IN THE BUBBLE JOHN THACKARA - witz cultural

170 Chapter 8
Criticism of the global-dashboard idea goes back a long way. Saint Augus-
tine, in City of God, attacked ‘‘scenic games’’ as being responsible for the
death of the soul. Ivan Illich believed that things all started to go wrong in
1120, when monks stopped reading texts aloud to each other and became
solitary scholars. 23 Some art historians date the birth of the spectator to the
seventeenth-century invention of linear perspective. Martin Jay, a contemporary
chronicler of the passive role accorded to spectators in Western
thought, charges that visual information tends to be ‘‘too static . . . in comparison
with other senses; vision still seems tied to the Platonic valorization
of static eternal Being, over dynamic, ephemeral Becoming.’’ 24 Another
critic of pictorial information, Susan Sontag, memorably alerted us to the
danger that photographs—and by implication all visualizations—have a
tendency to ‘‘shrivel sympathy. An image is drained of its force by the
way that it is used,’’ she warned. ‘‘Images shown on television are, by definition,
images of which one sooner or later tires. Image-glut keeps attention
light, mobile, relatively indifferent to content.’’ 25
The other problem with dashboards is that new images, however striking,
enter a world that is already filled with signs and ads and a million
other competing signals. Matthew Chalmers, a psychologist at Glasgow
University, warns that striking visuals can cause a loss of narrative flow
if they obliterate the links and connections that constitute the trail of
a story. 26 Understanding is situational, and we live in a society of spectacle
wherein a thousand and one other messages vie constantly for our
attention.
Visual to Sensual
Visual representations also undervalue the knowledge we have by virtue of
having bodies. Sensitivity to changes in our environment through time develop
best if we learn to use all our senses, not just sight. Otherwise stated,
our monitoring systems need to be more visceral. In his 1945 book The Phenomenology
of Perception, the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty argued
that perception is a process in which an active body enters into a ‘‘communion’’
with its surroundings. Perception, for Merleau-Ponty, is a continuous
interaction that involves the subject’s intentions, expectations, and physical
actions. There is no purely active ‘‘sender’’ nor any purely passive ‘‘receiver,’’
he wrote; without action, there can be no experience of anything