Interlude: pause for reflection

The chapters summarized so far described the spiritual failure of technology: "The ideology has encouraged narrow philosophies that deny the mystery of the existence of experience. A practical problem that can trickle down from this mistake is that we become vulnerable to redirecting the leap of faith we call 'hope' away from people and toward gadgets" (75). The second failure, according to Lanier, is behavioral, i.e. our designs are leading to the undervaluing of humans.

I am beginning to recognize the scale of the problem we have gotten ourselves into. This is not simply about technology. Our technology is a product of other societal structures. For example:
1. The more we offload our individual responsibility to the "hive" - e.g. instead of reading a book, we read other people's digested summaries of the book available online - the more we necessitate the design of the noosphere. This is problem of time, and it's a vicious circle.

Take the pedestrian case of the vacuum cleaner: this was advertised since the 1950s as something that makes women’s work easier, relieving them from the burdens of taking the carpets outside and beating the dust out of them. Whereas before, this was usually a two-person job, now thanks to the vacuum cleaner, the woman should be able to do this on her own. The reality of this technology in the home is that, yes, the act of cleaning the carpets was made easier, but this only raised the expectations for women’s responsibilities around the house. And the vacuum cleaner was only one in a range of technologies aimed at women around this time ostensibly to make doing housework easier. As this trend continued through the decades, the effect of bringing these devices into the home was to make individual tasks easier, but to make the job of doing housework on the whole much bigger for women, i.e. their remit expanded to meet growing expectations about their ability to perform tasks in less time. The number of things a modern homemaker is now single-handedly responsible for far exceeds that of the pre-technological home, and these added pressures have been linked to increased rates of anxiety for the modern woman.

The same false promise can be found in the aggregation of content in the noosphere. Seemingly this saves you time. Other people do the work for you. But the fact that you supposedly have this new time, you are now expected to do even more. Thus you now need the noosphere to digest material for you, because you don't have time to think deeply yourself. When I think about why I'm blogging now, it is because I am desperately trying to save myself time in the future. I have noticed in myself a worrying lack of ability to think deeply for long stretches of time. Much of my research activity involves becoming increasingly good at extracting information. I find it difficult to assimilate a book in its entirety; but I can easily collect quotes. Has this muscle begun to atrophy because of my reliance on technologies? To think! - our ancestors could memorize entire books verbatim! And I can't remember a one sentence quote accurately without referring to my notes.

My point is that we need to adjust the dial a bit in society and allow ourselves to use technology to make life easier without then having to fill that free time with ever more work. I think we must turn to Max Weber for an explanation of how and why our psychologies got so screwed up. The point is that whether or not we change technology, it will not actually change us unless we also change the social structures that created the state in which these soulless technologies were most likely to succeed. Now that's a huge problem, and I fear that we may just need to hit rock bottom before we realize the need to make such big changes.

2. One such huge structural change we desperately need is a new valuation system. Currently, money is valued as an end in and of itself. In order for a technology to be worth the time and effort required to develop it, it has to be profitable. To be profitable, one must design quickly, before someone else makes it first. This necessarily results in a decline of quality; and it means that it there is no incentive for designers to pause and be reflective, to consider the human implications of their design. In other words, we need a new incentive structure. And that's another huge problem. (Who is going to fund the development of a new incentive structure!!! - that seems to be a paradox.)

3. Something I think we can do immediately, however, is to develop new business models for websites. The fact that Facebook makes money from advertising has a profound affect on the way they treat their users: as mindless, easily influenced morons who must be spoonfed what they need (precisely because they don't know what they need as well as "social graph" analysis does). I don't think that we are that stupid, and I think we've caught on to the manipulation of web advertisements, as sneaky as they are. But I do think that being bombarded by Consumerism is unhealthy, and it certainly makes it difficult to have spiritual experiences in those virtual spaces.

4. And I think another thing we can do is try to conceive of new opportunities for self-expression where one is encouraged to tell his/her story, to create a personal journey, and to find unique means of representing themselves. We should do the exact opposite of anonymize people. Part of that is to encourage contextualization of contributions.

5. We should also avoid automating any creative processes. The moment a computer makes a creative decision for you, the moment you stop having to even consider whether there were other (better) ways of doing the same thing. This in itself will require a greater creative effort, which will enhance the experience of creating, increase one's feeling of personal accomplishment, and allow people to communicate themselves more uniquely (see 4).

6. I think we may even need to reconsider the "search engine" as being the best way to find information. The search engine is an extracting machine that allows us to skim along the surface of meaning (see 1), therefore using this as the dominant tool for finding information necessarily changes the way we think: we become "pancake people": our "complex inner density" and "inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance" becoming thinner and thinner (Carr, 2008). The internet, made navigatable by the search engine, "stresses immediacy, simultaneity, contingency, subjectivity, disposability, and above all, speed. The Net provides no incentive to stop and think deeply about anything, to construct in our memory that ‘dense repository’ of knowledge that Foreman cherishes…. On the Internet, we seemed impelled to glide across the slick surface of data as we make our rushed passage from link to link" (ibid). What would happen if we built the internet on a model that more closely resembles the way research was done before Google? - i.e. people recommending books to one another. We may end up with more personal interactions, that may in turn lead to the development of real friendships.

7. Lanier descibes at the end of chapter 3 what seems to be a spiritual engagement with a music forum. The key to this experience is the way in which the site is designed to allow people to share their passions, and through that process share themselves, so that they are not anonymous fragments but rather known participants in a community. Lanier says, "The oud forum doesn't solve the world's problems, but it does allow us to live larger than them" (72). The key seems to be that the site required the care of a single individual to cultivate a nurturing environment. In the cases of website design, the masses can't seem to design healthy environments, precisely because the individual contributors do not hold a great enough stake in the enterprise to invest any love and care into its development.