Interpersonal Insight and Obstructed Vision

Picking up from our discussion in class today of the importance of changing role of visuality in face-to-face or “real” interactions versus online interactions, I wanted to briefly expand upon this in relation to “authenticity” or a vague notion of “purity” in the act of self-representation.

In the Daniel Miller and Don Slater’s “Relationships” article, one of their subject’s lauds chat room interactions for circumventing the automatic, discriminating judgments that hinder or guide face-to-face interactions. With the removal of the conventions of imposed by a person’s immediate physical presence, the subject argues that online modes of communication allows users to bypass appearances and “actually see into people’s minds, their personalities” (196). For him, such interactions allow for a flourishing of authenticity that would normally be obscured a face-to-face interaction. And, he qualifies his assertion by saying that only an idiot could be duped in such an online environment by someone exploiting the anonymity afforded by the medium to nefarious or “inauthentic” ends.

Interestingly, this need not to be seen in order to truthfully reveal—to actually show one’s self to another—occurs in other confessional or reflective scenarios. For example, traditional Freudian psychoanalysis dictates that the physical arrangement of the analytical space should be arranged so that the patient faces away from the analyst, prohibiting direct eye contact from interfering with the act of listening. Additionally, the space of the conventional Catholic confessional is mediated by a screen so neither the priest nor the confessor can clearly see the other while also being arranged so that neither actually face each other. And, of course, these practices aim to elicit from their subjects a glimpse at an authentic self. In both, direct, interpersonal vision is disrupted in the name of an authentic accounting of the self.

Of course, in most contexts, “authenticity” is deemed a dubious notion at best. In relation to anonymity, and specifically visual anonymity, in online interactions, the level of trust found in Miller and Slater’s “Relationships” is incredibly curious. Of course, perhaps they caught their ethnographic subjects in Trinidad during the Internet’s halcyon days in the 1990s, before it succumb to the obligatory rise of cynicism and skepticism that accompanies the aging of any medium and the public’s gradual accustomization to its presence. Either way, the centrality of vision to this tension between genuinely knowing someone and being able to truthfully reveal one’s self and the necessity that the physically present and direct examining gaze be denied by way of the medium is incredibly fascinating and certainly deserves more attention and investigation than I’ve paid to it here.