Millennials and Loneliness: McLuhan and Levinas on the Phone

Many millennials are suffering from extreme loneliness. This was already the case prior to the onset of the pandemic, but coronavirus has made the problem even worse. All you have to do is Google “millennials loneliness” to see how much this is a thing. Lots of articles and YouTube videos have focused in on this sad state of affairs. Some millennials say that they do not have a single IRL friend, that is, a friend in real life. This is a unique feature of the generation as a whole (not to say that this is true of every millennial of course). Now, boomers and Xers certainly had their generational issues, but loneliness wasn’t one of them in the way it is for millennials. The studies also indicate that this problem is effecting zoomers (Generation Z) as well. But what’s the cause of this problem? The standard answer is social media. I definitely think that’s true, but I also think this needs to be viewed from a specific angle in order to explain the proliferation of loneliness. I’m going to argue that a combination of the work of Marshall McLuhan and Emmanuel Levinas can help us here. If boomers and Xers were able to cultivate close friendships, friendships that last a life time, then we must ask about the differences between their everyday circumstances and those of millennials and zoomers. Friendship is always the product of communication, but there are a multitude of forms of communication. The form of the medium through which people communicate fundamentally shapes the communication itself. This McLuhanite insight is the lens through which I will be investigating the problem of the youth’s loneliness.

I do not want to imply that the complexity causing generational loneliness can altogether be solved with a single easy fix, but I also think that there is something young people could start to do that would really help them. So, yes, I do want to offer a piece of advice. The experts recommend using less and less social media as this has been shown to reduce feelings of isolation, alienation, depression and loneliness, but this reduction in and of itself doesn’t do anything to help the youth actually make meaningful friendships. I advise that the youth start having conversations on the phone. Now, if you’re a millennial or zoomer struggling with extreme loneliness, then your initial reaction to my advice might be to laugh it off as being generationally out of touch. However, just hear me out before you hit me with the “OK boomer”. This advice is more philosophically nuanced than meets the eye. I’m not going to tell you to up and stop using social media or to even decrease how much you use it (though still a good idea). I understand that your lives are utterly entangled in it and that getting it out your life is virtually impossible. Instead of telling you to negate your social media activity, I think you should start by supplementing it with phone conversations. The question I know many of you are asking is “Why in the hell should I talk on the phone?” Fair question. I’ll tell you why.

Marshall McLuhan was a Canadian thinker who pioneered the field of media studies. What Freud was to psychoanalysis, McLuhan was to media studies. But what exactly is meant by “media”? We’re talking about the various forms or modes of communication. For example, speech and writing are two different forms (media) that we communicate through. Speech is a specific medium and so is writing. McLuhan’s fundamental insight was that media are not neutral in relation to the messages communicated through them. The unique structure or form of a given medium actually effects and shapes the way messages impact human beings. McLuhan famously incapsulated this idea in the phrase “the medium is the message”. Much confusion hovers around the statement. However, all it takes to see that a medium (form) is never neutral in relation to its message (content) is to consider the following example: imagine you are in love but have not yet said “I love you” to your lover. The medium in which you choose to express this message will greatly shape how it effects the one you are in love with. There is a world of difference between saying “I love you” for the first time in speech (in person) and posting it on Facebook, or saying it on TV, or on the radio, or writing it in a text message, or writing it in a handwritten letter. If media were neutral or indifferent toward the message, then there would be no major differences in how those three words effect a person. Oh, but are there big differences between them! Yes, indeed, the medium is the message.

Yes, of course, in a sense the message is the same across the various media. The three words “I love you”, in abstraction, are obviously identical. But in another sense, they are different. The structural features of a given medium have a huge impact on the meaning of the message. We can stand back and think about the message in abstraction and see it as the same. Whether spoken, written, texted, etc., “I love you” is the same, but not so when concretely filtered through a specific medium. It’s the differences between the structural effects media have on messages that McLuhan was interested in. A medium is, therefore, an environment or context that effects human beings and their bodies in unique ways. The form of speech itself (not its content) creates an environment of communication totally different from the communicative environment Facebook has produced. The various social media platforms are not reducible to one another, that is, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc., all structure communication in different ways and must be investigated on their own terms.

McLuhan’s masterpiece is undoubtably Understanding Media and in it he had a lot of interesting things to say about the telephone. Let’s have a look at what he said about the medium of the phone:

Since all media are fragments of ourselves extended into the public domain, the action upon us of any one medium tends to bring the other senses into play in a new relation. As we read, we provide a sound track for the printed word; as we listen to the radio, we provide a visual accompaniment. Why can we not visualize while telephoning? At once the reader will protest, “But I do visualize on the telephone!” When he has a chance to try the experiment deliberately, he will find that he simply can’t visualize while phoning, though all literate people try to do so and, therefore, believe they are succeeding. But that is not what most irritates the literate and visualizing Westerner about the telephone. Some people can scarcely talk to their best friends on the phone without becoming angry. The telephone demands complete participation, unlike the written and printed page. Any literate man resents such a heavy demand for his total attention, because he has long been accustomed to fragmentary attention. Similarly, literate man can learn to speak other languages only with great difficulty, for learning a language calls for participation of all the senses at once. On the other hand, our habit of visualizing renders the literate Westerner helpless in the nonvisual world of advanced physics. Only the visceral and audile-tactile Teuton and Slav have the needed immunity to visualization for work in the non-Euclidean math and quantum physics. Were we to teach our math and physics by telephone, even a highly literate and abstract Westerner could eventually compete with the European physicists.
(Understanding Media, pp. 266–7)

This is overflowing with profound discernments, but I want to draw your attention to two in particular. First, the telephone is a deeply personal, intimate and emotional medium which demands that we devote our full attention the other person’s speech. This is a structural feature of the telephone that differentiates it from the structures belonging to print, writing, texting, etc. Second, the phone forces us to suspend our inclination towards visualization (the primacy of the visual). Our default setting is one that prioritizes visual experience over the other four types of it (sound, touch, taste, smell), but the phone actually brackets out the visual experience of the person on the other end of the call. Each is a pure voice for the other and this shifts us into the primacy of auditory experience. Each person becomes pure voice and this is what is so important about the phone’s formal environment or structural context. McLuhan, therefore, has a certain Levinasian take on the telephone insofar as he recognized that it opens up a space that facilitates a very intimate encounter with the Other (another person).

Emmanuel Levinas was a French philosopher who sought to make ethics the foundation of philosophy. Most philosophers tend to make ontology or logic the foundation, but Levinas saw things very differently and presented his thoughts in a book called Totality and Infinity. According to him, reason, truth, being, knowledge, objectivity, etc., ultimately rely on a fundamental ethical experience. It’s only after one has experienced the face of the Other that one gains a sense of right and wrong. Totality and Infinity centers around this primary experience: the ethical face-to-face encounter of the Other. Ethics has an experiential or phenomenological foundation, which is the presence of another human being in all of his or her ownmost and irreducible singularity. This “face” is not the literal face of the other person, a collection of visual features, but, rather, the Other’s infinite integrity. The face Levinas is referring to is invisible. As he said, “The best way of encountering the Other is not even to notice the color of his eyes! When one observes the color of the eyes one is not in social relationship with the Other” (Ethics and Infinity, p. 85).

However, he also says,”Ethics is an optics. But it is a “vision” without image, bereft of the synoptic and totalizing objectifying virtues of vision; a relation or an intentionality of a wholly different type” (Totality and Infinity, p. 23). Of course, we mustn’t be too literal with this “optics”. In the Levinasian sense, a blind person can see the face of the Other just as easily as someone with 20/20 vision and, in fact, the blind can more easily see the face. While the face is strongly associated with the actual face, it mustn’t be identified with it. Think of the face Levinas is describing as the infinite depth and integrity of the Other and one can encounter this presence through sound and touch. However, the visual experience of the Other is emphasized due to the fact that vision is the primary sense for human beings. What is so special about the telephone is how it enables us to “see” the Other without any visual perceptions getting in the way. This subtraction of the actual visible features of the Other is precisely what helps to enable a profound ethical encounter.

The key Levinasian point is that the visual experience of the Other is not like the common experience of an object or a piece of equipment. Vision cannot capture the Other in the form of a concept, impression or summary. The Other always slides out of my categorizations. Levinas seems to be taking Kierkegaard’s famous quip and running with it: “Once you label me you negate me”. To highlight certain aspects of the Other in the form of a concept is to simultaneously conceal and mask his or her infinite depth. This is why the book is called Totality and Infinity: “totality” refers to how we attempt to totalize the Other through a conceptual reduction, to fit the Other into certain categories, whereas “infinity” refers to that inexhaustible, transcendent and uncategorizable depth of the Other.

Levinas argues that speech is essential to the ethical encounter of the Other. In his great commentary on Totality and Infinity, William Large writes, “The everyday experience of the irreducible singularity of the other, who calls into question my existence, and which is the source of justice in the world, is speech. Not the thought or description of speech, but speaking itself, the difference between an indirect speech that speaks about something, and direct speech that speaks to someone” (Levinas’s Totality and Infinity, p. 24). He, then, goes on to say, “Language is not first of all a description of the world, but generosity and openness to the other. The presence of the other calls into question my enjoyment of my world in their presence in speech. Of course I am free to ignore this interruption, but even this is recognition of their presence” (Levinas’s Totality and Infinity, p. 37). Levinas makes a distinction between the Saying and the Said. The Said is the actual linguistic content the Other says, whereas the Saying is the actual act of speaking. There is a difference between what is said and the act of saying it. The Saying is what is of crucial importance for Levinas, since it is in the very act of expression (the presence of the face in speech) that we have a revelatory encounter the Other’s infinity.

The ethical moment or surplus is not the words the other speaks, but the way in which the other speaks. This does not have to do with the tone or force of the speech, but how the other is present in speech. Levinas calls it ‘signification’ or ‘signifying’ (in French, signification and significance). We need to distinguish this presence of the other in speech from the division of the sign into the signifier and signified. The signifier refers to the word itself, like the word ‘cat’, and the signified, what is represented in that word (the idea of the cat). What Levinas means by signification or signifying refers to neither of these elements. It has nothing at all to do with signs. It is rather, the very utterance itself, or more precisely the presence of the speaker in their speech, that they ‘attend’ the words they speak. It is this ‘attention’ that is the ethical surplus of language.
(Levinas’s Totality and Infinity, pp. 44–5)

The presence of the Other in speech gives this medium a distinctively ethical structure. Levinas, like McLuhan, finds a sharp difference between speech and writing. Large explains:

This is the difference between writing and speech. In writing, the same and other are equivalent. In writing, I use concepts and categories and treat every person as belonging to the same totality. All the great systems of thought are the products of writing. It is only in speech that I can have this direct exposure to the other who resists my own conceptualization. I might write of this experience later, but even then the actual experience would be lost, because as soon as I attempted to describe it, it would vanish in the very words I use. What the written word lacks is the very presence of the other in the words they speak. For even if I might attempt to imagine the author who has written them, the words I am now reading are testimony to their absence.
(Levinas’s Totality and Infinity, pp. 35–6)

Here’s what’s important in relation to millennial/zoomer loneliness: what was just said about writing is even more true of texting (of course, writing and texting are two totally different media-forms which are not reducible to one another). At least in the written word there is a trace of the Other’s singularity in the form of the style of his or her handwriting. Texting even erases this trace of the Other. Given its impersonal structure, texting can be viewed as the opposite of talking on the phone. When we read McLuhan’s analysis of the telephone through Levinas’ description of speech it becomes clear why the telephone can be so productive of long-lasting friendships and why texting is not. The philosopher Slavoj Žižek provides a brilliant description of our current media landscape, that is, cyberspace:

Traces of Gnosticism are clearly discernible even in today’s cyberspace ideology. The cyberspace dream of the Self freed from its attachment to its natural body by turning itself into a virtual entity floating from one to another contingent and temporary embodiment is the scientific-technological realization of the Gnostic dream of the Self getting rid of the decay and inertia of the material reality. No wonder that the philosophy of Leibniz is one of the predominant philosophical references of cyberspace theorists: Leibniz conceived the universe as composed of ‘monads’, microscopic substances each of which lives in its own self-enclosed inner space, with no windows onto its environs. One cannot miss the uncanny resemblance between Leibniz’s ‘monadology’ and the emerging cyberspace community in which global harmony and solipsism strangely coexist. That is to say, does our immersion in cyberspace not go hand in hand with our reduction to a Leibnizian monad which, although ‘without windows’ that would directly open up to external reality, mirrors in itself the entire universe? More and more, we are monads with no direct windows onto reality, interacting alone with the PC screen, encountering only virtual simulacra, and yet immersed more than ever in the global network, synchronously communicating with the entire globe.
(How to Read Lacan, p. 100)

The Levinasian encounter of the face of the Other in speech shatters our digital isolation brought on by cyberspace. This encounter serves to produce a sense of responsibility and duty towards the Other precisely through registering his or her vulnerability.

This all sounds a bit abstract so let’s engage in a very brief description of the phone call (a phenomenology of the medium). Throughout my life, I’ve made about ten close friendships and they all have one thing in common: long phone conversations. In the last few years, I’ve become close with someone I first met on Facebook. I know that it can be very awkward to go from only texting to asking someone to talk on the phone, but Facebook actually provides us with a go-between. In Messenger you can send short voice messages. This is how my friend and I began talking. We got used to sending voice messages to each other on a daily basis and this naturally developed into us having actual phone conversations. If we had never started talking on the phone, then we would’ve never established a meaningful friendship and we both know this to be true.

The reason why is because of the intimacy and privacy this medium establishes. As McLuhan put it, “But the telephone, intimate and personal, is the most removed of any medium from the P. A. form. Thus wire-tapping seems even more odious than the reading of other people’s letters” (Understanding Media, p. 269). When you’re on the phone, the world around you tends to fade away and you find yourself submerged in the all-encompassing presence of the Other’s voice. As you both lose yourselves in each other’s speech, you become attuned to the Other as singularity, or, as we put it in everyday language, you experience the Other as a person. The more you talk, the more bullshit chit-chat is drained out of the conversation. The more the Other shares his or her personal desires, fantasies, traumas, joys, etc., the more you share yours. On the one hand, you experience the Other as a singular person that transcends all of your preconceived notions, but on the other, you also start to build long-lasting bonds through listening to the Other’s speech and lovingly embracing it. And, from his or her perspective, the Other does the same for you.

Of course, literal face-to-face speech can produce social bonds, but the phone is unique for how it subtracts visual experience from speech. Both McLuhan and Levinas were concerned with visualization. For McLuhan, it’s a way of keeping the Other at a distance, of maintaining a strong and “protective” inner space, and, for Levinas, literal visual experience can actually prevent us from seeing the face of the Other. Visualization itself can involve a strange sort of prosopagnosia. The phone suspends visualization and opens one up to the face by way of the non-visibility of speech. On the phone, the voice is concentrated and undiluted. This is why I dislike the video call — it defeats the purpose of the phone call. This is obviously fine in certain situations, but the visualization involved in it can become on obstacle on the road to friendship. The video call can trigger anxiety in the form of camera shyness and this makes one overly conscious of oneself and diverts attention away from the speech of the Other.

I also realize that there are important differences between the classic telephone and the smartphone. They are not the same medium, but the latter can come to function very much like the former. One crucial difference is that you can walk around with the smartphone whereas you were forced to be stationed in one place with the old phone. This ability to move around while talking can be a good and a bad thing. For one, walking around can cause you to become distracted, but it also can help one get used to having long talks. In a weird way, walking can initially serve as a buffer and gives you an excuse to get off the phone (“Oh, sorry, I’ll have to call you back”). However, if this proceeds, then it becomes a problem. I do recommend laying on the couch while having a phone conversation because of how it makes things less distracting. Another problem with the smartphone is the constant interruptions it entails, e.g., message notifications. If you start using social media while conversating, then the conversation breaks down. Despite all of this, the smartphone can still undergo a becoming-telephone, that is, it can be used in the way the classic phone was. In large part, I owe my new friendship (the one I just mentioned above) to the way we turned our smartphones into telephones. As we would lose ourselves in conversation, all of the social media apps and notifications withdrew from our awareness. Yes, they’re still there, but you begin to not even notice them. In fact, the smartphone itself, like the telephone, withdraws from consciousness and the voice of the Other takes center stage.

The extreme exposure to another person’s “infinity” can actually cause anxiety, but that’s the price one must pay to forge meaningful friendships. As chit-chat disappears, the Other begins to reveal things that might very well disturb you and you might end up becoming repulsed by that person. You might want to never speak to them ever again. Or you might end up making a friend for life. There is risk involved here. Sharing the intimate and personal details of one’s life is a form of gift-exchange. Some gifts you love and some you hate, but this type of risky gift-exchange is better than the safe and scripted interactions coded into social media.

Boomers and Xers give millennials a lot of shit, but I think much of this criticism is totally unfair. The older generations as well as the millennials themselves do not realize what has just happened in terms of our media milieu. We are currently living through the beginning of the third paradigm shift in the structure of communication, which is necessarily a revolution in the structure of our lives, minds, bodies, relationships, worlds, etc. James A. Dewar and Peng Hwa Ang discuss this in their article ‘The Cultural Consequences of Printing and the Internet’ (contained in Agent of Change: Print Culture Studies after Elizabeth L. Eisenstein) and Emily Pothast helpfully summarizes their position in her recent Medium post:

More recently, James A. Dewar and Peng Hwa Ang have noted that the “many-to-many” communication made possible by social media represents only the third paradigm shift in the history of physical media. The first shift was the emergence of the “one-to-one” communication of language, and the second was the “one-to-many” paradigm of the printing press. In each case, dramatic changes to how knowledge is stored, retrieved, and manipulated had a cascade effect that lasted decades and even centuries, as populations adjusted to the paradigm shift. During each of these periods, Dewar and Ang argue, a range of “unintended consequences” has, at times, come to “dominate intended ones.” The full contours of the “unintended consequences” of social media will continue to reveal themselves until long after my lifetime, and yours.

Millennials have been hurled into an entirely revolutionary media paradigm without anyone to turn to on how to gain a basic sense of familiarity and orientation with what has just started to unfold. This is why making close friendships is so important right now. Young people need each other in order to begin to cope with this brand new “many-to-many” form of communication, which has a strong tendency towards the erasure of the face of the Other. The face is blurred by the franticness of social media and by the shift into a new media environment. This is why the work of McLuhan and Levinas can be of such guidance at the moment.

The preference for texting and hesitance to talk on the phone is merely a symptom of a deeper problem: the desire to ward off the presence and depth of the Other. Talking on the phone is certainly not a cure-all for all of the loneliness millennials are struggling with, but it does have a structural difference from texting that facilitates intimacy, closeness, vulnerability, etc. This is not merely a generational preference on my part, but, instead, a crucial structural feature of the phone itself. There is a strange paranoia concerning the Other in the digital society. The digital superego silently screams at us: “Interact with the Other at all cost but always from a safe distance! Do not get too close!” I fully reject this injunction. I say take the risk of completely losing yourself in the dangerous Other, of having the Other turn your world upside down. Let’s resurrect the phone call. Dare to see the face! Dare to encounter the Other! Dare to be a friend!