April 10: Over the past week I’ve been ruminating on the importance of tactility in our modern era. Our generation grew up on the cusp of exponentially evolving technology and its immediate impact on interpersonal relationships and of course our relationships to ourselves. We were witnesses to the transition from physical page to screen, email to text, touch control to voice, as we internalized this new mode of epistemology. 

Without access to physical libraries, all my reading has been conducted online, just as our classes have, just as most of my interactions have. But it doesn’t feel real. To me, perhaps because of my age or my identification as a visceral empathetic person, real = consequential, real = a physical or emotional impact. This is perhaps comical considering how during my childhood I was unknowingly obsessed with the theory of animism--the belief that all physical things contain a distinct spiritual essence--and thus believed anything physical was real. I still value this theory as I cling to my belief in the importance of tactility and in person communication. I don’t feel as if my interactions online have the same consequences they do in person because there I don’t experience the same affect online as I would in person. I lose nuance in responses, verbal or non-verbal, of my peers and family because of this screen mediation. 

I watch my friend’s Instagram stories as they set up zoom playdates for their three year olds attempting to recreate normalcy through a screen, just as we do in class. But for these children, this is the normal, not the new. They are becoming accustomed to technology as the primary means of communication, as the answer to dirty fact-to-face interactions. Will this “new normal” become ours as well? What lasting fears will this pandemic hold for tactile interpersonal relationships? How will this punishment of tactility impact children’s development?

This quarantine has left me reflecting on what I know as home. I am currently still in my off campus Oberlin house with six other friends. I’ve called this place home just as much as I’ve called my childhood house home. However, I’m not without longing for my sunny North East Los Angeles Home. I’m currently struggling with deciding when and how to return home. The flight is five hours and moves through different time zones only able to carry my body and a few suitcases. To leave all my physical baggage behind seems frightening. My objects hold memories and pasts in a tangible form as if history and memories are contained in these pictures or teeth molded in gold. I’m a sentimental hoarder and most of the objects adorning my room were gifted from family past. To drive home, which is arguably safer, it would take about five days non-stop and I could take all my possessions, yet I don’t have a car and my parents still have to show up to work everyday so that isn’t an option. Arguably I’m safer in Ohio but I miss my family, my dogs, the sounds of home, and this off-campus home is not permanent. It’s temporary, just as my stay in Oberlin has been. I am privileged in having the past months, and months to come, to figure out when to say goodbye to my college life as I was not evicted from off campus housing. I’m still with my closest friends, or two houses down as others have stayed but I’m just as anxious and scared as I would be if I were home. 

In the spirit of virtual connection and mediation I have been building my homes on Sims 4, an online computer game that simulates, hence the name, “life”. I’ve been building houses on this game throughout quarantine as it provides me comfort. I’m in control of the weather, the location of the lot, and all the aspects of the house. In this simulation at least, I retain autonomy and agency. I spent a day on each of the homes and tried my best to perfectly replicate each floor plan. Unsurprisingly, this was impossible: the stairs weren’t curving in the right ways, there was no way to account for split level homes, and the furniture wasn’t a perfect match. This was frustrating but a reminder that this is only a simulation, not my real memories, and not real life.  

Both homes sit next to each other as neighbors in my simulation. Unlike real life, I could pop over to either within a few steps, not thousands of miles. From the window of my Oberlin room I can view my childhood room and vice versa. But this was only a simulation, and I was left wanting. After finishing the two, and honestly throughout, I felt a bitter sadness. It wasn’t perfect, it wasn’t real, it wasn’t attainable. But whenever I miss home, I can take a personal virtual tour and wander freely. It’s almost as if these homes were my virtual memory palace, translated through algorithms and incomprehensible algorithms. Was this my attempt to “manage” my worlds? Or my attempt to mediate my memories through technology as everything I interact with and the new memories I create are mediated?

April 24:

Frantumaglia reminded me once again about our ongoing struggle to define surveillance, particularly the difference between observation and surveillance. As I understand the difference between the two through this reading, observation is a tool of surveillance but the two are not completely equatable. Elena Ferrante Begins Frantumaglia with this idea of frantumaglia that she defines as a sort of jumble of fragments. Ferrante equates this overwhelming feeling of trying to contain this jumble of fragments to childhood--“shortly before language entered me and instilled speech: a bright-colored explosion of sounds, thousands and thousands of butterflies with sonorous wings.” as if this overwhelming accumulation has gotten no easier due to the ability to name things. Thus, in order to keep oneself sane, vigilance, meaning self-surveillance to assimilate, is required. Ferrante specifies that she does not agree with the negative connotation of state-sponsored surveillance, but finds surveillance to be a necessary portion of “keeping on”. Ferrante acknowledges that this self-surveillance displayed through her female protagonists is not necessarily self-reflective, but assimilative. Is this where we see the difference between observation and surveillance? Or at least their connotations. 

This got me rounding back to the question: is self-surveillance ever positive? Oftentimes, when considered by most women and non-white men it is essential to survival. However, because of the overwhelming saturation of media and white norms, negative self-surveillance practices become normalized. By negative self-surveillance I’m speaking of disorderly eating practices, body dysmorphia, an equation of self-worth with productivity, and so on. Speaking from personal experience, I’ve had to make an active effort to reorient my relationship with self-observation. To me, self-observation leads to self-reflection; non-judgmental exploration of yourself, and relation to others. On the other hand, self-surveillance has become a practice of self-observation with judgemental reference to the norms of our white-supremacist power structure. Perhaps this is because the definition of observation is a close watching of others to gain information, not to manage or necessarily interpret this information. Just as a child observing all the sensory overload as a child, you don’t intend at first to define or pass judgment, just intake.

Thursday May 7,

As of May 3rd the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services has created a website for employers to document employees who quit or refuse to go to work during the COVID-19 global pandemic. The website contains a simple form for businesses to fill out asking the questions; was the business deemed essential? If not what date did it reopen? Did the employee quit or refuse to come to work? And did the employer maintain the safety standards that are required by the Ohio Governer;s office? By filling out this form out the employer is essentially rendering their employee ineligible for unemployment benefits. This website is entrusting employers with their employees life, allowing them to abuse state surveillance to disrupt means of income and therefore employees life’s. Notice how the form asks if the employers are meeting Ohio’s Governor's office’s standards, not the CDC. This is because as of now, the standards required by the Ohio's governor’s office have made face masks, daily sanitization, and capacity markers optional. These employees are putting their lives at risk without compensation, without any form of security or safety. As a class we keep skirting around the question: is surveillance bad? No, but it has the potential to define and enforce the necropolitical and this is where we must push back. What would a potential overload of the system with laughably incorrect information do?