Book Review “Digitally Divided Self” by Dr. Ivo Quartiroli
If I had to sum up this book I might say “Marshall McLuhan meets the Dalai Lama”, but this is too trite, simplistic a verdict for what is an important and erudite text which covers a lot of ground and alerts us to a surreptitious peril.
There have been several minatory counter blasts about the Internet published recently. Perhaps you have come across The Net Delusion. Well, this book provides a similarly sobering view on the internet but from the spiritual perspective rather than the political one. Where Morozov points to the stultifying nature of the internet, Mr Ivo Quartiroli highlights the effect of the internet on our psyches and our well being. What makes this an important book is that, whether you subscribe to the broadly mindfulness-based substrate of the thesis, it critically evaluates the internet from a genuinely humanist perspective asking how it affects our state of mind. Quartiroli seems genuinely concerned by the narcosis into which we may be falling as we rush headlong into the dubious embrace of digital media.
Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows warned us of a rewiring of our brains and the engendering of shallow, distracted thinking patterns through heavy internet use. Eli Pariser’s Filter Bubble highlights how - through the offices of customizing algorithms - search engines sequester us in walled gardens and render our Internet search experiences much more parochial than we’d imagine. This book is a more ambitious enterprise, with more far reaching ramifications, in the sense that it suggests that the internet is in the process of altering our very states of consciousness in ways we are not aware of. This is certainly not the first book on this broad topic. Sherry Turkle in her latest book Alone Together reveals research into the deleterious effects of Internet and mobile phone usage on families and how it erodes emotional closeness and intimacy amongst young Millenials.
What I think distinguishes this book is the background of the author who is a practitioner of meditation and has a heightened degree of self-awareness but also has a strong background in IT and software programmer. This means he is able to seamlessly interweave his perceptions of how digital technologies penetrate into our frail wetware with solid evidence. There is much to enjoy in this book and it is divided into short, digestible chapters with sub headings and so is easy to read.
The book is full of insights and this is reflected in engaging chapters headings such as “Lost in the Current” and ” Upgrading to Heaven”. He makes an interesting point about the tyranny of the Internet and how capitalism has effectively made it compulsory to be connected through fear of missing out. He suggests that in the future “the right to non-information, to non-update, and to silence will be a privilege-and one of the indicators of quality of life”. (p 153). This is effectively a call to emancipate ourselves from the need to be “always on”. In this he seems close to sociologists like Zygmunt Bauman (Liquid Modernity).
There are some great metaphors used in the describing how our minds deal with internet use. He talks about the mind as an organ whose business it is to keep busy and that the internet obliges it by feeding it incessantly. For example, this passage. “Our mind often enters an information bulimia that is stressful, as we chase more information and stimulation for the mind. “enough” never arrives. New information gives birth to yet more information…We swallow anything set in front of us without chewing, like information hungry beasts.” (p.228).
He makes provocative points about the flattening of gender too by suggesting that the distracting effects of the Internet and the warping of our one pointed attention start to make men less directed in life: “the information society, pulling us in several directions, actually weakens our steadfastness and sense of direction, distracting us from a clear path which can only arise from within” (p.85).
He also makes most interesting comments about the Internet and its effect on our sexual self-expression where he describes porn addiction, the hollowing out of intimacy and masturbation as merely our attempts to reconnect with a progressively alienated human sensorium and as a result of feeling disconnected.
The book is a little rough in places. As a translation, the prose occasionally seems little flat but this hardly intrudes to spoil reading pleasure. It is true that many of his arguments have been predicted by Marshall McLuhan who talked about the steady dissipation of identity, the dangerous thrill of hunting in an all-at-once world with no boundaries and the amputation of our nervous systems over time by computing apparata. McLuhan also believed that this process robbed us of our awareness and that this anaesthetic effect was a necessary masking part of the process so as to reduce the trauma that dramatic changes in our sensorial environment bring about. What Quariroli does however is relate these abstract ideas to the peculiarities of internet usage that we can all identify with.
Overall, I would recommend this book to anyone with an interested in looking at our current immersion in digital worlds with greater scrutiny and a bit more critical distance. The author seems exasperated with the limits of narrow positivism. As a mindful and experienced meditator predicates much of his thesis on the idea of consciousness beyond the human brain. Some may find this off putting. If you have an interest in Buddhism, meditation and mindful spirituality you will probably have an easier time reading the book but the author shies away from dogmatism in his writing and no-one should find him too esoteric.
It may be that in two decades or so, books such as these will be vindicated as prescient in that they warn us of the dangers of recklessly ensconcing ourselves in new technologies, the total effects of which we do not properly understand. As our species gasps for mental headspace on the evolutionary shore of a new paradigms in information flow and availability, book such as this from Quartiroli are a salutary addition to our critical thinking toolkit.
