In
our modern technological society, many office workers are expected to be on
call 24/7. This is one of the
unfortunate consequences of owning cell phones.
However, it is one thing for a person to be obligated to be constantly
attached to his phone. It is quite
another for a person to be voluntarily attached to his phone. In this case, I am talking about people who
engage in night texting. These are
people who go to sleep at night with their cell phones next to them. And this is not just a situation where a
person wants to be always available should his friends or family want to reach
him. These are people who actively text
while they are asleep. I imagine that
the stimulation of engaging in a vocal phone conversation might be so strong
that it would actually wake the person up.
But
not texting. People seem to be able to
text while they are in some sort of sleep state. Sometimes the texts make sense, sometimes
they don’t make sense. Sometimes the
texts, perhaps coming from unconscious thoughts and feelings, can be
potentially embarrassing. But this
doesn’t discourage the night texts. The
kind of person who night texts wants to always remain connected. For a person who feels like a free-floating
figure in an experiential vacuum with little meaningful real grounding in his
life, the text connection world provides an ongoing surrogate social grounding
to protect him from becoming too numb and from psychologically falling apart in
the vacuum.
Nevertheless,
there are real consequences to such 24 hour text availability. In particular, it is an ongoing disturber of
sleep. Scientists don’t seem to have any
definitive scientific ideas about what sleep does for us, even though they seem
to feel that sleep is very important to our lives. I would like to discuss sleep from the point
of view of my social philosophy model, which, in this case, uses some psychoanalytic
categories, but not in the customary way.
Sleep is the deepest form of psychological grounding. Not only does sleep allow us to physically
rejuvenate, but it allows us to put the different pieces of our experiential world
together through the creation of grounded connections. This, in particular, is what dream sleep
does, during which time we are living in our unconscious. Dreams allow us to put some kind of coherence
to the narrative of our lives and, in so doing, to bring coherence to our senses
of self. And with a more coherent sense
of self, when we awake, we are more alive, more vibrant.
There
are people who see similarities between sleep and death and they experience
sleep as a temporary death, a temporary loss of consciousness. But as we can see, sleep is not no
consciousness, but a different level of consciousness in which a person is
still very much alive. Death is no
consciousness, an absence of consciousness.
We can postulate the existence of a surviving soul, even though there is
no sure way of proving it exists in this world.
But even if the soul exists and does survive after death, the person as
a whole animate organism is permanently without consciousness. We can say that death is the deepest form of
a psychological vacuum, just as sleep is the deepest form of psychological
grounding. However, when both
psychological vacuum and psychological grounding mix with different
psychological figures – different defined figures and ideas – they both
participate in different levels of consciousness in a fully alive human being.
In unconsciousness, a
person’s field of experience is that of barely differentiated figures totally
submerged in a field of grounding. By
transforming the defined figures of our conscious wakefulness into those barely
differentiated figures in dreams, we are thus able to experience more coherence
in actions and our sense of self when we wake up. In preconsciousness, when a person is
daydreaming and minimally aware of his surroundings, a person’s mental state is
only partially differentiated figures of images and ideas still partially
embedded in grounding. Again,
preconsciousness allows us to do some integration of the pieces of our
experiences while still being awake. In
consciousness, the ideas and images are more fully defined and stand apart from
the mental grounding in a largely vacuum mental state. But the grounding is still important to give
the psychological figures a sense of position and stability. It is the grounding that gives thoughts a
basic coherent relatedness, independent of logical figure connections, and
allows the thoughts to be used for coherent strategies by a person’s will. Internal grounding helps to give a person’s
mind a sense of independent agency in a field of primary experience.
And this is why a good
night of sleep is so important. It
rejuvenates a person and allows him to act with more coherence and more
direction, to be more assertive in his daily tasks.
So what happens to a
person’s mental state when he spends much of the night writing and sending
texts as well as receiving texts? The
person does not get to immerse in the psychological grounding that allows him
to be rejuvenated. The person does not
get to experience rapid eye movement (REM) sleep – the kind of sleep in which
he can temporarily live in an experiential field of dreams. The person does not get to reground himself
and to put the fragments of his figure sense of self together again. The person wakes up tired and numb. He wakes up as a series of fragments of self,
floating in an internal experiential vacuum.
Night texting hasn’t
been around that long, but I would speculate that in a long enough period of
time, deprived of REM sleep, the person slides into becoming like a self-less
will-less zombie. Like a robot. A person who mentally fuses with the cell
phone machine from which he is unable to separate. Such a person will have a weakened will and a
weakened sense of self. Without
psychological coherence, the person will become susceptible to being controlled
and manipulated just like a zombie.
I guess eventually this
will serve the interests of certain powerful economic forces well. The mental state of the zombie will implement
well the formal economic state of robitude, the modern economic answer to the
servitude that has existed in certain more traditional hierarchical
societies. As a zombie, a worker will be
more placid and malleable, maybe not always as fully productive, but certainly
less rebellious.
This gets back to the
important question of why do so many people today feel the need to stay
connected to other people through modern consumer technology 24/7. Why do so many people have difficulty today
being alone with themselves? Perhaps, it
is because with the lack of organic grounding in their modern technological
living environments, people already suffer from lack of psychological coherence
even before adding the element of night texting. And night texting appears as a sort of
distorted mechanical communion with other people to compensate for the lack of
primary experience organic communion in most people’s everyday lives. The paradox is that as people strive for some
connection to other people through night texting, they are actually creating
conditions, through lack of sleep and resulting lack of organic coherence, that
make their psychological condition even worse.
The cure becomes a part of the problem.
People have to find a
non-technological solution to their lack of organic connection to others. Just as people are told to avoid caffeine (which
can create an overstimulating experiential tension pocket) before they go to
sleep at night, they should also avoid excessive involvement with modern
consumer technology and have more face-to-face contact with live people during
the evening. As much as possible. Less involvement with modern consumer
technology during the waking hours will diminish the perverted need to stay
involved with modern consumer technology even during sleep at night. And then society won’t have to worry about
creating new generations of techno-zombies.
© 2013 Laurence Mesirow