A Proxy Culture

Abstract

We do not check out a hotel personally; we rely on TripAdvisor. We may have never met a person, yet we are ‘friends’ on Facebook. We may press ‘like’ but engage only in some kind of slacktivism. It does not matter whether we haven’t got a clue about how to reach a place downtown, as long as we have access to Google Maps and follow the instructions. Five stars on Amazon may be sufficient to convince us of the quality of a product, even if we have never tried it ourselves. Being a ‘best seller’ in The New York Times Best Seller list is often a self-fulfilling prophecy. In all these cases, something (the signifier) signifies something else (the signified). Such ‘signifying’ is at the heart of every semantic and semiotic process. It is the immensely important relation of ‘standing for’. There is no sense, reference, or meaning without it. So, we have always helped ourselves to different kinds of signifying means, in order to interact with each other and the world, and make sense of both. We are the symbolic species after all, and twentieth-century philosophy—whether hermeneutically oriented or based on a philosophy of language—can easily be read in terms of a theory of signification. All this is clear, if complicated. The point here is that only our own culture, the culture that characterises mature information societies, is now evolving from being a culture of signs and signification into a culture of proxies and interaction. What is the difference? Why is this happening today? And what are the implications of such a major transformation? In order to answer these questions, one needs to understand better what a proxy is and what ‘degenerate’ proxies may be. Let me start from the concept of proxy. In the Roman Catholic Church, a vicar is a representative or deputy of a bishop. This role, and its long familiarity, led to the idea of something being ‘vicarious’ as something ‘acting or done for another’ and, hence, ‘vicariously’. The idea of ‘proxy’ is similar. The main difference is that its roots are political, not religious, for it is a late Middle English contraction of ‘procuracy’, which means ‘legitimate action taken in the place of, or on behalf of, another’, in the context of government or some kind of socio-political structures (e.g. one could get married by proxy). Today, in a vocabulary more deeply affected by information technology than by Philos. Technol. (2015) 28:487–490 DOI 10.1007/s13347-015-0209-8