AESTHETICS OF DOMINATION IN THE DIGITAL SPACE: THE IPAD KID

Edited by: Dr. Greg Forter, University of South Carolina

The “iPad Kid” is a relatively new concept in the sphere of media consumption and the universe of consumerism. Commonly used to refer to five-year-olds with questionable hygiene, the sentiment of the “iPad Kid” is echoed in the broader demographic of “iPhone Teens” and “Facebook Moms” as the onset of digital attachment. The image of a child glued to a screen, yet to experience much of the physical world, is a particular variant of this archetype — one with special implications. Although childhood dependence is particularly irking, digital addiction is a factor in almost all demographics who have access to electronics. But with 42% of U.S. children aged from birth to 8 years old having their own tablets, one must question what this is a symptom of. However, this particular investigation is not so much centered around the greater implications of such an addiction, as the scientific consensus on the neurological effects of the passive consumption of entertainment is conclusively negative. Likewise, the revolutionary potential of the digital space will be temporarily set aside in this piece, as there are definite ways to utilize the internet as a conclave, as Fredrick Jameson called it, to criticize the system. Instead, I will delve into the system which bolsters and benefits from behaviors surrounding digital hyper-consumerism in order to critique digital addiction in youth (or in any age group) — which is also to critique postmodern consumerism, as it relates directly to the entertainment-industrial complex. This essay is structured conceptually from micro to macro, with two chief focal points in each category. First, on the individual level, a psychoanalytic slant on the intersection of schizophrenic society, materialism, and ego formation will be discussed. Second, on the macro and societal level, is the role of the media, its function, and the particular ethical implication of using addictive marketing methods on children. The image of the “iPad Kid” symbolizes somewhat of a historical event as the onset of a generation so absorbed by a polymorphous apparatus of control, socialized by the digital space. I believe that the technospacial invasion of childhood exists in perfect parallel with the expansive and exploitative nature of capitalism, revealing the “iPad Kid” as a subconscious…and conscious form of subjugation.

To begin with the subject: in Lacan’s conception of the Mirror Stage, an infant experiences the world as disassembled moments in time, disjointed disconnected sensations, yielding a disarticulate incoherence. Until a person sees themselves in the mirror, they have no sense of unity, yet upon this encounter, the idea that one is a whole subject is formed. This is what Lacan meant when he stated, “The Mirror Stage as formative in the function of the I as revealed in psychoanalytic experience” in Écrits, in which he further writes:

This form would have to be called the Ideal-I, if we wish to incorporate it into our usual register, in the sense that it will also be the source of secondary identifications, under which term I would place the functions of libidinal normalization. But the important point is that this form situated the agency of the ego, before its social determination, in a fictional direction, which will always remain irreducible for the individual alone, or rather, which will only rejoin the coming-into-being (le devenir) of the subject asymptotically, whatever the success of the dialectical synthesis by which he must resolve as I his discordance with his own reality.

In the mirror image, there is a construction of false unity, and this event is in fact the split between the id (unconscious) and the ego (conscious) with the realization of subjectivity on the part of the child. The development of the ego is influenced by social situations in which an individual is raised, called the “social determination”. Influenced by Saussurean linguistics and structuralism, Lacan believed the subject consists of signifiers: things such as one’s morals, religion, or ethnicity, or even their favorite foods. Lacan writes, “The subject is nothing other than what slides in a chain of signifiers, whether he knows which signifier he is the effect of or not…We know of no other basis by which the One may have been introduced into the world if not by the signifier as such..” (Seminar XX). In other words, the experience of unity is assembled through socialization and identifying signifiers. This informs Lacan’s notion of schizophrenia as a semiotic disorder, constituted by a breakdown in the signifying chain. The signifiers no longer connect correctly in a narrative fashion, and in this way, there is a return to the experiential realm of infancy, of disconnect. And so we bring this theory to its current application: the idea that postmodernity is culturally schizophrenic, as the system deterritorialized and disperses all that it touches.

Fredric Jameson, in Postmodernism and Consumer Society, likens society to the schizophrenic as it fails “to accede fully into the realm of speech and language”; essentially, it is outside of “human time”, abstracted from historical, social, or geographic origins (Deleuze and Guitarri took up the concept of schizophrenia; however, their characterization was different and applied ad hominem unlike Jameson). In this model, the media has become a muddled and homogeneous jumble, out of which the postmodern subject is unable, like the schizophrenic subject, to form a clear narrative. The late Mark Fisher in Capitalist Realism writes:

Lacan’s theory of schizophrenia offered a ‘suggestive aesthetic model’ for understanding the fragmenting of subjectivity in the face of the emerging entertainment-industrial complex. ‘With the breakdown of the signifying chain’, Jameson summarized, ‘the Lacanian schizophrenic is reduced to an experience of pure material signifiers, or, in other words, a series of pure and unrelated presents in time. Jameson was writing in the late 1980s — i.e. the period in which most of my students were born. What we in the classroom are now facing is a generation born into that ahistorical, anti-mnemonic blip culture — a generation, that is to say, for whom time has always come ready-cut into digital micro-slices.

The striving for identity finds its origins in the “mirror stage misrecognition”, or “méconnaissance”. The illusion comes about when the child looks in the mirror to see a stable, unified self, the “imago”; in actuality, there is a schism between the ideal and reality, and thereby, the ideal is impossible to realize. The fantasized image, what Lacan terms an “Ideal-I”, is a coping mechanism for a sense of lack or loss. That ideal ego, embedded in this imaginary realm, continues to exert its influence throughout life with images as the subject strives for stable unification. Jonah Peretti, in his essay titled Capitalism and Schizophrenia, notes:

The conception of the mirror stage has been used extensively by media critics to explain the force images have in the regime of consumer capitalism. The mirroring that Lacan describes happens when a woman looks at idealized images in a fashion magazine, when a teenager stares at a poster of a rock star, or when the man on the street gazes up at the Marlboro man on the billboard.

Immersed in modern media, the individual will often adopt the images Peretti described to gain a unified sense of identity. He goes on to say, “I assert that the increasingly rapid rate at which images are distributed and consumed in late capitalism necessitates a corresponding increase in the rate that individuals assume and shed identities”. By far the platform which best exemplifies this “acceleration of visual culture”, especially for today’s youth, is TikTok, as it presents the most palpable example of these identity formations. The fast-paced format, which perfectly describes Fisher’s term “blip culture” illustrates a constant aesthetic evolution. From the “indie” aesthetic with cow print, saturation photo filters, and wall vinyl, to the “earthy fairy cottage-core” aesthetic with poorly photoshopped fairy wings and hyper pop, to the latest crystal obsession, each aesthetic is materially unique and creates a space for the consumption of specific products to fulfill those images. One can linearly observe individuals on TikTok adopting these personas, buying these products, and within a few months or less, “shedding” that identity to assume new images, adapting to the aesthetic circumvolution. As Peretti states, “an essentially schizo person can have a quick ego formation, and buy a new wardrobe to compliment his or her new identity. This identity must be quickly forsaken as styles change, and contradictory media images barrage the individual’s psyche”. One of the distinct functions of media on the level of subjectivity is to produce images that last long enough for the subject to consume the associated products and adopt Lacian ego formation. However, these images must dissolve quickly enough to open the plan to new formations, further consumption, and perpetuation of the cycle.

How is the postmodern condition of the subject, analyzed on the micro-level, positioned in association with the societal level? What are the conditions that curate this torrent of media consumption? At the base, it is the extreme rationalization of media, in relation to the capitalist mode of production in its welding to profit motive, that steers the helm of societal expenditure. The mass consumption of passive entertainment is intertwined with a certain totalitarianism, as iterated by Herbert Marcuse in One-Dimensional Man:

By virtue of the way it has organized its technological base, contemporary industrial society tends to be totalitarian. For “totalitarian” is not only terroristic political coordination of society but also a nonterroristic economic — technical coordination which operates through the manipulation of needs by vested interests. It thus precludes the emergence of an effective opposition against the whole.

When making a case for the totalitarian nature of industrial society, one must observe the dialectic between enlightenment reasoning and domination. From the beginning, men have used systems to explain, control, and or dominate their environment, whether it be the mythology in the form of Christianity or the positive reasoning of the enlightenment that pervades today. What makes reason totalitarian is an absolute adherence to its empirical universality. In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Max Horkheimer and Theodore Adorno write:

Human beings purchase the increase in their power with estrangement from that over which it is exerted. Enlightenment stands in the same relationship to things as the dictator to human beings. He knows them to the extent that he can manipulate them. The man of science knows things to the extent he can make them. Their “in-itself” becomes “for him.

Reason tends to assimilate all neutral material objects, assigning them to a system of numbers, principles of utility, physics, or chemistry. “For the Enlightenment, anything which cannot be resolved into numbers, and ultimately into one, is an illusion; modern positivism consigns it to poetry” (Horkheimer and Adorno). Whatever does not conform to a structure of calculation and utility is at large rejected, leaving no space for individual compassion, beauty, allure, or aura. If it cannot simultaneously undergo osmosis into an extra-rational arrangement and is thereby alienated from the transcendent qualities.

However, like objects, reason or knowledge itself does not remain neutral. It is subject to the pervading social ideologies and the enforcement by those who are economically dominant. The entire technological and technical apparatus is shaped and animated by the ruling capitalist class, and are therefore employed, or rather weaponized, towards upholding the ideological hegemony of the system — whether it be social or economic. In Some Social Implications of Modern Technology Herbert Marcuse states, “Technology, as a mode of production, as the totality of instruments, devices, and contrivances which characterize the machine age is thus at the same time a mode of organization and perpetuating (or changing) social relationships, a manifestation of prevalent thought and behavior patterns, an instrument for control and domination”.

The entertainment industry as an ideological state apparatus exercises this domination in a spectrum of ways by exerting its influence in a wide arch. For one, the media configures a process of subsidiary conformity, as Marcuse explains: Most of the prevailing needs to relax, have fun, behave, and consume in accordance with the advertisements, to love and hate what others love and hate, belong to this category of false needs”. In the ever-increasing acceleration of digital space, societal consumerism rises in conjunction, facilitating the propagation of false needs, the “production and consumption of waste”. All pass through the system, which is configured by engineered technological coding that separates and defines each user demographically by income, age, sex, and niche. It, therefore, presents what is appealing, consumable, what is appropriate, and what is rational. In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adnonoro also illustrate the manipulation of needs in association with the status quo writing:

The standardized forms, it is claimed, were originally derived from the needs of the consumers: that is why they are accepted with so little resistance. In reality, a cycle of manipulation and retroactive need is unifying the system ever more tightly…Technical rationality today is the rationality of domination.

In the “rationality of domination”, addictive design can be easily seen as an invasive extrapolation of technological rationality, and just as well might be called “repressive design”. To reinforce the point, let us dive into some particular details, methods, and neurological implications, especially pertaining to children.

First, there exist broadly recognized specialized advertising techniques embedded in social media, including newer forms of digital marketing, influencers, data collection, persuasive design, and sponsored content. Next — the two which hold the most weight in this analysis — are the individualized marketing driven by AI and native advertising (both utilized heavily on TikTok, and Youtube). Before beginning, it is important to point out that the susceptibility to advertisement does vary. According to the American Academy of Pediatrics:

Research on children’s understanding of television advertising demonstrates that children 7 years and younger have limited ability to understand the persuasive intent (ie, that someone else is trying to change their thoughts and behavior) of the advertiser. From ages 7 to 11 years, children can start to recognize television advertising and persuasive intent with their parents’ assistance but lack the abstract thinking skills that help individuals recognize advertising as a larger commercial concept. At ∼12 years of age and older, teenagers were able to identify television advertisements (ads) and advertisers’ intention to change behavior (which is why some countries, such as Sweden and Brazil, have laws banning advertising to children younger than 12 years).

Social media is the extension of what TV used to be, now mobile and accelerated. Furthermore, the advertisement regulations placed on TV have not been extended to behaviorally algorithmic-based platforms. Specific tactics in gaming, mobile apps, and video platforms continuously employ addictive design; applications have been developed with the interest of retaining user attention, with modifications such as the default ‘autoplay’. The increasing amounts of user data are raising revenues due to more effective microtargeting, demonstrating how the use of personalized ads can boost clicks and buys. The same phenomenon is at work in ‘Text Mining’ or sentiment analysis, which is used to understand what engages the users and to even discern their moods. In culmination, these techniques can be employed to plant the most interesting news in one’s own personalized feed. TikTok’s extremely effective algorithm is evidenced by our own euphemisms: Alt-Tok, Frog-Tok, Book-Tok, Punk-Tok. This is evidence of a nichification like no other that is perpetuated by the fluctuations of accelerative algorithmic pressures. Physiologically, the phenomena of the ‘like’ button correlates with serotonin spikes, which is the very same neural circuitry used by slot machines. This neurological response is harnessed by platforms like Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, and especially TikTok by instantiating short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops into the user experience. Finally, native advertising, which is an amalgamation of a product and its promotion, is used extensively by these platforms. For instance, BuzzFeed is a perfect example of entertainment in which one consumes the product in the format of quizzes while simultaneously consuming the promotion of the product: Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, or possible vacation destinations. Consider the explosion of the “unboxing toys” channels on Youtube, which are hugely popular among young kids, a demographic that cannot yet recognize persuasion tactics; they consume a product about the consumption of a product. What is more technologically rational than that? To the positivist technician, children are the perfect client, as they present a lack of agency to recognize a product that may be idealized or mischaracterized for the sake of appeal. Children, the most susceptible to this dominating process, flounder in their newly discovered subjectivity, looking to authority figures for identity formation. These figures are increasingly taken from the media instead of their physical community. Addictive tactics in marketing are a painfully blatant apotheosis of technological rationality and domination. One cannot set aside the ethical friction of its employment towards youth, neither as an inevitable reality nor as an informant of ingenuity. It is to be criticized and should be addressed as a symptom of systematic repression.

Fragile postmodern subjectivity and overwhelming rationality of media are complementary, reproducing each other synchronously. The digital space is perfect for the aesthetics of domination, a pre-girded scape that is rigid and utterly non-organic. Even as the terrain seems to become more fluid, sporadic, or unraveled (with users freely producing content), the mania of postmodern consumerism is facilitated and recycled in a centrifugal and accelerating manner. There will always be a stratification for the ever-growing reservoir of data to federate an individual profile — the most rational profile — to predict and dictate emotions. The iPad Kid as an image is a kind of informal index (I use this in the semiotic sense) of a generation more socialized by simulacrum than reality, even as reality itself seems to conform by degrees to this principle. The iPad Kid is a loss confronted with loss, the loss of individual reason, and an illusion of wholeness, even as the illusion is further fragmented and disorganized.

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