Vastly Overrated Technology

(Ithaca, NY) -- Taking up the topic Toby introduced, I would add to his summary of Amusing Ourselves to Death the following: A central image in Postman's essay is the contrast between the predictions of George Orwell and Aldous Huxley of how mass media would be used for social control. In 1984, Orwell foresaw state control of media (and education, historical records, etc.) leading to omnipresent, blatantly intrusive (and coercive) propaganda in the style of the totalitarian movements of the twentieth century (fascism, Nazism, and the manifold varieties of revolutionary communism), where social control via thought control is accomplished through repetition and the subliminal threat of violent retribution against those who resist the official message. Fear is the ultimate guarantor of obedience. North Korea and Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge come to mind as partial realizations of the world Orwell envisioned.

In Brave New World, social control is maintained through the manipulation of desire and the distribution of pleasure. Order is maintained by controlling what individuals crave, deciding what they will believe they love, by creating and sustaining addictions. Interestingly, it is saturation with pleasure, rather than its withdrawal, which is the most effective method of subjugation.

In either case, like sheep, most people follow along, all too happily. And in either case, the social system inevitably becomes unmoored from its founding goals, forgetting that there had ever been a reason for its existence beyond self-perpetuation. But in Oceania, there is always a war to be fought against the outside, while in the brave new world, aimlessly adrift in an ocean of entertainment, one's (sightless) orientation is ever only inward.

(My understanding of economics is somewhat naive, but I speculate that the Orwellian model is best suited to situations in which the economics of scarcity obtain, while the Huxley's parable provides superior guidance to those who would rule the affluent society.)

Postman argues that America is best studied under a Huxleyan lens, and he focuses his attention on the role of the media of communication, specifically television, in abetting the unplanned stupidification and social control of American society. His essay is well worth reading.

I agree with most of it, including the assertion that the computer is a "vastly overrated technology." The idea of computation has come to dominate discourse in the sciences, the humanities, and what is left of middle-brow culture. It is a commonplace that thought is simply a form of computation, and the idea that perhaps the universe is just a giant computer running a version of Conway's Game of Life has tipped from novelty to banality in the span of thirty years. We take the Church-Turing thesis for granted, and we don't even know it. (We don't know any better, or we think that we know that we can't know any better.)

Do we realize what we are taking for granted in allowing the metaphor of computation to overrun our thinking, to dominate our analogies? I don't think so.

That the Internet is a "transformative" or "disruptive" technology is indisputable, even if the definition of these adjectives is vague (to the point of meaninglessness in the business world). For scholars it reduces the time and effort needed to track down a reference, to transmit a data set, to submit a publication. But is finding an answer (by typing in the right keywords to a search engine) really the same as answering a question? A popular idea (especially among Google employees and fans, for whom it is also self-serving) is that cognition is really just a form of search. I doubt it, and I find the fact of its suggestion disturbing, for it serves to narrow the mystery of thought through the rhetorical trick of redefinition, rather than enlightening it. It is an example of the detrimental trend in the evolution of our dominant thought-cliches that Jaron Lanier discusses at length in You Are Not a Gadget (also highly recommended): rather than adapting our machines to ourselves, we, being highly adaptable, change our definitions of human-ness to match prevailing technology and its interfaces. We first scheduled our lives according to the chiming of the town clock, then learned the rote maneuvers of the factory, and now we structure our actions to appease badly written software.

This is particularly pernicious in the case of the internet, the social web, where we are amused to distraction, yet never satiated, and where we fear above all else disconnection, to be out of the loop, to miss a pseudo-event or skip a tweet. We define ourselves to accommodate the categories available on our Facebook profiles, we measure our social valuation by the number of links pointing back to our homepages, and we continually tweak our web presences to attract more hits. Are we happier? Wiser? Better?

Sustained discourse? Hard to say, but I am skeptical.

I like the internet, but I would like less of it.

Like Postman, I find aspects of it to have been "great value to large-scale organization but have solved very little of importance to most people and have created at least as many problems for them as they may have solved."

Amusing Ourselves to Death 2010

Erik recently loaned me Neil Postman's 1984 book Amusing Ourselves to Death. Postman chronicles and analyzes the Huxleyan transition of an American media and culture based primarily on typography to one based on light-speed communications and images (perfected in television). The basic thesis is that, in 1984, American culture and discourse (politics, religion, education, etc) has devolved by means of its primary medium (TV) into entertainment where attention spans are measured in TV commercial spot times and where the substance, consistency and veracity are not the metrics of discourse but rather the way the message makes us feel. (This latter issue reminded me of the people who preferred GW Bush because "they could imagine sitting down and having a beer with him.")

Flip to 2010. The Internet is gaining ground on TV as a medium of discourse. In the final paragraph of his book Postman writes:

"I believe the computer to be a vastly overrated technology, I mention it here because, clearly, Americans have accorded it their customary mindless inattention; which means they will use it as they are told, without a whimper. Thus, a central thesis of computer technology -- that the principal difficulty we have in solving problems stems from insufficient data -- will go unexamined. Until, years from now, when it will be noticed that the massive collection and speed-of-light retrieval of data have been of great value to large-scale organization but have solved very little of importance to most people and have created at least as many problems for them as they may have solved."

I smiled at "vastly overrated technology." Clearly the speed-of-light retrieval of data has fundamentally changed how we, as individuals, work and even think. The answers are a click away. The Internet, unlike the TV, is a place where sustained conversation and exposition can exist. One might worry, however, that our attention to discourse will measure no longer than a wikipedia article and that the noise of email will drown out any sustained thought. The question I thought would be interesting to discuss here is whether we, as a country, are clicking or tweeting ourselves to death.