10 Things Our Kids Will Never Experience Thanks to the Information Revolution

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 8 Comments

Early in the life of this blog, I linked to a very useful post by Adam Thierer at Technology Liberation Front mapping out a spectrum of attitudes to the Internet ranging from optimism to pessimism with a pragmatic middle in between. The post helpfully positioned a wide variety of contemporary writers and summarized their positions on the social consequences of the Internet. It remains a great starting point for anyone wanting to get their bearings on the public debate over the Internet and its consequences.

Adam subsequently included a link to my post on technology Sabbaths in his list of resources for further reading and he has since then, and on more than one occasion, been generous enough to kindly mention this blog via Twitter. He’s now writing regularly at Forbes and offers excellent commentary on the legal and regulatory issues related to Internet policy.

On the aforementioned spectrum, I believe that Adam positioned himself on the optimistic side of the pragmatic middle. I’ve generally been content to occupy the  more pessimistic side. Precisely because of this propensity, I make a point of reading folks like Adam for balance and perspective. I was not surprised then to read Adam’s recent upbeat article, “10 Things Our Kids Will Never Worry About Thanks to the Information Revolution.”

I trust he won’t mind if I offer a view from just the other side of the pragmatic middle. This will work best if you’ve read his post; so click through, give it a read, and then come back to consider my take below.

So here are my more contrarian/pessimistic assessments. The bold faced numbered items are Adam’s list of things kids will never worry about thanks to digital technology. My thoughts are below each.

1. Taking a typing class.

I took a typing class in ninth grade and as much as I disliked it at the time, I’m extremely grateful for it now. It made college and grad school much less arduous, and has served me well given the countless professional uses of typing (on a computer, of course). Kids may figure out a rough and ready method of typing on their own, but in my experience, this is not nearly as efficient as mastering traditional typing skills. Unless the PC vanishes, expert typing skills will remain an advantage.

2. Paying bills by writing countless checks.

I too write very few checks and have been using online bill pay for years now. But here’s what’s lost: the sense of money as a limited resource that derives from both the use of cash on hand and the arithmetical practice of balancing a check book.

3. Buying an expensive set of encyclopedias

I remember rather fondly when the encyclopedia set arrived at my house; over the years I spent quite some time with it. Yes, I was that kid. Never mind that, this is a point that easily segues into the larger debate about digital media and print. Too much to reduce to a brief note; suffice it to say that digital texts have not exactly been linked to a renaissance of secondary education. That price tag for the set was a bit stiff though, probably why I got a World Book set instead of the gold standard Britannica.

4. Using a pay phone or racking up a big “long distance” bill

No argument on the big bill, but consider that what has been lost here is the salubrious social instinct that conceived of the enclosed phone booth in the first place.

5. Having to pay someone else to develop photographs

Hard to argue against having to pay less, but consider the psychic consequences of the digital camera. We’re obsessive self-documenters now and have never met a scene that wasn’t a picture waiting to happen. And when was the last time you actually printed out digital photos anyway. Interestingly, vintage photographic equipment is making a comeback in some circles.

6. Driving to the store to rent a movie

Gone with it are the little rites of passage that children enjoy like being allowed to walk or ride the bike to the video store for the first time and the subsequent little adventures that such journeys could bring. Of course, it’s not just about the video store. But the trajectory here suggests that we’ll not need to leave our house for much. I think it was Jane Jacobs who noted the necessary socializing influence of the countless personal and face-to-face micro-encounters attending life in the city. Suburbs diminished their number; the convenience of the Internet has reduced them even further.

7. Buying / storing music, movies, or games on physical media

These same objects also functioned as depositories of memories … when they have their own unique, tangible form. Lost also is the art of giving as a gift the perfect album or film that fits your friend and their circumstances just right. No need, iTunes gift card will do.

8. Having to endlessly search to find unique content

Adam tells us exactly what is lost: “I will never forget the day in the early 1980s when, after a long search, I finally found a rare Led Zeppelin B-Side (“Hey Hey What Can I Do”) on a “45” in a dusty bin at a small record store. It was like winning the lottery!”

9. Sending letters

Guess I’m a nostalgic old-timer. But seriously, tell me who wouldn’t get a thrill from receiving a letter from a friend. Lost is the expectation and the joy of waiting for and receiving a letter. Lost too is the relationship to time entailed by the practice of letter writing and the patience it cultivated.

10. Being without the Internet & instant, ubiquitous connectivity

Lost is solitude, introspection, uninterrupted time with others. But in fairness this does bring that unique blend of anxiety and obsessiveness that the expectation of being able to instantly communicate engenders when for whatever reason it is not immediately successful.

Admittedly, this is hardly intended to be a rigorous sociological analysis of digital culture. The “Never” in the title is hyperbolic, of course. Many of these losses are not total and they are balanced by certain gains. But as I wrote my more pessimistic rejoinders, I did notice a pattern: the tendency to collapse the distance between desire and its fulfillment. We do this either by reducing the distance in time or else the distance in effort. Make something effortless and instant and you simultaneously make it ephemeral and trivial. The consequence is the diminishment of the satisfaction and joy that attends the fulfillment.

If this is true and this pattern holds, then what our kids may never know, or at least know less of thanks to the information revolution is abiding and memorable joy and the satisfactions that attend delayed gratification and effort expended toward a desired end.

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Be sure to read Adam’s response, “Information Revolutions and Cultural/Economic Tradeoffs”

 

Civility, Politics, and Friendship

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 2 Comments

I was not exactly a student of Christopher Hitchens’ work, but I often enjoyed his style, even when I didn’t quite agree with the point he was making. Fittingly, his passing occasioned not only sadness, but also beautiful prose. When your inner circle of friends consists of upper crust members of the English speaking world’s literary establishment, you’re at least assured of being remembered eloquently. And so he was. I found the reminiscences by Peter Hitchens, Ian McEwan, and Christopher Buckley particularly well penned and moving.

Christopher Buckley’s column reminded me of Hitchens’ classy obituary for William Buckley. And this in turn elicited the thought that I’d happily listen to Hitchens and Buckley go at each other indefinitely while I could hardly stomach two minutes of what we, facetiously one must hope, call a political debate.

To some, the problem with our current public and political discourse is fundamentally a lack of civility. Yet, this depends on what we might mean by civility. A friend recently suggested that the inverse is probably true. We are too civil to speak forthrightly and honestly, it is all obfuscation. In which case it is not civility that is the problem, but civility’s unseemly counterfeits — slimy flattery, ingratiation, or cowardice. In any case, compared with previous ages, our political discourse is remarkably tame.

More to the point, I would say, we have not so much a failure of civility as a failure of eloquence, made all the worse for the narcissism that frequently attends it. Few, I presume, would mind a little incivility so long as it was to the point and artfully delivered. Hitchens was the master of this sort of artfully acerbic incivility, and he deployed it to great effect. Nothing of the sort characterizes our political discourse. We are plagued instead with the shallow and inelegant shouting matches of cable news programs or that manner of speaking without saying anything mastered by politicians.

In his remembrance of William Buckley, Hitchens wrote the following:

“But on Buckley’s imperishable show, if you failed to make your best case it was your own damn fault. Once the signature Bach chords had died away, and once he’d opened with that curiously seductive intro (“I should like to begin .  .  . “), you were given every opportunity to develop and pursue your argument. And if you misspoke or said anything fatuous, it was unlikely to escape comment.”

Of what forum on contemporary television could this now be said? More likely if one failed to make their case, it was because they were shouted down by one of the other eight people on the “panel,” or by the “moderator.” And while some of have attributed the decline of public discourse to the entertainment values that drive television, the result has been anything but entertaining. It is all a great bore.

The problem it seems is that we have either a bland surface civility that trades in mere politeness and niceness at the expense of substantive debate and truth telling, or else we have an artless, narcissistic incivility that brings us no closer to substantive discussion. A little incivility by the former’s account in the service of an argument would be more than welcome if it was artful, but unfortunately we get only crass incivility masking the absence of argument and reason.

The better sort of civility depends on respect, humility, and courage.

Civility depends on a fundamental respect for the humanity and dignity of our interlocutors, independent, to some degree, of the opinions and ideas they may espouse. Perhaps the deeper issue here is the danger of constructing identity solely around political positions. We must be able to separate, to some degree, the person from the issue. If our identity has collapsed into our political persuasion in such a way that we cannot rationally argue about political issues without perceiving opposition as an attack on personal dignity, then meaningful argument becomes nearly impossible.

Humility is necessary to entertain the possibility of coming to think otherwise, and entertaining this possibility is indispensable to meaningful discourse. Dialogue is precluded by the belief that you alone are right or that you could not be wrong. If I were to believe that I see all things clearly were others see only partially and unclearly, then I need not listen at all.

Courage is perhaps the most multifaceted component of the equation. It allows for the possibility of speaking the unpopular and challenging the conventional. But while we often think of courage in terms of speaking, it is good to remember that it takes courage to listen as well. It takes courage to listen attentively to those with whom we disagree. It takes courage because most people do not want to be wrong about convictions that they hold dear, and the best way to ensure that you will never be proven wrong is to refuse to listen to those who disagree with you. This is why our “debates” very often amount to little more than sequential monologues.

On this account, the failure of our political class amounts to an inversion of the virtues necessary to civility; instead of respect, humility, and courage we more often than not have self-interest, arrogance, and cowardice.

I might also add humor to this list of needful virtues. That the most unserious of people appear to take themselves with such solemn seriousness is surely a symptom of our disordered society. In this environment, the only laughter to be heard is the scornful laughter of the cynic, or alternatively, the nervous laughter of a society realizing the joke is ultimately on them.

Perhaps all of this amounts to a validation of Aristotle’s view of friendship and politics. According to Aristotle, it was on friendship that the health of the city depended. Might we conclude that the failure of politics is a failure of friendship? Or better, that the failure of politics is symptomatic of the absence of friendship? We can at least conclude, tweaking Aristotle’s dictum, when people are friends they have no need of civility.

Interrogative Intonation …

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ Leave a comment

A little over a year ago I wrote a post on the popularity of the ellipse ( . . . ) in online communication after I began to notice how frequently I had been employing the mark myself. After laying out a rough and ready taxonomy of uses, I wrapped up with the following conclusion:

“It was the mark of a thought that refused to assert itself …. The ellipsis gives expression to a habit of ironic detachment and preemptive indifference.  And here is where I found the point of contact with larger cultural trends.  The mood of ironic detachment that has settled over so many of us was manifesting itself in three simple dots.  With those dots we were evading conviction, giving off an apathetic vibe, and guarding ourselves from seeming unfashionably earnest.”

Today, via Peter Leithart, I came across the following from John Milbank:

“People who fondly imagine themselves the subjects of their ‘own’ choices entirely will, in reality, be the most manipulated subjects, and the most incapable of being influenced by goodness and beauty. This is why, in the affluent Anglo-Saxon West today, there is so much pervasively monotonous ugliness and tawdriness that belies its wealth, as well as why there are so many people adopting (literally) the sing-song accent of self-righteous complacency and vacuous uniformity, with its rising lilt of a feigned questioning at the end of every phrase. This intonation implies that any overassertion is a polite infringement of the freedom of the other, and yet at the same time its merely rhetorical interrogation suggests that the personal preference it conveys is unchallengeable, since it belongs within the total set of formally correct exchange transactions. Pure liberty is pure power – whose other name is evil.”

I thought at the time I had perhaps overanalyzed. I now feel better about that.

Habit of Mind in Search of a Medium

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 3 Comments

“He has perpetually occasion to rely on ideas which he has not had leisure to search to the bottom; for he is much more frequently aided by the opportunity of an idea than by its strict accuracy; and, in the long run, he risks less in making use of some false principles, than in spending his time in establishing all his principles on the basis of truth. The world is not led by long or learned demonstrations; a rapid glance at particular incidents, the daily study of the fleeting passions of the multitude, the accidents of the time, and the art of turning them to account, decide all its affairs.”

Conservative diatribe against the tenor of political discourse?

Traditionalist invective against new media and the decline of journalism?

Reactionary complaint against the culture of blogs and social media?

Curmudgeonly rant against all things digital?

Not exactly.

This was from the pen of Alexis de Tocqueville writing in the early nineteenth century about the habits of mind induced by America’s democratic society.

Apparently ours was a temperament waiting for a medium to match.

Technology in America According to Tocqueville

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 3 Comments

Alexis de Tocqueville arrived in America on May 10, 1831. He departed on February 20, 1832. He spent 271 days in the United States; 15 others were spent in Canada. Then, over the next several years, he wrote one of the most perceptive interpretations of American life ever written, Democracy in America.

Tocqueville touched on almost every conceivable facet of American life with a view to understanding the character of American democracy which was still something of a novelty, and certainly not guaranteed to endure. He necessarily generalized from his limited experience, but he did so brilliantly. Reading Democracy in America today, one is left with the impression that he saw through to the soul of the young republic and many of his observations remain compelling.

The tenth chapter of the second volume (Democracy in America was a hefty work) is titled “Why The Americans Are More Addicted To Practical Than To Theoretical Science.” You may recall from the essays of Leo Marx on the emergence of the concept of technology, that in Tocqueville’s day technology had not yet taken on the multifaceted sematic role it serves today. Other words and phrases, such as practical science, were invoked to discuss the various realities that we would group under technology. In this chapter, then, we find Tocqueville turning his attention to the American fascination and facility with technology.

As with all of the particularities of American society that Tocqueville discusses, he is mostly concerned to understand the consequences of the democratic political culture on the topic under consideration. At the outset of this chapter, for example, he notes that, “Equality begets in man the desire of judging of everything for himself: it gives him, in all things, a taste for the tangible and the real, a contempt for tradition and for forms.” And so it is with the culture of American science and technology.

To begin with, Tocqueville believes that the work of science may be divided into three types of endeavor:

“The first comprises the most theoretical principles, and those more abstract notions whose application is either unknown or very remote. The second is composed of those general truths which still belong to pure theory, but lead, nevertheless, by a straight and short road to practical results. Methods of application and means of execution make up the third.”

He concludes that Americans are quite good at the third, do a passable job at the second, and are least adept, but not altogether incompetent in the first. As best as I can judge, assuming the validity of his categories, this was not far off the mark. Tocqueville connects this with the absence of a leisured class:

“Nothing is more necessary to the culture of the higher sciences, or of the more elevated departments of science, than meditation; and nothing is less suited to meditation than the structure of democratic society. We do not find there, as amongst an aristocratic people, one class which clings to a state of repose because it is well off; and another which does not venture to stir because it despairs of improving its condition.”

Instead Americans are promiscuously active and, according to Tocqueville, “In the ages in which active life is the condition of almost everyone, men are therefore generally led to attach an excessive value to the rapid bursts and superficial conceptions of the intellect; and, on the other hand, to depreciate below their true standard its slower and deeper labors.”

Moreover, Tocqueville adds, “A desire to utilize knowledge is one thing; the pure desire to know is another.” Americans are decidedly in the former camp. Put otherwise, all of this means that America is much more likely to produce a Thomas Edison than an Albert Einstein. As a generalization, this seems about right still. I’m hard pressed to name theoreticians that Americans presently hold in high regard. Perhaps Stephen Hawking, but then again, he is not American. We venerate the likes of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates instead. The inventor-entrepreneur is still the preferred American icon.

Further on, Tocqueville once again leads with his familiar rough-and-ready brand of sociological analysis:

“The greater part of the men who constitute these nations are extremely eager in the pursuit of actual and physical gratification. As they are always dissatisfied with the position which they occupy, and are always free to leave it, they think of nothing but the means of changing their fortune, or of increasing it.”

From this premise, Tocqueville then launches into the following observations which strike me as more true than not:

“To minds thus predisposed, every new method which leads by a shorter road to wealth, every machine which spares labor, every instrument which diminishes the cost of production, every discovery which facilitates pleasures or augments them, seems to be the grandest effort of the human intellect. It is chiefly from these motives that a democratic people addicts itself to scientific pursuits-that it understands, and that it respects them. In aristocratic ages, science is more particularly called upon to furnish gratification to the mind; in democracies, to the body. You may be sure that the more a nation is democratic, enlightened, and free, the greater will be the number of these interested promoters of scientific genius, and the more will discoveries immediately applicable to productive industry confer gain, fame, and even power on their authors.”

And that is why Tocqueville is still in print — his analysis still resonates even if we may quibble with the details. This is as succinct a diagnosis as one could hope for of the distinct blend of technology and economics that we might label America’s techno-start-up culture.

Tocqueville, incidentally, was not being wholly critical in his observations. He notes, for instance, that, “These very Americans, who have not discovered one of the general laws of mechanics, have introduced into navigation an engine which changes the aspect of the world.”

What Tocqueville could not quite anticipate is the degree to which technology would eventually drive theoretical science. In this regard, his analysis falls short. But his insight into the American temperament and its stance toward technology has proved remarkably durable.

One final note, given recent posts, Tocqueville’s analysis is also an argument against a hard technological determinism. The history of technology in America takes its unique shape, at least in part, due to America’s political economy. But, mindful of the reciprocal nature of technology’s relationships to society, it would be only fair to note that technology has since rather significantly reshaped America’s political economy.

Alexis de Tocqueville by Théodore Chassériau, 1850