The group portrait of digital users published this week by NETendances confirms the growing shift in online life in Quebec: only 3% of adult respondents to surveys conducted in October 2021, after more than a year of pandemic, said their screen time has “decreased a little or a lot.” We repeat, 3% of the lot, which is roughly the margin of error, so you might as well say no one.
Quebec society more or less confined in waves has connected for work, films, TV series, video recordings, studies, telemedicine, social networks, video games, CH matches and football. stay. Six out of ten adults (58%) admitted to having increased the hours spent in front of screens “a lot or a little”. In the 18 to 44 age group, it jumps to seven out of ten.
“The pandemic has had a major effect on the use of digital technology by Quebecers: it has forced them to make a major transformation, to better equip themselves, to seek more reliable services and a wider range of services. in some cases, because their life became partly virtual, ”sums up Bruno Guglielminetti, spokesperson for the survey carried out by the Academy of Digital Transformation, attached to Laval University.
The Quebec survey focuses on adults. Research published in the Journal of Affective Disorders Reports in December 2021 found that Ontario children consumed three times as much screen time as recommended by the Canadian Pediatric Association. On average, primary school children (6 to 12 years old) spent 6 hours in front of their screens, but some totaled up to 13 hours connected to television, a telephone, a computer, a tablet or a game console. games. Counting about ten hours of sleep, there was therefore one hour a day left for the rest…
We are born, live, die surrounded by screens, now more than ever. Even the delivery men or the cashiers look like appendages of flesh on electronic machines, to pastiche Marx. Is this therefore the farewell to the desert of reality, according to the emblematic formula of the first film The Matrix, concentrate of our zeitgeist whose fourth iteration has just appeared on a screen at home? Are we crouching in the cave described by Plato, where the chained people take the shadows for reality?
Homo numericus
Let us ask the question that wakes us up: is so much screen time too much, doctor? "It is obviously much more complex, and I think that we will only be able to assess this experience term", indicates Florence Millerand, professor of communications at UQAM, specialist in the uses of digital technologies. “We can each see the advantages and disadvantages of this situation. Social dynamics take time to be observed. »
With this analytical prudence in mind, Mme Millerand admits to recognizing herself in the portrait of her contemporaries, herself totaling up to a dozen hours of screen time per day. Her teaching is done online, with "a huge overload of work", even for her who knows about digital devices. His ethnographic surveys suffer from this. Doctoral students under his supervision had to completely rethink their research methodology.
“There are perverse effects that are less immediately measured, accumulated fatigue, a lack of direct social interaction that energizes. We are very focused on the task and we have the right feeling to work more and all the time. All tasks go through the same media. »
Basically, here as elsewhere, the pandemic has only amplified situations and exacerbated problems. Professor Millerand recalls that at the very beginning of her scholarly research on the Web, two decades ago, opinions were divided in two, with fears that children would become amorphous and threatened by online predators or, on the contrary, , super-informed by taking advantage of all the knowledge at your fingertips.
His investigations finally revealed that young people were connecting to chat with their friends and watch their favorite band. “Basically, what we do online is not very different from what we do in real life. »
The same and the other
So that's the pitfall. Are the real and the virtual mutually exclusive? Is it even in these terms that we must situate this fundamental debate in our lives as in the conception of existence?
"You have to make a distinction between saying that the real and the virtual are separate, implying that they are two different worlds, and saying that they are two dimensions of reality, says the Professor Stéphane Vial, from UQAM. The virtual is totally real. I prefer to talk about digital reality and non-digital reality to avoid misunderstandings. This digital reality is technology, with a major ecological footprint and a major psychological footprint on us. »
Stéphane Vial was a pioneer in research in digital philosophy with his doctoral thesis published under the title Being and the screen: how the digital changes perception (2013). His digital phenomenology proposes replacing the term "virtual" with concepts that characterize different facets of digital. Reversibility, for example, which makes it possible to cancel and redo an incongruity in the non-digital entropic universe. Or reproducibility, which generates copies instantly or almost.
The term "virtual" is only kept to refer to simulation. On a computer, the desktop folders or recycle bin are virtual. This simulation born with graphical interfaces has only grown with video games, metaverses, everything based on interactive graphical simulation.
"This dimension penetrates our daily routines and everyday life," says the philosopher. It incorporates reality, like the telephone or electricity a century ago. The pandemic has made it possible to experience this digital reality like never before, to unprecedented heights of screen consumption for studies, work, leisure, interpersonal relationships and the rest. What I have been saying for ten years, that the virtual is the real, everyone has experienced it thoroughly for two years with the superdigitization of all our uses. »
He repeats that we do not live in shadows, nor shadows of shadows. He says again and again that certain human experiences cannot be replaced by the screen, love intimacy for example. Yes, the digital universe takes up a lot of space, but for him, in fact, there is nothing new in struggling with ubiquitous technology.
“We are all exhausted by the over-presence of digital in our lives, including people like me who have been digital advocates for a long time,” he says. But without digital, what would we do now? Everyone worries about the number of hours each person spends per day in front of a screen, but no one worries about the number of hours per day a copyist monk or a student spends in front of the paper, says Professor Vial. It should not be forgotten that human beings secrete technology. This is what sets us apart from other animals. »
Head in the cloud
The Australian philosopher David Chalmers, one of the great minds of contemporary philosophy, launches this week Reality+, an essay in which he pleads in favor of a deep immersion of humanity in the digital universes. The New York University professor, a theorist of consciousness, also denies the distinction between reality and virtuality.
"The virtual worlds we interact with can be as real as our ordinary physical world," he said in an interview with The Guardian. Virtual reality is an authentic reality. Professor Chalmers adds that the development of multisensory devices makes it possible to glimpse in a few decades, perhaps a century, a moment when reality and virtuality will become inseparable.
People could then choose to fit into augmented digital for most of their lives, the scientist predicts. He even envisages this universe as a substitute world in the event of persistent disasters, let's say an eternal pandemic...
Robert Dion teaches literature at UQAM and it is therefore not he who will question the importance of fictional universes in our lives. The idea of tipping our lives in “reality +” frightens him, however. "Locking ourselves in an alternate universe can lead us to neglect our own world," he said after learning about the theses of the philosopher Chalmers. In addition, we can imagine all the energy that this other planet will use to exist. This virtual world pollutes the real world. It's quite scary: if people could choose and chose to live in the virtual, for sure, we would be screwed. »
He repositions the perspective to remind us that the frameworks of life, the ethical beacons, are not the same in the fictional and the real, even if, as Shakespeare says, responsibilities begin in dreams.
“I am thinking of the influencers and alumni of the Sunwing flight reality shows. People go wild because they behave in the real world setting the same way they behave in the virtual world. On screen, we watch them and have fun. In life, we are offended by the recklessness and vulgarity of these revelers. Yet the actions can be ethically and morally equally reprehensible on either side. I believe that people who behave in this way do not understand that the two worlds are not radically different. »
Simulation and stimuli
Theatre Olivier Choinière defends the virtues of theater as a space for communication and communion between humans and he envisages the worst with the great digital, virtual, non-face-to-face withdrawal of recent years. On a Meta network, he admitted a few days ago that he had even lost the desire to go to the theater since the pandemic, because “the muscle [giving him] the taste for coming together and being in presence of the others no longer responded”.
"Theatre seems political to me, in the sense that it allows people to come together and be part of the collective," he explains in an interview. It is one of the few places where you could still experience the feeling of community outside of the screen. »
The taste of others returned to him by re-practicing his art in the street with the ambulatory Vers solitaire (approved by Public Health), without eliminating an aftertaste of catastrophe for his real world, too real. The little he saw of attempts to save certain productions by “streamed” recordings did not charm him, “quite the contrary”.
He says it again: the essential is the real, the other, his face, his voice, his presence, what he is rediscovering and rehearsing at the moment with the show Zoé (Denise-Pelletier theatre) , stopped in full swing in 2020 and whose recovery and tour are scheduled for March 2022.
“A live performance is not just accounting data, figures, income or jobs gained or lost, as governments seem to believe: it is a real-time experience of taking public speaking. This is part, in my opinion, of civic life, of life in society, of the collective and therefore of politics. Theater can act on fear and on the fear of the other, so important in a pandemic. This is also what we completely lose sight of when we are in front of a screen. »
The properties of the virtual
The shift to online is accelerating for all artistic and cultural disciplines. The Phi Center multiplies virtual reality presentations, including Carne y Arena (“Virtually present, physically invisible”, says the subtitle), by filmmaker Alejandro González Iñárritu, which continues its North American tour in Dallas, Texas. So to speak where the immersive fiction about migrants actually takes place.
In London, the Serpentine North Gallery is hosting this winter the exhibition New Fiction, by the artist Kaws, divided into three parts. The first part shows works in the rooms, which is really "last millennia". The second part, accessible through a QR code, shows virtual works, which is also starting to be commonplace. The third part, sold as a world premiere, develops another version of the exhibition, but on the Fortnite video game site, where the visit is made in the company of an avatar of your choice.
The digital entertainment platform is offering more and more concerts to its 350 million players. Rapper Travis Scott offered a 15-minute performance that was seen by 27 million people, then by another 180 million on YouTube. The long capsule also reportedly generated $25 million in merchandise sales.
“Virtual properties” also break real banks. Speculators are inflating the prices of cryptocurrencies, digital works authenticated by non-fungible tokens, and even pixelated constructions. Superworld, a virtual planet, sells digital versions of real monuments. The digital Eiffel Tower was paid for the equivalent of $200,000 in bitcoins and the Taj Mahal, $400,000.
The great change is concentrated in Facebook, the most powerful network in the world, which has become Meta, a controlled designation that could not be more transparent. In October 2021, its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, announced the creation of its metaverse, betting on the prediction that humans were going to spend more and more time there. Simple glasses will soon replace virtual reality headsets. In Europe alone, the company plans to hire 10,000 employees to build this parallel world over the next five years.
Meta, like many other digital giants, is betting on transmuting the good old two-dimensional Web into an immersive, networked and three-dimensional universe. The term "metaverse" itself is borrowed from the science fiction novel Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, in which the protagonist, a pizza delivery man, entertains himself by plugging into Metaverse, a virtual reality network sheltered from control. policemen.
In this regard, the contrast between these deep transformations in accelerated progress remains striking with the dreams and utopias that accompanied the birth and development of the Web two or three decades ago. As governments mark and monitor online exchanges, the Internet giants now have control over the digital territories where they enact the rules. "I've seen the metaverse and I don't want it," Keza MacDonald, video game columnist at The Guardian, said this week.
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