Posting has been light of late, but will likely pick up in the coming weeks. In the meantime, here are some items that have crossed my screen recently that might be of interest to regulars.
First, Alex Williams exams digitally enhanced family time in his NY Times piece, “Quality Time, Redefined.” Williams explores the digitally gathered family which inhabits the same physical space while exploring individual digital spaces accessed via laptops, tablets, and smart phones. Physically present to one another, family members are dispersed in their own activities, occasionally sharing something of interest. According to James Gleick, who is cited by Williams,
In the near future, he said jokingly, “A new skill that will be taught by relationship counselors will be knowing when and how to interrupt one’s loved ones: Is a particular joke you’ve just read on Twitter worth her yanking out her earbuds?”
Despite the obligatory gesture toward “the critics,” Williams is sanguine. This arrangement beats the passive absorption of television and the forced and artificial feel of planned quality time around games or meals. It could be just me, but I can’t help but sense that such reassurances are like a tasty tonic into which a tasteless poison has been surreptitiously slipped.
At Crooked Timber, you can find an interesting post, “Against Studying the Internet,” about what is being studied, or what should be studied, when one studies “the Internet.” Rather than focusing on the immensely large and notoriously amorphous thing we call the Internet, or even more specific things like social networking platforms, it is recommended that the object of study should be the role of causal mechanisms associated with specific technologies. What does this mean? Read the post and, if this sort of thing interests you, the long, but substantive, comment thread.
Finally, Gary Wolf interviewed on the Quantified Self. Wolf and Kevin Kelly, along with others, have been working on a project to make the immense amount of data collected about you in a digital environment work for you. According to Wolf, “[Y]our data is not for your boss, your teacher, or your doctor — it’s for you.” Sounds good. Most obvious applications are, of course, for health care. Other potential applications?
Facial tracking to improve happiness.
Cognition tracking to evaluate effects of simple dietary changes on brain function.
Food composition tracking to determine ideal protein/carb meal ratios for athletic performance.
Concentration tracking to determine effects of coffee on productivity.
Proximity tracking to assist in evaluation of mood swings.
Mapping of asthma incidents and correlation with humidity, pollen count, and temperature.
Energy use tracking to find opportunities for savings.
Gas mileage tracking to figure out if driving style matters.
Sounds less good somehow, but in that difficult to articulate way I tried to put some words to in my last post.
“Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more,” or so David Carr seemed to say. In his latest NY Times op-ed, “Keep Your Thumbs Still When I’m Talking To You,” Carr rallies the troops once more to the cause of civility in a digital age. The battle has been raging for some time and some might think it already lost, but Carr brings us rumors from deep within the enemy’s citadel suggesting that even there the tide may be turning.
Alright, so the martial metaphor may be a bit overdone, but that is more or less how I experienced Carr’s piece. On more than a few occasions over the last several months, I’ve written on the same theme and advocated an approach to digital media which preserves the dignity of the human person, particularly the in-the-flesh human persons in front of us. I’ve done so mainly by seconding the work of Jaron Lanier (here and here), Rochelle Gurstein, and Gary Shteyngart among others. But it has been awhile since I’ve addressed the matter, and I have to confess, there is a certain complacency that starts to set in. One begins to question whether it is even worth the effort. Perversely, one even begins to feel that it would be rude to point out the rudeness of those who will not give another human being their undivided attention or manage to take their calls out of public earshot. Carr, however, gives the cause of civility one more public shot in the arm.
He begins his piece straightforwardly, “Add one more achievement to the digital revolution: It has made it fashionable to be rude” Nothing new here, of course. Carr’s anecdotal evidence is drawn from his recent experience at South by Southwest Interactive. Here he witnesses all sorts of activities that would neatly fall into the category aptly described in the title of Sherry Turkle’s recent book, Alone Together. It is the usual sort of thing, people distractedly gazing at their smart phones and tablets whether in the audience, waiting in line, or even participating on a panel. In this particular piece, my favorite moment of bemused recognition came from Entertainment Weekly’s Anthony Breznican describing what happens after one person excuses themselves to check their phone at the dinner table,
“Instead of continuing with the conversation, we all take out our phones and check them in earnest,” he said. “For a few minutes everybody is typing away. A silence falls over the group and we all engage in a mass thumb-wrestling competition between man and little machine. Then the moment passes, the BlackBerrys and iPhones are reholstered, and we return to being humans again after a brief trance.”
Yet, there were also signs of awakening. For example, in response to his own presentation, “I’m So Productive, I Never Get Anything Done,” Carr reports that,
The biggest reaction in the session by far came when Anthony De Rosa, a product manager and programmer at Reuters and a big presence on Twitter and Tumblr, said that mobile connectedness has eroded fundamental human courtesies.
“When people are out and they’re among other people they need to just put everything down,” he said. “It’s fine when you’re at home or at work when you’re distracted by things, but we need to give that respect to each other back.”
His words brought sudden and tumultuous applause. It was sort of a moment, given that we were sitting amid some of the most digitally devoted people in the hemisphere. Perhaps somewhere on the way to the merger of the online and offline world, we had all stepped across a line without knowing it.
Perhaps.
Lest we get too encouraged, Carr also tells of the earnest young man that came up to him after the talk to affirm the importance of “actual connection” while “casting sidelong glances at his iPhone while we talked.” Carr is almost certainly right when he suggests that the young man didn’t even realize what he was doing. The behavior is more or less habitual and thus just below the level of conscious awareness.
For some, however, the behavior is, in fact, quite conscious. Carr mentions MG Siegler’s TechCrunch essay entitled “I Will Check My Phone at Dinner and You Will Deal With It.” “This is the way the world works now,” Seigler brusquely informs us, “We’re always connected and always on call. And some of us prefer it that way.” Those are fighting words. They are also words that almost invoke a wearied resignation on the part of those who, in fact, don’t prefer it that way. This is the force of the rhetoric of inevitability: hear it and repeat it often enough and you start believing it.
Moreover, Carr notes that
… there is also a specific kind of narcissism that the social Web engenders. By grooming and updating your various avatars, you are making sure you remain at the popular kid’s table. One of the more seductive data points in real-time media is what people think of you. The metrics of followers and retweets beget a kind of always-on day trading in the unstable currency of the self.
That is nicely crafted and incisive metaphor right at the end, and, to borrow a line from David Foster Wallace, it all amounts to getting fed “food pellets of praise.” I would go so far as to speculate that the issue is neurological and I’m sure someone out there can refer me to a study that suggests a link between our social media interactions and the release of dopamine in the brain, or something along those lines. (Here’s a start: “All those tweets, apps, updates may drain brain.”)
In any case, the lines are drawn once more. The martial metaphors are in a sense already suggested by Carr in his closing lines, drawing on the observations of William Powers, he writes
And therein lies the real problem. When someone you are trying to talk to ends up getting busy on a phone, the most natural response is not to scold, but to emulate. It’s mutually assured distraction.
Mutually assured distraction of course alludes to the Cold War-era doctrine of mutually assured destruction. There may be more overlap between the two than even Carr intended, both are a form of madness in their own way. And perhaps it is time for more aggressive tactics. De Rosa, cited above, also wrote Carr the following:
I’m fine with people stepping aside to check something, but when I’m standing in front of someone and in the middle of my conversation they whip out their phone, I’ll just stop talking to them and walk away. If they’re going to be rude, I’ll be rude right back.
“Concerning social memory in particular, we may note that images of the past commonly legitimate a present social order. It is an implicit rule that participants in any social order must presuppose a shared memory. To the extent that their memories of a society’s past diverge, to that extent its members can share neither experiences nor assumptions. The effect is seen perhaps most obviously when communication across generations is impeded by different sets of memories. Across generations, different sets of memories, frequently in the shape of implicit background narratives, will encounter each other; so that, although physically present to one another in a particular setting, the different generations may remain mentally and emotionally insulated, the memories of one generation locked irretrievably, as it were, in the brains and bodies of that generation …
… images of the past and recollected knowledge of the past … are conveyed and sustained by (more or less ritual) performances …
I believe, furthermore, that the solution to the question posed above — how is the memory of groups conveyed and sustained? — involves bring these two things (recollection and bodies) together …
If there is such a thing as social memory … we are likely to find it in commemorative ceremonies; but commemorative ceremonies prove to be commemorative only in so far as they are performative; performativity cannot be thought without a concept of habit; and habit cannot be thought without a notion of bodily automatisms.”
Connerton’s observations, further developed throughout the rest of the book, raise interesting questions about the kind of social order that the personalization and digitization of memory yields. If Connerton is correct in his claim that a social order rests upon shared memory and that this memory is fundamentally embodied in a quasi-liturgical mode, what becomes of the social order when the memories we most obviously sustain are strictly personal and digitized?
As Connerton also notes in his introduction, this is not merely a technical question, it is also a political question. If social order hinges on social memory, then, to paraphrase Alasdair MacIntyre, it is worth asking, “Whose memory, which order?”
In 1903, E. M. Forster imagined the future. Teleconferencing, instant global communication, and televisions all make an appearance. Forster envisioned a networked world in which every person lived physically isolated from, yet at the same time, mechanically connected to every other person. Humanity had driven itself under ground and each person lived in a habitation like the one Forster describes at the start of his story, The Machine Stops:
Imagine, if you can, a small room, hexagonal in shape, like the cell of a bee. It is lighted neither by window nor by lamp, yet it is filled with a soft radiance. There are no apertures for ventilation, yet the air is fresh. There are no musical instruments, and yet, at the moment that my meditation opens, this room is throbbing with melodious sounds. An armchair is in the centre, by its side a reading-desk-that is all the furniture. And in the armchair there sits a swaddled lump of flesh-a woman, about five feet high, with a face as white as a fungus. It is to her that the little room belongs.
The action begins when the woman is contacted by her son who lives on the other side of the globe. His call is taken as a great inconvenience because it requires the mother to silence the music, dim the lights, and disconnect from the flow of networked communication. The constant wall of sound and sight is the norm, and the woman must press the “isolation knob” in order to speak exclusively with one person. We discover that this person to person communication takes place with the help of a device which projects a holographic image of the other person. The son, we learn, wants to see the mother face to face, and in the following exchange we begin to recognize the nature of the third main character in the story, The Machine:
“I want to see you not through the Machine,” said Kuno. “I want to speak to you not through the wearisome Machine.”
“Oh, hush!” said his mother, vaguely shocked. “You mustn”t say anything against the Machine.”
“Why not?”
“One mustn”t.”
“You talk as if a god had made the Machine,” cried the other. “I believe that you pray to it when you are unhappy. Men made it, do not forget that. Great men, but men. The Machine is much, but it is not everything. I see something like you in this plate, but I do not see you. I hear something like you through this telephone, but I do not hear you.”
In the world Forster has created ideas rule; physicality is taken as a great encumbrance. Explaining why she would rather not travel to see her son, the mother whose name we learn is Vashti, explains, “I dislike seeing the horrible brown earth, and the sea, and the stars when it is dark. I get no ideas in an air- ship.” And it is the ideas that everyone is after.
Each day they awake, they are bathed automatically, they are fed artificial food, and they tap into the network in search of ideas. They gather virtually for “lectures” to hear about ideas; Vashti herself delivers lectures on the history of music. When the artificial day is done, a bed emerges so that they may sleep and do it all over again tomorrow. People rarely emerge from their cocoons where everything is brought to them and from which they may communicate with everyone else. The “clumsy system of public gatherings had been long since abandoned” and while an earlier age made machines to take people to things, this age had learned the real purpose of machines was to bring things to people. They were “funny old days, when men went for change of air instead of changing the air in their rooms!”
Finally unable to convince Vashti to make the journey, the son disconnects, Vashti re-enters the flow of networked communication, and “all the accumulations of the last three minutes burst upon her.” Time goes on and Vashti carries on, delivering lectures and searching for ideas, all from her armchair. Meanwhile the “Machine hummed eternally,” yet no one noticed the noise for they had heard it from birth. Vashti, finally moved by a tempered maternal compassion, decides that she must go to see her son. It would not be hard since a system of airships still ran across the globe. Few ever used it, however, “for, thanks to the advance of science, the earth was exactly alike all over … What was the good of going to Peking when it was just like Shrewsbury?”
Travel in the airships exposed people to more physical stimulation than they were used to and it was taken as a great annoyance. The glimmer of light from the sun or the stars, the sight of others, god forbid the touch of others, and the smell – it was all nearly unbearable. Vashti regretted her decision, but pressed on. As she glides over the earth the narrator informs us that “all the old literature, with its praise of Nature, and its fear of Nature, rang false as the prattle of a child.”
As the story unfolds we come to understand that the Machine and the book that explains how to use the Machine to satisfy every need are treated with nearly religious veneration even though religion had long since been exposed as a superstition. Occasionally, the characters in the story break into liturgical exchanges:
How we have advanced, thanks to the Machine!”
“How we have advanced, thanks to the Machine!” said Vashti.
“How we have advanced, thanks to the Machine!” echoed the passenger …
Passing over one place and then another, Vashti sighs, “No ideas here.” Later she looks again, “They were crossing a golden sea, in which lay many small islands and one peninsula. She repeated, ‘No ideas here,’ and hid Greece behind a metal blind.”
When Vashti finally arrives at her son’s room, he informs her that he had been to the surface. Strictly speaking this was not forbidden and one could request a respirator with which to travel momentarily to the outside world whose air was taken to be unbreathable. The son, however, had found his own way out through an old ventilation shaft, and because of his impudence he was now being threatened with homelessness. Homelessness, we later learn, was akin to a death sentence imposed by exposure and abandonment on the earth’s surface.
The story goes on to its stirring climax, which the title already suggests, but I will not give away anymore of the plot here. Take an hour or so and read the whole thing for yourself. It is thought provoking and entertaining in equal measure. Like most dystopian visions of the future, it is exaggerated. And like Orwell’s 1984, the evil lies in a centralized, authoritarian power represented by the Machine and its Committee. But in a Huxleyean mode, it is a power that humanity has acquiesced to in its pursuit of comfort and its flight from material reality.
The body is the victim in Forster’s tale. The body has been starved while the mind has been indulged. The senses have atrophied in a world of ideas, or we might say, of Information. Even sex is uninteresting, having been reduced to merely a proscribed and mechanical act for the sake of propagating the race. At one point the narrator informs us that, “by these days it was a demerit to be muscular.” In one of the more striking exchanges in the story, the son tells of his first experience with genuine physical activity:
You know that we have lost the sense of space. We say “space is annihilated”, but we have annihilated not space, but the sense thereof. We have lost a part of ourselves. I determined to recover it, and I began by walking up and down the platform of the railway outside my room. Up and down, until I was tired, and so did recapture the meaning of “Near” and “Far”. “Near” is a place to which I can get quickly on my feet, not a place to which the train or the air-ship will take me quickly. “Far” is a place to which I cannot get quickly on my feet; the vomitory is “far”, though I could be there in thirty-eight seconds by summoning the train. Man is the measure. That was my first lesson. Man’s feet are the measure for distance, his hands are the measure for ownership, his body is the measure for all that is lovable and desirable and strong.
This is a remarkable passage for the way that it insists that our embodied experience is an essential component of our apprehension of reality. It anticipates the later philosophical work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and the even later cognitive science that has revealed the degree to which our thinking and experience of reality depends on our embodied interactions with the world and with others. Forster’s imagined world, however, was a Cartesian paradise. Ideas and abstractions reigned. The further removed from experience and the more abstract an idea could become, the better:
Those who still wanted to know what the earth was like had after all only to listen to some gramophone, or to look into some cinematophote. And even the lecturers acquiesced when they found that a lecture on the sea was none the less stimulating when compiled out of other lectures that had already been delivered on the same subject. “Beware of first- hand ideas!” exclaimed one of the most advanced of them.
Contemporary readers, as you may have already guessed, tend to read the Machine as a prescient allegory of the Internet. It is not a perfect allegory for, among other reasons, Forster’s network is not quite wireless, but it is remarkably suggestive nonetheless. Most striking perhaps is the degree of dependence upon the network of telecommunications exhibited by all of the characters except the son, as well as the ubiquity of the Machine’s stimulation represented by the constant, unnoticed hum. As he approaches the surface, the son explains,
The light helped me for a little, and then came darkness and, worse still, silence which pierced my ears like a sword. The Machine hums! Did you know that? Its hum penetrates our blood, and may even guide our thoughts. Who knows! I was getting beyond its power.
Many will also be jolted into startled recognition by the degree of agency that was handed over to the Machine. In a passage that reminds us of The Matrix, we read:
We created the Machine, to do our will, but we cannot make it do our will now. It was robbed us of the sense of space and of the sense of touch, it has blurred every human relation and narrowed down love to a carnal act, it has paralysed our bodies and our wills, and now it compels us to worship it. The Machine develops – but not on our lies. The Machine proceeds – but not to our goal. We only exist as the blood corpuscles that course through its arteries, and if it could work without us, it would let us die.
Later on we also catch a warning about the alienation from humanity and the exploitation of nature, all in the name of efficiency:
Year by year it was served with increased efficiency and decreased intelligence. The better a man knew his own duties upon it, the less he understood the duties of his neighbour, and in all the world there was not one who understood the monster as a whole … Humanity, in its desire for comfort, had over-reached itself. It had exploited the riches of nature too far. Quietly and complacently, it was sinking into decadence, and progress had come to mean the progress of the Machine.
Still tempted to go on telling more of the story, I’ll content myself by leaving you with this last line:
“Quicker,” he gasped, “I am dying – but we touch, we talk, not through the Machine.” He kissed her. “We have come back to our own. We die, but we have recaptured life …”
Now go read the rest, and then take a walk outside and hug someone — not necessarily in that order.
The key, Powers, said, is to create gaps between these periods of connectedness. Just as white space on a page draws attention to what is most visually important, digital white space can help us focus on those ideas that take some time to formulate.
Digital white space is nice metaphor and Powers’ himself ran with it in a blog post on his site. In case you missed it, you can listen to Powers’ discussing his very sensible approach to digital life with Jerry Brito in an interview we mentioned here a few months ago.
White space, however, may become increasingly hard to find. Marshall Kirkpatrick discusses Chetan Sharma’s vision of an uber-connected world in, “How 50 Billion Connected Devices Could Transform Brand Marketing & Everyday life.” These devices will include not only smart phones and tablet PCs, but also cereal boxes. What do you do with a connected cereal box, you ask?
“With a cereal box? You’ll communicate about health related issues, add social elements, easy ordering. A brand can build a direct relationship with the consumer without relying on retail stores. Look at the aftermarket, 30% of the diapers ordered are now ordered online. There’s no reason why that can’t happen on other objects. I think the chance for the brand to interact with consumers directly is huge.
Earlier Sharma explained, regarding the uber-connectivity he envsions:
This is where it needs to go and will go in 10 years, making everyday experiences much better and friction free. If a person has a desire to learn or shop or engage in social interaction, it’s right there. Beyond just doing things on televisions and cell phones, you’ll be able to do these things on a wall anywhere. It’s about reducing friction. You can accomplish any given task today with 50 different steps but this future of connected devices is all about making things much easier.
Good luck finding that white space. No really, good luck, because we need that white space.
After reading this last piece, I vaguely remembered a movie that gave us a picture of this frictionless world, and then it came to me:
, Steve Myers 
L.M. Sacasas 