The Ontological Insecurity of Disconnecting:

A Theory of Echolocation and the Self

Annette N. Markham, Ph.D.

This is (October 2020) draft writing, as part of my forthcoming book on Social Echolocation.
Part or all of this may also appear in other anthologies and journal articles.
Please contact amarkham[at}gmail{dot]com for more information on related publications.

In 2010, Booz & Co designated a new label for millenials: Generation C, for Connected.1
Between 2010-2013, this label evolved from a demographic to psychographic label to include
“individuals, irrespective of age, who use an abundance of technology during their daily
routine.”2 It includes people who are, or feel, constantly connected, carrying out everyday life
in digitally-saturated ways, and while connection is the core, marketers in the early 2010s
began to build a range of Cs, including “creation, curation, connection, and community.”3
This psychographic has grown globally; especially since COVID-19 has prompted most of
the world to “stay at home,” we are tied4 more than ever before to digital platforms to carry
out everyday social, work, learning, and leisure activities. Those who are heavily connected
are likely also recipients of competing and opposing discourses about what they should do
about being tethered: While marketers, governments, and platform providers continue to

1
I like this label even though it never really caught on. Read the original report by Strategy&, formerly
Booz & Co (2010).
2
Jenblat (2018).
3
Cf., Solis (2011)
4
I consider this a widespread fact. But for a good case, E-estonia dthe way citizens are required to
use the internet for social services. In a more theoretical sense, Sherry Turkle discussed this as being
“tethered” to the “always on” internet (in Alone Together, 2011).

1
nudge, if not require, people to be more (and more and more) connected, media panics
counter this discourse in waves, citing narcissism, addiction, and other ills as reasons to
disconnect; do more digital detox.

The importance of disconnecting, even temporarily, seems to strike nearly every participant
I’ve interviewed with in more than 20 years of ethnographies of everyday digital media use.
Whether the “I’m addicted to the internet” or “I really need to be less connected” sort of
statements are internally or externally motivated, their persistence is an acknowledgment
--even since the mid 1990s-- of the ongoing sensibility that we are “too connected” and
should be doing something about it. There’s an obvious simplification that occurs alongside
this sentiment; young people in my most recent ethnographies (2012-2019) tend to place
connection and disconnection as binary opposites. As if it’s a light switch. On. Off. This,
despite their own recognition, in their self-study of their lived experience, that disconnecting
constitutes a range of practices and the state of disconnection varies (Light, 2014; Dremljuga,
2018).

In this essay, I build on earlier work around the existential vulnerability of disconnecting
(Markham, 2017) to contribute to current scholar conversations seeking to build nuance into
how we understand and describe both connection and disconnection. I do so in a roundabout
way, using the existential angst that follows disconnection in my own studies to explore the
theory of echolocation, helping conceptualize what’s happening when we are
connected/connecting and thus, why disconnecting is so difficult. To introduce this theory
briefly (also cf Markham 2017; 2020b): We send out messages, post on social media, and
otherwise engage in the everyday activities of being with others online. These function like a
bat’s or dolphin’s shrieks and clicks5, creating waves of energy (think sonar or radar) that
bounce off others and objects6 in social space to give us a sense of where they are and where

5
In my work, I do not take up echolocation as a neurological or physical process. Of course, it may
well be both. Human echolocation is actually possible, demonstrated mostly by blind people and in
controlled lab experiments. It is rarely used to describe how humans navigate through physical space
and has not been used to describe human sociality, as far as I have found.

6
The term ‘object’ is misleading here, since most of what is being ‘located’ doesn’t have physically
obdurate properties. ‘Stuff’ could be a useful term here, as it is used in physics as an umbrella term
for various kinds of under or undefined matter. In the case of finding one’s place in society, we can
think of ‘matter’ as Latour does when he makes a distinction between ‘matters of fact’ and ‘matters of
concern.’ So our informational pings bounce off stuff that matters.

2
we are, in relation to these objects and others. This theory of sociality identifies and
elaborates a particular element of the human communication process and a key component in
our construction of identity and Selfhood: the response.

The theory emerged from my 8-year ethnographic studies of youth and their everyday uses
and lived experiences of social media. As part of their participation, they would disconnect
from all (or most) digital media for 24. During that time, they would generate elaborate
self-reflexive fieldnotes and later, record phenomenologically oriented video narratives. A
common phenomenon emerged time after time: Disconnecting for even short periods of time
generated a surprisingly deep vulnerability that participants could not rationalize or
adequately explain to themselves. This sentiment was not expressed as fear of missing out on
events or news about the world or updates on the lives of friends and families (FOMO), as
both they and I would have expected before the “digital media fast” experiment began.
Rather, it felt like they didn’t know where they were in the world. To be clear, this was not an
affective response focused on the idea that they didn’t know where others were, but they
didn’t know where they were and doubted who they were, themselves.

For most of the participants, this feeling doesn’t seem to last very long, as they (we all) adjust
quickly to changing circumstances. If we’re disconnected in one way, we find other ways of
being in the world. Still, this moment highlights a fracture in our ontological security.

At the surface level, this is a tiny moment of normal everyday life in the digital age of
constant connection. But if we look closely and unpack what’s happening to cause this
ontological insecurity, an intriguing interaction is occurring at such microscopic levels that it
can be difficult to notice, much less analyze: Continuous streams of information flow back
and forth in a form of call and response, back and forth. The content of this stream may
produce meaning in a variety of ways, but underneath, its presence provides a reassuring
buzz, a reverberation of informational echoes that constantly position the self in relation to
the world, proving repeatedly that the self exists meaningfully in the social world.

Echolocation is a type of interaction. The theory of echolocation presented here is grounded

in a (fairly) commonly held symbolic interactionist premise that the self is relational,

3
co-constructed in dialogic interaction with others. In the digital age, this process incorporates
multiple agential nonhuman elements in what is often glossed as ubiquitous, or “always on”
internet7. The digital era promotes a condition whereby near-constant connectivity and ever
higher speeds of connectivity build an expectation of continuous connectivity and an
accompanying expectation of equal, instantaneous information exchange through digital
media. This expectation matters in the timespace of the micro processes of being with, in a
phenomenological sense.

It’s well accepted by now that any interaction online includes humans/human,
human/nonhuman, and nonhuman/nonhuman exchanges via multiple layers of technical and
infrastructure elements of large media ecosystems. Especially when people are not physically
proximal, they must rely on devices, interfaces, and platform features, among other things, to
provide evidence of an interaction and give indicators or feedback at various points that a part
of that interaction has been completed and may be successful, given whatever criteria is used
to measure success. This includes, minimally, information that their message was delivered or
received, their image was uploaded, their post was viewed and liked, favorited, or forwarded.
These micro interactions occur across and among multiple elements of infrastructures and
with multiple agential forces, but the focus here is that each and all of these are playing roles
as interactants in the formation of the Self. These are aside from and perhaps precursors to
other aspects of Selfhood in relation to others, such as micro-coordination (Ling, 2004),
presencing (Couldry, 2012), co-presencing (Hjorth, 2005), or what we generally mean by
social networking or, even more broadly, ‘networking’. These interactions between person
and systemic elements are often invisible, and are designed to disappear into tacit practice,
since this is how effective infrastructures work best (van Dijck, 2014) to guide our activities
without our focusing on the practical procedures each time (Markham, 2020a). If we take
seriously that we are being trained through platform features and affordances, the reliability
of almost instantaneous platform-specific indicators of a response will build a reliance on
these indicators. But what do these indicators tell us?

7
Cf Turkle, Alone Together (2011); Nicolas Carr’s The Shallows (2010); Naomi Baron’s Always On
(2008); and even the older text on The Saturated Self by Kenneth Gergen in 1991.

4
Take for example the common practice in the 2010s of removing a post from Instagram if it
didn’t get enough likes in a short enough timeframe. As one of my research participants
explains in a vlog: “I finally post my selfie on instagram. I’m sure I won’t get as many likes
as the celebrities I follow, but I just hope that someone will like my photo. I guess I just want
them to know I exist.” They add, “I’ll stay online to check the likes. If I don’t get a lot of
likes in the next, uh, 10 minutes or so, I’ll probably take down the photo.” After thinking
about it for a few seconds, they add with a laugh, “I don’t know why I do that” (participant
H).

Thinking of this through the lens of echolocation as a navigation and orienting practice
usefully highlights how people find the shape and quality of their social body by constantly
assessing its positionality in relation to others. This is accomplished by a continuous call and
response pattern. As people respond to us, we have a sense of a social self. A sense that we
exist. The quality of this existence, or the shape and features of the social self, are in many
ways dependent on how the responses from others define our shape.

In my larger body of work thinking about relational or interactional (symbolic interactional)

models of the constant dialogic interaction of Self/Other, I have long wondered: Has adequate
attention been given to the importance of the response? The salience of this question emerges
from the advent of the internet, which highlights many taken for granted premises about the
basic elements of human communication. In the Instagram example above or any
communication environment where we don’t see others physically, one could argue that our
own existence is not meaningful in any social sense until someone else alerts us they have
seen or heard us, or otherwise acknowledges our existence in a way we can see/sense. In
Cyberspace, the condition of existence requires participation in a continuous cycle of
statement and response, Mackinnon (1994) notes, and the response of the Other is evidence
of this perception. We can and should extend this beyond the digital realm. A relational
ontology insists that “I am responded to, therefore I am.”

This may seem like nonsense to anyone who has a strong sense of self and doesn’t feel like
they need to be responded to in order to exist, socially or otherwise. To explore this, let’s dive
even deeper into the microcosm of the interaction, building from those elements that are

5
mostly characterized as responses, like the ping (and its echo). From there, we can step back
to consider the extent to which the response is essential to our very existential, or ontological,
security, or belief that we are a stable, unified, whole self.

The Ping
Pings are central features of echolocation. Radar, lidar, sonar, and other wave detection
systems are central technologies of the modern age. Lidar--light radar, is essential to
autonomous or self driving cars. Radar, which grew in importance after the Titanic struck an
iceberg, is the foundation for modern navigational systems, useful as much in autonomous
cars as finding enemy submarines during wartime. We still use infrared, radio frequencies,
and other forms of echoing signals for location aware devices. Sonar is a term we often
associate with echolocation, the method by which bats, dolphins, whales, and certain other
creatures navigate. The core process is “call and response” whereby signals are first sent out
and then interpreted on their return. A bat shrieks in the dark. A dolphin clicks. A radar
system sends out an audible p i i i i i i n n n n n g. The characteristic of the echo is everything
that matters in this process.

While the echo is a time honored concept discussed in ancient greek mythology (think of
Narcissus, or Plato’s cave), only recently has the concept of echolocation through sonar been
studied as a human sense (mostly in sight-impaired or blind people). These detection systems
give drones, airport screening machines, medical scanners, the ability to see, to make sense of
what is present. Interpreting the echos is a process complicated by the fact that the signal sent
out is never returned in a pure or simply reflected way. It might be reflected, as from a
smoothly textured surface or the signal might penetrate the surface it hits, whereby the signal
will refract, altering its character before returning an echo. The signal might hit other objects
on its return, causing it to bounce into new angles or scatter, which will influence the way the
wave returns to the source. This offers rich complexity to explore, which I don’t do in this
piece.

Digital echoes, or micro responses in digital interactions are most often called simply
“pings,” which is inaccurate given the description of a ping above. However, and using the
chicken and egg analogy here, because the origin signals (ping) are not distinguished

6
adequately from the responding pings (echoes) it makes sense to simply refer to them both
(pings and echoes) as pings. We can include in this such symbolic elements as: the red
notification dots on our smart devices; the hearts and thumbs and other emojis that we receive
on posts; the classic ‘poke’ on Facebook; the animated ellipses in messaging apps; or various
types of indicators that a message was likely received, such as old-school ‘read receipts’ in
email, double checkmarks in WhatsApp or a “delivered” notice in iMessage.

What counts as a ping differs from individual to individual. For some, a ping might seem
direct, like someone replying to an email message. Others might consider a ping something
like a ‘like’ or heart on their Facebook or Instagram post. Or their attention might be drawn
to the red notification dots on the front screen of their iphones, or be assured by the double
checkmark in WhatsApp that lets them know someone has received and read their message.

For me, the central importance of the ping emerged as a sensitizing concept some years ago
in the aforementioned digital ethnography of youth and social media use. In narratives
produced by youth (19-29 years old) who have conducted phenomenological studies of their
own digital lived experience, the ping emerges as a character when it was unexpectedly
absent or when it became overwhelming or incessant. Paul Frosh writes about this evocative
object in his work on digital poetics. And others have discussed the need and characteristics
of forms of interaction that I’m referring to as ‘ping’ even in the earliest studies of computer
mediated interaction. It is most often characterized as an indicator of presence or liveness
from the other end, whether that’s a person or a computer (as for the latter, Turkle’s early
1980s interviews and observations of children anthropormophizing their computers is a
classic example of how this works).

My ethnographic work suggests that digital identity is even more deeply linked to the quality
and characteristics of the responses to our pings than we have previously developed in studies
of digital identity.8 Focusing on this side of the interaction exchange, so to speak, we can ask
what is happening in and just following the moment of the ping, checkmark, push

8
Previous conceptual work has tended to focus on how digital identity is a matter of performativity
(e.g., Sunden’s 2003 notion that we write ourselves into being); that it occurs through multiple
windows (Turkle, 1995) or on multiple front- and back-stages (e.g., Pearson, 2008, drawing on
Goffman, 1959).

7
notification, or other form of informational echoes? These moments are when and how the
Self makes sense of what they signaled (cf. Donath 2007), whether this is a digital signal or
not, in addition to responding in some way, the Self is simultaneously building self awareness
through micro adjustments, as Weick discussed in his early work on the social psychology of
sensemaking (1969). This connects to recent explorations on distraction and affective
modulation by Susanna Paasonen (2016) or the phenomenology of “operative attention” by
Paul Frosh (2019). These affect scholars are among those who attend to these granular levels
where we can see micro shifts in affect. Sharif Mowlabocus (2016), for example, focuses on
the rhythms of what occurs in what he calls “interstitial time,” or “moments when we become
uncertain — about what to do next, about how to occupy our time, about how to ‘be’ in a
particular space, perhaps even about our life trajectories” (np).

What happens when you send out a signal and receive no reply? The absent echo carries as
much if not more modulating power than the presence of an echo, in that it creates a gap,
prompting operative attention through a notable silence in an environment that normally is
humming with the comforting reverberations of verification. Beyond its presence and sudden
absence, the frequency, immediacy, and quantity of echo all carry affective and informational
value.

The phenomenon of the ping is about motion, navigation, and positioning. This makes more
sense perhaps when we shift for a moment away from interpersonal communication,
returning how pings matter in navigation. In uses of radar and sonar by humans (imagine
someone staring at the radar screen on a submarine) or bats (catching tiny insects while flying
at high speeds in the dark), the information value of a ping is in the quality of the echo. The
faster the response, the closer the object. This speed is experienced also as volume or pitch,
since the continuous sending of a signal creates greater frequency of responding pings. At
very close range, this exchange can have a reverberation effect. This becomes important as
we turn back to the Self to consider where our sense of stability comes from, which becomes
interesting if we remove the physical boundaries of the body for a moment and assume that
we are informational beings more than physical beings. In this way, we only ever come into
being temporarily, but because this occurs over and over again in rapid sequence, it feels like
we are stable, standing still, or positioned, rather than assemblages that are continuously

8
coming into being as we move (are moved), adjust (are adjusted), and position the self (or are
positioned) in relation.9

Beginning in 2015, almost every messaging app incorporates the read receipt. These were
originally built into email systems and largely abandoned by the turn of the century. Why
were they revived? Beyond basic trending of tech development and in this case following the
lead of WhatsApp, these echoes provide assurance that someone is out there. That your ping
has hit something and you got, or would get, an echo. When we send out a message, we
receive multiple echoes to let us know the system is working properly (or not). This
reassurance builds more than trust in the system. It also builds trust in, as well as information
about, one’s position in various social landscapes.

Returning to the question of what happens when you send out a message and receive no
reply, let’s take for a moment the example of ghosting. Ghosting is considered a particularly
cruel behavior in relationships. It occurs when someone ignores you so completely, it’s as if
you’ve disappeared. Some describe this as being erased. Others say that the ghost is the one
who stops communicating, since they end up doing the haunting (Bruton, 2019) Mostly,
discourse about ghosting focuses on the person who did the ghosting or how it feels to have
someone else disappear. But looking closely at the narratives of youth who have been
ghosted, the lack of response fosters an immediate inability to know what to do next. It is not
just that there is nothing out there, but that our own agency is called into question.

Ontological Security
The concept of “ontological security” as elaborated by Giddens (1984) is a useful tool in
discussing how we understand the self. Simply put, ontological security is a sense of stability
that emerges in response to “the need to experience oneself as a whole, continuous person in
time —as being rather than constantly changing.” Although we might understand
theoretically that self identity is interactive and relational, our sense of security in the world

9
This builds on the work of Latour, et al (2012), who use the concept of the monad to argue that the
part is always greater than the whole. Their example that we are in essence no more or less than the
temporary object emerging from a database is instructive. We appear as an entity when people focus
on us, either in person or in a search. Our parameters are a temporary outcome of a particular
assembly of information, each time a slightly different set.

9
relies on our belief that we ourselves have somewhat stable boundaries (most obviously
delineated by our skin, the largest organ of our body). Even if we accept the idea of
metaphysicality, most humans also experience physicality most dominantly and this provides
constant evidence that we can be known to ourselves.

This understanding and description of “Self” or being in the world is sometimes reflexive, as
when we question our own position in the world, in the existential sense, but most of the
time, people experience themselves as unified entities unreflexively as a fact, as when simply
living everyday life without thinking too much about it.

Theories of the Self tell a different story of ontological security than people tell themselves,
and since centuries of thought have been devoted to this topic, I will just turn to my own
favorites to summarize how the Self is both stable and interactional, product and process,
entirely relational. Judith Butler’s work nearing the end of the 20th century extends the more
classic symbolic interactionist theories of theorists such as Mead, Blumer, and Goffman,
giving new depth to how the enactment of social roles --like gender-- is performative. Self is
interactional in that it is built repeatedly in response to the mirror of the other’s perceptions, it
is a temporary outcome of cyclical dynamics of structure and agency, and it is stabilized
through structured and organized routines so that what was once a negotiation of meaning
(negotiation of identity) or a subject position, becomes an objectified, reified Self. This is not
to say the Self remains obdurate or unchanging. But that it feels good to know who we are.
That’s the simple explanation of ontological security.

Like many invisible infrastructures or frames of being in the world, we notice ontological
security when it’s disrupted. Gergen would say it was broadly disrupted at the end of the 20th
century, an outcome of postmodernism’s relentless reflexivity on the construction of reality,
including the self. And as people become commonly aware of this,10 it undermines any
grounding one might have used prior to this epoch to maintain the certainty required to have
a stablized sense of self. Combined with endless perspectives from multiple different sources
of ‘truth’ at once, the objective self becomes just another matter of perspective. Or as he puts

10
Whether or not this is felt is another matter --certainly the luxury of class and
industrialization enables some people more than others to reflect on multiple realities

10
it, the “consciousness of construction” is sharpened and the “objectivity of self recedes from
view. And in the end one is left with perspectivity -- itself a product not of the individual but
of the surrounding communities in which one is embedded” (Gergen, 1991, p. 137-8, et
passim).

The capacities of digital social contexts of the 1990s augmented and actualized the ideas of
multiple, fragmented, proteon, distributed, or flexible selves. So the aforementioned
reflexivity of the so-called postmodern era coincided with the advent of the publicly available
internet, with its unique characteristics and features for communication and being with
others. To be physically distant yet intimately connected in synchronous or asynchronous
ways with others meant one could play with one’s performance of identity, which became a
common practice for those with means and leisure time. It was possible to build multiple
concrete identities in various digital places and be with others beyond simply building an
imaginary of multiplicity. Thus, people experienced and then shared their experiences of
radically moving beyond the self as a singular entity. Globally distributed networks of
connection highlighted in the 1990s what sociologists or philosophers like Martin Buber had
long known, that whatever we describe as self requires and emerges in continuous interaction
with Other. And if we have multiple relations, we are essentially multiple beings in contexts.
Sociologist and psychologist Sherry Turkle provides exemplary discussions of these
dynamics and practices in her 1995 work Life on the Screen.

Echolocating the self in social space

The theory of echolocation keys in on the specific process of locating the self through
constant comparison. This is not new; the reality of the self has often been conceptualized as
comparative.11 The sheer scale of potential and number of possibilities of comparison is the
mark of the internet age.12 At the same time, this comparison is not carried out at scale, but in

11
This description is vastly oversimplified since it is not the central feature of the chapter. The
“comparative” aspect I mention is much more complicated than a simple comparison. It is dialogic and
dialectic, to say the least. I point readers to authors who have talked about differences that make a
difference, such as Gregory Bateson’s early discussions of finding “a difference that makes a
difference,” Michel Foucault’s genealogical approach. Or for more recent nuanced treatments, I
recommend reading the work of many intersectional theorists, including Patricia Hill Collins.
12
Gergen describes this as the multiphrenic self, a condition whereby the individual has been split
“into a multiplicity of self investments” (1991, p. 74), largely because of a seemingly endless
saturation with possibilities for the social construction of the reality of Self. While Gergen is careful not

11
micro moments. And many elements of the situation stand in to interact on behalf of both
Self and Other, as well as function independently of any human counterpart, meaning the
performativity of material aspects of the Self may or may not be in the direct control of the
person from which this material originates or who it represents (cf, Markham, 2013).

Paul Frosh reflects on how digital media function as “poesis,” in that they are capable of
creation, production; to make, to produce (from the Greek etymology). Media are poetic in
that they “bring forth worlds into presence, producing and revealing them” (2019, pp. 5-8 et
passim). The opening vignette of his book describes a person waking up to discover that the
world has ended because there is no signal --in any medium. No television, scratchy white
noise on the radio, a silent landline, and obviously, no cellular network, no digital media.
“How do you interpret this sudden isolation , an imposed solitude that has everything to do
with the routine experience and expectation of connectivity made possible by your
communication devices?” Obviously, one must conclude (and Frosh speaks of this ironically)
that since the world is created and produced through the poesis of connecting, when the
connection fails, the world ends.

By zooming in on the interactions implicit in these activities, we can see constant comparison
pairing with the sending out of continuous signaling, trying to get a particular response but
only getting the response of “no response, which sends a clear signal, but not what the person
wants to receive. Let’s look at the person checking the phone’s cellular signal by sending a
test message to a friend. She taps out a message on the screen, checks the recipient, presses
the ‘send’ button. A ping sent out. It seems to work on her end, as the button lights up
temporarily (an echoing ping) and the outgoing message moves from the text in the
composition box to a message in a cartoon speaking bubble (another echoing ping). She waits
for some response. If we look even closer at the actions of tapping a message on a screen,
pressing the send button, and pausing after seeing the message in a new window, we might
notice these each constitute sending a signal and receiving responses from the interface and
device. These are processes and products of a series of echolocations. All three actions could
be equivalent of shrieks, if we think of a bat’s echolocating method. And immediately, we

to pathologize multiphrenia, he does emphasize that this is a dilemma, outlining symptoms such as
“vertigo of the valued,” “rationality in recession” or “expansion of inadequacy.”

12
can recognize that there is not a single shriek but a continuous series of pings and
responding/echoing pings. We could fall down a rabbit hole of micro processes, so let’s back
up to the higher level of simplification to say that a main ping occurred when she tapped the
“send button.” She received a response from the local system, indicating the message was
sent out, but that’s not as relevant as needing to receive a pingback from the external system.
So she waits. Failing to get a response in text messaging, she turns to another platform
through which to send out a ping. We might then turn to the device settings themselves, test
the wifi router, then turn to the radio, the television, and at last resort, the landline telephone,
if there’s one still connected to the wall.

Over time, we begin to understand, through all our RADAR, that there is nothing there. There
is no object out there off which a signal can bounce. This is where echolocation becomes
most effective as a heuristic device, when we considering what we actually receive and
comparing it with what we wanted or expected to receive. The typical scenario in an “always
on” or “ubiquitous computing” society is that these various pings yield responses at some
intervals, shorter or longer. If there’s no echo, there’s no object stopping our signal. So it
didn’t land anywhere. The first explanation is that we have not found the object yet. As we
shift our angle and send out more, continuous shrieks into the void, we wait for the echo. The
speed of reply will tell us how close we are to it, barring distortions in the transmission
process, which in this day and age of high speed networks, is less and less of a problem.
“Close,” in this sense, doesn’t mean physically, but experientially, where location is a
temporality that places us in a location relative to other relevant social elements. This
timespace is momentary, since we (and the rest of the informational network) are in
continuous motion, all nodes positioning and repositioning, being moved, positioned,
repositioned.

Imagine being aware of this process, knowing that pings always bounce off some object
somewhere, and in this case, that’s not happening. What would we conclude? That we have
not yet found the objects, likely. If the absence of a response continues for a long time, it can
begin to cast the entire system, network, world, or universe into doubt, including the Self.

13
Moving away from this hypothetical example and back to the narratives of participants from
my digital ethnographies, echolocation makes a lot of sense to explain the immediate and
deeply affective reaction of vulnerability of disconnecting. When one is accustomed to
receiving responses from the environment (a glossed term here), the absence of response
becomes something to miss. It can create ontological insecurity.

Ontological insecurity
We know that disconnecting has been associated with angst, disruption, and other
uncomfortable impacts on people (cf, Karppi, 2011, 2018; Light, 2014). In providing various
definitions of disconnective practice, Light talks about the geographies, politics, and agnst of
disconnection. Many of our ideas about disconnection rely on our understanding of
connection, not surprisingly. A key feature of connection is a sense of presence. Nick
Couldry (2012) talks about presencing, perhaps expanding on earlier notions of “perpetual
contact,” “always on” or “tethered” culture, or the “absent present”13. The power of the
vulnerability I witnessed is deeper than simply feeling unconnected, disconnected, or missing
out by being absent. If we get past the dismissive or explanatory vocabulary, like “Oh, it must
mean I’m just addicted to the internet,” or “I am feeling so much FOMO,” we witness people
describing complicated and often poignant affective responses and sensations where they
don’t just feel like others are missing or removed from view, but they themselves are missing,
absent, or gone.

“I feel nervous. It’s so quiet in here and I keep turning over my phone to see
if I have any notifications. Then I remember that I’m supposed to be on a
media fast and I turned off notifications. Why do I care so much whether I get
a notification? I think it is because it assures me that people are out there or
that Im still in here (points at chest in video)” (participant A)

It has not been fun. It is only 10 am and I don’t know how I will make it
through an entire day. I literally don’t know what to do. And I don’t mean

13
Respectively, cf Perpetual Contact edited by Katz & Aakhus (2002), Naomi Baron’s Always On
(2008) Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together (2011), and Gergen’s essay, The Challenge of Absent Present
(2002).

14
 because I don’t have things to do. But because I am disoriented. I just don’t
know why I feel this way.” (Participant B)

“I feel disoriented, apart from everyone and everywhere. How could I be so

addicted that I can’t be offline even for a day?” (participant C)

“I wonder if people notice I’m gone. I have never felt so naked and invisible
at the same time!” (participant D)

“It’s a feeling of invisibility, I guess, more than anything. I thought I would

have more FOMO, but it’s more like I’m ghosting myself. Where am I
even?” (participant E)

“I post because I just want people to know I exist, that I’m out here. So if
they don’t respond, I can’t know and that makes me uncomfortable. Really
uncomfortable. ” (Participant F)

“Why am I so nervous to be gone from the world? It’s not like I will be
disappeared forever.” (Participant G)
(various respondents, 2014-2019)

These are snippets in larger stories of angst that might last five minutes, or a day. They are
remarkable because they don’t only depict themselves as being absent from what’s going on
out there. They express profound disruption, anxiousness, vulnerability, and loss of agency.

Some statements stand out obviously as indicators that the self is absent and no longer visible
since they are disconnected, as when Participants D and E refer to themselves as invisible.
But Participant E adds the idea that they have ghosted themselves, which adds the element
that they are not just absent but have stopped communicating with themselves. “Where am I
even?” becomes the final thought of this videolog.

15
F clarifies that posting is a form of making sure people know they exist. The act of sending a
message is not enough to exist, however. F feels uncomfortable because they have not
received a response, saying they cannot know [they exist] unless and until they receive a
response. And since they’re disconnected for 24 hours, they’re uncomfortable. This account
resonates with Participant A’s idea that while offline, he won’t know whether he’s “in here,” a
poignant remark on the importance of the Other as vital to one’s own existence.

The use of the word “disorientation” was not uncommon. As Participants B and C use it here,
it points to being unable to fix oneself in a location in relation to other elements of the
environment. Orienting, if you think about navigating or wayfinding, is generally
accomplished through a process of oscillating from near to far, inward-out and then
outward-in orientations, or looking out toward the horizon and back at one’s feet to see where
one is placed, physically. “Disorientation” can also imply dizziness, as when one is
unbalanced. This is more than simply being absent from the digital social context, it indicates
not knowing where you are, or being nowhere, unable to place or position the self on a map
anywhere.

This dislocation is emphasized by participant G, who says they are gone from the world, not
that the world is gone. It was never clarified whether the use of the phrase “be disappeared”
is from English as a second language or a deliberate invocation of the phrase colloquially
used to describe when people are forcibly removed or thought to be killed by a dominant
group (like the government). But the condition is clear: this person feels they are “gone from
the world.”

There’s more in these (and many other) statements to analyze, but here, I use them to
demonstrate that in addition to the typical absent/present discourse of
disconnecting/connecting, there is for many a radical sensation of the self disappearing when
disconnecting, which highlights that connecting is deeply rooted to one’s sense of being.

Echolocating highlights motion, movement, positioning. If we specify Self as identification

within globally distributed networks of relations, and visualize that network in our heads as
massive and animated tangles of nodes and lines, this shifts conceptual attention toward the

16
fact that networks are not static but continuously shifting as nodes are repositioned and lines
grow shorter or longer, fainter or clearer. Moreover, this absence is felt as a loss of multiple,
rather than single feedback loops, which suggests the importance of the continuous stream of
calls and responses. The visual image is not so much an individual having a controlled
interaction with a single other person, but has been in a naturalized, tacit process of
continuously marking the sociality of the self by bouncing signals off multiple objects in
immediate or ongoing contexts. Until it is absent, this phenomenon of being constantly
unstable is not apparent. We live under the illusion that we are stable, the classic definition of
ontological security. When the actuality is revealed, it can throw us off balance, since we
didn’t realize we were in motion to begin with.

This is a fruitful way to conceptualize the temporality of being in a world of flows of globally
distributed networks. In this imaginary, the Self is a position in relation to other elements of
the network. If we focus on it, we may be able to temporarily stabilize it, long enough to take
a snapshot, but it is a bit like stepping into the same river twice.

Giddens’ (1984) discussions of positioning (versus position) are useful in operationalizing

how social roles might be better described as social positioning, since it occurs along a
time-space path throughout life. He describes at length how the self is always in a process of
positioning itself in relation to the image presented by other, drawing on Cooley’s notion of
the looking glass self (1902). One’s identity is continually positioned and repositioned, which
aligns with what Butler says in her later works.

Many who write about the self would at this point turn to terms like resonance and
reverberation to describe this process when it is working properly. Both terms have legacies
in music, sound studies, and physics. Reverberation implies a swift transfer back and forth of
information that creates a resonance. We can take this to mean in the present argument that
when the process is working seamlessly --that is, when we feel ontological security, the
frequencies of any energetic elements are a good match (harmonic, creating resonance) and
the reverberations are swift enough that there’s no sensation of an echo at all, simply a single
or continuous sound or energy.

17
Echolocation as a Symbolic Interaction Theory
This work is an extension of some fundamental concepts of symbolic interaction and in many
ways, returns to some of the ecological roots of interactionist theorists like Gregory Bateson,
whose body of work highlighted how a sense of self identity is never stable but an ongoing
dynamic of interdependencies within larger ecosystems of continuous inter/intra-activities;
Watzlawick, Bevin-Bavelas, and Jackson, whose classic 1960s text developed our
contemporary understanding of how communication always operates at a content and
relational level; or even Cooley’s classic 1902 theory of how we learn who we are by seeing
ourselves in multiple mirrors held up by others’ perceptions of us.

Echolocation addresses a concern I have held for more than two decades in my close-level
ethnographic, phenomenological, and sociological studies of interaction. How can we
effectively characterize the constant and incalculably swift back-and-forth of interaction that
occurs as we see someone responding to us, and then again, and then again, even before
we’ve finished a sentence? How do we get at these granular, microscopic processes of
sensemaking? These social reverberations are central features in the ongoing negotiation of a
sense of self, whether or not we notice these. The theory of echolocation --social
echolocation, if you will, focuses attention on how motion, navigation, and positioning in a
relational sense are essential to ontological security.

The interaction between Self and Other has always been more about the response than the
performance or utterance. In information theory, by someone like Claude Shannon, this might
be called feedback, which could be as simple as some sort of response by the system
signaling that some data, information, or message has or has not been received. In
communication studies, this response has been generally considered as a reply in the form of
a speech act, an utterance, or other symbol that can be transformed into language. George
Herbert Mead (1934), focusing on the importance of interactions between humans, theorized
that the response of Other is centrally important to the construction of Self. He would say that
“humans are talked into humanity.” What he meant is not just that a person talks, but that
through talking with others, they interact in a continuous exchange of symbols that build
meaning in the immediacy of the context and perhaps over time. This notion is foundational

18
to the by now well-accepted understanding that the self is at its core (whatever that is taken to
mean) relational.

Echolocation challenges researchers and theorists to reconsider the core elements and
processes in an era of continuous, machinic as well as human interaction in multiple and
massive networks of information flow. This doesn’t mean we no longer experience dyadic
(two person) or intra interactions, of course, but echolocation, the process of moving,
navigating, and positioning through radar-like call and response provides a promising model
to apply to how humans make sense of who they are in the complexities of continuous and
tangled data flows.

More importantly, perhaps, this research contributes to addressing a persistent

epistemological glitch in how the interaction is operationalized in (social) psychology,
sociology, communication, and media studies. Despite the broad uptake of the key premises
of symbolic interactionism, the interaction itself is elusive for researchers to capture and
study because our methods are more attuned to the outcomes of interactions than interactions
themselves. Specifically, social science methods tend to capture utterances or behaviors, both
of which are products of a complex set of interactions that happen more swiftly than we can
observe, mostly beneath the surface of visible dialogue. This is a continual challenge even for
ethnomethodologists, who are arguably the closest to these micro phenomena in their studies
of how everyday meaning and structures are organized in continuous interactions and flows
of action. Even in social network analysis, a popular model for analyzing social networks that
appears to show connections and instances of interaction between people, depicted as nodes,
in the network, the instance of nodes and lines only indicate the fact that a relationship of
some sort or strength is present, not the meaning of the relationship or the ways that
relationship was built or is being maintained. Whether this gap can ever be closed is another
matter. Echolocation simply provides a heuristic for adding and analyzing more layers of
granularity around the process, but cannot focus on the actual process itself, since it involves
humans and the continuing mysteries of how our mindbodies work.

19
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