SubStance

The older, traditional ideas of private, isolated thoughts and actions . . . are very seriously threatened by new methods of instantaneous electronic information retrieval, by the electrically computerized dossier bank—that one big gossip column that is unforgiving, unforgetful and from which there is no redemption, no erasure of early "mistakes."

Since 1880, there has been a storage medium for each kind of betrayal.

A short while ago a former colleague of mine disclosed a somewhat embarrassing tale about how he discovered his wife was cheating on him. They had just crossed the country and moved into a new apartment. Very few people had any knowledge of their new address or phone number. During the first week in the apartment they received a phone call, which my colleague's wife quickly answered. Expecting the call to be from his mother-in-law, he began to leave the room. He was puzzled however by his wife's silence and her unfamiliar facial expression. A death in the family? A violent, prank phone call? Who was the ghost at the other end of the line? As my colleague explains it, the true nature of the call came to him in a paralyzing flash. Without the passing of a word, he recognized in his wife's face the terror of disclosed adultery; the phone call had been placed by her lover's wife who, irate and vengeful, had made handy use of 4-1-1. As my colleague describes it, at that very moment, the previous year of his life rewound in high speed in his mind, generating a psychic snowball of paranoiac suspicions and innuendos—most of which he would never be able to prove or disprove—involving his wife and a faceless lover. My colleague claims that his wife, having been "busted," burst into uncontrollable tears, and he, in a state of information overload perhaps, lay paralyzed on the bathroom floor for nearly an hour. Needless to say, this telephonic interruption seriously disrupted their domestic scene. To this day my colleague recalls this incident as one might recall a sudden death in the family. [End Page 34]

This overly prosaic tale is a cliché, repeated almost every afternoon on television. Though it may not be new to aficionados of daytime TV, it reveals a great deal about the nature of technologically mediated communication. My former colleague may have been the victim of a wayward partner, but his partner is the victim of a betrayal that is even more pervasive and insidious—technological betrayal. The phenomenon has occurred to just about anyone who has ever used e-mail. You compose a message, hit the "send" button, and then shudder in terror as you realize, in the split-second the mouse button unclicks, that your message is on the way to the wrong recipient. There's no way to stop the inevitable and instantaneous course of miscommunication once the message hits the wire. All you can do is wait for the chips to fall. Electronic communications media, as McLuhan proclaimed, are "unforgiving" and "unforgetful." There are innumerable instances in which technology fails us—or if we look at it differently, instances in which we fail at using technology. After all, the technology itself is inanimate, cruelly indifferent to the content of our discourse. This is a situation that we can only greet with terror and anguish, and yet we continue to rely on digital communications systems, welcoming them into the bosom of our very households, perhaps unaware of their potentially disruptive effects. Whereas the focus on technology in Media and Cultural Studies often stops at the identification of communication networks and their effects, we are lax to investigate the formation of miscommunication networks, or even "dyscommunication" networks, discourse networks created by a dysfunctional use of communications technologies.

Of course, the issue of miscommunication and dyscommunication is not strictly "digital," and is certainly not a...