death by text
Music: Ulrich Schnauss: Far Away Trains Passing By (2001)
News broke yesterday that Bailey Goodman, a recent high school graduate, was text messaging a friend as she was driving four friends to her parent's vacation home in New York state. Distracted and speeding---apparently responding to a message that inquired, "what are you doing?"---Goodman plowed the SUV into an oncoming tractor-trailer, killing herself and her fellow high school cheerleaders.
The news coverage of this accident has been characteristically tragic because of the underlying subtext: five very attractive, no doubt "popular" young women (signaled, of course, by the detail they are "cheerleaders") from well-to-do families had a charmed future. Their confident gazes in their latest class photos are paraded across the public screen as a symptom of upper-middle class status. The framing of the story suggests that their social privilege and the ease of life afforded by beauty and popularity comprised the tragic flaw, blinding them---or at least the driver---to the basic laws of physics. This framing is nothing new, as it participates of course in the "youth in crisis" narrative as the naive obverse to the knowing evil of the Columbine massacre: characteristic teenage invulnerability blinded the cheerleaders to common sense, and so death arrived, the news stories seem to suggest, as the assertion of the law of karma.
Texting is unquestionably yoked to "youth" in the United States (I gather not so much in Europe and Japan---there folks text instead of call to save money more than circulate cultural allegiance). What strikes me in the key of Jungian synchronicity is that I have been reading Walter Ong for the last week or so in preparation for a review essay focused on media ecology and the human voice, and in that reading, Ong has a lot to say about communicative technology and homeostatic response. Writing in the 1960s, Ong argues that voice, once "muted by script and print, has come newly alive." He's speaking in particular about "recordings and tapes" that have "given sound a new quality, recuperability." On the very next page, however, he stresses the newly alive vocality also abides a newly alive textuality:
Now that we have electronic communication, we shall not cease to write and print. Technological society in the electronic stage cannot exist without vast quantities of writing and print. Despite the activation of sound, it prints more than ever before. One of the troubles with electronic computers themselves is that often the printout is so vast that it is useless: there are not enough attendants to read more than a fraction of it . . . . What we are faced with today is a sensorium not merely extended by the various media but also so reflected and refracted inside and outside itself in so many directions as to be thus far utterly bewildering. Our situation is one of more and more complicated interactions.
Texting while driving is complicated indeed, and reflecting on Ong's prescience one cannot help but think about the inertia of the new textuality in an age of mobility: while Kayne West says that Jesus walks, clearly in our time, Text now drives.
Two relevant theoretical ideas some to mind in concert with Ong's assertion: first, Paul Virilio on the idea of "the crash." New technologies herald new accidents at the advent of their being. Few would have prophesied that "text driving" would be the new accidental death of our time, however, new accidents that emerge with new technologies are frequently associated with youth. Second, there is what Lacan has to say about the "agency of the letter," that language uses us, determines us in a certain, qualified sense---the signifier puts us in our place (e.g., Poe's purloined letter). One must think about the compulsion to text message someone while driving: if you've ever gotten a text message, you feel like you must respond sometimes, and in kind. The power of text (again, like Jesus) "compels you!" Unlike drunk driving where you must go to the booze, in text driving, the letter hails you.