Argentina’s triumph in the 2021 America’s Cup gave us iconic images to treasure in the visual culture of the country. Among them, Lionel messi sitting on the court of the Maracana stadium, with the cell phone in his hands, making a video call. While the rest of the team celebrated in different parts, the captain interacted alone and smiling with different members of his closest family, who were present from virtuality. Soon, as is almost always the case with these media events, the reactions arrived on social networks. Some people expressed feelings of tenderness for Lionel’s gesture – in one image he is seen showing the medal that hangs around his neck to the children and in another he shoots a kiss at the screen. And many others took it as a standard of good behavior when responding and being there for the other in daily communication: if Lionel Messi could call his family from the Maracana, you have no excuse not to call . ?? In different tweets, this issue was located in the specific context of sex-affective ties – lovers or partners who do not respond to the messages; in others, it was about making a general rule applicable to ?? any mortal ??, as indicated by a tweet with more than 4,000 likes.
Loneliness. There is something in those spontaneous images of Messi and his video call, and of the reactions in networks, that seems to condense moral tensions typical of the era of permanent connectivity in which we live. I mention two: first, the already long discussion about our right to be absent, in solitude, from the here and now of our context to enter into conversations with others in different temporalities and spaces. Second, the question of the degree of accountability to which we are obliged in a sociability that tends to assume permanent connection. In both cases, these are discussions that are not new: the media always offered interactions at a distance and the expectations of responsiveness are typical of the social order. However, these tensions remain latent and seem increasingly difficult to resolve in an era of hyperconnectivity that is experienced, repeatedly, with a feeling of overflow and fatigue.
We can include the first tension around the image of Messi and his video call under the title of ?? connected but alone ??. Many years ago researcher Sherry Turkle proposed that mobile devices, which make us potentially accessible at any time and place, took us away from our co-present links, those with whom we share the moment and physical environment. Turkle’s warning circulated massively and even became a motorcycle of restaurants and bars: We don’t have Wi-Fi, talk to each other.
The behavior of ignoring a person from the here and now to communicate with other interlocutors receives a technical name, in English: ??phubbing??. Different studies analyze it assuming in general that it is a negative behavior for sociability and study its impact on interpersonal bonds. The video call of the Argentine captain reflects, however, something else. The gesture of the call, which momentarily separates him from his team and from his physical environment, seems to arise from the desire to connect and communicate through distance and to sustain what the researcher Christian Licoppe called “connected presence”, by the which produces a flow of multimodal communications in which there is less and less distinction between what is “in real life” and what is mediated. There is, then, not necessarily a lesser amount of sociability, but an abundance of links at different times and points in space, and which are sustained at the same time, as proposed by Professor Pablo Boczkowski in his book Abundance.
Connectivity It is precisely that abundance of communication that seems to be intimately related to the second tension that arises with the image of Messi and his video call: our responsibility, as connected beings, to presentify ourselves through our calls and our responses. The proliferation of mobile devices, which make us ubiquitous, along with the connectivity infrastructures that, it goes without saying, are unequal, are combined with an individual will but also with a social and institutional imposition.l increasing to be available, almost in a 24/7 logic, for interaction with the world.
This trend led the academy to frequently use the metaphor of ?? permanent connectivity ?? to talk about the problems that come with apparent full connectivity. In recent years, there have been more and more concerns about digital disconnection – that intention to disconnect, even for a while, from our mobile devices – which seem to go against the great concern, of a moral and ethical nature, that people declaim about the responsibilities and obligations of being present and even of being accountable.
In in-depth interviews conducted in Buenos Aires during 2019 with 40 users of digital technologies, I found that a very common complaint is the lack of immediate response from the other, which is combined, paradoxically, with a feeling of fatigue due to the imposition of having to give an immediate response to the large number of messages that arrive.
Iconic. 35 years ago, football gave us another (sound) image that was also iconic: the audio of Diego Armando Maradona, after the final of the ’86 World Cup, who spoke by telephone with his mother to tell her, excited, that he dedicated the goals to her. In another historical moment, and with a new technology, the scene of Lionel Messi and his video call does not seem in itself so different from that of Diego: it reflects a love scene in which good news is communicated to physically estranged loved ones. What seems to have changed is the context and it is not a minor fact: provided with mobile devices that make us accessible to the world almost 24/7, the absence of communication -which contrasts with Messi’s tender gesture- sounds stronger and It makes us wonder what agreements we want, and are willing to sustain, in our bond with others.
* Master in Technology, Innovation, and Education from Harvard University and in Media, Technology and Society from Northwestern University.
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