Digital Media Still Isn’t Very Good at Connecting People

We can’t relate to people online in a way that the brain recognizes as real
Douglas Rushkoff



Safer than the real world, where we are judged and our actions have consequences, virtual social spaces were assumed to encourage experimentation, role-playing, and unlikely relationships. Luckily for those depending on our alienation for profits, digital media doesn’t really connect people that well, even when it’s designed to do so. We cannot truly relate to other people online — at least not in a way that the body and brain recognize as real.

As neuroscientists have now established, human beings require input from organic, three-dimensional space in order to establish trusting relationships or maintain peace of mind. We remember things better when we can relate them to their physical locations, such as when we study from a book instead of a digital file.

The human nervous system calibrates itself over time based on the input we receive from the real world. A baby learns how to fall asleep by lying next to its mother and mirroring her nervous system. An anxious person gets calm after a walk in the woods. We come to trust another person by looking into their eyes and establishing rapport. We feel connected to a group when we breathe in unison.

Digital is just not good enough to fool the brain and body into these same states. Sure, it’s close. Digital recordings have no “noise floor” — meaning no background hiss at all. But that’s not the same as organic fidelity. A record album was an object in itself. We may have heard the clicks and scratches of an LP, but that allowed the brain and body to calibrate itself to the event occurring in the room — the vinyl record being played. The playback of a digital recording is less a real-world event than the projection of a symbolic event — a mathematical one — into the air. We have no reference for this.

Nor do we have an organic reference for a cellphone call or video conversation. We may look into the eyes of our conversation partner on a screen, but we can’t see if their pupils are getting larger or smaller. Perhaps we can just make out their breathing rate and subconsciously pace ourselves to establish rapport — but it doesn’t quite work. We’re not getting much more information than we do from text, even though we’re seeing someone’s face or hearing their voice. This confuses us.

All the methods technologists use to increase the apparent fidelity of these exchanges are, themselves, fake — more noise than signal. The MP3 algorithm used for compressing music files, to take just one example, is not designed to represent the music accurately; it’s designed to fool the brain into believing it is hearing music accurately. It creates some of the sensations we associate with bass or treble without using up valuable bandwidth to re-create the actual sounds. Through earbuds, the simulation is convincing. When played through stereo speakers, the missing information becomes apparent — less to the ears than to the whole body, which is expecting to absorb vibrations consistent with the music tones being simulated. But they’re just not there. When we communicate through algorithmic compression, we are seeing what looks like a clearer image, or listening to what sounds like a more accurate voice — when they are anything but.

Audio engineers who care about fidelity try to restore it in other ways. The most common tactic to establish a wider dynamic range is to slow things down. One person says something, and the computer records it and stores it in a buffer before sending it to the receiver. The digital transmissions are paused for a fraction of a second so that the computer can catch up and put it all together. But that means you hear something a perceptible moment after I’ve said it. This addition of “latency” necessarily changes the timing of a conversation, making it impossible to establish a normal or reassuring rhythm of responses.

Human beings rely on the organic world to maintain our prosocial attitudes and behaviors. Online relationships are to real ones like internet pornography is to making love. The artificial experience not only pales in comparison to the organic one, but degrades our understanding of human connection. Our relationships become about metrics, judgments, and power — the likes and follows of a digital economy, not the resonance and cohesion of a social ecology.

All those painstakingly evolved mechanisms for social connection — for playing as a team — fail in the digital environment. But because mediated exchanges are new on the evolutionary timescale, we don’t have a way to understand what is going on. We know that the communication is false, but we don’t have a species experience of inaccurate, lifeless, or delayed media transmissions through which to comprehend the loss of organic signal.

Instead of blaming the medium, we blame the other party. We read the situation as a social failure, and become distrustful of the person instead of the platform. Team Human breaks down.

This is section 35 of the new book Team Human by Douglas Rushkoff, which is being serialized weekly on Medium. Read the previous section here.