Feb. 8, 2005

Narcissus With an iPod

By Scott McLemee

With “The Age of Egocasting,” appearing in the latest issue of The New Atlantis: A Journal of Technology and Society, Christine Rosen (a senior editor of that publication and a resident fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center) coins a neologism to describe something that has, until now, gone without a name. We are now well into the era of tailor-made media feeds. TiVo, the iPod, and RSS provide the tools with which an individual can regulate and customize the flow of news, information, and entertainment. We can create very comfortable and diverting pockets of cultural influx — “egocasting,” as Rosen calls it, “the thoroughly personalized and extremely narrow pursuit of one’s own taste.”

The author does not just identify this emergent fact of life; she also traces its secret history through a fascinating account of how the TV remote control was invented and marketed. And like any good cultural critic, she worries in an incisive manner. “By giving us the illusion of perfect control,” as Rosen puts it, egocasting technologies “encourage not the cultivation of taste, but the numbing repetition of fetish.... In thrall to our own little technologically constructed worlds, we are, ironically, finding it increasingly difficult to appreciate genuine individuality.”

That is forcefully put. Yet ultimately it is just a variation on the theme of the late Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism (1979). That Rosen does not cite Lasch’s book is hardly surprising. It is more often denounced than read. Few people now realize that it was not a jeremiad against self-indulgence. Rather, Lasch took a hard-eyed look at how consumerism — including nonstop media consumption — tends to empty out the personality, leaving an insatiable appetite for more of the same.

“Narcissism,” wrote Lasch, “signals a loss of the ego, an invasion of the ego by social forces that have made it more and more difficult for people to grow up.” And that complaint was lodged, remember, long before the rise of the Webcam or the 24-7 media cycle (let alone “egocasting” technologies).

For an unusually insightful take on Lasch, check out Robert Boyers’s essay “The Culture of Narcissism after Twenty-Five Years,” in the fall issue of Raritan. Boyers makes short work of those who would treat Lasch as a neoconservative: such critics “didn’t know what they were talking about.” But the essay does offer a patient and exacting account of how Lasch yearned for some kind of stable, authoritative cultural order — while never quite offering a plausible account of what one would look like, or how it might come into being.

Boyers’s essay is not available online. (It is mildly appealing to find that Raritan’s Web site is not just primitive but at least one year out of date.) Copies of the fall issue should still be available at some newsstands. Or you could avoid the lures of cyberspace and consumerism altogether by reading it in the periodicals section of a good library — that perfect institutional antithesis of cultural egocasting.

And now a favor to ask of you. Please copy this contact information into your address book. Consider this an open invitation to drop me a line.

For a columnist, there is some danger of falling into a trance from the pursuit of one’s own fascinations. My interests are not exactly narrow. The towering piles of academic books and JSTOR print-outs in my study present a certain risk to our housecats. It is pleasant to have a license to pontificate on whatever lies at hand, but there’s just no way around it: This column will be of much greater substance if readers occasionally write in with suggestions, hints, remonstrations, and reading lists.

Now, to be perfectly explicit, this is not a request for tips on what is “hot, hip, and happening” in academe. The rise and fall of intellectual hemlines is a fascinating topic, to be sure. But the tendency of cultural journalism to become a form of fashion reporting brings out the worst features of everyone involved. There is a cultural studies volume from the mid 1990s in which the authors solemnly proclaim that wearing a leather jacket and an unorthodox haircut may be a scholar’s way of subverting the dominant codes of academic life. (Uh, OK. But that didn’t work, now, did it?) When you hear that a trend is “hot,” the healthiest impulse is to throw cold water on it. Remember, the leisure suit was once fashionable.

But if some discussion or development strikes you as important — if it has consequences, good or bad, that people outside your field should know about — then please drop me a line.

Likewise, please let me know if you’ve recently read a book or article that left you blinking with astonishment for days afterwards. There are moments of intellectual excitement that remind us why we ever got into this line of work. Conversely, there might be a conference paper that leaves you thinking, “Well, that was a masterpiece of incoherence and bad faith. Professor X has just summed up everything that is wrong with the discipline.” (Irritation, too, can generate the tingle of insight.)

So please consider this a standing invitation to share your moments of illumination, whether euphoric or dyspeptic.

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