Allegory of the cave

Socrates: And now […] let me show in a figure how far our nature is enlightened or unenlightened:—Behold! human beings living in a underground den, which has a mouth open towards the light and reaching all along the den; here they have been from their childhood, and have their legs and necks chained so that they cannot move, and can only see before them, being prevented by the chains from turning round their heads. Above and behind them a fire is blazing at a distance, and between the fire and the prisoners there is a raised way; and you will see, if you look, a low wall built along the way, like the screen which marionette players have in front of them, over which they show the puppets.

Glaucon: I see.

Socrates: And do you see […] men passing along the wall carrying all sorts of vessels, and statues and figures of animals made of wood and stone and various materials, which appear over the wall? Some of them are talking, others silent.

Glaucon: You have shown me a strange image, and they are strange prisoners.

Socrates: Like ourselves, and they see only their own shadows, or the shadows of one another, which the fire throws on the opposite wall of the cave?

Glaucon: True, how could they see anything but the shadows if they were never allowed to move their heads?

Socrates: And of the objects which are being carried in like manner they would only see the shadows?

Glaucon: Yes.

Socrates: And if they were able to converse with one another, would they not suppose that they were naming what was actually before them?

Glaucon: Very true.

Socrates: And suppose further that the prison had an echo which came from the other side, would they not be sure to fancy when one of the passers-by spoke that the voice which they heard came from the passing shadow?

Glaucon: No question.

Socrates: To them, the truth would be literally nothing but the shadows of the images. (Plato 2017, 514a–515c)

In Plato’s famous ‘allegory of the cave’, those who are stuck in the cave are not present in the real world. They mistake the shadows on the wall for reality, when the actual reality is outside the cave, or as Plato would have it, in the ideal forms and not in their representations. Unlike the unfortunates in Plato’s cave, Greg is very much aware that there is a whole world outside his living room and that he can freely enter that world whenever he wants to. Despite these fundamental differences, it is easy to think of Greg as living in a cave like Plato’s, captivated by the images on the TV. Perhaps it is also too easy to side with Plato in thinking that these representations are somehow less real than actual, physical, real-time presence?

One way to approach such a hierarchisation of reality is through the analysis of the ‘metaphysics of presence’ provided by philosophers Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida (Milne 2010; Miller 2012). A central point of reference for both is Plato and his idealistic theory of forms, but what they analyse and diagnose as metaphysics of presence is a persisting tendency in the whole Western philosophical tradition. This is the tendency to privilege presence as the only immediate and truthful access to reality, whereas all forms of mediations constitute mere approximations, derivations and second-rate realities with dubious truth value.

Heidegger and the question of being

“Entities are grasped in their Being as ‘presence’; this means that they are understood with regard to a definite mode of time – the ‘Present’” (Heidegger 1962, 47). For Heidegger, the philosophical tradition since Plato has forgotten the question of the meaning of Being and instead been caught up with questions of beings and their properties (Frede 2006, 45). The ontological difference between Being (as in to be) and existing entities (beings, or what is) is crucial for Heidegger, and when the meaning of Being is reduced to the being of entities and understood on the basis of things, objects or substances, we are falling into ontology and trapped in the present.

“The question of Being does not achieve its true concreteness until we have carried through the process of destroying the ontological tradition” (Heidegger 1962, 49). The problem with ‘the ontological tradition’ is that it is removed from how we actually experience the world as something ‘always already’. Instead, it makes up a distanced and theoretical view of the world as something static and external that confronts us from the outside. This is metaphysics, as it makes one mode of existing and relating to the world into the basis for any relation to the world. Heidegger believed that this mode was in fact derived from a more primordial attitude, which is the everyday attitude as we experience it through our practices.

Besides Plato, one of the most classical and well-known formulations of these metaphysical ideas is the substance dualism of Descartes, where there is a radical separation between subject and object (res cogitans and res extensa) (2008). This makes the question of how a subject can know the world of objects the most important philosophical question (Taylor 1995, 34; Bhaskar 2008, 38), where the centre of reference becomes the subject. Our relations with the world thus takes the form of true or false beliefs, where the criterion of truth being whether or not a belief (internal to the subject) corresponds to reality (external to the subject). This means that both subjectivity and objectivity are constituted in their separation, which has been a central problem in our philosophical and scientific tradition.

This is also one of the core issues in the metaphysics of presence, since such a separation makes presence (in space and time) the necessary and privileged basis for our dealings with our surroundings. “The understanding of Being as presencing takes what-is as something with which we can deal, something here and now which we can literally grasp, turn to and fro, modify to suit our needs, and so forth” (White 1996, 150). This understanding opens the possibility of creating hierarchies of reality based on physical or perceived distance from an ideal and transparent ‘here and now’.

Heidegger’s own thinking is a sustained effort to overcome metaphysics by meticulous phenomenological analysis of everyday practical experience, and where the ultimate goal is to approach the question of the meaning of Being. In Being and Time, he develops an analytic of human beings as Dasein (being there) through exploring Dasein’s various existential modalities and how we as Daseins disclose and relate to our surroundings in these different modalities (Heidegger 1962). The essence of Dasein is our openness to being, and this openness is structured as care. We care for our surroundings, our fellow human beings, and we are cared for in turn. Care is a fundamentally practical, relational and temporal orientation towards the world, and this orientation is our primary mode of existing. From this primordial ground, we can adopt various attitudes in how we use and relate to our surroundings, such as a more theoretical, instrumental and derived attitude. This derived attitude is how Heidegger perceives the attitude of the sciences, which in his view is also the defining characteristic of modernity (Heidegger, Young and Haynes 2002).

The purpose of the construction Dasein is to approach our way of being in a more truthful manner than the separation of subject and object allows for. In our primary relations with the world, there is no such separation, according to Heidegger. That is not how we experience the world or other people, and thus the presence of the subject in a ‘here and now’ cannot be the criterion of reality or the truth.

Derrida and the presence of difference

Heidegger tried to escape metaphysics by avoiding the vocabulary of metaphysics, substituting metaphysical concepts with new ones, such as Dasein. Derrida, however, believed such an escape to be an illusion, since we are forced to relate to metaphysical concepts, even when avoiding them or substituting them. “[T]he Heideggerean destruction of metaphysics” (Derrida 1978, 280) is thus not an overcoming or abandonment, but turns out to be yet another of its iterations. “We have no language – no syntax and no lexicon – which is foreign to this history” (Derrida 1978, 280). For Derrida, the signature move of metaphysical thinking is the attempt to locate and fixate a centre, a ‘transcendental signifier’ and “[t]he history of metaphysics, like the history of the West, is the history of these metaphors and metonymies. Its matrix […] is the determination of Being as presence” (Derrida 1978, 279).

Derrida mentions several examples of these transcendental signifiers, among which we also find Heidegger’s prime targets of attack, ‘substance’ and ‘subject’, but also ‘presence’ which is ‘the centre’ at the centre of this paper. “According to Derrida, the metaphysics of presence is inseparable from a hierarchical system of binary opposites where one term is privileged and the second is denounced as parasitic” (Milne 2010, 13). Such as presence/absence, real/representation, original/copy, and so on. In his biography of Derrida, Peter Salmon comments that despite the “great destabilizers of presence, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Freud” (2020, 117), metaphysics continues, and that Derrida uses “metaphysical terms to interrogate – to deconstruct – metaphysics” (2020, 117). However, Derrida does not believe “that we could get along without a centre”, but that “the center is a function, not a being – a reality, but a function” (Derrida quoted in Salmon 2020, 121). This is in line with Heidegger and his refusal to reduce reality to a question of beings and their properties, and it is a rejection of the metaphysical dream of ‘full presence’ (Derrida 1978, 292). Deconstruction can thus be summed up as “simply a question of (…) being alert to the implications, to the historical sedimentation of the language which we use” (Derrida quoted in Salmon 2020, 121).

As we can discern, language assumes a pivotal role in Derrida’s perspective, where he embraces the fundamental tenet of Saussurean linguistics, which posits language as an arbitrary relationship between signifier and signified. However, he diverges from structuralism by eschewing its ahistorical spatiality and its dependence on discontinuities, radical ruptures and origins (exemplified in concepts like ‘structure’ and ‘sign’). Furthermore, Derrida criticises Saussure’s phonocentrism, where speech is favoured over writing (Derrida 1997, 30). Language thus becomes a relational structure of differences that is always already there, in place and in play, and which we cannot escape. In Of Grammatology, Derrida writes: “However the topic is considered, the problem of language has never been simply one problem amongst others” (Derrida 1997, 6). More specifically, Derrida is concerned with writing and how it already from the time of Plato (1925, 274c-277a) has been seen as a threat to truth as presence and self-presence (Derrida 1997, 6).

We are again entering Plato’s cave and the theory of forms, where representations stand in a mimetic hierarchy to the original form, making even speech representations of thought and writing into mere representations of representations. Questioning the primacy of speech, Derrida also questions the primacy of presence, whether in the form of subject, consciousness or cogito, thus extending the critique of phonocentrism to a critique of logocentrism (Spivak 1997, lxviii). Counter to Plato (and most of the Western philosophical tradition), Derrida considers writing as the condition of possibility for the existence of ideal objects, like Kant’s synthetic a priori, or Husserls ideal objects of science, not the other way around, where writing is just symbols of prior mental processes (Derrida 1989). The existence of writing (in some form or other) is what makes these objects ideal and it is what makes it possible to transmit them from one person to another or one generation to the next, without requiring presence. Writing is thus also the condition of possibility for historicity (Derrida 1997, 27).

It is in this context that Derrida introduces one of his most counterintuitive ideas, the concept of ‘arche-writing’:

I would wish rather to suggest that the alleged derivativeness of writing, however real and massive, was possible only on one condition: that the ‘original’, ‘natural’, etc. language had never existed, never been intact and untouched by writing, that it had itself always been a writing (Derrida 1997, 56).

By arche-writing, Derrida understands a structure that is always already there, even in cultures without writing. This is reminiscent of Heidegger and his temporal care structure, where we are always already thrown into the world. The concept of arche-writing is closely related to two other arche-Derridaen concepts, différance and the trace, which both point towards the lack of origins or the absence of presence. In Derrida’s own words:

“The trace is not only the disappearance of origin […]it means that the origin did not even disappear, that it was never constituted except reciprocally by a non-origin, the trace, which thus becomes the origin of the origin” (1997, 61). This is the structure of language, always indebted to the “impossible presence of the absent origin” (1978, 292), as arche-writing, “at work not only in the form and substance of graphic expression, but also in those of non-graphic expression” (1997, 60). And this is also the meaning of ‘différance’, as the delay which precedes distinction, dichotomies and naming: “the Absolute is present only in being deferred-delayed (différant) without respite, this impotence and this impossibility are given in a primordial and pure consciousness of Difference” (1989, 153). It is the always already, the absence of presence and the free play of signifiers, debunking “the myth of consciousness” (1997, 166), and the 2000-year-old philosopher’s dream of presence and immediacy.

We find traces of this metaphysics of presence all around us, in our language (expressions like “I saw it with my own eyes” or “I was there”), our metaphors (‘virtual reality’, ‘’real time’, ‘IRL’) and our imaginaries (digital detox to become more present and mindful, etc). Thus, there is no reason to believe that this tendency is not also affecting how we understand the effects of tele-technologies for alleviating loneliness and social isolation.

What is displaced?

A major concern in early studies of internet use and online communication was “[w]hether the Internet is increasing or decreasing social involvement” (Kraut et al 1998, 1017). Several studies concluded that increased internet use was correlated with a decrease in sociability (Kraut et al 1998; Nie and Hillygus 2002), cementing a ‘displacement hypothesis’ saying that internet use displaced other types of social involvements (Nie and Hillygus 2002; Nie 2001). Quantitatively speaking, the amount of time is fixed (eg, as 24 hours a day), and if you spend 1-hour chatting to a stranger online, you have 1 hour less to spend chatting with your next-door neighbour. However, when presenting the conclusions from some of these studies, the authors reveal their underlying view of mediated presence: “more time spent on the Internet meant less time spent socializing” (Nie 2001, 425). This view effectively posits internet use and socialising as mutually excluding, closing off the possibility of social internet use. According to these studies: “The amount of time spent on the Internet is the key” (Nie 2001, 425), but unwittingly they slide from quantitative to qualitative. The displacement thesis is presented in quantitative terms as a question of time, while the implicit conclusion is that real time is more valuable than virtual time, affirming a latent hierarchy of reality. Later studies opened the possibility for social internet use (Wellman et al 2003), but without getting rid of the ontological hierarchy between real and virtual or actual and potential, relegating internet to a realm of potentiality, while ‘reality’ is actual (Neves et al 2019, 51).

In some of the ‘displacement’ studies, they also found that increased internet use, decreased people’s sense of well-being (Kraut et al 1998). Such findings are more difficult to interpret, since they involve more variables and more explicit qualitative judgements. For example, “[t]he aversive state of loneliness is associated with interpretative biases and withdrawal behavior that influence the way that lonely people employ social technologies, indicating that they are more likely to use social technologies in a way that displaces offline friendships and communications” (Nowland, Necka and Cacioppo 2018, 71). There are also huge differences between different age groups (Nowland, Necka and Cacioppo 2018), related to the strength of the social ties between those interacting (Kraut et al 2002) and between socioeconomic groups (Nie 2001, 51). According to Lindemann and Schünemann, “[s]ociological discourse about communication technologies often concentrates on phenomena deemed pathological” (Lindemann and Schünemann 2020, 627), such as loneliness and social isolation, and that “the prevailing sociological perspective is characterized by an apparent indifference towards the actual experience of using such technology” (Lindemann and Schünemann 2020, 628). Could the metaphysics of presence thwart our potential for understanding ‘the actual experience of using such technology’ and its relation to loneliness and social isolation?

As if present

Attempting to unify several conceptualisations of telepresence, virtual presence and mediated presence in the term ‘presence’, Kwan Min Lee provides the following definition: “a psychological state in which the virtuality of experience is unnoticed” (2004, 32). Lee is conscious to avoid words such as illusion in the definition, which would imply a dichotomy between presence and virtual presence, but the dichotomy is nevertheless reinstated, only on the level of experience. If presence implies virtual experience, there must also be situations of non-virtual or actual experience, which brings us back into the cave.

Already in 1997, Lombard and Ditton wrote an extensive review of conceptualization of presence in relation to media technology, where they synthesised various definitions into their own general definition of presence: “the perceptual illusion of nonmediation” (1997). They reserve the word presence for situations where some kind of medium is involved and explains the definition thus: “An ‘illusion of nonmediation’ occurs when a person fails to perceive or acknowledge the existence of a medium in his/her communication environment and responds as he/she would if the medium were not there” (Lombard and Ditton 1997). This effectively points to the possibility of non-mediated communication, or immediate perception or experience, and their definition of presence could thus also be the definition of the metaphysics of presence.

One of the lessons we could learn from Derrida is to take the words, concepts and language we use as something ‘always already’, and thus also as something always already mediated. Even when we talk face to face, the words we use and their meaning are always deferred. The words exist independent of us, and their relation to any meaning is purely arbitrary, conditioned by culture, history and the constitution of those listening and interpreting. There is nothing immediate, transparent or purely present in even the simplest utterances. We have never been present, and even if digitally mediated interaction might involve both spatial and temporal displacements, there is no original, pure and direct interaction in the first place. We always bring with us our language, culture, history, identity and memory. Perhaps the relevant question is not whether there is a medium involved, but rather what the affordances are, of the medium at hand (Nordtug and Johannessen 2023)?

The real and its double

In one of the most read books on loneliness and the effects of technology from recent years, Sherry Turkle begins the introduction by stating: “Technology proposes itself as the architect of our intimacies. These days, it suggests substitutions that put the real on the run” (Turkle 2011, 1). Here, there is clearly a distinction at work between real and ‘real’, where technology can substitute the former with the latter. In the second paragraph, we can read: “Digital connections and the sociable robot may offer the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship.” (2011, 1). Again we are caught in the vocabulary of illusions, but in what exactly does the illusion consist?

This partitioning of reality is pervasive, and we find another example already in the title of a paper from 2022: “Online social connections as surrogates of face-to-face interactions […]” (Marinucci et al 2022). The word surrogate usually means substitute, or someone or something acting on behalf of someone or something else (Merriam-Webster 2023a), and using the word implies a certain hierarchy of existence. Later in the paper, the authors write: “When adequate face-to-face social connection satiated the psychological needs, online communication could not add further to psychological well-being, with this highlighting the limits of online interactions as subordinate surrogates of offline ones” (Marinucci et al 2022, 6). Here, it gets clarified that there is not only a distinction between online and offline interactions, but the former is ranked lower in the hierarchy, being ‘subordinate’. Even if we discard the idea of the metaphysics of presence as being metaphysical, it is clear that we are constantly caught in a language structure where presence is cemented as primary.

In a randomised controlled study comparing the effect of social support in-person or via text messages, the researchers ask: “Can text messaging compete with in-person interactions?” (Holtzman et al 2017). The overall results of the study are not surprisingly that in-person social support is more effective than social support via text messaging, but how can they at all be compared? We have the expression that you cannot compare apples and oranges, based on the assumption that what is to be compared must belong to the same category or be at least somewhat similar for the comparing to make sense. Text messaging and in-person interactions are clearly two qualitatively different things, but in this study they get related in a way that assumes that they are somehow the same. The common ground here seems to be interpersonal communication and social support, but if an underlying premise is that one of the elements are not really communication or actually interpersonal, then this ‘competition’ is skewed at the outset.

Sociable conversation

“Sociology’s traditional stance on interaction implies that physical co-presence provides the standard by which to judge the importance, the form and the quality of all other varieties of exchange” (Cerulo 1997, 49). There is a long research tradition that has promoted the importance of authentic face-to-face relationships as the foremost and strongest form of social togetherness and thus the most preventive against loneliness (Knorr-Cetina 2009; Zhao 2015; Ollinaho 2018). Collins has combined the work of Emile Durkheim and Erving Goffman into a general theory of interaction rituals (2004). In the perspective of Collins, society is held together by the mechanism of social rituals. In ‘successful’ interaction rituals, there is an intensification of shared experience, what Durkheim called collective effervescence. The degree of ‘success’ achieved by social rituals is a way of describing the qualitative dimension of social integration. The most basic of all interaction rituals is sociable conversation. Successful interaction rituals are important in forming social bonds, providing a sense of meaning and belonging, while people who do not get these experiences become demoralised and depressed (Weininger, Lareau and Lizardo 2018). Scholarship is in general agreement that interaction rituals are most likely to be successful if they are face to face rather than technologically mediated, as face-to-face interaction rituals are considered ‘full channel’ interactions, which facilitate the synchronisation of focus and emotions (Johannessen 2023; Collins 2020).

“In our culture the face-to-face encounter is the ideal paradigm of the meeting of minds. Communication seems most complete and successful where the person is physically present 'in' the message. This physical presence is supposed to be the guarantor of authenticity: you can look your interlocutor in the eye and search for tacit signs of truthfulness or falsehood, where context and tone permit a subtler interpretation of the spoken word” (Feenberg 1989, 22).

Face-to-face interaction is therefore considered the essential medium for interaction rituals and, as such, has been the primary research focus of interaction rituals studies. There are exceptions to this tendency (Lindemann and Schünemann 2020), and the past 15 years have seen studies applying interaction ritual theory to technology-mediated interactions via mobile phones, social media, discussion boards, online dating platforms and live-streaming services, demonstrating, in all cases, that technology-mediated interaction are capable of producing group solidarity and emotional energy (Johannessen 2023). Importantly, however, these studies generally maintain that face-to-face interactions are more likely to lead to successful interaction rituals and thereby prevent loneliness.

If we go back to the ‘displacement hypothesis’, there is not only that online communication might displace offline communication but also a fear that “even if people use the Internet to talk with close friends and family, these on-line discussions might displace higher quality face-to-face and telephone conversation” (Kraut et al 2002, 50, emphasis added). This implies a related hierarchy of technology and presence, or levels of telepresence, based on how well the technology in question mediates presence. It is taken for granted that face-to-face conversation always and everywhere is of ‘higher quality’ than ‘online discussions’. However, we insist that this is an empirical question, susceptible to contextual and situational factors, not a premise for the investigation. By using Greg as a device or prism to shed light on various aspects of the privileging of presence in the context of loneliness and technology, we hope to illuminate some potential implications of this primacy of presence. We have ordered the discussions of possible implications into four domains: ontology, epistemology, ethics and politics.