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and Nass (1996). In their The Media Equation: How People Treat Computers,
Television, and New Media Like Real People and Places, they declare, triumphantly
but simplistically, that media equal real life (!): ‘We have found that individuals’
interactions with computers, television, and new media are fundamentally
social and natural, just like interactions in real life’ (5).
The simplistic import of their ‘equation’ is that ‘the social’ is defined
in the narrow, everyday sense of ‘politeness’. Nevertheless, their observa-
tions concerning interaction bear some attention despite the fact that they
lack contextualization in any recognizable social analysis. The social
responses study indicates that people are polite to well-designed com-
puters, that screen motion draws similar responses to real motion, and
that, psychologically, object-relations to TV screens are not so different
from those to PC screens.
Mostly, these relationships are of a passive order; they ‘do not apply
to the rare occasions when people yell at a television or plead with a com-
puter’ (253). Interactions between persons and media technology lead
individuals to ‘allocate attention, assess competence’ and organize infor-
mation in ways which aren’t just about efficiency or entertainment (253).
Such research, which is also the subject of numerous studies on
mobile phone use in Katz and Aakhus’s collection Perpetual Contact
(2001), can sometimes lead to New Age kinds of spiritualism represented
in attempts to suggest a new kind of community technospirit which
emerges within a particular medium.
Katz and Aakhus, in their sixteen-page review of the essays in
Perpetual Contact, feel compelled to invent a new term for such a spirit
which emerges out of mobile phone use, which they call ‘Apparatgeist’
(2001). In advancing this term, the authors rapidly slide from a concern
with (as the essay title suggests) ‘The Meaning of Mobile Phones’ to uni-
versal claims about history, society and the human spirit! The tendency
for New Media theorists to coin neologisms to define a new epoch, as we
saw with the second media age thesis, or to make such grand universal
claims, a matter to which I will return, is interesting in itself. For Katz and
Aakhus, the term Apparatgeist achieves no less than to ‘tie together the
individual and collective aspects of societal behaviour’ (307). Having
defined Apparat as a term that can be found in numerous dictionaries and
then defined Geist as a handy word derived from Hegelian philosophy,
they see their new term as suitable for referring to ‘the common set of
strategies or principles of reasoning about technology evident in the iden-
tifiable, consistent and generalized patterns of technological advance-
ment throughout history’ (307).
Apparatgeist is the ‘master concept which is informed by a ‘logic’ which
is called ‘perpetual contact’. In turn ‘perpetual contact is a socio-logic’ of
‘personal communication technology’ or PCT (307). From there, Katz
and Aakhus run through a series of random but no less grand theoretical
consequences of how ‘PCTs’ make up the Apparatgeist: