Fidelity Angst — Real Life

As Peters writes, paraphrasing Franz Kafka, “Those who build new media to eliminate the spectral element between people only create more ample breeding grounds for the ghosts.”

But that’s the crux of fidelity angst: if we take the promise of media immersion with the seriousness that technology companies encourage, we can’t help but break the spell by wondering if this is really it. The promise of immersion is thus self-negating.

At some point, the erotics of music crossfade into something more onanistic. At its worst, communication equipment becomes a fetish, as when Jodi Dean describes the communicative capitalism of the internet, which, instead of facilitating democracy, becomes its substitute. Counters for likes and retweets are not unlike the specifications sheet for a... See more

We live and listen, he writes, “in the afterlife of data,” no longer believing in the communicative precision that the digital promised us, but continuing to live as though we do: “Nobody knows what a ’97 percent match’ in the context of a dating app really means — and no reasonable person would take that ranking as indicating that a successful cou... See more

Instead, like a lathe moving back and forth to cut a spiral groove, we will continue to oscillate between believing and disbelieving the promises of technology, leaving behind an everchanging history of communication.

Just as the goal of desire is to extinguish itself, audiophilia’s object is a kind of intimacy and immediacy that can be achieved only when one purchases a technology sophisticated enough to disappear itself, allowing creators and listeners to comingle in its transparency. 

Thus, “the moments of sensual pleasure in the idea, the voice, the instrument are made into fetishes and torn away from any functions which could give them meaning.”They exemplify what media theorist David Cecchetto, building on the work of John Durham Peters, calls “incommunication”: the process by which the impossibility of true communication cre... See more

Indeed, fidelity angst is an engine that drives all manners of digital innovation. Each year, consumers purchase devices with faster processors, higher pixel counts, larger screens, lighter and thinner enclosures, more comfortable keyboards, VR, speech-to-text, and voice activation. Each innovation promises a more ideal form of connection via an im... See more

Emoji respond to the impossibility of truly knowing the other’s affect through text; in so doing, they become the new texture of that impossibility.