Smartphones as Quasi-Objects

Bruno Latour, in his book/essay "We Have Never Been Modern," argues that the Modernist Constitution is inherently self-contradictory. Modernists argue that all objects have been constructed by free and rational humans--"mere receptacles for human categories" (52). On the other hand, Modernists "debunk and ridicule [a] naive belief in the freedom of the human subject and society" (53). According to Latour, this way of "seeing double" makes it almost impossible for social scientists to agree on the nature of objects. They are regarded by Modernist thinking as simultaneously "too weak or too strong" (53). The result of this thinking is what Latour terms "quasi-objects," those things that are fabricated and constructed, yet real and objective. In attempting to retain their distinction between subjects and objects, Modernists have succeeded only in creating more "quasi-objects" that challenge that line of thinking.

Latour's explanation of quasi-objects and the contradictory thinking behind them is illustrated in the book Always On: How the iPhone Unlocked the Anything-Anytime-Anywhere Future--and Locked Us In by Brian Chen, a writer for Wired Magazine. (An excerpt from the book can be found on NPR.) From a Modernist standpoint, smartphones are objects of technology that humans have constructed for their own uses. Modernists would regard the smartphone as an amalgamation of circuits, lights, and batteries that has no inherent meaning or agency apart from that granted to it by its user. As this article points out, however, smartphones are playing an increasingly large role in controlling and changing their Modern subjects.

Although the book mainly focuses on the business and marketing implications of the iPhone, the author raises some interesting implications for the role of "quasi-objects" in contemporary life. Three of the specific examples discussed by the author are education, medicine, and law. In all three of these fields, smartphone applications are changing the ways humans interact with each other and with technology. Today's human subjects have embraced these new objects of technology to such an extent that the smartphone begins to take on a life of its own. How does the Modernist subject-object distinction hold up when faced with a society of humans that rely on their phones to tell them when to get up in the morning, what weather-appropriate outfit to wear, or what highly recommended restaurant to try? Latour would argue that it can't.

Like the "quasi-objects" Latour describes, smartphones are problematic to Modernist thinking. In one sense, the Modernist smartphone user views himself or herself as an "always-on, all-knowing being." Ironically, the subject role that the Modernist attributes to himself or herself is actually created by the smartphone (or object) itself. Smartphone users (consciously or unconsciously) acknowledge the agency of smartphones in their fears about how the phones impact the privacy of their digital lives or how they threaten the overall intelligence of society. By attributing this agency to the phone, the human subject views the smartphone as a "meaningless" object, all the while knowing the smartphone is actually more. Perhaps, a quasi-object?