How Thick is Your Presence?
Published on 2.12.24 at garyborjesson.substack.com
In a friendship, living together is the thing most worthy of choice. -Aristotle
Note: I change identifying details of patients and stories in order to protect anonymity.
The other day a 40-year-old patient tearfully told me about a “fight” she’d gotten into with one of her closest friends. She’s warm and thoughtful and engaging—and online a lot. So, before hearing more, I asked where they were. She looked at me, puzzled: “What do you mean?” I said, “I just mean, where were you together? In person? Over FaceTime or Zoom? By phone or text?” She said, “Oh, we were chatting on What’s App. Why? Does it matter?” Her questions lead to a bigger one: What does it mean to be-together?
I take this to be one of the most pressing questions of our time. Yet, until about 150 years ago (when the telegraph and then the telephone first came into use), this question wouldn’t have made much sense. The only way to be together was to be in physical proximity to each other: to be able to see, hear, smell, touch, even, possibly, taste each other. So when Aristotle noted that nothing so characterizes friendship as living together, the only variation he could have imagined is how often and for how long friends are actually together.
In our time, however, being together itself admits of degrees: we can be more or less present to each other. That’s why I interrupted my patient to ask about the medium of communication. I told her about research that proves what most of us already know, that it’s easier to be mean on the phone or by text than it is in-person. So, if they had a fight over text, that’s one thing. But if they had spent the evening together in “meatspace,” as I said to her (she’s also a sci-fi fan), that’s another thing. It’s not as simple as McLuhan’s famous quip that “the medium is the message,” but who will deny that the medium profoundly affects the connection?
The question about what it means to be-together bears on the mental-health crises in the US and peer countries, on the degradation of friendship and the epidemic of loneliness, on polarization and tribalization, on all the opportunities and challenges that come with increasingly “remote” ways of working and playing and being together. We are guinea pigs in an unprecedented experiment: The most gregarious and social animal on the planet (that’s you!) is being networked together in ever more social(ly) media(ted) ways. Virtual connections are now so ubiquitous that it’s hard to remember how recent and how strange it is that we can connect, and feel connected, in the absence of physical presence.
This brave new world presents many ethical issues, and in future notes I’ll speak to these as they bear on helping relationships. But as with my patient, before we can know what something means, or say how things ought to be, we first have to notice what exists—in this case, that there exist various mediums of communication and various ways of being together. To begin here is to begin phenomenologically, as all good science and philosophy do—by looking at what appears. (The Greek word phainomenon means that which appears.)
It appears, then, that connecting, meeting, hanging out, fighting—being-together—admits of degrees. Degrees of what? Degrees of embodied presence. These range on a spectrum from physical connection at one end, to a text chat at the other. For fun, let’s imagine that this spectrum varies according to the thickness of presence, of being-together. Then the thickest, most embodied presence would include a mother-fetus pair, where the being-together is so complete that the two are one; or being joined together in coitus (from the Latin for go together), or being and/or living together in the same place.
From this embodied presence at one end of the spectrum we move by degrees toward the spectral thinness of texting. What’s lost at each turn is some of our sensory power to be with the other. The most sophisticated tech tries to thicken the virtual presence to approximate actually being together. (Apple’s new “spatial computing” device, Vision Pro, is an example.) But while there’s 3D sight and sound, there’s no smell, taste, or touch. The degree of presence thins as we move to the 2D medium of video. It thins still more as we come to phone calls, where the sound of our voices is the only remaining trace of physical presence. When we get to text, presence is reduced to a spectral arrangement of pixels into signs and symbols. We’ve arrived roughly where we began 150 years ago, when the dot-and-dash sounds of Morse code first pulsed through the telegraph wire.
As the thickness of presence changes, so too do the quality and value of our friendships, partnerships, alliances, and larger communities to which we belong. The medium affects the message—though not always for the worse. Remember, phenomenology is not ethics: there’s no direct correlation between the thickness of presence and the goodness of the connection.
Right or wrong, I noticed it was harder for me to take as seriously the fight my patient had with her friend once I found out it was a text exchange—and one of many she was having with other friends at the same time. How much reality and heft did their fight actually have, given how little of each of them was present for it? I looked for a gentle and hopeful way to wonder about this, asking whether she thought the argument would have been so heated if their mutual presence had been thicker. Though not in quite those words.