Miscellaneous

Google Glass and the Symbolism of Technology

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 12 Comments

Recently, I’ve been coming across more and more links to pieces written at Medium, a relatively new platform created by some of the folks behind Blogger and Twitter. Finally, I was curious enough to sign up for an account and request an invite to post. Once I got set up, I cross-posted a couple of items that I’d already written here just to get a feel for the interface. As promised it’s clean, attractive, and very easy to use.

Today, I wrote up a new piece on Medium that I just published: “The Technological Symbol of Our Age: How Google Glass Crystalizes Our Fears and Aspirations.”

It takes Henry Adams’ famous discussion of the Virgin and the Dynamo as a point of departure to talk about how certain technologies take on a symbolic, sometimes quasi-religious significance. It wraps up with a discussion of how Google Glass might be just such a technological symbol. It also includes some interesting stuff on the early history of the airplane in America. Click over and give it read.

Oh, and of course, this blog remains my primary online home.

Relay Failures

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 10 Comments

Years ago I heard someone say that many arguments would be averted if only we would use the word merely more often. Case in point: I titled my last post “Don’t Be a Relay in the Network.” My point could have been more appropriately stated, “Don’t Be Merely a Relay in the Network.”

The difference is not insignificant. Being a relay in a network is not necessarily problematic. We receive and pass along information, digital and otherwise, all of the time. Problems arise when we function merely as a relay, or, even better, when we function merely as a passive relay.

My concern stems from the habits I felt taking shape as a result of my own online reading practices. I found myself reading not for the enjoyment or value of reading, but simply to have read. I owe this formulation to Alan Jacobs, who, in The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, observes that we sometimes read simply to be able to claim that we have read something.

Jacobs had in mind lure of the prestige attached to being known as the sort of person who has read War and Peace or In Search of Lost Time or whatever happens to be trendy at the moment. There’s that, to be sure, but I have in mind the desire to have read which translates into seeing my RSS feed at zero. It is reading motivated by the pressures of keeping up with the digital news feed or fear of missing out.

When this sort of reading is coupled with the desire, variously motivated, to share what has been read, then it becomes reading to have shared. And it’s not just reading, of course. All forms of online content are subject to this dynamic. When this sort of dynamic drives our experience with online content, then we are acting merely as relays in a network. There’s something of Eliot’s “Hollow Men” in this dynamic: we’re shaped by the network, but we have no form of our own. Stuff passes through us, but we remain hollow.

Thoughtless passivity is one of the problems that attends being a mere relay in a network. The pattern of habitual receiving and sharing within the temporal horizons of digital culture tends to preclude the possibility of internalizing the information so that it is appropriated as genuine personal knowledge. Apart from this sort of internalization that is, in part, a product of time and method, what we are left with is a vague, generic awareness that we have at some point come into contact with some information. “Oh, I think I read about that a few days ago” or “I saw a link to that on Twitter” or “Didn’t someone post that on Facebook not too long ago.”

I would go so far as to suggest that the apathy or inaction in contemporary culture that many lament is partially a function of this kind of ambient awareness that does not quite sink in and become personal knowledge. Involvement and action are a product of personal knowledge. The ambient awareness that comes from functioning as mere relays of information lacks the power to motivate, inspire, outrage, etc.

The other danger is what we could call the conditioned passivity of being merely a relay. This describes the subtle temptation to pass along information that will be well-received by your audience. This is not unlike the “filter bubble” problem in which our personalized streams of digital information enclose us within a filter bubble or echo chamber that mirrors and reinforces our prejudices and blind spots. The risk of being passively conditioned when acting as a mere relay arises from the temptation to share and disseminate what will resonate or play well with the audience we’ve fashioned for ourselves. The temptation, in other words, is to tacitly bend to the shape of our bubbles or tune our online voice so as to achieve maximum echo.

None of this necessarily follows from reading online or sharing information through social media; but it is a temptation and it is worth resisting.

Don’t Be a Relay in the Network

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 13 Comments

Back when the Machine was the dominant technological symbol, a metaphor arose to articulate the fear that individual significance was being sacrificed to large-scale, impersonal social forces: it was the fear of becoming “a cog in the machine.”

The metaphor is in need of an update.

This train of thought (speaking of archaic metaphors) began when I read the following paragraph from Leon Wieseltier’s recent commencement address at Brandeis University:

In the digital universe, knowledge is reduced to the status of information. Who will any longer remember that knowledge is to information as art is to kitsch-–that information is the most inferior kind of knowledge, because it is the most external? A great Jewish thinker of the early Middle Ages wondered why God, if He wanted us to know the truth about everything, did not simply tell us the truth about everything. His wise answer was that if we were merely told what we need to know, we would not, strictly speaking, know it. Knowledge can be acquired only over time and only by method.

It was that last phrase that stayed with me: knowledge can only be acquired by time and method. I was already in fundamental agreement with Wieseltier’s distinction between information and knowledge, and his prescription of time and method as the path toward knowledge also seemed just about right.

It also seemed quite different than what ordinarily characterized my daily encounter with digital information. For the most part, I’m doing well if I keep on top of all that comes my way each day through a variety of digital channels and then pass along – via this blog, Twitter, FB, or now Tumblr – items that I think are, or ought to be of interest to the respective audiences on each of those platforms. Blog, reblog. Like, share. Tweet, retweet. Etc., etc., etc.

Read, then discard or pass along. Repeat. That’s my default method. It’s not, I suspect, what Wieseltier had in mind. There is, given the sheer volume of information one takes in, a veneer of learnedness to these habits. But there is, in fact, very little thought involved, or judgment. Time under these circumstances is not experienced as the pre-condition of knowledge, it is rather the enemy of relevance. The meme-cycle, like the news-cycle is unforgivingly brief. And method – understood as the deliberate, sustained, and, yes, methodical pursuit of deep understanding of a given topic – is likewise out of step with the rhythms of digital information.

Of course, there is nothing about digital technology that demands or necessitate’s this kind of relationship to information or knowledge. But while it is not demanded or necessitated, it is facilitated and encouraged. It is always easier to attune oneself to the dominant rhythms than it is to serve as the counterpoint. And what the dominant rhythm of digital culture encourages is not that we be cogs in the machine, but rather relays in the network.

We are relays in a massive network of digital information. Information comes to me and I send it out to you and you pass it along to someone else, and so on, day in and day out, moment by moment. In certain circles it might even be put this way: we are neurons within a global mind. But, of course, there is no global mind in any meaningful sense that we should care about. It is a clever, fictive metaphor bandied about by pseudo-mystical techno-utopians.

The minds that matter are yours and mine, and their health requires that we resist the imperatives of digital culture and re-inject time and method into our encounters with information. It begins, I think, with a simple “No” to the impulse to quickly skim-read and either share or discard. May be even prior to this, we must also renounce the tacit pressure to keep up with it all (as if that were possible anyway) and the fear of missing out. And this should be followed by a willingness to invest deep attentiveness, further research, and even contemplation over time to those matters that call for it. Needless to say, not all information justifies this sort of cognitive investment. But all of us should be able to transition from the nearly passive reception and transmission of information to genuine knowledge when it is warranted.

At their best, digital technologies offer tremendous resources to the life of the mind, but only if we cultivate the discipline to use these technologies against their own grain.

Kindling

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ Leave a comment

The Tourist and the Pilgrim is now available through the Kindle Store.

I’m grateful to those of you who’ve picked up a copy and spread the word.

A couple of observations: First, you all are generous. Almost everyone who’s picked up a copy at Gumroad has paid more than the asking price. Secondly, if you refine the category sufficiently, it’s apparently not that hard to crack a top 100 list on Amazon, at least temporarily.

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Also, thanks for your patience as I do some self-promotion. I can barely stand it myself, but if I’ve put the thing together, I should at least make sure people know it’s out there.

UPDATE: Well, we’re movin’ on up …

ranking

In the works …

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 12 Comments

For some time now I’ve entertained the idea of compiling some of what I’ve written here over the last three years and turning it into an e-book. In part, I’m motivated by the desire to give the work I’ve put into this blog a more finished and enduring form – or, at least what would feel like a more finished and enduring form. I’ve also been intrigued by the process of putting together an e-book and thought it might be interesting to experiment with it. And, of course, it would be disingenuous of me if I didn’t also admit that I’ve wondered whether putting together an e-book might not help finance what remains of grad school. My expectations on that count are, I assure you, quite modest. In any case, entertain the idea is pretty much all I had done with it. Until recently that is.

I’ve been inspired by Jeremy Antley to finally undertake the project. Jeremy is a thoughtful and articulate scholar of Russian history, games, and digital culture who blogs at The Peasant Muse and has written for some of the same online venues I’ve contributed to over the last couple of years. His post on the process of putting together an e-book was tremendously helpful and made the whole thing seem easy enough for me to give a it whirl. I picked up his book at Amazon, and you can also find it at gumroad.

So I’ve been working on a collection I’m tentatively titling The Tourist and the Pilgrim: Essays on Life in a Digital Age. I’m hoping to make it available in the next few days. All of what will be gathered therein, at least in its original form, has been and will remain freely available on this site. But those of you who would appreciate a collection of the better work that’s passed through these pages and an opportunity to support that work, stay tuned, it’s forthcoming.

Update:

One more, possibly oddball thought. I imagine this is the sort of thing a publisher would traditionally do, so this might be a little weird, but, whatever, these are weird times: If you’ve been reading The Frailest Thing for awhile and would be interested in giving me a “back cover blurb” sort of endorsement drop me an email at LMSacasas at gmail dot com. Cheers!