What Has Ironic Distance Done to Us?

For a brief moment, the internet was transfixed by a hippy girl from 1996. A short video clip, which has millions of views, shows a girl with dreadlocks being interviewed by MTV outside a Phish concert. She’s been traveling around the country, she says, hoping to get into a show.

It’s a dull interview. The girl herself is quite dull. So why the millions of views?

Dudley Newright, who shared the video on Twitter, explains it best:

I think people are attracted to this girl, not because we miss dirty hippie chicks, but because she is presenting herself honestly, without a layer of ironic distance. She's not burying her own personality under layers of memes like "I'm in my dirtball era" or "It's a wook girl summer." She's not speaking in code that she picked up from social media, or dropping pop culture references. She is not brat in the least.

She's just sharing her boring thoughts without trying to be clever, because this is probably the first time in her life someone shoved a camera in her face. iPhones taught people that they have to perform as a character for an audience. Just being yourself isn't nearly enough. If you're old enough to remember this era, you probably recognize in this clip something good that we've lost.

I’m not sure if Newright is right about all this. it’s possible he’s simply nostalgia maxing, as the kids today might say. It’s easy to notice that Phish Girl is fully locked into the cultural memes of her own day. In fact, she’s a walking cliché in at least half a dozen ways.

But I don’t want to pick at Newright’s analysis. Instead, I want to accept the spirit of his argument and extend it further.

In a broad sense, Newright is arguing that technological advancements have changed our way of speaking by adding new layers of symbols. The result is that we all speak in ways that are further removed from some base reality that we felt closer to when we didn’t have the internet.

This is a familiar observation to anyone who studies how cultural and technological advancements impact language. For example, philosopher Ernst Cassirer writes:

Physical reality seems to recede in proportion as man’s symbolic activity advances. Instead of dealing with the things themselves man is in a sense constantly conversing with himself. He has so enveloped himself in linguistic forms, in artistic images, in mythical symbols or religious rites that he cannot see or know anything except by the interposition of [an] artificial medium.

While the transition to the internet age certainly added “layers of ironic distance” (as Newright put it), this was nowhere near the most drastic transition we’ve undertaken. As psychologist Julian Jaynes observed, there was a time when metaphors (using a term for one thing to describe another thing) did not exist at all in language. Even the pronoun “I” and the concept of the “self” are constructed metaphors which did not exist in early writing. For example, if you read Homer’s Iliad or any work written before it, you will find literally no first-person introspection. Language had simply not advanced to the point where first-person introspection was even possible.

But then, when the metaphor was invented, suddenly entire worlds opened up as writers found that they could examine the interior lives of themselves and other characters. Jaynes, in his book, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, goes so far as to argue that this advancement in language gave humans, for the first time, consciousness.

Today, we’re all living in a world so rich with stories, symbols, and metaphors that we might as well be living in a complete simulation. The contours of our simulation reveal themselves most starkly when we see someone from the recent past who existed with all but the most recent layers of the simulation pulled back. This is why Phish Girl hits so hard. For all the meat and the bones that we have built up around ourselves, the girl from the recent past, standing outside in the cold waiting to get into a Phish concert, shows us that we’re still not fully comfortable in our new skin.