Random, Assorted, Miscellaneous, Etc. II

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ Leave a comment

Time for another round of links to some interesting items from the last few days.

First, from the NY Times op-ed pages.  In “From Students, Less Kindness for Strangers?”, Pamela Paul reports on a recent study that claims the current college-age crowd is significantly less empathetic than their counterparts ten years ago.  The causes?

“We don’t actually know what the causes are at this point,” Dr. Konrath said. But the authors speculate a millennial mixture of video games, social media, reality TV and hyper-competition have left young people self-involved, shallow and unfettered in their individualism and ambition.

Not a surprising list of culprits, but here it just sounds like knee-jerk generalization.  Also, remember what happens to “the latest study” as it goes through the news  cycle.

Also in the NY Times, “But will it make you happy?” by Stephanie Rosenbloom explores recent data on consumption and happiness.  Bottom line:  stuff is out, experiences are in.  But money still can’t buy you love, and that, not surprisingly, is what contributes most significantly to enduring happiness.  Well, meaningful relationships in general anyway.

At NPR, you can read or listen to the latest installment from their ongoing series The Human Edge, “When Did We Become Mentally Modern?” The answer:  When we developed the capacity for symbolic thought.  Interestingly, this was a point novelist Walker Percy dwelt on at length in his writings on semiotics.

If you are at all intrigued by issues of online privacy (and we all should be, at least a little) The Wall Street Journal has brought a lot of helpful information together at their What They Know page.  Judging from this interactive feature, they know a lot.

Lastly, I’m going to be playing with the Tags and Categories again in the next few days and in the past this has triggered the republishing of older posts.  For the happy few who have added this lovely blog to their readers or those who subscribe by email, my apologies in advance if that occurs.

Jaron Lanier on the Religion of Singularity

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ Leave a comment

From Jaron Lanier’s op-ed, “The First Church of Robotics,” in todays NY Times:

WHEN we think of computers as inert, passive tools instead of people, we are rewarded with a clearer, less ideological view of what is going on — with the machines and with ourselves. So, why, aside from the theatrical appeal to consumers and reporters, must engineering results so often be presented in Frankensteinian light?

The answer is simply that computer scientists are human, and are as terrified by the human condition as anyone else. We, the technical elite, seek some way of thinking that gives us an answer to death, for instance. This helps explain the allure of a place like the Singularity University. The influential Silicon Valley institution preaches a story that goes like this: one day in the not-so-distant future, the Internet will suddenly coalesce into a super-intelligent A.I., infinitely smarter than any of us individually and all of us combined; it will become alive in the blink of an eye, and take over the world before humans even realize what’s happening.

Some think the newly sentient Internet would then choose to kill us; others think it would be generous and digitize us the way Google is digitizing old books, so that we can live forever as algorithms inside the global brain. Yes, this sounds like many different science fiction movies. Yes, it sounds nutty when stated so bluntly. But these are ideas with tremendous currency in Silicon Valley; these are guiding principles, not just amusements, for many of the most influential technologists.

. . . All thoughts about consciousness, souls and the like are bound up equally in faith, which suggests something remarkable: What we are seeing is a new religion, expressed through an engineering culture . . .

Technology Sabbaths and Other Strategies for the Digitized World

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 58 Comments

We avert catastrophes by making adjustments.  At times those adjustments are sudden swerves out of the path of some suddenly on-rushing disaster.  More often our adjustments amount to subtle course corrections as distant dangers become visible on the horizon.  My sense is that a growing number of people are beginning to make just these kinds of small but deliberate adjustments in their interaction with the wide array of technologies that envelop our daily lives.

In a remarkably helpful post (complete with charts), “Are You An Internet Optimist or Pessimist?  The Great Debate over Technology’s Impact on Society,” Adam Thierer surveys the major voices in the debate and proposes a pragmatic middle ground between unbridled optimism and reactionary pessimism.  In his view, the pragmatic middle should, all things considered, lean toward optimism.  The pragmatic middle is not a bad place to be, although my tendency is to slouch toward pessimism.  I attribute this to my sense that we are more likely to embrace technologies uncritically rather than the reverse, so it is important to advocate for a certain critical distance.  Again, this is just my sense and I could be off target.

One thing I am sure about though:  very few people care about the criticism you offer unless you also have some solutions in tow, practical solutions that can be readily implemented.  Now, in the case of navigating the world the Internet created, I’m not sure that solutions are quite what we’re looking for.  Perhaps the better word is strategies, and a growing number of people are talking about the strategies they employ to strike a more fulfilling balance between the technology in their lives and other significant priorities.

A constellation of these strategies can be group together under the heading “slow movements.”  These are strategies designed to counteract the break-neck speed of our digitally enhanced world.  In his article, “The Art of Slow Reading,” a somewhat skeptical Patrick Kingsley tells us,

First we had slow food, then slow travel. Now, those campaigns are joined by a slow-reading movement – a disparate bunch of academics and intellectuals who want us to take our time while reading, and re-reading. They ask us to switch off our computers every so often and rediscover both the joy of personal engagement with physical texts, and the ability to process them fully.

Along the same lines, in his 2009 article, “Not So Fast,” John Freeman advocates “slow communication.”  We have come to take progress for granted, but Freeman is surely right in observing that “the ultimate form of progress … is learning to decide what is working and what is not,” and, in his view, the pace of our digitally enhanced communication is one of those things that is not working for us:

The speed at which we do something — anything — changes our experience of it.  Words and communication are not immune to this fundamental truth. The faster we talk and chat and type over tools such as email and text messages, the more our com­munication will resemble traveling at great speed. Bumped and jostled, queasy from the constant ocular and muscular adjust­ments our body must make to keep up, we will live in a constant state of digital jet lag.

The remedy Freeman suggests is simple and yet elegantly stated,

The difference between typing an email and writing a letter or memo out by hand is akin to walking on concrete versus stroll­ing on grass. You forget how natural it feels until you do it again. Our time on this earth is limited, the world is vast, and the people we care about or need for our business life to operate will not always live and work nearby; we will always have to com­municate over distance. We might as well enjoy it and preserve the space and time to do it in a way that matches the rhythms of our bodies.

Like Freeman, Linda Stone is attentive to the forgotten significance of our embodiment.  In “A new era of post-productivity computing?” Stone takes issue with recent applications such as Freedom which are designed to “force” us to focus on our work by locking us out of the Internet for predetermined amounts of time.  She is concerned that with such an approach,

… we re-assign the role of tyrant to the technology. The technology dictates to the mind. The mind dictates to the body. Meanwhile, the body that senses and feels, that turns out to offer more wisdom than the finest mind could even imagine, is ignored.

For example, she draws our attention to something so basic that it easily slips beneath our notice:  just breathe.

At the heart of compromised attention is compromised breathing. Breathing and attention are commutative. Athletes, dancers, and musicians are among those who don’t have email apnea. Optimal breathing contributes to regulating our autonomic nervous system and it’s in this regulated state that our cognition and memory, social and emotional intelligence, and even innovative thinking can be fueled.

Neither Stone nor Freeman suggest that we abandon our technologies; they carry no pitchforks or torches.  Their very legitimate concern is that we not allow our technologies to determine the pace and shape of our lives.  Better that our lives be attuned to more humane rhythms that honor our embodiment and our personhood.

Jaron Lanier, a tech-industry insider if ever there was one, also voices concerns about the loss of personhood in his 2010 book You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto.  In a recent post at Text Patterns, Alan Jacobs helpfully summarizes the very practical advice Lanier offers for those interested in preserving their integrity as a human person while online:

“These are some of the things you can do to be a person instead of a source of fragments to be exploited by others.”

  • Don’t post anonymously unless you really might be in danger.
  • If you put effort into Wikipedia articles, put even more effort into using your personal voice and expression outside of the wiki to attract people who don’t yet realize that they are interested in the topics you contributed to.
  • Create a website that expresses something about who you are that won’t fit into the template available to you on a social networking site.
  • Post a video once in a while that took you one hundred times more time to create than it takes to view.
  • Write a blog post that took weeks of reflection before you heard the inner voice that needed to come out.
  • If you are twittering, innovate in order to find a way to describe your internal state instead of trivial external events, to avoid the creeping danger of believing that objectively described events define you, as they would define a machine.

All of it very good, and very practical advice.  Like Stone and Freeman, Lanier is not advising people to disconnect and unplug.  His advice is for those desiring to navigate the Internet world rather than retreat from it.  There have been some, however, who have experimented with the option of unplugging altogether.  James Sturm, for example, has recently concluded a four month experiment in Life Without the Web.  He has chronicled his experience through a series of columns at Slate (he used a third party to submit his columns).  He writes engagingly about his experiment and he appears to have inspired more than a few others (look up “quitting the internet” on Google, all the while noting the irony, but then keeping it to yourself because it is really not that clever).

In his last post, Sturm reflected on the possibility of writing a book based on his experience.  Feeling four months might be unreasonable for those whose livelihood now depends on the Internet, he wonders if a 30 day hiatus might not be more manageable.  But then he writes,

… even if a few of you could disconnect for 30 days, then what? It’s only a finger in the proverbial dike. One month might be a futile effort—how long until you’re back in front of the computer, incessantly updating your Facebook page? When dealing with something as powerful as the Internet, perhaps a more extreme measure is needed, a manifesto along the lines of Jerry Mander’s 1978 classic Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television.  I’m not hard-core enough to write a book that advocates living entirely without the Internet, but I do find taking such a forceful position appealing.

In the end it might be a less severe approach that turns out to be most helpful.  In a 2008 post on his blog MediaShift, Mark Glaser observed a growing trend “among bloggers and media people who are overwhelmed with the always-on nature of the broadband Internet and smartphones.  [And for whom] the overwhelming feeling, is exacerbated by instant messaging, social networking and services such as Twitter, that allow us to do more informal communications electronically rather than in person.”  It was a trend toward taking a “Technology Sabbath.”  Not surprisingly, it was also a trend emerging in certain Jewish and Christian circles.  In the two years since Glasser wrote, the circle of the overwhelmed has almost certainly expanded.

There is a good chance that talk of keeping Sabbath will most likely suggest a rather drab and joyless affair, a relic of a grayer age.  Either that or it conjures images of debilitating attention to countless puritanical  rules regulating the life out of an otherwise pleasant day.  We tend, after all, to equate restriction with loss.  But consider this alternative vision articulated by Jewish scholar Abraham Heschel in his class work, The Sabbath:

To observe the seventh day does not mean merely to obey or to conform to the strictness of a divine commandment. To observe is to celebrate the creation of the world and to create the seventh day all over again, the majesty of holiness in time, a day of rest, a day of freedom …

Heschel goes on to quote a Jewish prayer that describes the Sabbath as “a day of rest and holiness, a rest in love and generosity, a true and genuine rest, a rest that yields peace and serenity, tranquility and security, a perfect rest with which Thou art pleased.”

This vision of the Sabbath should resonate with those who may be experiencing tech-fatigue accompanied by that disquieting sense that their tools are running, rather than facilitating their lives.  The Sabbath was intended to remind us that while we must work and work can be noble and useful, we were not made for work and work is not our highest calling.  Taking a day, or even some hours in a day, to disconnect and rest from our technologies, useful and noble as they may otherwise be, can likewise remind us that we were not made for our technology and being connected is not our highest calling.

The idea of a technology Sabbath presents a number of advantages.  It is simple, practical, and effective.  It recognizes the significance of intentional practices in shaping our habits and our dispositions.  It avoids extremes.  And it creates a space for both  silence and introspection on the one hand, and on the other, celebration and joy in company friends and family.

It may be that deliberate and regular unplugging can help us rediscover a more humane rhythm for our lives, one that is attuned to the needs of our bodies and in sync with the world around us.  If so, then perhaps celebration, rest, freedom, love and generosity, peace, serenity, and tranquility may more frequently characterize our experience.

From Awe to Complacency

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ Leave a comment

Today, we no longer approach our many machines with awe; in fact, the more personalized and individualized our machines have become, the less humility we feel in using them . . .  Rather than awe-inspiring symbols of man’s power, they are merely extensions of ourselves, like the cell phone that helps us communicate or the microwave that speeds the cooking of our dinner. They are servants of our whims rather than objects of reverence.

In light of my posts the past few days and because Christine Rosen consistently offers thought provoking analysis take a look at Awe and the Machine at In Character, A Journal of Everyday Virtues.

Gods of Love and War

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 5 Comments

She was beautiful and alluring.  He was ugly and crippled.  Their marriage had been arranged and she resented it.  She began sleeping with his brother, and he caught them in a net — literally.  Having  caught them, he exposed them to public shame.

In rough outline this was the story of Greek god and goddess, Hephaestus and Aphrodite.  He was variously associated with blacksmiths, craftsmen, artisans, metallurgy, and fire.  In short, he made tools and weapons.  He was a god of technology.  She was the goddess of beauty, love, and sexuality.  She was the goddess of desire.  Her affair had been with Ares, god of war and Hephaestus’ own brother.  Although sorting out the different accounts on this point is difficult, in some versions of the story Eros, god of sexual desire and love, is born of the union of Hephaestus and Aphrodite; in others he is the child of Aphrodite and Ares.  Hephaestus is also regarded as the creator of Pandora and her infamous box.  It was also out of Hephaestus’ furnace that Prometheus stole fire to give to humanity and it was  Hephaestus in turn who is called upon by Zeus to forge the chains that bind Prometheus to his eternal fate.

Say what you will about the Greeks and their gods with their sordid sex lives and petty rivalries, their stories certainly had a way of touching the universal.  In the stories surrounding Hephaestus there is laid out for us a vision of technology in its various relationships to love, sex, beauty, war, disaster, hubris, death, and desire.

It was no doubt the image of Hephaestus, crippled from birth, that inspired the quip, “Technology is a god that limps.”  And while I would be stretching the details of the story to say that he fashioned a prosthetic for himself — he was technically missing no limbs — he did nonetheless fashion crutches and other instruments to help him move about when needed, certainly extensions of himself in some sense.  In the image of Hephaestus then, my posts “A God That Limps” and “Prosthetic Gods” are linked.  I did not set out to write a triptych of thematically linked posts, but having written the first two and then recognizing the symbolic significance of Hephaestus, I felt compelled to tie them together with this last reflection.

Embedded in these ancient myths is another answer to the question that began these reflections:  “Why do we react so defensively when we hear someone criticize our technologies?”  The metaphor of technology as prosthesis suggests that our defensiveness has its roots in our identification with our technologies.  The best of them become a part of us.  The network of myths surrounding Hephaestus suggests that our defensiveness lies in the complicity of our technologies with our most deeply and passionately held desires.

The marriage Hephaestus and Aphrodite suggests that the genesis of technology sometimes lies in a desire for beauty and love.  That Ares steals away Aphrodite reminds us that the warrior, whole in body and virile, is more apt to have the desire fulfilled (whether justly or not).  That Hephaestus is a maker of armor and shields and other implements of war suggests that the origins of technology are sometimes implicated in the military-industrial complex.  One here need only think of the Internet.  The Internet, might otherwise be linked to Eros; the tool fashioned as an aid to war famously becomes a site for the generation of sexual desire.  That Hephaestus is the maker of Pandora calls to mind the sight of oil-dark seas, rather than Homer’s wine-dark seas.  That he fashions the chains that bind Prometheus, the ancient symbol of human hubris, suggests a fruitless cycle wherein we turn to ever more sophisticated technologies in order to solve the problems engendered by our earlier technologies.  We create our technologies to fulfill our desires, and yet it may be that our technologies fan rather than fulfill, intensify rather than satisfy those same desires.

It was to Hephaestus that Thetis, mother of Achilles, came seeking a shield and armor for her son.  That scene inspired W. H. Auden’s mid-20th century poem, “The Shield of Achilles.” In its lines Auden poignantly captured the sense of profound disappointment that attended a generation which having placed its hopes in Hephaestus found those hopes smoldering in the ashes of smoking cities from London to Hiroshima.  In its closing stanza we read,

The thin-lipped armorer,
Hephaestos, hobbled away,
Thetis of the shining breasts
Cried out in dismay
At what the god had wrought
To please her son, the strong
Iron-hearted man-slaying Achilles
Who would not live long.

To avoid the same fate we would do well to resist technologies that discourage us from fashioning a world where, as Auden put it, “promises were kept” and “one could weep because another wept.”