mental metropolis
Standing on the sidewalk in downtown Knoxville, I had just partaken of a cappuccino from Frothy Monkey after a lengthy online session.
I took a breath.
This feeling was all too familiar, but I couldn’t put a name to it.
I felt honed in by different ‘presences’ online, after unexpected bombardments from ads, opinions, images, and potential rabbit holes.
Looking around, there were bodies on curbs of Old City Knoxville, in the smudged crosswalks of the Depot, walking across the railroad tracks, but none of them felt claustrophobic, like spending too much time online had.
Once psychically overloaded, I could take the trolley back to my hotel, lay down in a park, pause to view a mural, pace my stroll.
Bodies didn’t have to feel oppressive every minute of every day.
Nicholas Carr, author of the book “Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart” explains this sense of claustrophobia I was experiencing online (same as everyone else).
When consuming information and communicating online, especially on social media, it is as if each person is pressing their virtual flesh against everyone else’s.
Unlike the feeling of being on a crowded streetcar or in the metropolitan environment, there is no escape valve online where one can move out of the way, take a deep breath, sit down on a stoop, pause at a curb.
I read “Superbloom” last year during my downtime in the restaurant, working to save up money to return to Utah. I find the history and merging of communication and technology fascinating.
Before the Net, Georg Simmel wrote about this claustrophobia that is an inevitable component of urbanism in his 1903 book “Metropolis and Mental Life.”
In Carr’s words; “There are no bodies online, but there are myriad presences. With everyone pressing their virtual flesh on everyone else all the time, the communicative life becomes more extensive, and more oppressive, than it is in even the most densely populated of cities...In online society, moreover, the tempering influence of face-to-face conversation is missing. There are no sidewalks or stoops. Virtual presence entails physical absence.”
In response to this urban environment, our nervous system gifts us with a blasé attitude. None of that is found on the Net as it removes physical distance while reproducing the same claustrophobic effect.
What I’ve gleaned from this is that mobility (biking, walking, transit) acts a medicine, being the nervous system regulator that it is.
Scrolling towards infinity doesn’t offer buffers, pauseable places, the path that walkable and bikeable infrastructure paves.
Car-light living isn’t just carbon-conscious, it’s claustrophobia-conscious.
Because car culture creates physical crowding and doesn’t allow the body to set the pace, jammed in with no possibility of escape, it also creates claustrophobia (in my opinion).
Screens vs. self-paced movement, the scroll vs. the stroll.
Not algorithmically engineered, sustainable, active mobility regulates the nervous system, not just the planet.
Unlike the information we consume on our rectangular block, mobility promotes a fixed pace.
I reject the constant claustrophobia of the hyper-real every moment I choose to ride a transit route, bike in a bike lane, exercise my small talk skills with a service worker (I like wearing a virtual reality headset when I choose because I am entering the hyper-real on my own terms).
In 2022, I chose to work on messy interactions where I had the potential to say something idiotic, swapping it for the curated ones online.
I attended a meet up where I talked with other SLC transplants from Memphis to Missouri, bantered in French with other learners at a ‘patisserie,’ asked new co-workers their names, shared stories about myself that I’ve never told anyone, initiated a coffee chat with a local writer, and spoke with the higher ups of the hotel I was working at at the time.
I prefer this to a new group chat thread or a faceless, inaudible text where I could close out the convo. Of course, I see the need for these forms of communication, but I am arguing, in agreement with Carr, that it’s not healthy that they are constant.
The World Wide Web, the curated world of social media, this hyper-real environment is also a part of the consumer capitalism camp.
This camp manufactures this urban claustrophobia. I would include car culture in this.
Sustainable mobility alternatives cap this craving to consume. There is only so much we can carry on our backs.
By contrast, the online universe calls for more speed, more stimulation, more stuff.
A little later in “Superbloom,” Carr discusses Adam Joinson’s concept of ‘digital crowding’ that appeared in his book “Privacy Online.” His argument is that social media produces a crowding effect, furthering anti-social tendencies because of this environment of ‘excessive self-disclosure….and social contact.’
I, for one, don’t enjoy virtual flesh pushing up against me all hours of the day. I’d rather decompress, like I did walking to a converted garage coffee house in North Knoxville.
Self-paced, pausing at K-Brew, I felt the overload melt away.