A summary of:
Paul Hawken (2004). Natural Capitalism: Brother, Can You Spare a Paradigm? In Ausubel, K. & Harpignies, J.P., eds., Nature’s Operating Instructions: The True Biotechnologies. Sierra Club Books: San Francisco.
&
Amory and Hunter Lovins (2004). Natural Capitalism: Where the Rubber Meets the Road In Ausubel, K. & Harpignies, J.P., eds., Nature’s Operating Instructions: The True Biotechnologies. Sierra Club Books: San Francisco.
I read Hawken’s (with the Lovins’) book, Natural Capitalism. It was quite long, and a little bit tedious. The gist of it, what redeemed it, can be found in these much shorter chapters, summarized here.
First, a definition, from the Lovins’ chapter: “Natural capitalism doesn’t just mean reducing waste; it means eliminating the whole concept of waste through better design, design that adopts biological patters, processes, and often materials. This approach implies eliminating any industrial output that represents a disposal cost rather than a salable product” (169). The Lovins’ argue: “We believe the leaders in waste reduction are going to be in the private sector, but there remains a vital role for governments and civil society. It’s important to remember the purposes and limitations of markets. Markets make a great servant but a bad master and a worse religion. Markets produce value, but only communities and families produce values. And a society that tries to substitute markets for politics, ethics, or faith is seriously adrift” (174). (To me, this suggests that the whole free market ethos that underpins the Internet – e.g. Net Neutrality – needs to be reconsidered.)
Hawken’s definition is this: “Natural capitalism as a metaphor is an attempt to describe an integrated application and program of the economies of restoration. Rather than being an (149) approach to sustainability, natural capitalism attempts to describe a practical relationship between human beings and the biosphere that will improve the quality of life for all while dramatically reducing our impact on living systems and eventually increasing ecosystem viability and productivity” (150). Hawkens draws on the wisdom of C.S. Lewis, who wrote in The Abolition of Man, “What we call Man’s power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.” Hawkens responds: “It is the power of corporations over people and place. The world’s top 200 companies have twice the assets of 80 percent of the world’s people. This power was never granted” (149).
Another key element of natural capitalism is that, “in the developed world, the limiting factor to human well-being and development is no longer human-made capital; it is life itself. As more people place greater strain on living systems, (152) limits to prosperity are coming to be determined by scarcities of natural systems rather than industrial prowess. …Unlike traditional economic factors of production, these biological limiting factors are not fungible; in other words, they can’t be replaced” (153). And what of our human capital? “We have the highest rates of abortion, drug use, violence, gangs, and teen pregnancies of any industrial nation. The list goes on. So what does that tell us? What young people are saying to us is that they don’t want to be here. At all. On earth. In the United States, besides injury, the greatest cause of mortality among teenagers between ten and fourteen years old is suicide. Not drugs, not violence, not AIDS. Suicide” (156). Surely this is a threat to the natural capital of humans – and our mental health is a necessary consideration of any responsible action. And anyway, even if we argue that humans are better off with certain technological advances, is this really worth it in the grand scheme of things? Hawken asks the most perfect question: “Consider the idea of road warriors rushing onto the red-eye with their Palm Pilots, their laptops, their cell phones – what’s that all about? So we ask the question, Do we really want to be more productive? Do we really want to swap more productivity for the loss of our forests, our riparian systems, our resources? I don’t think so” (152)….“So the real question is, What are we doing? We’re creating a world in which we cannot spend enough time with our children. To accomplish that, we are sacking the planet” (152).
Another element is: “if we’re going to create an economic system that has any semblance or resemblance to biological systems, we can no longer think of ourselves as episodic manufacturers of goods but must recast ourselves as deliverers of a flow of services. After all, that flow of services is what we receive from nature. The materials, molecules, and compounds themselves must be carefully marshaled and monitored. Either they must be made from living systems and be capable of being biodegraded or reconstituted, or they must be technical nutrients that are returned to industrial systems in a closed loop. There are no exceptions. There is no landfill in this society” (155).
And Hawken also argues that we must restore natural capital, (although he doesn’t phrase it like this) as an indicator of progress: “We cannot simply organize ourselves to be effective, efficient, or productive. We have to organize our industrial systems in such a way that our oceans, our soil, our waters, our riparian systems, and our climates are restored, step by step by step. Restoration has to be a natural outcome of what we do, not an altruistic of a legislated outcome” (155).
This is Hawken’s grand, inspiring vision:
“What is possible in fifty years is a world that is wonderfully messy, shockingly magical, and deliriously creative. It doesn’t fit a single scenario written anywhere by anyone. It is not a world defined by technologies, tools, and products. It is not a world that can be measured by money. It is not a world that can be reduced to demographics. It will be a world defined by the acts of restor-(159)ing life on earth, a world that celebrates dance, costume, song, ritual, magic, prayer, worship, and play. It will be a world that cares for its old people, its children, and its storytellers. This is the work of carefully reconstituting what has been lost by creating conditions conducive to life on earth. It is born of a culture in which no materials used in industry cause damage to anyone, now or later. It is created by a society that imitates and emulates the design brilliance of nature that we reside within and walk upon and have never fully appreciated. Ours is a time of extraordinary work, because it is not the work of a decade or a century, but the work of a millennium” (160).
Monday, August 29, 2011
Ethnospere and ethnocide
A summary of:
Wade Davis (2004). A World Made of Stories. In Ausubel, K. & Harpignies, J.P., eds., Nature’s Operating Instructions: The True Biotechnologies. Sierra Club Books: San Francisco.
In this chapter, Davis (re-)introduces his term ‘ethnosphere’, “to describe a concept suggesting that just as there is a biosphere, a biological web of life, so too there is a cultural fabric that envelops the earth, a cultural web of life, the sum total of all thoughts and dreams, beliefs, myths, intuitions, and inspirations brought into being by the human imagination since the dawn of consciousness. The ethnosphere is humanity’s great legacy. It is the product of our dreams, the embodiment of our hopes, the symbol of all that we are and all that we have created as a wildly inquisitive and astonishingly adaptive species” (215).
The central argument about the importance of preserving this ethnosphere comes from Margaret Mead: “Just before she died, anthropologist Margaret Mead spoke of her concern that as we drift toward a more homogenous world, we are laying the foundations of a blandly amorphous and singularly generic modern culture that ultimately will have no rivals. The entire imagination of humanity, she feared, might become confined within the limits of a single intellectual and spiritual modality. Her nightmare was the possibility that we might wake up one day and not even remember what had been lost” (218). And what would be lost? “Every view of the world that fades away, every culture that disappears, diminishes life’s possibilities and reduces the human repertoire of adaptive responses to the problems that confront us all. Knowledge is lost, not only of the natural world but also of the spirit realms, intuitions about the meaning of the cosmos, insights into the very nature of existence. This is why it matters that we tell these stories and make these journeys” (226). And importantly, he argues: “Whether this notion [i.e. the mythology] is ‘true’ or not is hardly the point. What is interesting and consequential is how a people’s conviction or belief mediates the relationship between human society and the natural world. In the high Andes, people believe that a mountain is an Apu, a sacred being that has the power to (225) direct the destiny of all those living within the shadow of its slopes. A young child coming of age in such a place will have a profoundly different relationship to that mountain than a kid from Montana raised to believe that a mountain is a pile of inert rock ready to be mined. Is a mountain a god or a pile of ore? Ultimately, who is to say? The important point is how the belief itself mediates and defines the relationship between the human and the natural landmark” (226).
But because of our faith in the mythology of progress (in Greer’s The Long Descent), we believe we are continually improving upon how to live on this planet. Davis reminds us: “Human beings as a recognizable social species have been around for perhaps 600,000 years. The Neolithic revolution, which gave us agriculture and with it surplus, hierarchy, specialization, and sedentary life, occurred only 10,000 years ago. Modern industrial society is but 300 years old. This shallow history does not suggest to me that our current way of life has all the answers for all the challenges that will confront us as a species in the coming millennia” (218). Even worse, however, there is a Western elitism at the heart of this so-called “progress”, which Davis describes (only to shatter) thusly: “There lingers a conceit that while we have been busy inventing the Internet or placing men on the moon, other societies have somehow been intellectually idle. This is simply not true. Anthropology has long taught that whether a people’s mental potential goes into technical wizardry or unraveling the complex threads of memory inherent in a myth is merely a matter of cultural choice and orientation. In the Sahara, for example, the raw potential of the human mind has been tapped in astonishing ways, some metaphysical, some boldly concrete, like the very capacity to orient oneself in an endless expanse of sand where there is no separation between horizon and sky, nothing on a human scale, no point of reference save the hallucinogenic waves of delirium that sweep over the unfettered imagination when the throat is scorched with a thirst impossible to describe, impossible to bear” (221). And then Davis writes the most wonderful few sentences:
“Genocide, the physical extermination of a people, is universally condemned by civilized societies. Yet ethnocide, the destruction of a people’s way of life, is often endorsed as appropriate development policy. Who is to say that American culture matters more than that of the Tuareg? At a more fundamental level, we have to ask ourselves, What kind of world do we want to live in? Most Americans will never see a painting by Monet or hear a symphony by Mozart, but does that mean that the world would not be a lesser place without these artists and their unique interpretations of reality?” (224).
What does this mean for the development of Web technology? Well Davis has a quite easily realizable plan: “to turn the Internet into a virtual campfire around which we might gather to share tales from all reaches of the ethnosphere” (224). I think this would be a noble effort, but it seems too limited by what we know of as the Internet now. I think what this chapter suggests, instead, is that we need to consider alternative visions for the Internet that make sense within other worldviews, in a way that doesn’t erode these cultures and homogenize them all into the kind of culture that created the Internet as it is now. And I think it means not encouraging uptake of our current Internet by other cultures as a desperate attempt for them to be heard. Maybe what it means, ultimately, is reconceptualizing cyberspace as something that need not be a purely technological creation. How would other cultures think about cyberspace?
(Davis also points out the fundamental flaw in the Western way of living, which is that it only works by establishing ranks of haves and have-nots, winners and losers; therefore it is foolish to think that it is our great philanthropic mission to bring Western development to the rest of the world. “Indeed the Western model of development has failed in so many places largely because it has been based on the false promise that people who follow its prescriptive dictates will in time achieve the material prosperity enjoyed by a handful of Western nations. Even were this possible, it is not at all clear that it would be desirable. To raise consumption of energy and materials throughout the world to Western levels, given current population projections, would require the resources of four planet earths by the year 2100. To do so with the one world we have would so severely compromise the biosphere that the earth would be unrecognizable. In reality, development for the vast majority of the world’s peoples has been a process in which the individual is torn from his past and propelled into an uncertain future, only to secure a place on the bottom rung of an economic ladder that leads nowhere” (217).)
(Davis also touches on the alienation as mentioned in the previous post: “We long ago liberated the individual from the constraints of community and with such finality that we forget what an astonishing innovation it represented in human affairs…. We forget that in most of the world the community still dominates, for without its strength the individual cannot survive. In embracing the cult of the individual, we secure an irresistible sense of liberation and freedom, but it comes at a cost, as is evident in the alienation and isolation that characterize too many lives in the West” (222).)
Wade Davis (2004). A World Made of Stories. In Ausubel, K. & Harpignies, J.P., eds., Nature’s Operating Instructions: The True Biotechnologies. Sierra Club Books: San Francisco.
In this chapter, Davis (re-)introduces his term ‘ethnosphere’, “to describe a concept suggesting that just as there is a biosphere, a biological web of life, so too there is a cultural fabric that envelops the earth, a cultural web of life, the sum total of all thoughts and dreams, beliefs, myths, intuitions, and inspirations brought into being by the human imagination since the dawn of consciousness. The ethnosphere is humanity’s great legacy. It is the product of our dreams, the embodiment of our hopes, the symbol of all that we are and all that we have created as a wildly inquisitive and astonishingly adaptive species” (215).
The central argument about the importance of preserving this ethnosphere comes from Margaret Mead: “Just before she died, anthropologist Margaret Mead spoke of her concern that as we drift toward a more homogenous world, we are laying the foundations of a blandly amorphous and singularly generic modern culture that ultimately will have no rivals. The entire imagination of humanity, she feared, might become confined within the limits of a single intellectual and spiritual modality. Her nightmare was the possibility that we might wake up one day and not even remember what had been lost” (218). And what would be lost? “Every view of the world that fades away, every culture that disappears, diminishes life’s possibilities and reduces the human repertoire of adaptive responses to the problems that confront us all. Knowledge is lost, not only of the natural world but also of the spirit realms, intuitions about the meaning of the cosmos, insights into the very nature of existence. This is why it matters that we tell these stories and make these journeys” (226). And importantly, he argues: “Whether this notion [i.e. the mythology] is ‘true’ or not is hardly the point. What is interesting and consequential is how a people’s conviction or belief mediates the relationship between human society and the natural world. In the high Andes, people believe that a mountain is an Apu, a sacred being that has the power to (225) direct the destiny of all those living within the shadow of its slopes. A young child coming of age in such a place will have a profoundly different relationship to that mountain than a kid from Montana raised to believe that a mountain is a pile of inert rock ready to be mined. Is a mountain a god or a pile of ore? Ultimately, who is to say? The important point is how the belief itself mediates and defines the relationship between the human and the natural landmark” (226).
But because of our faith in the mythology of progress (in Greer’s The Long Descent), we believe we are continually improving upon how to live on this planet. Davis reminds us: “Human beings as a recognizable social species have been around for perhaps 600,000 years. The Neolithic revolution, which gave us agriculture and with it surplus, hierarchy, specialization, and sedentary life, occurred only 10,000 years ago. Modern industrial society is but 300 years old. This shallow history does not suggest to me that our current way of life has all the answers for all the challenges that will confront us as a species in the coming millennia” (218). Even worse, however, there is a Western elitism at the heart of this so-called “progress”, which Davis describes (only to shatter) thusly: “There lingers a conceit that while we have been busy inventing the Internet or placing men on the moon, other societies have somehow been intellectually idle. This is simply not true. Anthropology has long taught that whether a people’s mental potential goes into technical wizardry or unraveling the complex threads of memory inherent in a myth is merely a matter of cultural choice and orientation. In the Sahara, for example, the raw potential of the human mind has been tapped in astonishing ways, some metaphysical, some boldly concrete, like the very capacity to orient oneself in an endless expanse of sand where there is no separation between horizon and sky, nothing on a human scale, no point of reference save the hallucinogenic waves of delirium that sweep over the unfettered imagination when the throat is scorched with a thirst impossible to describe, impossible to bear” (221). And then Davis writes the most wonderful few sentences:
“Genocide, the physical extermination of a people, is universally condemned by civilized societies. Yet ethnocide, the destruction of a people’s way of life, is often endorsed as appropriate development policy. Who is to say that American culture matters more than that of the Tuareg? At a more fundamental level, we have to ask ourselves, What kind of world do we want to live in? Most Americans will never see a painting by Monet or hear a symphony by Mozart, but does that mean that the world would not be a lesser place without these artists and their unique interpretations of reality?” (224).
What does this mean for the development of Web technology? Well Davis has a quite easily realizable plan: “to turn the Internet into a virtual campfire around which we might gather to share tales from all reaches of the ethnosphere” (224). I think this would be a noble effort, but it seems too limited by what we know of as the Internet now. I think what this chapter suggests, instead, is that we need to consider alternative visions for the Internet that make sense within other worldviews, in a way that doesn’t erode these cultures and homogenize them all into the kind of culture that created the Internet as it is now. And I think it means not encouraging uptake of our current Internet by other cultures as a desperate attempt for them to be heard. Maybe what it means, ultimately, is reconceptualizing cyberspace as something that need not be a purely technological creation. How would other cultures think about cyberspace?
(Davis also points out the fundamental flaw in the Western way of living, which is that it only works by establishing ranks of haves and have-nots, winners and losers; therefore it is foolish to think that it is our great philanthropic mission to bring Western development to the rest of the world. “Indeed the Western model of development has failed in so many places largely because it has been based on the false promise that people who follow its prescriptive dictates will in time achieve the material prosperity enjoyed by a handful of Western nations. Even were this possible, it is not at all clear that it would be desirable. To raise consumption of energy and materials throughout the world to Western levels, given current population projections, would require the resources of four planet earths by the year 2100. To do so with the one world we have would so severely compromise the biosphere that the earth would be unrecognizable. In reality, development for the vast majority of the world’s peoples has been a process in which the individual is torn from his past and propelled into an uncertain future, only to secure a place on the bottom rung of an economic ladder that leads nowhere” (217).)
(Davis also touches on the alienation as mentioned in the previous post: “We long ago liberated the individual from the constraints of community and with such finality that we forget what an astonishing innovation it represented in human affairs…. We forget that in most of the world the community still dominates, for without its strength the individual cannot survive. In embracing the cult of the individual, we secure an irresistible sense of liberation and freedom, but it comes at a cost, as is evident in the alienation and isolation that characterize too many lives in the West” (222).)
The Human-Nature Dance
A summary of:
Malcolm Margolin (2004). The Human-Nature Dance: People as a Keystone Species. In Ausubel, K. & Harpignies, J.P., eds., Nature’s Operating Instructions: The True Biotechnologies. Sierra Club Books: San Francisco.
This chapter is incredibly eye-opening. Margolin describes a worldview that seems so foreign:
“For California natives, managing that land began with a deeply detailed knowledge of place – climate, seasons, soil, plants, and animals – around which their own lives were organized. Encoded in their intricate and eminently practical relationships with the land was a conscious ecological ethos, a living land ethic that recognized people as playing a central environmental and spiritual role in the web of life” (72).
My first reaction is that we are clearly getting dumber. For example, I have no real understanding of climate, seasons, soil, plants, and animals – and I certainly feel no relationship to them, except that they are external to my existence. And then I feel a great sadness for what we have all lost in severing these connections. This is precisely what Huston Smith (and many sociologists and psychologists) referred to as ‘alienation’, and it is no wonder this alienation creates a void in our lives. If we are not part of something greater than ourselves, what is the point of our individual existences?
Then consider: “Food was shared communally – a marvelous social device that prevents overconsumption and uses resources very efficiently. When people hunt and gather food individually, they have to stockpile because the next week they might be sick or have bad luck in their hunting. When it’s shared among people, there is less need to stockpile. Sharing becomes an amazingly efficient way of using resources” (74).
This, too, is incredibly foreign. (It also smacks of Communism, which people seem so afraid of.) Nevermind how we do this with environmental resources – that seems evident enough; instead, let’s think how we do this with information. When I spoke to people at a recent computing conference about Web 3.0 and I asked them why it was a good idea, one of the common replies was that we need it to be able to find as much information as we could, so that we could make sense of it all. (Notice this shatters the common fallacy that the Internet is a magnificent specimen of collective activity. It is, rather, an opportunity for all to realize their individuality.) But this was something that societies used to do collectively. This hoarding of information is highly inefficient, but worse, it is arguably less meaningful, in that it is stripped of its collective understanding and communal belonging. But the way we hoard is both symptomatic of, and contributing to, a lack of social cohesion that traditional forms of society offered. I’m reminded of Emile Durkheim, who argued that modern societies tend to be highly individualistic because they are so complex that they have to rely on divisions of labour which intensify differences between people, meanwhile dissolving all bonds between people except that they are all “individuals”. He writes, “Since human personality is the only thing that appeals unanimously to all hearts, since its enhancement is the only aim that can be collectively pursued, it inevitably acquires exceptional value in the eyes of all. It thus rises far above all human aims, assuming a religious nature” (REF: Suicide; in Lynch: 103-4). Durkheim believed that the “cult of the individual’” would eventually become the new secular religion – “‘a free, private, optional religion, fashioned according to one’s own needs and understanding” (in Heelas et al., 2005: 149) – and that all others that were “‘handed down by tradition’” (ibid) would slowly fade to extinction. But the lingering question is, Is this secular religion fulfilling in the way that participating in the “collective effervescence” would have been? Or even more importantly, Is this individuated living sustainable? I would argue it’s not.
I also really like this excerpt: “A beautiful example of conservation was a rock quarry near Oroville that was a source of chert, a hard rock used for making scrapers, arrowheads, and the like. This area doesn’t have a lot of obsidian or other minerals, so the chert was extremely valuable. The Indians had been quarrying this spot for who knows how long. In a sense it was owned in common. Any local male could (77) go into the quarry, which was dug into the hill like a cave, once each year and take out as much as he could get with the single blow of a hammer. He had to leave an offering of money beads on the way out. These laws were encoded in religion, and if a person broke them, there were grave repercussions. That the rules were strictly observed was a tribute to the power of this place, and in part clearly reflected a conservation ethic. Limiting access to the quarry and making certain that nobody took more than his share assured that the chert would last for several generations” (78).
I realized when reading this that there are no such taboos surrounding the use of Web resources. There are no rituals surrounding its appropriate use either (not like these offerings, anyway). What if such rituals and taboos were somehow introduced into and intertwined with our use of the Internet. Surely we would not see the levels of addiction-like behaviour we see today. Surely we would begin to treat it reverently, as the gift that it is. And surely it would last longer as a result. How can we possibly expect the Internet to be there forever if we expand and reap it mindlessly?
There is another issues being touched on in this chapter, about the silencing of voices that have some really excellent, wise things to say. Margolin writes, “To be a human being in this way, to learn such practices, required more than one generation. Among California’s Native Americans, this knowledge was learned and transmitted over many generations, and a lot of it is still around. Perhaps above all, it gives us a view of humanity as not living apart from nature and being destructive to the natural world. These traditions and peoples show us splendidly how, by our way of living, we can actually be a blessing to the world” (79). I suppose this poses an interesting inclusion problem for Web technologies. If what I’m suggesting is that a more holistic, nature-oriented worldview would be a beneficial contribution to the way we currently develop, what then? If we try to force this thinking – these cultures, these people, even – into cyberspace, surely this will forever change the nature of that worldview, thus exacerbating its extinction. I don’t know the answer, but I do know that we could certainly use the notion of ‘being a blessing to the world’ in the way we develop our Web technologies. I suppose it just means, like the previous post, asking ourselves honestly how we want to live.
Malcolm Margolin (2004). The Human-Nature Dance: People as a Keystone Species. In Ausubel, K. & Harpignies, J.P., eds., Nature’s Operating Instructions: The True Biotechnologies. Sierra Club Books: San Francisco.
This chapter is incredibly eye-opening. Margolin describes a worldview that seems so foreign:
“For California natives, managing that land began with a deeply detailed knowledge of place – climate, seasons, soil, plants, and animals – around which their own lives were organized. Encoded in their intricate and eminently practical relationships with the land was a conscious ecological ethos, a living land ethic that recognized people as playing a central environmental and spiritual role in the web of life” (72).
My first reaction is that we are clearly getting dumber. For example, I have no real understanding of climate, seasons, soil, plants, and animals – and I certainly feel no relationship to them, except that they are external to my existence. And then I feel a great sadness for what we have all lost in severing these connections. This is precisely what Huston Smith (and many sociologists and psychologists) referred to as ‘alienation’, and it is no wonder this alienation creates a void in our lives. If we are not part of something greater than ourselves, what is the point of our individual existences?
Then consider: “Food was shared communally – a marvelous social device that prevents overconsumption and uses resources very efficiently. When people hunt and gather food individually, they have to stockpile because the next week they might be sick or have bad luck in their hunting. When it’s shared among people, there is less need to stockpile. Sharing becomes an amazingly efficient way of using resources” (74).
This, too, is incredibly foreign. (It also smacks of Communism, which people seem so afraid of.) Nevermind how we do this with environmental resources – that seems evident enough; instead, let’s think how we do this with information. When I spoke to people at a recent computing conference about Web 3.0 and I asked them why it was a good idea, one of the common replies was that we need it to be able to find as much information as we could, so that we could make sense of it all. (Notice this shatters the common fallacy that the Internet is a magnificent specimen of collective activity. It is, rather, an opportunity for all to realize their individuality.) But this was something that societies used to do collectively. This hoarding of information is highly inefficient, but worse, it is arguably less meaningful, in that it is stripped of its collective understanding and communal belonging. But the way we hoard is both symptomatic of, and contributing to, a lack of social cohesion that traditional forms of society offered. I’m reminded of Emile Durkheim, who argued that modern societies tend to be highly individualistic because they are so complex that they have to rely on divisions of labour which intensify differences between people, meanwhile dissolving all bonds between people except that they are all “individuals”. He writes, “Since human personality is the only thing that appeals unanimously to all hearts, since its enhancement is the only aim that can be collectively pursued, it inevitably acquires exceptional value in the eyes of all. It thus rises far above all human aims, assuming a religious nature” (REF: Suicide; in Lynch: 103-4). Durkheim believed that the “cult of the individual’” would eventually become the new secular religion – “‘a free, private, optional religion, fashioned according to one’s own needs and understanding” (in Heelas et al., 2005: 149) – and that all others that were “‘handed down by tradition’” (ibid) would slowly fade to extinction. But the lingering question is, Is this secular religion fulfilling in the way that participating in the “collective effervescence” would have been? Or even more importantly, Is this individuated living sustainable? I would argue it’s not.
I also really like this excerpt: “A beautiful example of conservation was a rock quarry near Oroville that was a source of chert, a hard rock used for making scrapers, arrowheads, and the like. This area doesn’t have a lot of obsidian or other minerals, so the chert was extremely valuable. The Indians had been quarrying this spot for who knows how long. In a sense it was owned in common. Any local male could (77) go into the quarry, which was dug into the hill like a cave, once each year and take out as much as he could get with the single blow of a hammer. He had to leave an offering of money beads on the way out. These laws were encoded in religion, and if a person broke them, there were grave repercussions. That the rules were strictly observed was a tribute to the power of this place, and in part clearly reflected a conservation ethic. Limiting access to the quarry and making certain that nobody took more than his share assured that the chert would last for several generations” (78).
I realized when reading this that there are no such taboos surrounding the use of Web resources. There are no rituals surrounding its appropriate use either (not like these offerings, anyway). What if such rituals and taboos were somehow introduced into and intertwined with our use of the Internet. Surely we would not see the levels of addiction-like behaviour we see today. Surely we would begin to treat it reverently, as the gift that it is. And surely it would last longer as a result. How can we possibly expect the Internet to be there forever if we expand and reap it mindlessly?
There is another issues being touched on in this chapter, about the silencing of voices that have some really excellent, wise things to say. Margolin writes, “To be a human being in this way, to learn such practices, required more than one generation. Among California’s Native Americans, this knowledge was learned and transmitted over many generations, and a lot of it is still around. Perhaps above all, it gives us a view of humanity as not living apart from nature and being destructive to the natural world. These traditions and peoples show us splendidly how, by our way of living, we can actually be a blessing to the world” (79). I suppose this poses an interesting inclusion problem for Web technologies. If what I’m suggesting is that a more holistic, nature-oriented worldview would be a beneficial contribution to the way we currently develop, what then? If we try to force this thinking – these cultures, these people, even – into cyberspace, surely this will forever change the nature of that worldview, thus exacerbating its extinction. I don’t know the answer, but I do know that we could certainly use the notion of ‘being a blessing to the world’ in the way we develop our Web technologies. I suppose it just means, like the previous post, asking ourselves honestly how we want to live.
Some thoughts on Biomimicry
A summary of:
Janine Benyus (2004). Biomimicry: What Would Nature Do Here?. In Ausubel, K. & Harpignies, J.P., eds., Nature’s Operating Instructions: The True Biotechnologies. Sierra Club Books: San Francisco.
The argument presented here is that we need to learn from nature how to “create the conditions conducive to life.” This does not mean learning how to create better and better simulations of ourselves (see Turkle’s Alone Together), but rather to learn the fine art that nature seems to do so instinctively, of being OF NATURE. Our problem begins by thinking of ourselves as something outside of nature, and therefore positioning ourselves in opposition to it. Sadly, we need to learn how, or remember how, to be nature; and our teachers are all around us. Hence the sense in biomimicry: “Biomimicry is innovation inspired by nature, looking to nature as a teacher.”
What we find, if we are humble enough to see it, is: “In fact, organisms have done everything we humans want to do but without guzzling fossil fuels, polluting the planet, or mortgaging their future” (5). So since we seem to have lost our way in this respect, we should “step outside and ask the local geniuses that surround us.” This means changing our questions, e.g. “…when we want to clean a surface, we get hung up on questions such as ‘What’s the least toxic detergent to use?’ or ‘How can I reduce the energy involved in sandblasting?’ A more helpful question might be ‘How does nature stay clean?’” In short, we should be asking questions along the lines of “What would nature do here?” The result: “Instead of seeing nature as warehouse, you begin to see her as teacher” (8).
What are some of the lessons, then? One is that we are living completely out of proportion to our share of the planet. Things that we assume as human rights now – e.g. the right to Internet access, the right to electricity – are predicated upon this disproportionate use of nature’s resources. Consider: “And how does nature power itself? Obviously, not the way we do. Of course we all rely on photosynthesis, on sunlight captured by plants. But in our case, it’s ancient sunlight trapped 65 million years ago by plants that we now dig up and ignite in a huge bonfire. We burn 100,000 years of ancient plant growth every year” (7). Wes Jackson (quoted here) points out that our greed is founded upon a disrespect for nature as a teacher (“When we begin to see nature as mentor, gratitude tempers greed and the notion of resources becomes obscene”). Benyus argues that we need to finally realize how amazing nature is in order to realize how self-evident the rationale is for protecting it. My question is, how are our technologies helping us realize this? I would say that this is precisely what many of our technologies push further and further from our awareness. What if they were instead designed in a way that mimicked nature, thus bringing that to our awareness?
Another lesson is that the world is a web. We do not contribute additively to our environments. As Postman pointed out, introducing a technology into our social lives, for example changes the entirety of social life. Furthermore, this means that the only way to approach the world is in a holistic way. “In order to deal with that kind of complexity, we need to start paying attention to how organisms live in context. We need to throw a party where people who are asking, ‘How does life operate in a way that enhances place?’ can get together with people who are asking, ‘How shall we live?’” (12). So how DO we want to live?
Benyus finds hope in humanity’s distinct skill: “One thing that seems to make us different from other creatures, as far as we know, is our ability to act collectively – as a whole species – on our understanding” (12). If we take this statement as true, it means that there is hope for mass change in our thinking about the world, which would then prescribe an entirely different relationship with it.
Janine Benyus (2004). Biomimicry: What Would Nature Do Here?. In Ausubel, K. & Harpignies, J.P., eds., Nature’s Operating Instructions: The True Biotechnologies. Sierra Club Books: San Francisco.
The argument presented here is that we need to learn from nature how to “create the conditions conducive to life.” This does not mean learning how to create better and better simulations of ourselves (see Turkle’s Alone Together), but rather to learn the fine art that nature seems to do so instinctively, of being OF NATURE. Our problem begins by thinking of ourselves as something outside of nature, and therefore positioning ourselves in opposition to it. Sadly, we need to learn how, or remember how, to be nature; and our teachers are all around us. Hence the sense in biomimicry: “Biomimicry is innovation inspired by nature, looking to nature as a teacher.”
What we find, if we are humble enough to see it, is: “In fact, organisms have done everything we humans want to do but without guzzling fossil fuels, polluting the planet, or mortgaging their future” (5). So since we seem to have lost our way in this respect, we should “step outside and ask the local geniuses that surround us.” This means changing our questions, e.g. “…when we want to clean a surface, we get hung up on questions such as ‘What’s the least toxic detergent to use?’ or ‘How can I reduce the energy involved in sandblasting?’ A more helpful question might be ‘How does nature stay clean?’” In short, we should be asking questions along the lines of “What would nature do here?” The result: “Instead of seeing nature as warehouse, you begin to see her as teacher” (8).
What are some of the lessons, then? One is that we are living completely out of proportion to our share of the planet. Things that we assume as human rights now – e.g. the right to Internet access, the right to electricity – are predicated upon this disproportionate use of nature’s resources. Consider: “And how does nature power itself? Obviously, not the way we do. Of course we all rely on photosynthesis, on sunlight captured by plants. But in our case, it’s ancient sunlight trapped 65 million years ago by plants that we now dig up and ignite in a huge bonfire. We burn 100,000 years of ancient plant growth every year” (7). Wes Jackson (quoted here) points out that our greed is founded upon a disrespect for nature as a teacher (“When we begin to see nature as mentor, gratitude tempers greed and the notion of resources becomes obscene”). Benyus argues that we need to finally realize how amazing nature is in order to realize how self-evident the rationale is for protecting it. My question is, how are our technologies helping us realize this? I would say that this is precisely what many of our technologies push further and further from our awareness. What if they were instead designed in a way that mimicked nature, thus bringing that to our awareness?
Another lesson is that the world is a web. We do not contribute additively to our environments. As Postman pointed out, introducing a technology into our social lives, for example changes the entirety of social life. Furthermore, this means that the only way to approach the world is in a holistic way. “In order to deal with that kind of complexity, we need to start paying attention to how organisms live in context. We need to throw a party where people who are asking, ‘How does life operate in a way that enhances place?’ can get together with people who are asking, ‘How shall we live?’” (12). So how DO we want to live?
Benyus finds hope in humanity’s distinct skill: “One thing that seems to make us different from other creatures, as far as we know, is our ability to act collectively – as a whole species – on our understanding” (12). If we take this statement as true, it means that there is hope for mass change in our thinking about the world, which would then prescribe an entirely different relationship with it.
Monday, July 25, 2011
The Internet doesn't understand friendship
Great quote from Bill Maher on his show 15/7/11:
"Now that the social network, Google+, has arrived expressly to try and destroy Facebook and Twitter, the way Facebook and Twitter blew away MySpace, right after MySpace obliterated Friendster . . . the Internet must admit that it really doesn't understand the concept of friendship." (Bill Maher 2011).
"Now that the social network, Google+, has arrived expressly to try and destroy Facebook and Twitter, the way Facebook and Twitter blew away MySpace, right after MySpace obliterated Friendster . . . the Internet must admit that it really doesn't understand the concept of friendship." (Bill Maher 2011).
Tuesday, July 12, 2011
Saturday, June 11, 2011
Cyberspace as a dwelling?
A summary of:
Papanek, V. (1993). The Green Imperative: Ecology and Ethics in Design and Architecture. Thames & Hudson, Ltd.: London.
It was interesting timing to read this while simultaneously reading Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together, because it sparked an epiphany about cyberspace as an architectural entity. Turkle’s work elaborates the extent to which we are living our lives in cyberspace, that cyberspace has become a kind of home, although she is the first to point out that this is an impoverished one, a lame substitute. Papanek writes, “I use the word (99) ‘dwelling’ to denote a living or working space that balances life and nature; it then indicates life in an organic harmony with environment and ecology” (100). Given this definition, it would be difficult to call cyberspace a ‘dwelling’. This made me wonder what it would take to make it more dwelling-like.
One point has to do with customization. Papanek writes, “Yet architecture can only flourish if the dwellings built are in harmony with the people who live in them, with nature and culture” (104). With the Internet, we have a one-size-fits-all solution. Clearly, as we can see with the previous post (the talk by Genevieve Bell), people will have very different needs for the Internet, and yet the Web is designed to fit a very particular person that everyone is expected to conform to. (Lanier might say that we have to make ourselves into this person in order to satisfy the Web.) The Web is about homogenization, not customization. It is about globalization, not localization. It attempts to make a virtual community to which everyone belongs. But Papanek references research by Professor George Murdoch of Yale University who has studied the ideal (‘magic’) number for communities and found it to be around 450 to 600 individuals, after which point the community tends to suffer. Further:
“Behavioural scientists consider that 250 people constitute a ‘small’ neighbourhood, 1500 a ‘large one’, about 450 to 600 a ‘social’ neighbourhood. / From these numbers we can go further. With our objective a benign, neighbourly way of life, rich in interconnections and cultural stimuli, we can say that ‘face-to-face’ communities will consist of 400 to 1000 people (the ideal is around 500), ‘common neighbourhoods’ will accommodate roughly 5000 to 10,000 residents (or 10 to 20 face-to-face communities), and the ‘ideal city’ will house about 50,000 souls (or 10 to 20 common neighbourhoods). Special functional reasons may decrease city size to 20,000 or increase it to 120,000 – byond that lies social chaos” (112).
Of course there may be a different ideal size for a virtual community… but clearly these numbers suggest there would be an ideal community size, and it wouldn’t be 6 billion. In order to satisfy the first condition of a social community, we may need to carve out little virtual cities, little pockets of socialization, or even different Webs. It might be that if we truly felt like we belonged to a community, rather than that we were tourists in cyberspace, we might behave more neighbourly to one another.
Papanek also references a study done in the 1950s by Dr Abraham Maslow to determine the effects of environment. “He built three rooms: one beautiful, one ‘average’ and one ugly (77)…. Volunteers were given photographs of people and asked whether these faces displayed ‘energy’ and ‘well-being.’ The volunteers were supervised by these examiners who were themselves unaware of the real objective of the experiment, that is, people’s reaction to work-spaces. The results reveal that in the beautiful room the volunteers found the faces energetic and happy; in the ugly room, they thought they looked tired and ill. The behaviour of the examiners also varied: in the ugly room, they rushed brusquely through interviews, exhibited ‘gross behavioural changes’ and complained of monotony, fatigue, headache, hostility and irritability” (78). Now, note the descriptions of the rooms: “The ugly room has a naked light bulb hanging from the ceiling, an old mattress on the floor, battleship-grey walls, torn window shades, brooms, mops and a good deal of trash and dust. The beautiful room had large windows, a superb Navajo rug on the floor, off-white walls, indirect lighting, a bookcase, soft armchairs and a wooden desk, paintings, plants and a small sculpture. The ‘average’ room had ‘the appearance of a clean, neat “worked-in” office with grey metal furniture’” (77). Which description best matches the Web? I would argue that the ugly one does, because of the randomness, chaos, and trash (think of the unwanted advertisements that pollute every webpage). It certainly wouldn’t be the ‘average’ room, all neat and ordered. And it definitely doesn’t seem ‘beautiful’. But given this lack of beauty, what kind of emotions and behaviour and other responses does cyberspace evoke? Could the fact that it’s ugly be a contributing factor in the rampant ‘flaming’ we see online?
So what would be a beautiful Web? Papanek writes, “There is a point at which beauty and high utility through good design interconnect. If both conditions exist simultaneously in an object, and are furthermore clear expressions of the social intent of the people who designed it, it is possible to speak of the spiritual in design. We have seen that the old Modernist saying, ‘If it works well, it will be beautiful,’ is false. We are surrounded each day by hundreds of objects that nullify this approach. At the same time we know that the reverse, ‘If it is beautiful, it will work well,’ is ridiculously wide of the mark” (57). So obviously, just because the Internet works and we are mesmerized by it doesn’t make it beautiful. Papanek leaves some clues as to where we might find beauty.
1. “Ecology and the environmental equilibrium are the basic underpinnings of all human life on earth; there can be neither life nor human culture without it. Design is concerned with the development of products, tools, machines, artefacts and other devices, and this activity has a profound and direct influence on ecology. The design response must be positive and unifying. Design must be the bridge between human needs, culture and ecology” (29). This brings us back, once again, to the fact that in order to be beautiful, the Web would have to be customized to fit the user – not just the user generalized, but specific users in specific contexts for specific cultures.
2. “I firmly believe that it is the instinct of the designer as well as the intended use of the designed object that can yield spiritual value” (53). This suggests firstly that beauty is linked with the spiritual, and secondly that it is important that the designer consider his/her intention in producing the ‘thing’, in this case the Web. It cannot be a mindless production – every development needs to be for a purpose. This means asking him/herself questions like, “Will the design significantly aid the sustainability of the environment? Can it make life easier for some group that has been marginalized by society? Can it ease pain? Will it help those who are poor, disenfranchised or suffering? Will it save energy or – better still – help to gain renewable energies? Can it save irreplaceable resources?” (54). This is also captured in this handy list:
• When we become the hired guns of greed-driven corporations, we are driving to conform.
• If we generate status kitsch for a jaded élite, and allow ourselves to become media celebrities, we perform.
• When we twist products to reflect the navel-gazing of market research, we deform.
• If our products divorce appearance and other functions – a telephone that looks like a duck and quacks instead of ringing, a clock-radio that looks like a female leg – we misinform.
• When our designs are succinct statements of purpose, easy to understand, use, maintain and repair, long-lasting, recyclable and benign to the environment, we inform.
• If we design with harmony and balance in mind, working for the good of the weaker members of our society, we reform.
• Being willing to face the consequences of our design interventions, and accepting our social and moral responsibilities, we give form (53).
3. This also means that beauty is not to be found in appealing to the “fun”. Yes, the Web can be fun, but is it the beautiful kind of fun? Papanek writes: “When I use the word ‘fun’ in an almost pejorative sense here, it speaks to a passive experience, the sort of fun that has been pre-designed, pre-chewed and pre-digested by designers and corporate directors. The childlike in us is grounded in Earth and close to nature. It responds to beauty, to activities that help us use our body and mind by extending and challenging physical and mental powers, or that result in spontaneous laughter. It is when we have to rely on manufactured fun (theme parks like Disney World or Disneyland) or the specious amusement we might derive from a banana-shaped telephone that the hubris of the fake is breathing down our backs” (155).
4. Something that’s beautiful ‘fits’ its user and its use. Papanek bemoans design fashions that add nothing to the design, for example the ‘streamlining’ of objects like CD players, which hardly need to fly through the air at great speed (153). You might say that the Web also does this unhelpful ‘streamlining’, in that it forces us to move at breakneck speed, not because our brains actually work like this and need the Web to move us around this quickly, but because it is fashionable, i.e. it suits our current culture of needing to do things as fast as possible, to multitask, etc.
Now, back to this idea of cyberspace as an architectural space. Papanek writes: “Architecture has been called ‘frozen music’ since it brings this same sense of rhythm into play by the repetition and spacing of windows, floorboards, wall spaces. Frank Lloyd Wright would manipulate these signifiers of rhythm, as well as room heights, to ‘tune’ the design of his houses to his clients’ eye-height and provide a wholly new sense of psychic comfort from such visual modulations, best experienced in his Meyer May house” (90). What kind of music would the Internet be? When I think about this, it’s an incredibly rapid, monotonous, synthesized, high-pitched song that never ends. How might we go about changing the music of cyberspace? Yet again, part of this might be helped by varying it more, making it less homogenized. My favorite website is this. Notice that this space would be a totally different song? It would be a peaceful, cheery little ditty, free of annoying beeps.
Papanek makes the case throughout his book that it is the designer’s responsibility to pay attention to things that would make people happier and healthier in their spaces. For example, architects are familiar with this phenomenon and design for it (or at least should): “Behavioural scientists have found that a room with daylight flooding in from windows set at right angles to each other will increase serotonin levels and – in many cases – provide its inhabitants or users with a more positive attitude” (80). We don’t really know yet what the equivalent Web design elements would be that have a similar effect. Sherry Turkle shows that being “connected” increases dopamine levels, which effectively makes us addicted to it. This is NOT what we want. But how can we design the space of cyberspace so that it increases serotonin?
Similarly, Papanek mentions Japanese stepping stones: “The architect Gunter Nitschke has this to add: ‘We can find a presentation of space as a time and mood-structured process in the layout of traditional Japanese stroll gardens and, on a smaller scale, in the placement of tobi-ishi, [skipping stones] used to make garden paths. By a sophisticated placing of the stones, our foot movements can be slowed down, speeded up, halted or turned in various directions. And with our legs, our eyes are manipulated, and our visual input from spatial phenomena is structured over time” (84). Where are Web developers every tasked with this kind of thoughtful structuring of the space and the pathways that users take? And yet, as Carr and others would quickly point out, these pathways are structuring our brains over time in a very specific way.
I also liked the description of a traditional Japanese garden: “In the quiet of traditional Japanese gardens, one is startled about every fifteen minutes, by a loud clack, like the sound made by hitting two wooden blocks together. The sozu consists of a bamboo tube, closed at one end and balanced on legs so that it can tip. It is constantly filled by a stream of water trickling from a bamboo water-pipe. When the tube is full, it tips forward, empties and falls back to tits original position, loudly striking a rock. Originally these sozu or shishi-o-doshi were used to frighten away birds, deer and even wild boar that invaded farmland and gardens. Zen Buddhists, however, will explain that they were first introduced by the Zen mentor Rikkyu some six hundred years ago ‘to give a sudden “clack” a few times during each hour so that one can hear the silence more clearly’” (89). This really highlights the ways in which silence is not valued and therefore not cultivated (or even accommodated) in cyberspace. How would we, for example, even hear the clack over the other beeps and whistles and constant noise of life in cyberspace?
I want to end with this thought. Papanek quotes Eugene Raskin: “We are born indoors, live, love, bring up our families, worship, work, grow old, sick and die indoors. Architecture mirrors every aspect of our lives – social, economical, spiritual” (75). We are living online to some extent. What does it say about our culture, our values, that the Web is arguably devoid of beauty, and treated so carelessly? And what will happen to our Internet if we don’t begin to approach it from an ethical perspective? As John Vassos was quoted saying, “Design can only succeed if guided by an ethical view” (7).
Papanek, V. (1993). The Green Imperative: Ecology and Ethics in Design and Architecture. Thames & Hudson, Ltd.: London.
It was interesting timing to read this while simultaneously reading Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together, because it sparked an epiphany about cyberspace as an architectural entity. Turkle’s work elaborates the extent to which we are living our lives in cyberspace, that cyberspace has become a kind of home, although she is the first to point out that this is an impoverished one, a lame substitute. Papanek writes, “I use the word (99) ‘dwelling’ to denote a living or working space that balances life and nature; it then indicates life in an organic harmony with environment and ecology” (100). Given this definition, it would be difficult to call cyberspace a ‘dwelling’. This made me wonder what it would take to make it more dwelling-like.
One point has to do with customization. Papanek writes, “Yet architecture can only flourish if the dwellings built are in harmony with the people who live in them, with nature and culture” (104). With the Internet, we have a one-size-fits-all solution. Clearly, as we can see with the previous post (the talk by Genevieve Bell), people will have very different needs for the Internet, and yet the Web is designed to fit a very particular person that everyone is expected to conform to. (Lanier might say that we have to make ourselves into this person in order to satisfy the Web.) The Web is about homogenization, not customization. It is about globalization, not localization. It attempts to make a virtual community to which everyone belongs. But Papanek references research by Professor George Murdoch of Yale University who has studied the ideal (‘magic’) number for communities and found it to be around 450 to 600 individuals, after which point the community tends to suffer. Further:
“Behavioural scientists consider that 250 people constitute a ‘small’ neighbourhood, 1500 a ‘large one’, about 450 to 600 a ‘social’ neighbourhood. / From these numbers we can go further. With our objective a benign, neighbourly way of life, rich in interconnections and cultural stimuli, we can say that ‘face-to-face’ communities will consist of 400 to 1000 people (the ideal is around 500), ‘common neighbourhoods’ will accommodate roughly 5000 to 10,000 residents (or 10 to 20 face-to-face communities), and the ‘ideal city’ will house about 50,000 souls (or 10 to 20 common neighbourhoods). Special functional reasons may decrease city size to 20,000 or increase it to 120,000 – byond that lies social chaos” (112).
Of course there may be a different ideal size for a virtual community… but clearly these numbers suggest there would be an ideal community size, and it wouldn’t be 6 billion. In order to satisfy the first condition of a social community, we may need to carve out little virtual cities, little pockets of socialization, or even different Webs. It might be that if we truly felt like we belonged to a community, rather than that we were tourists in cyberspace, we might behave more neighbourly to one another.
Papanek also references a study done in the 1950s by Dr Abraham Maslow to determine the effects of environment. “He built three rooms: one beautiful, one ‘average’ and one ugly (77)…. Volunteers were given photographs of people and asked whether these faces displayed ‘energy’ and ‘well-being.’ The volunteers were supervised by these examiners who were themselves unaware of the real objective of the experiment, that is, people’s reaction to work-spaces. The results reveal that in the beautiful room the volunteers found the faces energetic and happy; in the ugly room, they thought they looked tired and ill. The behaviour of the examiners also varied: in the ugly room, they rushed brusquely through interviews, exhibited ‘gross behavioural changes’ and complained of monotony, fatigue, headache, hostility and irritability” (78). Now, note the descriptions of the rooms: “The ugly room has a naked light bulb hanging from the ceiling, an old mattress on the floor, battleship-grey walls, torn window shades, brooms, mops and a good deal of trash and dust. The beautiful room had large windows, a superb Navajo rug on the floor, off-white walls, indirect lighting, a bookcase, soft armchairs and a wooden desk, paintings, plants and a small sculpture. The ‘average’ room had ‘the appearance of a clean, neat “worked-in” office with grey metal furniture’” (77). Which description best matches the Web? I would argue that the ugly one does, because of the randomness, chaos, and trash (think of the unwanted advertisements that pollute every webpage). It certainly wouldn’t be the ‘average’ room, all neat and ordered. And it definitely doesn’t seem ‘beautiful’. But given this lack of beauty, what kind of emotions and behaviour and other responses does cyberspace evoke? Could the fact that it’s ugly be a contributing factor in the rampant ‘flaming’ we see online?
So what would be a beautiful Web? Papanek writes, “There is a point at which beauty and high utility through good design interconnect. If both conditions exist simultaneously in an object, and are furthermore clear expressions of the social intent of the people who designed it, it is possible to speak of the spiritual in design. We have seen that the old Modernist saying, ‘If it works well, it will be beautiful,’ is false. We are surrounded each day by hundreds of objects that nullify this approach. At the same time we know that the reverse, ‘If it is beautiful, it will work well,’ is ridiculously wide of the mark” (57). So obviously, just because the Internet works and we are mesmerized by it doesn’t make it beautiful. Papanek leaves some clues as to where we might find beauty.
1. “Ecology and the environmental equilibrium are the basic underpinnings of all human life on earth; there can be neither life nor human culture without it. Design is concerned with the development of products, tools, machines, artefacts and other devices, and this activity has a profound and direct influence on ecology. The design response must be positive and unifying. Design must be the bridge between human needs, culture and ecology” (29). This brings us back, once again, to the fact that in order to be beautiful, the Web would have to be customized to fit the user – not just the user generalized, but specific users in specific contexts for specific cultures.
2. “I firmly believe that it is the instinct of the designer as well as the intended use of the designed object that can yield spiritual value” (53). This suggests firstly that beauty is linked with the spiritual, and secondly that it is important that the designer consider his/her intention in producing the ‘thing’, in this case the Web. It cannot be a mindless production – every development needs to be for a purpose. This means asking him/herself questions like, “Will the design significantly aid the sustainability of the environment? Can it make life easier for some group that has been marginalized by society? Can it ease pain? Will it help those who are poor, disenfranchised or suffering? Will it save energy or – better still – help to gain renewable energies? Can it save irreplaceable resources?” (54). This is also captured in this handy list:
• When we become the hired guns of greed-driven corporations, we are driving to conform.
• If we generate status kitsch for a jaded élite, and allow ourselves to become media celebrities, we perform.
• When we twist products to reflect the navel-gazing of market research, we deform.
• If our products divorce appearance and other functions – a telephone that looks like a duck and quacks instead of ringing, a clock-radio that looks like a female leg – we misinform.
• When our designs are succinct statements of purpose, easy to understand, use, maintain and repair, long-lasting, recyclable and benign to the environment, we inform.
• If we design with harmony and balance in mind, working for the good of the weaker members of our society, we reform.
• Being willing to face the consequences of our design interventions, and accepting our social and moral responsibilities, we give form (53).
3. This also means that beauty is not to be found in appealing to the “fun”. Yes, the Web can be fun, but is it the beautiful kind of fun? Papanek writes: “When I use the word ‘fun’ in an almost pejorative sense here, it speaks to a passive experience, the sort of fun that has been pre-designed, pre-chewed and pre-digested by designers and corporate directors. The childlike in us is grounded in Earth and close to nature. It responds to beauty, to activities that help us use our body and mind by extending and challenging physical and mental powers, or that result in spontaneous laughter. It is when we have to rely on manufactured fun (theme parks like Disney World or Disneyland) or the specious amusement we might derive from a banana-shaped telephone that the hubris of the fake is breathing down our backs” (155).
4. Something that’s beautiful ‘fits’ its user and its use. Papanek bemoans design fashions that add nothing to the design, for example the ‘streamlining’ of objects like CD players, which hardly need to fly through the air at great speed (153). You might say that the Web also does this unhelpful ‘streamlining’, in that it forces us to move at breakneck speed, not because our brains actually work like this and need the Web to move us around this quickly, but because it is fashionable, i.e. it suits our current culture of needing to do things as fast as possible, to multitask, etc.
Now, back to this idea of cyberspace as an architectural space. Papanek writes: “Architecture has been called ‘frozen music’ since it brings this same sense of rhythm into play by the repetition and spacing of windows, floorboards, wall spaces. Frank Lloyd Wright would manipulate these signifiers of rhythm, as well as room heights, to ‘tune’ the design of his houses to his clients’ eye-height and provide a wholly new sense of psychic comfort from such visual modulations, best experienced in his Meyer May house” (90). What kind of music would the Internet be? When I think about this, it’s an incredibly rapid, monotonous, synthesized, high-pitched song that never ends. How might we go about changing the music of cyberspace? Yet again, part of this might be helped by varying it more, making it less homogenized. My favorite website is this. Notice that this space would be a totally different song? It would be a peaceful, cheery little ditty, free of annoying beeps.
Papanek makes the case throughout his book that it is the designer’s responsibility to pay attention to things that would make people happier and healthier in their spaces. For example, architects are familiar with this phenomenon and design for it (or at least should): “Behavioural scientists have found that a room with daylight flooding in from windows set at right angles to each other will increase serotonin levels and – in many cases – provide its inhabitants or users with a more positive attitude” (80). We don’t really know yet what the equivalent Web design elements would be that have a similar effect. Sherry Turkle shows that being “connected” increases dopamine levels, which effectively makes us addicted to it. This is NOT what we want. But how can we design the space of cyberspace so that it increases serotonin?
Similarly, Papanek mentions Japanese stepping stones: “The architect Gunter Nitschke has this to add: ‘We can find a presentation of space as a time and mood-structured process in the layout of traditional Japanese stroll gardens and, on a smaller scale, in the placement of tobi-ishi, [skipping stones] used to make garden paths. By a sophisticated placing of the stones, our foot movements can be slowed down, speeded up, halted or turned in various directions. And with our legs, our eyes are manipulated, and our visual input from spatial phenomena is structured over time” (84). Where are Web developers every tasked with this kind of thoughtful structuring of the space and the pathways that users take? And yet, as Carr and others would quickly point out, these pathways are structuring our brains over time in a very specific way.
I also liked the description of a traditional Japanese garden: “In the quiet of traditional Japanese gardens, one is startled about every fifteen minutes, by a loud clack, like the sound made by hitting two wooden blocks together. The sozu consists of a bamboo tube, closed at one end and balanced on legs so that it can tip. It is constantly filled by a stream of water trickling from a bamboo water-pipe. When the tube is full, it tips forward, empties and falls back to tits original position, loudly striking a rock. Originally these sozu or shishi-o-doshi were used to frighten away birds, deer and even wild boar that invaded farmland and gardens. Zen Buddhists, however, will explain that they were first introduced by the Zen mentor Rikkyu some six hundred years ago ‘to give a sudden “clack” a few times during each hour so that one can hear the silence more clearly’” (89). This really highlights the ways in which silence is not valued and therefore not cultivated (or even accommodated) in cyberspace. How would we, for example, even hear the clack over the other beeps and whistles and constant noise of life in cyberspace?
I want to end with this thought. Papanek quotes Eugene Raskin: “We are born indoors, live, love, bring up our families, worship, work, grow old, sick and die indoors. Architecture mirrors every aspect of our lives – social, economical, spiritual” (75). We are living online to some extent. What does it say about our culture, our values, that the Web is arguably devoid of beauty, and treated so carelessly? And what will happen to our Internet if we don’t begin to approach it from an ethical perspective? As John Vassos was quoted saying, “Design can only succeed if guided by an ethical view” (7).
Wednesday, June 8, 2011
Saturday, April 2, 2011
Is it just me, or isn't this insane?
I've been watching a lot of the TED talks recently, with horror. 'Ideas worth spreading' is their confident catchphrase. I can't help but thinking that many of the ideas would be disastrous if they caught on… and even more worryingly, they are being lauded by TED, hailed as the greatest thoughts of our society, and applauded eagerly by the audiences.
It seemed a good time to focus on this one, in light of the last post which mentioned (not favorably) Google’s Book Search project. Here’s a librarian ecstatically proclaiming that not only CAN we archive all of humanity’s creative works, but we SHOULD… nay, we MUST. At first pass, this fits in well with our neo-liberal mentality, referenced, in fact, by Kahle himself: this belief in the inalienable right of people to information. We shall be liberated by greater access to information!
I think this is a huge lie that we’ve been sold. We are no more liberated by information than we are informed by it. We are addicts to information that, as Postman explains in Amusing Ourselves to Death, is not even particularly interesting or informative. We want and we want, but irrationally so, because we are not made happier, or smarter, by all this information. Imagine if someone were able to consume all these works that the Internet holds (an impossible dream that would drive people crazy in the chase of this will-o-the-wisp). I would think that without any discernment, their intelligence would trend toward mediocre. Compare this to if everyone read all the supposedly ‘great’ works in the world – they would probably get smarter. But this statement is threatening to people, approaching heretical. Censor our archives!? How dare you! Who are you to decide what we keep and what we don’t keep? Who’s to say what might be important to someone else?
The thing is, we can collect anything in the world if we make the criteria ‘something that might be useful at some point in the future to someone.’ As my supervisor quipped, why not go out into the woods and collect all the leaves? We don’t know if they might be useful one day.
It’s painful for us to think of letting some works go, forgotten from the archives of human history. (I think it has to do with fear of our own mortality – that everyone wants to think that part of them is immortal and will be remembered.) But every household does a selective editing of their family history when they save certain items, donate others, and trash the rest. For example, finger paintings and crayon drawings are eventually taken off the refrigerator when the child grows up. Some are thrown away (they really were shit, as difficult as it is for us to admit it, because we love our children), and some of the more impressive ones are kept. Why are we so afraid to do this to our library archives?
This is not really the point. The point is that even if we decided that, yes, we want to keep everything, we would not be able to do this (I don’t care what Kahle says). Kahle seems to think the limiting factor is money. This is very naïve. The limiting factors include 1) our actually limited data storage space (cyberspace is not, in fact, infinite), and 2) the limit of energy we are able to supply to run these data centers (and the environmental costs of doing so). So although we may be able to archive all of the works ever created to date, we are fast-producing more and more. Eventually we won’t be able to keep up with our own data production.
Consider the enormous costs of archiving what we have so far! Google estimates there are 130 million books in the world. And if we multiply that by the approximate CO2 cost of a 300 page digital book, it works out to nearly 300,000 tonnes of CO2, and that’s just for the books! You also have to add all the music and the videos (at considerably greater CO2 cost). And you have to multiply that by multiple copies Kahle (rightfully) proposes we would need, so that our archives don’t go down like the Alexandra Library. Additionally, we need technologies to enable us to access and interact with the web, like Mobile Phones, eReaders, and computers, which all consume virgin materials, emit CO2 during their production and use, and contribute to eWaste.
And there are psychological implications of this as well. Firstly, of course, we have to question the ways in which this enables information pleonexia, and increases our anxiety as we attempt to keep up with the information now available to us (and fears that we don’t know it all!). Furthermore, this promotes the unsustainable notion that we can forever expand into cyberspace, and the false perception that doing so has no real world consequences; and as we become increasingly dependent on cyberspace as storage for everything we value, we are forever consigning ourselves to supplying energy to maintain it, unable to disengage when the environment inevitably compels us to do so. How terrifying it becomes to contemplate the thought of unplugging! The hard truth is that one day we just might have to do that. If we tell ourselves that we need to be connected to this much information in order to be human in this world, we won’t be able to cope without it.
There are obvious objections to what I’m saying, namely that digital alternatives in many ways seem more environmentally friendly. People say, ‘Well, doesn’t a paper book have a greater carbon footprint than a digital book.’ Yes. But paper books come from trees, so if we learned to moderate our consumption of them, they would renew over time (moderation is a difficult but necessary pill for us to swallow). When we store a digital book, we consume non-renewable fossil fuels, which makes them fundamentally unsustainable. So in one sense, cyberspace is unsustainable for the same reason that any fossil fuel-based product is. But there’s another important point, which we can make with the example of a disposable camera. These are awful environmentally. But their costs are easily visible – because we have to pay to use them, and we physically throw them away. In contrast, the digital conceals its environmental costs, and there are no financial incentives for moderation.
My point is that we have to make an informed – and painfully grown up – decision about whether this goal of dumping everything in cyberspace is worth the costs. It certainly isn’t without environmental and psychological costs above and beyond economic ones, so let’s not delude ourselves that it is risk- and cost-free in these respects.
Thursday, March 31, 2011
Carr's The Shallows - our plastic minds
A summary of:
Carr, N. (2010). The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to our Brains. W.W. Norton & Company: New York.
(Warning: Internet causes massive brain damage?)
Having read Carr’s first book, Rewiring the World: From Edison to Google, I must say that I am wholly convinced now that Google is a very sinister company. Not only do they aspire to world domination, but they seem to have a highly objectionable vision of what their world would look like, if they got their way. They seem to have no concern for the environmental impacts of their projects, nor for the ethical implications of them, both evidenced by their new baby, the Google Book Search.
More worrying than this is their utter disregard for – and massive devaluation of – the human mind. To them, it is an imperfect machine; and I suppose the fact that their technologies may or may not be damaging it only further proves to them its need for augmentation… or replacement.
But I do care about what’s happening to our minds. And while you are immediately branded a Luddite to say so, I think the Internet may be hurting us. I think there are two kinds of effects this is having on our minds: cognitive impairment (which you would have to weigh against the clear cognitive augmentation is also provides), and damage to our emotional and psychological wellbeing. I shall take these one at a time.
Carr argues – and he is not alone in proposing this – that the Internet is “chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation” (7). He continues, “Whether I’m online or not, my mind (6) now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski” (7). Or, stated elsewhere: “Our use of the Internet involves many paradoxes, but the one that promises to have the greatest long-term influence over how we think is this one: the Net seizes our attention only to scatter it” (118). He understands this to be a result of technology’s power over us. He writes that he began to sense that the computer “was more than just a simple tool that did what you told it to do. It was a machine that, in subtle but unmistakable ways, exerted an influence over you. The more I used it, the more it altered the way I worked” (13), so that for example, “In using the word processor, I had become something of a word processor myself” (13). He also cites the interesting case of Nietzsche: when he adopted a kind of typewriter known as a writing ball, his writing style changed perceptibly. A friend of his commented that his “prose had become tighter, more telegraphic. There was a new forcefulness to it, too, as though the machine’s power – its ‘iron’ – was, through some mysterious metaphysical mechanism, being transferred into the words it pressed into the page” (Carr’s words, 18).
But the Internet is not a writing tool. It is a thinking tool. As such, it changes the way we think. Carr muses on his distracted mind, “But my brain, I realized, wasn’t just drifting. It was hungry. It was demanding to be fed the way the Net fed it – and the more it was fed, the hungrier it became. Even when I was away from my computer, I yearned to check e-mail, click links, do some Googling. I wanted to be connected. Just as Microsoft Word had turned me into a flesh-and-blood word processor, the Internet, I sensed, was turning me into something like a high-speed data processor machine a human HAL” (16). This is an interesting way of understanding what I have come to call information pleonexia. Our insatiable desire for information is in a way determined by the technology’s desire for information working through – and using – us.
There is another way of understanding this phenomenon, and that is to look at our neurobiology. Carr spends a great deal of time explaining what is called ‘neuroplasticity’, i.e. the ability of the brain to change and adapt. By studying simpler nervous systems, like that of the large sea slug, biologist Eric Kandel proved how easy it is to alter the brain. Carr writes: Kandel… found that if you touch a slug’s gill, even very lightly, the gill will immediately and reflexively recoil. But if you touch the gill repeatedly, without causing any harm to the animal, the recoiling instinct will steadily diminish. The slug will become (27) habituated to the touch and learn to ignore it. By monitoring slugs’ nervous systems, Kandel discovered that ‘this learned change in behavior was paralleled by a progressive weakening of the synaptic connections’ between the sensory neurons that ‘feel’ the touch and the motor neurons that tell the gill to retract. In a slug’s ordinary state, about ninety percent of the sensory neurons in its gill have connections to motor neurons. But after its gill is touched just forty times, only ten percent of the sensory cells maintain links to the motor cells. The research ‘showed dramatically,’ Kandel wrote, that ‘synapses can undergo large and enduring changes in strength after only a relatively small amount of training” (28).
What’s important for us to understand from this is that it is very possible, in fact very likely, that the Internet is changing the physical structure of our brains. Carr cites some other interesting examples.
· “In 2008, Small and two of his colleagues carried out the first exper-(120)iment that actually showed people’s brains changing in response to Internet use…. / The most remarkable part of the experiment came when the tests were repeated six days later. In the interim, the researches had the novices spend an hour a day online, searching the Net. The new scans revealed that the area in their prefrontal cortex that had been largely dormant now showed extensive activity – just like the activity in the brains of the veteran surfers. ‘After just five days of practice, the exact same neural circuitry in the front part of the brain became active in the Internet-naïve subjects,’ reports Small. ‘Five hours on the Internet, and the naïve subjects had already rewired their brains.’ He goes on to ask, ‘If our brains are so sensitive to just an hour a day of computer exposure, what happens when we spend more time [online]?’” (121)
· “In 2003, a Dutch clinical psychologist named Christof van Nimwegen began a fascinating study of computer-aided learning that a BBC writer would later call ‘one of the most interesting examinations of current computer use and the potential downsides of our increasing reliance on screen-based interaction with information systems.’ Van Nimwegen had two groups of volunteers work through a tricky logic puzzle on a computer…. One of the groups used software that had been designed to be as helpful as possible. It offered onscreen assistence during the course of solving the puzzle, providing visual cues, for instance, to highlight permitted moves. The other group used a bare-bones program, which provided no hints or other guidance (214). / In the early stages of solving the puzzle, the group using the helpful software made correct moves more quickly than the other group, as would be expected. But as the test proceeded, the proficiency of the members of the group using the bare-bones software increased more rapidly. In the end, those using the unhelpful program were able to solve the puzzle more quickly and with fewer wrong moves. They also reached fewer impasses – states in which no further moves were possible – than did the people using the helpful software. The findings indicated, as van Nimwegen reported, that those using the unhelpful software were better able to plan ahead and plot strategy, while those using the helpful software tended to rely on simple trial and error. Often, in fact, those with the helpful software were found ‘to aimlessly click around’ as they tried to crack the puzzle. / Eight months after the experiment, van Nimwegen reassembled the groups and had them again work on the colored-balls puzzle as well as a variation on it. He found that the people who had originally used the unhelpful software were able to solve the puzzles nearly twice as fast as those who had used the helpful software. In another test, he had a different set of volunteers use ordinary calendar software to schedule a complicated series of meeting involving overlapping groups of people. Once again, one group used helpful software that provided lots of on-screen cues, and another group used unhelpful software. The results were the same. The subjects using the unhelpful program ‘solved the problems with fewer superfluous moves [and] in a more straightforward manner,’ and they demonstrated greater ‘plan-based behavior’ and ‘smarter solution paths’” (215).
Notice that the latter of these studies seems to directly contradict Jane McGonigal’s euphoric assessment of the ways in which gaming helps us solve problems. And the former study begs even more urgently, What exactly are we training our brains FOR??? It seems to me that we are training ourselves to think like machines think… which is a futile endeavor, given that we will always be sub-par machines. Why not train our brains to think like better humans? We can excel at that!
Of course, we can’t deny that the Web helps us tremendously in doing very specific kinds of thinking. And we seem excited at the prospect of freeing up some real estate in our brains. But just as we made the mistake of thinking that labor-saving devices would free up time, we made the mistake of thinking that cognitive tools would free up our brains to do more exciting things (see p.181 for evidence of this mistake). I was surprised in particular by the study by James Evans at the University of Chicago, who looked at citations in journals from 1945 to 2005. Carr writes: “He analyzed the citations included in the articles to see if patters of citation, and hence of research, have changed as journals have shifted from being printed on paper to being published online. Considering how much easier it is to search digital text than printed text, the common assumption has been that making journals available on the Net would significantly broaden the scope of scholarly research, leading to a much more diverse set of citations. But that’s not at all what Evans discovered. As more journals moved online, scholars actually cited fewer articles than they had before. And as old issues of printed journals were digitized and uploaded to the Web, scholars cited more recent articles with increasing frequency. A broadening of available information led, as Evans described it, to a ‘narrowing of science and scholarship’. / In explaining the counterintuitive findings in a 2008 Science article, Evans noted that automated information-filtering tools, such as search engines, tend to serve as amplifiers of popularity, quickly establishing and then continually reinforcing a consensus about what information is important and what isn’t” (217). So just because doing something seems easier (I often think how difficult it would be for me to do a PhD without the Internet), that doesn’t make the product better. Perhaps humans are better versions of themselves when they have to struggle toward their goals.
But again, some cognitive functions are undeniably improved by the Web. Carr writes: “While experimental evidence is sparse, it seems only logical that Web searching and browsing would also strengthen brain functions related to certain kinds of fast-paced problem solving, particularly those involving the recognition of patterns in a welter of data” (139). / “Other studies suggest that the kind of mental calisthenics we engage in online may lead to a small expansion in the capacity of our working memory. That, too, would help us to become more adept at juggling data. Such research ‘indicates that our brains learn to swiftly focus attention, analyze information, and almost instantaneously decide on a go or no-go decision,’ says Gary Small. He believes that (139) as we spend more time navigating the vast quantity of information available online, ‘many of us are developing neural circuitry that is customized for rapid and incisive spurts of directed attention’” (Carr, 140). But then he is quick to put these gains in perspective, writing, “…it would be a serious mistake to look narrowly at the Net’s benefits and conclude that the technology is making us more intelligent. Jordan Grafman, head of the cognitive neuroscience unit at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, explains that the constant shifting of our attention when we’re online may make our brains more nimble when it comes to multitasking, but improving our ability to multitask actually hampers our ability to think deeply and creatively” (140). The thing that I must reconcile in my own research is this: while I am on the one hand bemoaning what the Internet is doing to certain cognitive functions (such as creativity and attention), I am also questioning the goal of cognitive augmentation that underlies computer technology in general. So I am effectively suggesting that we shouldn’t be aiming to improve our cognitive functions. If that’s true, then do I have a right to complain that certain ones seem to be getting weaker? I think I do, actually. It’s the old Hippocratic Oath: Do no harm.
There are three other points to make about neuroplasticity:
1) It would explain why things that are anathema to us initially come to feel like human nature. We literally change. In social psychology terms, this is known as the foot-in-the-door phenomenon; i.e. as we make small concessions, we allow more and more unwanted things through the door. So while we may cringe initially at the thought of ubiquitous computers, they become acceptable through our repeated exposure to them, as our brains change and come to react less and less to this unwanted stimuli (like the sea slug no longer recoiling at touch).
2) As Carr says, “What we’re not doing when we’re online also has neurological consequences. Just as neurons that fire together wire together, neurons that don’t fire together don’t wire together. As the time we spend scanning Web pages crowds out the time we spend reading books, as the time we spend exchanging bite-sized text messages crowds out the time we spend composing sentences and paragraphs, as the time we spend hopping across links crowds out the time we devote to quiet reflection and contemplation, the circuits that support those old intellectual functions and pursuits weaken and begin to break apart. The brain recycles the disused neurons and synapses for other, more pressing work. We gain new skills and perspectives but lose old ones” (120).
3) Given the changeability of our brains, it is not far fetched to suggest that we are damaging our wellbeing through our exposure to the Internet, potentially hardwiring in anxiety, addiction, apathy, etc.. This is different from saying that technology increases our anxiety (etc.). This is saying that technology is encoding anxiety (etc.) into our brains.
So let’s get to the wellbeing implications of the Internet.
We are increasingly addicted to information. E.g., “The near-continuous stream of new information pumped out by the Web also plays to our natural tendency to ‘vastly overvalue what happens to us right now,’ as Union College psychologist Christopher Chabris explains. We crave the new even when we know that ‘the new is more often trivial than essential’” (134). This is similar to Postman’s argument about the information-action ratio, that we feel increasingly disempowered to do anything with or about the information we receive. We are, like all good addicts, consuming compulsively; and we need more and more information to satisfy our cravings, ultimately meaning that we consume, but we are doing so only to feel ‘normal’. In other words, it is not making us happy; it is not satisfying our human needs.
Secondly, we are overloaded with information, which as we know from studies affects our ability to be compassionate, or to respond to information in emotionally appropriate ways. Carr writes, “Information overload has become a permanent affliction, and our attempts to cure it just make it worse. The only way to cope is to increase our scanning and our skimming, to rely even more heavily on the wonderfully responsive machines that are the source of the problem. Today, more information is ‘available to us than ever before,’ writes Levy, ‘but there is less time to make use of it – and specifically to make use of it with any depth of reflection.’ Tomorrow, the situation will be worse still” (170).
Thirdly, technology is making it more and more difficult to be contemplative. And it is very likely that humans need these opportunities to feel fulfilled: “When carried to the realm of the intellect, the industrial ideal of efficiency poses, as Hawthorne understood, a potentially mortal threat to the pastoral ideal of meditative thought. That doesn’t mean that promoting the rapid discovery and retrieval of information is bad. It’s not. The development of a well-rounded mind requires both an ability to find and quickly parse a wide range of information and a capacity for open-ended reflection. There needs to be time for efficient data collection and time for inefficient contemplation, time to operate the machine and time to sit idly in the garden. We need to work in Google’s ‘world of numbers,’ but we also need to be able to retreat to Sleepy Hollow. The problem today is that we’re losing our ability to strike a balance between those two very different states of mind. Mentally, we’re in perpetual motion” (168).
This really does sound like I’m just a Luddite. But I don’t think it’s crazy to weigh the downsides of technology versus their supposed benefits. Otherwise, how can we give our informed consent to the objects in our world? And without this consent, of course these technologies will appear to us as techno-demons, i.e. as forces that confront us that are beyond our control. But they are in our control! And the key is to begin by being questioning. This is no easy task, especially since it is very difficult to appreciate the effects technology are having on us while we are being affected by them (it’s easier for an outsider to study this). And there is an element of denial as well, given the Sisyphean challenge of trying to stop the continued proliferation of technologies and the growing power they have over us (for example, we can’t stop the Google Book Search, no matter how damaging this may be). But I think if we face up to the difficult truths, we can start to improve our situation, and we’ll be better off.
Saturday, March 26, 2011
Jane McGonigal – Gaming Can Make A Better World
In his book, Carr writes, “The importance of such skills [the ones fostered by computer game play] shouldn’t be taken lightly. As our work and social lives come to center on the use of electronic media, the faster we’re able to navigate those media and the more adroitly we’re able to shift our attention among online tasks, the more valuable we’re likely to become as employees and even as friends and colleagues” (140). Jane McGonigal takes this argument one step further, arguing that the skills developed in online game play are the skills that can help us save the world. Or more correctly, she believe that games reinforce behavior and attitudes that may prove necessary for solving our real world problems.
The first such attitude is what she describes as “urgent optimism.” Unfortunately, she admits, so far this urgent optimism translates into the belief that one can change the virtual world only, and not the real world (the very thing she hopes to change with her games). But the point is that, whereas in the real world we feel increasingly disempowered to make real change, paralyzed by the seeming impossibility of affecting big problems, in the game world, these players feel like nothing is impossible. I would agree that we certainly need more of this.
The second behavior is that gamers are really good at weaving a social fabric. I might suggest that the weaving of this fabric is a game in itself – strategic alliances. My real concern here is that it reinforces the slightly sick transformation of ‘friendship’ that is occurring with our social media. And the other is that this notion of geographically boundless collaboration itself has environmental implications, when we consider the resources that go in to maintaining these connections (see Mobile Lives). But I am torn here, because in my work, I’m arguing that we need greater social connections, and these gamers are doing this. I suppose the difference is that I’m suggesting that the connections are themselves better (i.e. they are more fulfilling, and meaningful), whereas she is implying that these connections need to be more numerous, and more organized, which itself betrays a worldview bias.
The third attitude is what she calls “blissful productivity.” This is the idea that humans are most human when they are being productive, and that we feel good about this. I find this funny, in that it seems like the latest transformation of the Protestant Ethic to fit our modern world. But yes, it would be nice if these productive efforts were focused on changing the world for the better, rather than on making money (and in turn, working to perpetuate the world as it is now).
And finally, she identifies “epic meaning” as being something that gamers are drawn to. When describing the appeal of her game, A World Without Oil, she says blithely that “nobody wants to change how they live because it’s good for the world, or because they’re supposed to,” but that if you immerse people in an epic game, they can in a sense be tricked into doing what’s good for the world (though she didn’t phrase it that way). I find this really sad on the one hand, because I can’t fathom why our sustainability problems are not ‘epic’ enough to engender this motivation. On the other hand, my research argues something not too dissimilar! – namely that I suggest that people need to be re-immersed (reminded in some cases) in a meaningfilled world, one that is passed down through great myths and spiritual traditions, in order that they adopt these more harmonious behaviors. (See Walker’s Sustainable By Design.) As she said, those who participated in the epic game, continued the practices learned years after the game ended. This suggests that this is likely the key, and that I am on the right track. You have to provide people with a greater reason to want to change the world. I just sort of wish it wasn’t by having them play games online.
McGonigal has to overcome many people’s kneejerk reaction to immersion. People might argue that immersion is bad – or if not inherently bad, that this amount of time immersed in a fictional world is to the detriment of real world health/happiness/productivity, etc.. I don’t think immersion is bad (see Ryan post). And I don’t think that the amount of time spent means that it is necessarily bad either. It all depends on what you are gaining from that engagement. My issue is that the games are built within the same paradigm that seems to be producing an unsustainable relationship between humans and the planet. They reinforce particular kinds of thinking (as I mentioned before about collaboration/information exchange, for example), and they increase our addiction to computer technologies, which has both psychological and environmental implications. For example, she quickly mentions how many more gamers will be using mobile devices to connect to these games, and dismisses the environmental impact by saying that the power they use will be increasingly ‘green’. I worry that there will be a point at which these lines cross on the graph, and that as we use more and more devices/energy, we are running out of time to use these games to solve these huge problems – or indeed to do anything to solve them. Increased gaming accelerates the crises in some ways, just in terms of the energy cost of doing so.
And as for the ‘escapism’ arguments against immersion, she is not advocating exodus into virtual reality. She doesn’t want to make better games so that we have a better place to escape to. She wants to make better games that help us make our real world better. I think this is a great mission.
Finally, I must come back to the question she asks, which is: In all of the zillions of hours we spend gaming, what exactly are we training for? She quotes a figure that the average young person will spend 10,000 hours gaming, which, according to Malcolm Gladwell’s research, means that we are producing a fleet of gaming ‘virtuosos’. But really, are these individuals ‘virtuosos’ or ‘idiot savants’? I guess I think that being a great computer gamer may not be that helpful when the time comes that we disengage from computer technology. If we are creating a generation of people who are excellent at solving problems specifically with computer – or a she suggests, we are evolving to think like this – then we may be in big trouble because. What happens when we try to unplug? Do we know how to function without these tools? We are not preparing ourselves for Power Down. And as Carr shows, using computers to help us solve problems does not make us better problem solvers, but worse….
Carr's The Shallows - the Internet is changing us
A summary of:
Carr, N. (2010). The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to our Brains. W.W. Norton & Company: New York.
(Be Warned: The Internet is changing us)
The main message Carr sends in this new book is that our technology – indeed, every new medium – changes us. This is not a new idea. McLuhan, whom he cites frequently, is famous for saying that the “medium is the message”, alluding to the “transformative power of new communication technologies” (2). But this aphorism was also, according to Carr, a warning “about the threat the power poses – and the risk of being oblivious to the threat” (2). Carr suggests that often times, the introduction of a new technology sparks debate about the wrong thing, namely the content the technology conveys. Carr writes: “What both enthusiast and skeptic miss is what McLuhan saw: that in the long run a medium’s content matters less than the medium itself in influencing how we think and act. As our window onto the world, and onto ourselves, a popular medium molds what we see and how we see it – and eventually, if we use it enough, it changes who we are, as individuals and as a society” (3). Just as “When a carpenter picks up a hammer, the hammer becomes, so far as his brain is concerned, part of his hand” (208), when we use the Internet, the Internet becomes an extension of our brains.
So how does the Internet change us? Well, some cognitive skills are strengthened as we engage with the Web. These include things like “hand-eye coordination, reflex response, and the processing of visual cues” (139). As a 2003 Nature study shows, game players are more deft as shifting their visual focus and identify more items in their visual fields. The authors of this study concluded that “‘although video-game playing may seem to be rather mindless, it is capable of radically altering visual attentional processing’” (139). A similar argument has been made by Jane McGonigal (see post). But the question is, how useful are these skills in a age when computers no longer exist? If we are training ourselves to be better and better at using computers – i.e. thinking like computers – aren’t we getting less and less good at NOT using computers? (Of course, not only are their cognitive tradeoffs to be considered with our increased Web use, there are negative psychological consequences to this as well – which is the topic of my next blog.)
Another thing that becomes clear in reading this book is that the tenets that underpin technology are self-reinforcing. For example, Carr identifies the Internet as one of many “intellectual technologies,” in that they seek to “extend or support our mental powers” (44). In using the Internet, we tacitly accept the correctness of this endeavor; and the more we use the Internet, the more we come to value its cause. Nowhere is this more evident than in Google itself. Carr quotes Richard Koman, who said that Google “‘has become a true believer in its own goodness, a belief which justifies its own set of rules regarding corporate ethics, anti-competition, customer service and its place in society’” (164). Here we see in action the reshuffling of the hierarchy of value system. Whereas once honesty and community etc. may have been at the top, here they are subordinated to freedom of information. (For evidence of this, note the many lawsuits against Google’s Book Search and their dismissive, cavalier attitude, Google’s Eric Schmidt saying: “‘Imagine the cultural impact of putting tens of millions of previously inaccessible volumes into one vast index, every word of which is searchable by anyone, rich or poor, urban or rural, First World or Third, en toute langue – and all, of course, entirely for free’” (162).) The Google Book Project vaults “data” and “information” to the top of our priorities, asserting yet again “the machine” over “the garden” (167). It is little surprise, then, that Westerners see their great philanthropic mission as being the increased access to information for supposedly ‘disadvantaged’ populations (e.g. the well-meaning but entirely misguided One Laptop Per Child Initiative; proving that poverty is measured in diminished informational resources, rather than diminished social bonds, happiness, etc.).
What is even more worrying – and frankly insulting – is the assertion by these intellectual technologies (the Web more so than others, I would argue) that we would be “‘better off’ if our brains were supplemented, or even replaced, by artificial intelligence” (173). When societies were becoming literate, there was similar debate about the impact it would have on people’s minds. Socrates feared that writing would teach people to become less dependent on their own memory, and remember things “not from within themselves, but by means of external marks” (177). And he was right. But this is ever more true with the Internet, which encourages people to completely offload their memory to the Web, to save up precious brain space. But Socrates’ wariness should prove to us just how far our line in the sand has moved, how much we have been changed by our technology. If books were at one time anathema to us, and now many of us see nothing wrong with deferring by default to Google’s search results, it should suggest to us that perhaps we need to rethink the seemingly unquestionable sense of the mission of intellectual technologies.
Another way that technology changes us is that it homogenizes us culturally, so that we lose all rich, human ways of doing as we replace them with specifically technological ways of doing. (This is another reason for my aversion to One Laptop Per Child – pushing Western values to non-Western countries.) Carr writes, “Culture is more than the aggregate of what Google describes as ‘the world’s information.’ It’s more than what can be reduced to binary code and uploaded onto the Net. To remain vital, culture must be renewed in the minds of the members of every generation. Outsource memory, and culture withers” (197). He quotes Richard Foreman, who argues that offloading memory threatens both the depth of culture and the depth of self: “‘I come from a tradition of Western culture,’ he wrote, ‘in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense and ‘cathedral-like’ structure of the highly educated and articulate personality – a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West.’ But now, he continued, ‘I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self – evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the ‘instantly available.’ As we are drained of our ‘inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance,’ Foreman concluded, we risk turning into ‘pancake people – spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button’” (196).
The final way that technology changes us is that we design our societies to function around its capabilities; or as Weizenbaum says, “Such technologies become part of ‘the very stuff out of which man builds his world” (206). Carr quotes Weizenbaum futher: “‘The computer was not a prerequisite to the survival of modern society in the post-war period and beyond,’ Weizenbaum argued; ‘its enthusiastic, uncritical embrace by the most “progressive” elements of American government, business, and industry made it a resource essential to society’s survival in the form that the computer itself had been instrumental in shaping’” (207). Carr explains further: “Comptuers would come to mediate the activities that define people’s everyday lies – how they learn, how they think, how they socialize. What the history of intellectual technologies shows us, he warned, is that ‘the introduction of computers into some complex human activities may constitute an irreversible commitment.’ Our intellectual and social lives may, like our industrial routines, come to reflect the form that the computer imposes on them” (207). Just as Carr warned from the beginning: “The computer screen bulldozes our doubts with its bounties and conveniences. It is so much our servant that it would seem churlish to notice that it is also our master” (4). This is because, “Once (206) adopted , they can never be abandoned, at least not without plunging society into ‘great confusion and possibly utter chaos.’ An intellectual technology, he wrote, ‘becomes an indispensible component of any structure once it is to thoroughly integrated with the structure, so enmeshed in various vital substructures, that it can no longer be factored out without fatally impairing the whole structure’” (207).
My concern is this: Everything we know as humans (from our spiritual traditions, social taboos, etc.) should tell us that we should resist the mesmerizing effect of these intellectual technologies, and yet we sacrifice these values because adopting them is easier to do. But like every empire, the Age of the Computer will one day fall (just as cars will as fossil fuels dry up and nuclear power cannot supply enough energy to the grid to provide for an electric car society), and when that comes, I’m afraid we’ll be very ashamed of having eschewed our human values for technological ones.
I want to end on a more positive note. The real question about the power of technology should be this: How do we use it to our advantage? Can we see hope in the transformative affects of media? Firstly, as Langdon Winner pointed out, “technologies are not merely aids to human activity, but also powerful forces acting to reshape that activity and its meaning” (47). To us, this should indicate that if we design responsibly, we can have a huge impact on our very worldview. So just as the mechanical clock “helped bring into being the scientific mind and the scientific man” (44), it is possible that a spiritualized cyberspace might create an altogether different man, perhaps an incarnation that’s more sensitive to issues of human/nature harmony. And secondly, if we recognize that the addition of a medium affects all other media – in McLuhan’s words, ‘It never ceases to oppress the older media until it finds new shapes and positions for them’ (89) – then if we create a new Internet, it has the power to affect the Internet we have now. In other words, we are not in competition with previous, highly popular incarnations of the Web. By innovating cyberspace creatively, we may ameliorate the negative impacts of the Web (as we know it today) by merely opening eyes to an alternative.
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