism that thrives on limitless interconnectedness.
Smartphones as affective media
More than a decade ago, Sherry Turkle (2011: 155) writing on the new subjectivity in digital society observed that public venues were “no longer a communal space but a place of social collection: people come together but do not speak to each other. Each is tethered to a mobile device and to the people and places to which that device serves as a portal”. Recalling her childhood days in Brooklyn where kids gathered to play hopscotch, she said now the “hopscotch boxes are gone. The kids are out, but they are on their phones”. Even she admitted owning a mobile phone, having held out for years because she did not “like the feeling of always being on call. But now, with a daughter studying abroad who expects to reach me when she wants to reach me, I am grateful to be tethered to her through the Net” (ibid.: 153). As a researcher studying the emergence of newly digitalized selves, she too had become part of the bigger picture to experience “living full-time on the Net, newly free in some ways, newly yoked in others” (ibid.: 152). But the question of being yoked is less about the new subjectivity than the creation of a new inter-subjectivity, the idea that digitalized selves are completely submerged in grids of exchange so complexly intertwined with assemblages, networks, and platforms to challenge and dispose of any sense of individuality once thought to be pristinely essentialized. These grids make it nearly impossible for digitalized selves to renounce unrelenting attachment to their smartphones and other wireless devices since the “growing reality of lives lived in the continuous presence of screens … provide[s] a social and psychological GPS, a navigation system for tethered selves” (ibid.: 167). What is this navigation system if it is nothing more than the means for instantaneous connectivity and multidirectional communication that have become habitual and automatically derived? It is a system that conditions users “to struggle to make time to think” because they live in “a new kind of time: the time of attention sharing” (ibid.). It is this attention sharing that has become central to the emergence of an inter-subjectivity where users “besieged by thousands of e-mails, texts, and messages” end up treating most or all “individuals as a unit … [a] part of this larger thing … something close to objects” (ibid.: 168). She was indeed echoing Serres in addressing the inter-subjectivity arising from the need for attention as driving all users to become the object of their own objects (Crocker, 2021: 186).
Through the ‘mash-up of a life mix’ brought on by ubiquitous smartphone usage (Turkle, 2011: 161), ownership of mobile devices would exemplify this state of objectifying entanglement as exhibited by a young lawyer who claimed that “[w]hen there is an event on my phone, the screen changes … I always know what is happening on my phone” (ibid.). This rapid intuition of phone-related events demonstrates the experience of being ‘more than one’ can be automated by habitual contact with the smartphone. At this level of interactive communication, individuation arises through the intuition that one is always in constant touch with others – the collectivity being always present virtually on the smartphone that has seemingly become the subject which commandeers and informs. Virtual presence refers to the unseen nature of inter-subjective experiences blending work with leisure in atmospherics that can induce a “feeling of the change in capacity” (Massumi, 2015: 4), giving rise to varying levels of contagious flows between communicants. If it is these flows that can determine outcomes in situations of remoteness where communicants do not need to interact personally, then focusing on affective media would suggest a conceptual shift to another level of power analysis on “the collective, mimetic and non-conscious nature of user experience [where] … the subjectivity of the user is the product, not the producer of experience” (Sampson, 2020: 1).
As product, the subjectivity (qua objectivity) of smartphone users can be construed as the conditioned outcome of the millions, if not billions, of interweaving connections and intermediated communications formed through the commodity form where media “have been transformed into commercial things on which exchange-values are essential” (Canpolat, 2021: 428). In digitalized environments, these values may be considered ‘invisible’ because users are plugged into grids of assemblage-networks that provide “an experience of immediacy where everything appears connected yet experienced as part of a perpetual present” (Blackman, 2019: 22). In this experience, inter-subjectivity arises through “performance re-movals, or compositional forms of ‘seeing’ which move beyond representationalism” (ibid.: 170). It implies that users are always already entangled at a level which cannot be readily made representational in the same way that public ceremonies and rituals are sustained through the visibility and palpability of actual encounters. Such inter-subjectivity arising from smartphone networking is cloistered because it can take form “in places, relations and shapes, which exert agency or an affective force without obvious definition” (ibid.). What this suggests is that smartphone entanglements do not require the immediate presence of others since users can always engage with events and agencies to become even more susceptible to contagious flows in their own private spaces. The convenience of such entanglements is vividly conveyed by a woman in her late sixties who described her new iPhone to Sherry Turkle (2011: 3) as “having a little Times Square in my pocketbook. All lights. All the people I could meet”. Contagions from these entanglements are already predisposed to spread widely since the user is “alone, the potential for almost instantaneous contact gives an encouraging feeling of already being together … Alone with your thoughts, yet in contact with an almost tangible fantasy of the other, you feel free to play” (ibid.: 188).
These contagions are also decentered because the power of spreading affects lies not in a single user but in the relentless repetition of collective sharing across networks. In this sharing, no single individual comes to dominate as a representational figure in affective influence, quite similar to the acephalous nature of swarming where togetherness can occur not through a centralized structure but in the coordination of multitasking units (Miller, 2010). Multitasking provides a basis for creativity by allowing uninhibited distribution of roles in simultaneously occurring situations that can plausibly lead to innovative and instructive actions under both conditions of stress and leisure. In smartphone usage, multitasking has become akin to something magical. From her interviews with BlackBerry smartphone users, Turkle (2011: 163-4) claims they “admit that interrupting their work for e-mail and messages is distracting but say they would never give it up” because “[o]ur network devices encourage a new notion of time … you can text while doing something else … This is more than welcome; it is magical”. It is magical because multitasking involves a highly personalized sense of empowerment like the curator who told Turkle that “[w]hen I move from calendar, to address book, to e-mail, to text messages, I feel like a master of the universe” (ibid.: 165). At the same time, texting as part of a multitasking routine is also fleeting because it is only “momentum [to] fill a moment” (ibid.: 168). The implication is that the creativity of multitasking is not lasting but can create moments for contagions to spread unsuspectingly through the simultaneous alternation of activities which disperses consciousness as well as heightens affectivity. It may even induce a high feeling by neurochemicals in the body (ibid.: 163), suggesting that smartphone users prone to continuous contagions can bring on non-consciously levels of ecstatic feelings to maintain “the circulatory movement of drive” or the “movement from link to link” (Dean, 2010: 42).
In tune with these circulatory movements, users tend to be oblivious to or in a state of denial towards the problematic basis of daily smartphone usage because the inter-subjectivity created from such usage is not only a generator of highs but also a template for a ‘social cosmos of imitative relationality’ (Sampson, 2017). In this social cosmos, “the personal in computing has certainly moved into the social domain where … actors collapse into data-bodies assembled by relational databases” (ibid.: 73). These databases originate from tracked data in collective sharing on smartphones and other wireless devices that have transformed into ‘personal panopticons’ (Bauman and Lyon, 2013), the idea that users can never shake off the relentless tracking by parties that are difficult to pin down and identify. Through ubiquitous smartphone usage, the creation of databases balloons into a vast industry of apparitional control where users of flesh-and-blood are gradually replaced by ethereal populations of data-doubles (Haggerty and Ericson, 2000) and phantom publics (Petersmann and Van Den Meerssche, 2024) composed and recomposed from the profiles which had been set up from the original entanglements. These data-doubles may be seen as constituting an important part of the transformative flows of information underlying “the life blood of surveillant assemblages” (Tucker 2013: 37), which have come to deny the primacy of privacy in any kind of smartphone interconnectivity. Through the control of these flows, we may consider surveillant assemblages and various data corporations to be instrumental in shaping the affective forces that are “becoming the means by which people do themselves” (ibid.: 38). Thus, the question of why contagions spread must be addressed in relation to the role of these assemblages in the datafied lives of most or all smartphone users.
The consumption of contagions
The datafied lives implicated by constant touch via the smartphone may appear to be ego-centered, as most users would consider their cognitive discernment to be highly attuned to their individual needs and fully intact when scanning the device and multitasking on the touchscreen. The concentration that one sees registered on the faces of users tends to give the impression of intense cognitive focus and seldom one of hypnotic trance. There are hardly any hints of discombobulated action as eye and finger coordination in managing images and texts on the touchscreen provides a highly rational sensibility to users’ routine of linking up with people and places anywhere and everywhere. You would think that there is a ‘self’ behind all that work in smartphone connectivity when actually the ‘self’ is nothing more than “a contagious flow of imitated belief experienced at a sub-representational level” or one culminating as “an individual captured in a topology” (Sampson, 2017: 66). But this is not simply a topology of mobile interactants; it is also a territory of the technological unconscious,2 an “insentient mode of relationality … marked to some extent by a shift from a dial-up culture to an age of permanent connectivity … a somnambulistic space increasingly colonized by an unseen and ubiquitous computing” (Sampson, 2012: 164-5). The colonization here marks the intervention of surveillant assemblages, data corporations, and various intelligence agencies that do not consider smartphone data traffic to be trivial or irrelevant to their spheres of capitalist operation.
All this traffic is not just indicative of the heavy daily flitting in digital space between millions of mobile communicants; it is also key to the monitoring and recording of data by highly trained specialists and high-tech machines positioned in “scattered centers of calculation” (Haggerty and Ericson, 2000: 613) around the world. But these centers are also set up “clearly not to constrain contagion but to cultivate, nurse, and prime small worlds of infection to exploit the spreading of social influence from the few to the many and thus make small contagions, relating to fashions, brands, and products, spill over into much wider (and more profitable) epidemics of desire” (Sampson, 2012: 99). What this means is that users are not only paid-up mobile communicants but also a type of cannon fodder targeted by digital corporations that have “recognized the power of the affective forces … to generate new performative knowledges … through the manipulation of mood … that draws on the whole intellect of the consumer in order to induce emotional identification with the commodity” (Thrift, 2008: 245). The keyword here is commodity which is in many ways aligned with subjectivities that are considered as non-elemental, possessing no essences, and only “attuned to the processual, indeterminate, entangled technical-material-affective agencies that cannot be reduced to psychological capacities” (Blackman, 2014: 368). In short, subjectivities objectified by “some medium, means or ‘infrastructure’” are always exposed to the “affective qualities of forces and relations which [they] can never fully control” (Crocker, 2021: 196). Through this perspective, we can see why subjectivity is always deemed to be superfluously conceived since all selves are regarded as wills o’ the wisp and highly vulnerable to forces perpetrated by affective contagions.
These contagions form a substrate of the “trans-subjective ontology of subjectivity” (Blackman, 2014: 380) which connotes an understanding of the subject as always decentered because it is primarily assumed to be coreless and penetrable. Therefore, inter-subjectivities are first and foremost an open condition of imitative influences which renders the subject as always already vulnerable to the forces of any social field that it finds itself in. Such a condition provides affective capitalists like marketers and datafiers with the means to treat entanglements in any social field as sensory environments packed with eager consumers who will unhesitatingly respond to “affective control quantized by the refrain of habitual social media usage” (Sampson, 2016: 59). In this habitual usage of social media, the smartphone features as the new certitude of permanent connectivity which is at the same time the ramification of techno-hegemonies. These hegemonies intend to redefine permanent connectivity as a concourse of uninhibited social intercourse coupled to perceptively free and safe exchanges and interchanges that would make the public invest their trust in the innovative and transformative capacity of the new mobile technologies. For instance, Turkle (2011: 247-8) pointed out that following the 9/11 attacks in the US, “cell phones became a symbol of physical and emotional safety … parents who really had not seen the point of giving cell phones to their children discovered a reason: continual contact”. Radiation risks and other intervening agencies associated with these phones became sidelined and overshadowed by “a new nonnegotiable: to feel safe, you have to be connected … The cell phone as amulet becomes emblematic of safety … [but] it creates problems of its own” (ibid.).
The problems of connectivity that Turkle discusses deal primarily with the online popularity, stalking behavior, and patterns of befriending (and unfriending) among teenagers and young adults wedded to their phones. However, what she does not emphasize is the vulnerability of these young consumers of smartphone connectivity to the waves of contagion reaching them at any given moment in their electronic entanglements that can activate a social medium from which marketers and datafiers may make an impact by exploiting and harvesting the data produced and circulated (Sampson, 2017: 64). As commodity, connectivity made permanent by smartphone capability offers an open social field for concerns about security to evolve into avenues of consumption in which contagions can be made to spread skillfully and desultorily. Thus, under conditions where instantaneity is both cause and effect of billions, if not trillions, of calls, texts, and imageries circulating every single moment around the world, smartphone connectivity would be commoditized as the indispensable permalinks that cannot be melted or liquefied in order for datafication in advertising, sales, and intelligence work to operate and be used indefinitely. Hence, smartphone users are not only consumers of affective contagions but also “participants in an infectable space in which they co-produce and pass on code” (ibid.: 70). Even in war zones like Eastern Ukraine, such consumption is not absent but forms “an inherent, integral part of the assemblage of engagement and war” (Horbyk, 2023: 14), suggesting that commoditized connectivity is not limited to civilian assemblages but infiltrates conflict arenas.
In this way, the smartphone can be depicted as likely the most ingenious invention of the high-tech age that recreates individuated inter-subjectivity as a means of propagating contagion by mobilizing permalinks in networked communication for commercial and political agendas, which can exceed the public penchant for collective internet sharing. As the new consumers of affective contagions, smartphone users just cannot get enough of the calls, texts, and other digitalized bric-a-brac as their daily bread, as well as the non-ionizing radio-frequency radiations absorbed through their skins. Yet, very few or none are fully aware of the “imitative meshwork of financial media” through which “contagion is thrust forward … via discursive utterances and sub-representational flows of affect” (Sampson, 2012: 114), where users are non-consciously sourced as data to be filed and reconstructed algorithmically. The affective capitalists can be credited with the ability and power to tap into this meshwork under the guise of promoting and marketing the indispensability of technological innovations that have made “[p]eople say that the loss of a cell phone can “feel like a death” (Turkle, 2011: 16). But this death is not just a metaphor; it is one concerned with the fear of missing out as entangled participants in a world set up for collective internet sharing. And it is this fear that continues to be exploited as the principal drive to turn entanglement into the very reason for contagions to arise and spread in hyper-connected contexts where the circulation of affects is enjoyed as a form of contemporary communication (Dean, 2010: 21).
Conclusion
We now live in an era where interconnectedness and entanglement have become increasingly indistinguishable because the means to stay in constant touch can be regarded as no longer dissimilar to the way people interrelate into a meshwork that originates from myriad intersecting lines. The smartphone undoubtedly features as a single most important tool of communication that enhances interconnectedness for collective internet sharing and also allows for this sharing to cut across multiple relationships. It is Serres’ parasitical token for all seasons bridging many forms of social and cultural relationship and perpetuating the decentered nature of public subjectivity (qua objectivity) tethered to touchscreen automaticity. The world today has in a sense transformed into a vastly and invisibly canopied structure that allows the intertwining of communication, collective sharing, and contagion to be inter-subjectively enhanced and reinforced simply through the ubiquitous ownership of the smartphone. By this ownership, users’ search for greater meaningfulness in a digitally enclosed world inevitably arrives at a condition of no-exit (á huis clos) because their entanglement is now embedded in a meshwork of quotidian forces based on codes from which no one could slip out or be made inaccessible. And it is in this meshwork that vulnerabilities predominate; the end user whose banalities and fantasies become the profitable means to be sculptured by techno-hegemonies bent on transforming “active populations into a passive docile consumer-proletariat” (Sampson, 2016: 59).
As consumer-proletariat, smartphone users are basically concerned with instantaneous accessibility and staying in constant touch with all kinds of insipid activities, or as Canpolat (2021: 429) puts it, “the users are “not doing anything” while navigating around social media. On the other hand, they deal with daily things, “pay bills”, “receive news from friends” and “follow magazines” with their smartphones, carrying them like an extra limb”. It is in such situations that the consumer-proletariat syndrome ripens into a field of extraction where techno-hegemonic methods can be unsuspectingly applied to everyday routines in the form of a “melting pot of exploitation” (ibid.: 434) that places users in a bind of being damned if they have a phone and damned if they do not. With a phone, users might feel joyfully connected even if they were marginally aware of surreptitious tracking and clandestine data-foraging. Without a phone, they would inevitably experience the predicament of being left behind in a Gomorrah of contagious entanglements. But the dilemma itself could also turn into a bind of indifference if users became inured to the ongoing exploitation that has been featured “not as direct economic relations but as routine social relations” (ibid.: 424).3
In other words, users themselves are co-participants in the phone-centered virtual world of data exploitation, sustained by the collective social relations growing out of multiple entanglements that individuate the infectious inter-subjectivity of digitalized consumption. Collective social relations may be considered central to an understanding of how contagious entanglements can be manipulated in mediated relations of production. In light of this approach to smartphone exploitation, it would be appropriate to ask whether collective social relations in smartphone usage could be affected by new and renewed controversies challenging the commodification of user data and the reification of user vulnerabilities.
These controversies centering on ongoing lawsuits in North America filed against tech and media corporations regarding data-tracking, mental health and cancer-related issues demonstrate another aspect of collective social relations that may shed more light on the discontents of co-participation and the limits of mobile communication.4 These discontents and limits may demonstrate that even as users become the object of their objects, they could reach a threshold of objectification where pain, anguish and incapacitation come to compel them to question their dependency on “the action of systems that we had thought our machines had made dependent on us” (Crocker, 2021: 186). Indeed, if users are no longer necessarily beholden to the actions of systems that are producing and propagating their inter-subjective condition, then it would be in the interests of media theorists and researchers to speculate on the new directions fostered by alternate user entanglements. These new directions would therefore raise the question of whether users as the object of their objects can respond effectively to the system’s response to them. It could open up a new field of media enquiry in which alternate user entanglements are not seen as leading them down the road to docile and unsceptical consumption but to active litigation and other forms of dissent to challenge the control of tech and media corporations. And in that sense, it may show that the parasite as the ultimate conveyor of collective action and behavior can also become a weapon for the weak and powerless to act upon what are concealed or withheld from them.
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Notes
1 These radio-frequency radiations emitted by mobile phones have been demonstrated by various scientific researchers to be a plausible agent of carcinogenic developments following DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) breakdown, deleterious body-cell mutations, and blood-brain barrier leakage (e.g. Sadetzki et al., 2007; Nittby et al., 2008; Khurana et al., 2009; Samet et al., 2014; Morgan et al., 2015; Zhang et al., 2016). There is also a growing popular literature (Davis, 2010; Blank, 2014; Debaun and Debaun, 2017; Mercola, 2020) that emphasizes the long-term impact of non-ionizing radio-frequency radiation on human health, despite the earlier observation that only ionizing radiations (like those emitted by X-rays and UV-rays) are deadly because they can break chemical or intermolecular bonds.
2 This term refers to a non-Freudian form of unconsciousness that exposes users to the unseen powers of the technological environment to result in a “bending of bodies” within a computerized context (Thrift, 2004), “which pervades, organizes, and intensifies the open-ended repetitions of turbocapitalism” (Sampson, 2012: 164).
3 When asked whether she knew she was tracked all the time on her smartphone, a businesswoman nonchalantly said to me she didn’t care because she had committed no wrongdoing and therefore had nothing to worry about. Instead, she would worry a lot if she didn’t have a phone. Being in constant touch with her network of clients necessitated a sense of indifference to the built-in tracking system of mobile telephony. Pervasiveness of such indifference would mean that datafiers might encounter little or no opposition to their techno-hegemonic regime of control.
4 For instance, the US$5 billion lawsuit filed against Google in California (2020) over allegations that it tracked the data of users who believed they were privately surfing the internet (AFP report, ‘Google to settle US$5b to lawsuit over ‘incognito’ mode’, theSun, Jan.1, 2024). On mental health lawsuits, a class-action lawsuit filed in 2023 in 33 US states against Meta, the parent company of Facebook, was based on the claim that it was responsible for the mental anguish and depression experienced by many teenagers hooked on frequent participation in social media platforms [apnews.com/article/instagram-facebook-children-teens-harms-lawsuit-attorney-general-1805492a38f7cee111cbb865cc786c28]. In cancer-related cases, a class-action lawsuit was filed in Canada in 2019 against Apple and Samsung [ca.topclassactions.com/lawsuit-settlements/lawsuit-news/canada-apple-samsung-class-action-alleges-radiation-exposure-from-phones]. In representing the claims of affected users, a class of personal injury lawyers called phone-cancer lawyers has emerged to imply that users can now seek out a new legal specialty to address their health-related grievances against tech and media corporations.
Raymond Lee previously served on the sociology faculty at the University of Malaya in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Having retired from the analogue era of representational teaching, he is presently a non-affiliated and non-virtual researcher of media and mass society. He is the author of The New Collective Behavior in Digital Society (2023).
Email: rlmlee@hotmail.com
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