Screen Time, or the Postviral Internet

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[P]erhaps it is more accurate to say that the internet almost wholly consists of the past. It is the place we go to commune with the past.

-Bob, in Ling Ma's Severance1

In a controversial Inside Higher Ed article, University of North Georgia student success coordinator Kristie Kiser implores those teaching online courses to, at the very least, wash their hair before appearing on screen. Bemoaning how our sense of the "ordinary" during this pandemic has come to mean something "less . . . hygienic," Kiser insists that clean hair is a matter of pedagogical responsibility: students need routine and structure in a time of uncertainty. "Would you show up unwashed, overly casual and ill prepared for a meeting?" Kiser asks. "Our students are our clients, and we must exhibit professionalism."2

By conflating the virtual classroom with the business meeting, Kiser implies that screen time has become a medium for schoolwork that entails the demand for successful self-management in a crisis. Just as the responsible IRL subject is a mask-donning one3, the good virtual subject stays present and presentable on screen. Kiser's invocation of professional standards as a matter of hygiene is gendered and racialized: the civilizing project of Empire, after all, normalizes habits around dress, hair, and even toilet practices, and the burden of these norms fall more forcefully upon some than others. The petition for instructors and students to "exhibit professionalism" online maintains the damaging normalcy of the status quo during an unfolding global crisis, as Dwight Tanner discusses. It reveals how a global pandemic amplifies neoliberal routine — the non-time of the marketplace that Jonathan Crary describes as belonging to "24/7" capitalism.

And yet, despite or because of these demands, many of us can't quit our screens. In Severance, even the death of the internet cannot kill the desire for everyday screen time. The novel's prologue details the Google searches of survivors at the beginning of the apocalypse — from "how to build a fire" to "is there a god." By the time these survivors find Candace Chen, the internet's infrastructure has already collapsed. Candace spends most of the novel recounting a past in which Google still exists, and in which she sends weekly productivity reports to her managers from an empty Spectra office, even after her contract expires. (For Aviva Briefel, the end began when retail stores started sending her reassuring emails about COVID-19.) Candace's attachment to the computer screen is not so different from the actions of the zombie-like fevered, repeating the same daily routine on an "infinite loop."4

Those infected by the Shen Fever share the seemingly affectless, vacant expression of someone interfacing with a screen. Candace and several of her fellow survivors search an abandoned home for weed. They think they might find some because the home once belonged to the family of one of the survivors, Ashley. During the search, Candace realizes that Ashley is becoming fevered. She can tell by the look in her eyes: "They were open but unfocused. They didn't register me. The pupils didn't move. The closest approximation for this gaze is when someone is looking at their computer screen, or checking their phone."5 The fevered acquire the blank face of both the screen viewer and the inscrutable and technophilic Oriental — the Asiatic body who haunts discourses about the pandemic in both Ma's novel and COVID-19.

How does Severance help us see screen time as a metaphor for racialized infection and everyday productivity? The online screen indexes what we might call the viral temporality of neoliberal capitalism: the demand and desire for constantly inhabiting a present that is haunted by the routes of racialized and gendered labor. Virality names both online circulation and the self-propagating life of capitalism. Such a ubiquitous temporality is analogized by the subject who constantly needs to check her phone, who needs to be in touch, and becomes stuck in a loop of repetitive motions — a posture that becomes and recalls labor. The smartphone user's everyday routines bring together these meanings of the viral, connecting the vlogger, the iPhone factory worker, and the spectral figure of the Asiatic coolie.The multiple valences of virality help us see how biological contagion and online productivity are entwined. Take computer viruses, for instance. They have been described in terms of biological contagion since the 1980s — often explained, as Jussi Parikka puts it, "as if they were biological viruses." ⁶ Computer viruses, like anxieties produced by organic viruses or by the terrorist figure, are raced threats. The first widespread PC virus, Brain, was created by brothers Basit Farooq Alvi and Amjad Farooq Alvi in 1986 and was also known as the "Pakistani Brain" or "Pakistani Flu." But such breaches are constantly being converted into productivity by the capturing logic of capitalism. A year after Brain's outbreak, the first anti-virus companies appeared. The Alvi brothers now own a large internet service provider in Pakistan.

Parikka suggests that "[c]apitalism itself is viral" because it spreads via mutations, deterritorializations, and reterritorializations. Risk is transformed into potential on a global scale. It becomes the anti-virus software industry7, the boom in facial-recognition technologies or, perhaps even more insidiously, the constant self-care one attends to presumably at home during one's leisure time. While they seem like disparate anxieties, both the (cyber)terrorist and the loss of "me time" are rendered opportunities for national and individual optimization through "new" technologies — from facial detection algorithms that are used in Snapchat filters to 10-minute sheetmasks that make for likeable Instagram selfies.

Screen time as online performance, office administration, or even as public health and border security processes is a 24/7 temporality most comfortably inhabited by subjects who are legibly safe, healthy, and responsible: that is, those who are white, Western, cis and able-bodied. In Ma's novel, however, screen time also mediates contagious encounters between the narrative present and past, and thus between Candace's narrating self and her recollected Other. This simultaneously widening and blurred space between "before" and "after" for Ma's lonely first-person protagonist ruptures traditional liberal narratives of self-possession and autonomy, exposing the uneven material conditions of a global crisis.

Stay in touch, stay alive

Walking through a deserted city, Candace sees a saleswoman inside a Juicy Couture store folding and refolding polo shirts "with an economy of movement never breaking pace."8 Realizing this worker is infected, Candace takes a video of her and posts it to her blog, NY Ghost, where it becomes the most popular and controversial post.

Candace's viral post brings into focus how social media activity is related to, or even entails, the afterlife of gendered and racialized work. The zombie-woman who mechanically folds clothes on repeat mirrors not just garment workers' programmed, continuous movements but also Ashley's trance-like state of trying on dresses in front of a mirror — "her body [going] through all the motions of posing" until she falls ill.9 These machine-like motions make apparent the contradictions of neoliberalism's promises of autonomy and self-possession through the obvious commodification of the wage laborer's gestures.

While neither the Juicy Couture worker nor Ashley are explicitly raced in the novel, their repetitive poses — their failures to possess their own bodies — are nonetheless racialized by the Shen Fever. Minh-ha Pham theorizes Asian fashion bloggers' poses as job performances that accrue cultural, social, and financial capital by producing value that is attached to the racialized and gendered body.10 As Ashley positions herself in pose after pose without registering emotion, her body brings to the surface the work of gender — a mode of identity production structured by networked, viral capitalism. But her body also becomes an Orientalist anxiety about the loss of individualism, interiority, and agency. We could consider the fevered in Severance in relationship to Western discourses about the Asian gamer who literally dies because of too much screen time — narratives that Steve Choe and Se Young Kim argue figure the Asian gamer as taking "the logic of life in neoliberalism to its limit" by blurring the line between work and pleasure, and rupturing the fantasy of virtual escapism."11 That Shen Fever is racialized by the computer screen is not surprising, given how, as scholars like Timothy Yu suggest, anxieties about capitalist, "borderless" racial contact continue to emerge as fantasies about the Orient as a kind of cyberspace.12 The fevered in Severance are exemplary bodies of techno-Orientalism.That Candace's immediate response to seeing the Juicy Couture worker is to take a video for her blog suggests how the routine social media update not only communicates but continues to reproduce her sense of self. As Wendy Chun points out, "To be is to be updated: to update and to be subjected to the update."13 What began as a hobby is now a form of transnational online production that allows Candace to tell the world that she is alive because she is working. It is a kind of daily screen time that, while relentless, is not without affective gratification. As Candace notes, "There was a pleasure in doing this, a pleasure in knowing that every morning, upon waking, I knew my agenda for the day."14 The internet is where Candace lives in the end times, staying in touch by being present online. In our unfolding COVID-19 pandemic, social media timelines are also where we go to feel connected to others, to be with others in "real time," even as these feeds expose how contagion infects unevenly across race, gender, and class.

Candace's (and our) regular maintenance of an online presence in a global crisis enacts what I consider a postviral mode of digital transmission. While online viruses were affiliated with homophobic discourses of AIDS transmission in its earlier days, going "viral" online is now understood as successful circulation. Robert Payne suggests that our contemporary language of new media "sharing" indicates a shift to a neoliberal mode of desirable, non-risky (heteronormative) intimacy that privileges a self-enterprising subject.15 For Candace, regularly sharing her photos on NY Ghost is not only motivated by a promise made to her ex-boyfriend on their last night together, but also by the sense of agency it gives her in a crisis.

Yet, the "post" in the postviral signals not only the "after" but also the destabilization of a teleological or linear understanding of the past. The blog entries on NY Ghost are, after all, nostalgic reflections on what the city once was. The online update, like the internet in general, is an archival production across personal and global scales. Repetition or imitation, Alix Beeston suggests in relation to Candace's adaptation of photography tropes, can mediate "outsider" perspectives. The internet as archive, or screen time as habitual archival work, is a site where memories of migration interface with the temporality of globalization, even as they risk being subsumed by it.

The internet is haunted

Described as a "disease of remembering,"16 Shen Fever keeps the body within an "economy of movement"17 that registers as screen time and renders the digital interface a portal to the past. Yet, even after the internet crashes at the height of the pandemic, the unfevered are caught in a loop of their memories. Candace observes, "But what is the difference between the fevered and us? Because I remember too, I remember perfectly. My memories replay, unprompted, on repeat. And our days, like theirs, continue in an infinite loop."18

When IT-expert-turned-cult-leader Bob returns Candace's lost iPhone, she fantasizes about reading her old emails and accessing her photos only to be told that the phone is broken. Bob advises her to consider the dead iPhone a "reminder of [her] former self, an artifact from long ago," and to treat the end of the internet as an opportunity to live in the present.19 Here, once again, Candace's search of self is tied to her digital screen presentations. Yet, even without the internet or a functioning smartphone, Candace's narration of her journey with Bob's group is interrupted by vivid memories, particularly of her family's migration from China to the US. While Bob exhorts the group to live in the moment, Candace returns to an intergenerational past that links Fuzhou to Salt Lake City and New York, and through which her mother's memories reproduce her own recollections: "[My mother's] remembering elicited my remembering."20

Intergenerational diasporic memory is a mode of transmission that makes the subject vulnerable to infection by a past that may not be entirely hers. Candace describes her dying mother Ruifang as "spurting stories . . . with unstanched flow, as if from a main artery" and having to "brace" herself for these visceral stories.21 As Candace loses herself to her mother's accounts, she remembers moments from when she was two, three, and four years old, despite these memories supposedly being too early for one to recall. Marianne Hirsch uses the term "postmemory" to articulate the personal and collective cultural trauma that a generation bears in relationship to a preceding one, theorizing these experiences as affective transmissions that "seem to constitute memories in their own right."22 Candace's language of diasporic transmission — or what Eileen Ying might call "racial pathology" — highlights how intergenerational memory works like contagion and as contagion. Candace's postmemories are inherited from her mother's memories of migration, and from the violence of capitalist and imperial structures that shape such histories.According to Hirsch, postmemory is transmitted through stories and cultural productions, so that this form of memory production is not merely an act of recall, but mediated by imagination and creation.23 In Severance, the transmission of diasporic affects and experiences often occurs through the internet. On a business trip to Shenzhen, Candace receives an email24 from the Phoenix printing factory's operations manager with a PDF attachment of the poem "Thoughts in Night Quiet" by Li Bai. As a follow-up note about her Chinese name, the translated poem is rife with migrant longing: "I look up, gaze at the mountain moon / then back, dreaming of my old home."25 The midway point of the novel is marked by a chapter formatted as a "Shen Fever FAQ" similar to what one might find on a public health website.

The email and corporate FAQ are online formats that facilitate transnational memory production in the novel. These movements parallel how the Shen Fever breaches East and West through the networks of information capitalism. Like Juicy Couture tracksuits, Candace's dead iPhone is haunted by the routes of its production, by the uneven circulations of racialized labor through which the Apple product travels from a city like Shenzhen, where the largest Foxconn factory is located, to the US. Personal and familial narratives of migration cannot escape these routes of capital. After she catches a young Candace playing Homeless instead of House, Ruifang tearily tells her daughter that they came to the US so that Candace could "study hard, grow up, get a job."26 Capitalism structures both the family and the pandemic's circuits across the globe, particularly via information technologies' production lines. In other words, the Shen Fever materializes and spreads the precarity engendered by and for the digital screen.

Virality exposes us to the risk of transnational, racial contact. While the ritualization of a "new normal" alchemizes risk into neoliberal productivity, lingering in vulnerability might engender a politics of solidarity — or, an "ethical mode of relationality," as Hoang Tan Nguyen calls it.27 Vulnerability to the border-crossing transmissions of racialized and gendered labor — including making art, making wigs, making clothes — entails an openness to losing the securitized fantasy of the self-governing individual. This presumed safety, it is worth recalling now, is afforded to very few through the uneven networks of globalization that position others as already behind, or out of time.

Danielle Wong is Assistant Professor of English at the University of British Columbia.

ALSO IN THIS SERIES

Jane Hu and Anjuli Raza Kolb
Right Time, Right Place

Eileen Ying
Coolie Pathology

Amy R. Wong
On Being a Person of Use

Eugenia Zuroski
The Tree at the End of the World

Aviva Briefel
Killing Us Softly

Dwight Tanner
Familiar Zombies

Summer Kim Lee
Too Much to Miss

Lucia Tang
Undead Language

Alix Beeston
A Ghost With a Camera

Aaron Bartels-Swindells and Jane Hu
Genre Fever

Dora Zhang
Staying Alive

References