Moderating Our Informational Desires

A summary of:
Schultze, Q. J. (2002). Habits of the High-Tech Heart: Living Virtuously in the Information Age. Baker Academic: Grand Rapids, MI, USA.
Chapter 2 - Moderating Our Informational Desires

Schultze argues in this chapter that with regard to our informational wants, we practice "pleonexia: a deep-seated desire for something to the point of greed" (49). It's psychotic, and it's hurting us mentally, as well as morally. "Mired in pleonexic intemperance, we tend to desire greater information without considering the virtue between excess and deficiency" (67). Schulze argues that "We need to learn how to moderate the transient traffic of bits and bytes so that we are able to listen to the nontechnological voices of virtue" (68). While I see where he's coming from, I think that disengagement does not solve the problem; and we need to consider how we can in fact design technologies so that they become voices of virtue themselves, i.e. they embody more spiritual, human, values.

One problem of this greed is that it leads to unchecked production of information, which in turn leads to a situation where we experience information overload. Schultze refers to Borges' short story, "The Library of Babel," where the characters are swimming in information but are in a state of "literary and psychic disarray" (49). There is a great volume of information, but no synthesis of it, and much of it is irreconcilable." The message for us is: "Unless we learn moderation, our lives will be a mishmash of messages and information that is ever more tenuously connected to concrete obligations, cultures, and traditions" (48). Microsoft Research notes in its 2008 Being Human, that cyberspace has democratized information production: "We are all fast becoming content producers, publishers and developers as much as we are consumers.... As we approach 2020, we are entering an era where we are much more hands-on with our digital materials, where the world of software is no longer under strict control of developers and engineers, and where we can create a more customised, personalised digital world for ourselves” (23). This seems like a great win for democracy. But consider that until recently, we did not value information production as much as we did the acquisition of knowledge: "People spent more time remembering the past - in ritual, song, and story - than they did trying to create new information" (50). What we are losing in our mania to produce is an appreciation of what has already been produced; and it fuels the ego, which in turn weakens our commitment to the community.

We have to wonder, then, what Metcalf's Law means in its statement that "the 'value' of the Internet increases at the rate of the square of the number of people using it" (51). Surely this is partially if not mostly or even entirely because of the information that these users produce. I think we have confused ourselves again in terms of value. This is because information has acquired economic value (think of the Knowledge Economy, which refers more to information - data - than knowledge - wisdom). More is better. Quantity over quality.

Schultze mentions a snarky little website "Recognizing our condition as tired Web surfers with little direction" (54), which greets people with the following:
We need moderation precisely so that we can be productive in human (rather than technological) terms: "Setting reasonable technological limits enables us to dedicate time and energy to noninstrumental pursuits that are crucial for living a good life" (56). And, "If more and more of our time is dedicated to exchanging voluminous amounts of information with impersonal databases, we will be less likely to commune responsibly with people in our own domiciles and neighborhoods" (66).

Quantity in the Internet immediately raises issues of speed, i.e. bandwidth. According to Moore's Law, "'computer power' doubles every eighteen months" (51)... but should it? Do we need this? Actually, the way we are consuming right now, we need this continuous doubling. But doesn't this signal addiction? Microsoft Research write, "Having access to email and the Web is becoming more commonplace on all phones, and this may increase the spread of the ‘disease’ of communications addiction. But as with any other addiction, there are ways of dealing with the habit. People increasingly do not feel obliged to answer email on the same day, citing email overload or by being more explicit about being out of touch. There are also numerous self-help books on what it means and how to achieve ‘turning off’. Filtering using social metadata is another possibility for people to use to manage their communication and availability better" (24).

And also, how can a model like this (Moore's Law, that is) be sustainable? Microsoft Research wrote in 2008 in Being Human that we are casually wasting a huge amount of digital space, assuming that it is infinite and free. It is infinite only to the extent that we are willing to pay for the infrastructure needed to support and manage this data (and presumably to the extent that the Earth is able to provide the resources needed to produce the hardware). The irony is that while an awareness of a need to check our digital footprint reintroduces the notion of scarcity into the equation; and scarcity leads to greater economic value. When we begin to approach the ceiling, there will be an even greater urge for people to colonize the remaining space. On the other hand: "Scarcity, not abundance, usually denotes value and leads us to be more thoughtful about our use of resources. If we have to invest our limited time and energy into an activity, we are more likely to be committed to it" (58).

Schultze asks whether this information is making us better or wiser. I think we all know the answer: No. Firstly, it is making it difficult to compose our thoughts. Havel wrote that being limited to only a few pages retrained his thinking: "In time I leanred how to think ahead and arrange my thoughts in thematic cycles, and to weave the motifs in and out of them and thus - to build, over time, my own little structure, putting it together something like my plays" (60). Self-imposed limits can only be conducive to better thinking. But as we engage more and more with technologies, we are beginning to think more and more like them, and as a result we are becoming more and more scattered. "Stephen L. Talbott warns that the database is a metaphor for the 'scattered mind - the mind that feverishly gathers trinkets here and there, convinced that, somehow, a big enough pile of such notions will magically coalesce into one of those new paradigms said to be taking shape all around us'" (56). Clearly, undeniably, this is the purpose of my blog. To amass informational trinkets in preparation for writing a grand PhD thesis. I see no other way of managing the great volume of data I am expected to assimilate in order to satisfy the criteria of academic rigor as well as the criteria of my interdisciplinary PhD program. I'm sure I'll look like the guy above in a few months.

Secondly, our engagement with the Internet is making us dumber. It's destroying our memories. Yes, our memories have always been fallible; but in designing technologies that remember things for us, we are less and less able to do our own remembering. The memory muscle is wasting away. (Again, hence the need to manically blog as I go so that I don't forget what I was thinking, or lose the poignant quote, heaven forfend!) Microsoft Research write that blogging etc. is seen as a way of augmenting human memory, providing new ways of recording and searching memories; but this new kind of memory may surpass augmentation and even replace our biological memories (72). The authors ask: "But just what benefits will these efforts bring us? Will these technologies really help us to know ourselves better, make our lives richer, strengthen our connections to those we care about and bring us closer to the world around us" (72)? They suggest that HCI needs to consider precisely which "aspects of memory will make our lives richer", which situations we want to remember and why, and whether in some cases it is "better and more desirable to forget" (72).

Scultze argues that there are several problems with increased bandwidth. One is that it "devalues human communication because of the ease of making and distributing digital copies" (58). This comes from Walter Benjamin's argument in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction that "the ability to mechanically reproduce cultural artifacts tends to render the originals less meaningful - less like special icons and more like everyday artifacts" (58). Also, "increased bandwidth further fragments society by expanding specialized messaging at the expense of shared culture" (59). Balkan's Law states that "'like interests' coalesce online" (59) - which is a different way of describing what Carr refers to as the great unbundling of the internet that leads to polarity of thought.

Schultze makes the point that we take a very laissez-faire attitude toward technological production because we tacitly accept the idea that the market will sort it all out for us. "In other words, we do not have to concern ourselves with the habits of our hearts, because the market is a sufficiently moral arbiter of information and progress" (52). I think what we desperately need is to pause for reflection before developing technology. The problem will be getting anyone to turn off and to focus long enough, as well as to remember how to be reflective, so that we can address these issues, particularly as we are becoming less and less familiar with the pursuit of creating "shared understanding" (62).

I wonder if one of the things we might want to consider is using the power of technology to trace the development of ideas and concepts. The fact is, we are more likely to turn to Wikipedia for answers than go back to the source... particularly because we hardly know where the orignial source might be. We often quote people who are themselves quoting other people's quotes of other people's quotes! This is a timesaver in the way that buying a Best Of CD is the way to get the best value for money without having to pay for crappy music tracks. But I think it would be interesting if we could add another dimension to each data point (or better yet, each concept or idea), which is the continuity of that idea through time.

Schultze argues that "technological language takes on a moral weight it hardly deserves. We equate informational abundance with goodness and progress, as if all information and all uses of information technologies are worthwhile" (56). I sympathize with T.S. Elliot's lamentation: "Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information" (56-7)? It is worth considering why it is that monks were only allowed to read one book a year (59-60). How deeply you can think about that book! Wow - to have the space to think that deeply would be truly precious. The closest I can come without joining a monastery is to do a PhD.