One man's enthusiasm and another man's inanity
This quarter's issue of IEEE Technology and Society presents the results of a survey of blog entries concerning tablet PCs conducted by Efpraxia D. Zamani and colleagues. Two things about the survey struck me immediately: that "most of the bloggers hold upper level managerial positions", and that nearly all of the material quoted from their blogs seems rather inane. Zamani et al. could almost be writing a parody of Dilbert's Pointy-Haired Boss.
To be fair to upper-level managers, Zamani and colleagues compiled their material in a way that seems likely to select only the most inane stuff: they searched for "blog" and "iPad", and discarded any technical reviews. That is, they sought out casual writing about iPads and explicitly ignored rigourous reviews of the technology. We can still hope that most upper level managers actually have better things to do than write uninsightful observations like "it was ultra-convenient to just flip out the iPad ... without having to whip out a laptop or projector" (p. 76), which I would otherwise expect to find only in mediocre undergraduate essays. What, exactly, is the difference between "flipping out" and "whipping out"?
Whatever the merits of the bloggers' own observations, Zamani and colleagues identify a euphoric attachment to technological devices that seems totally alien to me. There are plenty of devices that I find useful for one purpose or another, and occasionally I might even mention so in conversation or on this blog. But I don't think I'd ever use words like "love", "passion" and "excitement", as Zamani and colleagues do in the last part of their article (p 78). I don't, for example, feel any loss when going for days or even weeks without my phone or computer when camping or travelling. (I do eventually wonder if any of my friends sent me any e-mail, though.)
In part, I guess this reflects my engineering background. For me and other engineers, technological artifacts are simply the end result of sound engineering principles. If we get excited about anything, it's the cleverness and power of the principles themselves. For non-engineers, however, technological artifacts can be magic boxes to be marvelled at in their own right.
Perhaps I'm also just not one to feel attached to non-human objects. Similar enthusiasm about cars and pets, for example, leaves me feeling cold. I do feel sentimental about objects I've owned for a long time, and I hate throwing things out. But I can't imagine myself writing a blog entry praising the guitar I've owned for twenty years (but rarely play), or chronicling the life and times of my once-sturdy pair of cargo pants that were torn beyond repair during a hike last month.
I certainly can't imagine anyone wanting to read such a blog entry. But I guess iPad enthusiasts probably don't find my actual blog very interesting either.
Alone together and feeling used by communication tools
My recent difficulties with social networking inspired me to read Sherry Turkle's Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. The book's subtitle neatly captures my dissatisfaction with LinkedIn and other supposedly social media: it's very easy to click a button that creates a record in a database stating that I'm "connected" with someone, but there's a whole lot more to do if I want to form and maintain a significant and effective relationship with that person.
Turkle makes a distinction between "performance" and "friendship". In the first half of the book, "performance" refers to robotic toys that are programmed to enact rituals that children expect from conscious beings: the robots say they are happy, hungry, etc. even though they (presumably) don't experience such emotions like humans do. In the second half of the book, "performance" refers to manipulating text messages and Facebook profiles to present the desired standards of coolness, connection and caring. She believes that
sociable technology will always disappoint because it promises what it cannot deliver. It promises friendship when it can only deliver performances (p. 101).
Turkle acknowledges critics who point out that we are always performing to one degree or another, in that we craft different personae for friends, family, work, school and so on. And how does one distinguish "authenticity" from a highly sophisticated and nuanced performance anyway? Of course Turkle contends that the performances exhibited by current robots and social networking sites are hopelessly inadequate to fully capture human emotion and relationships, and I find it hard to disagree.
It is, of course, conceivable that improvements in technology will one day overcome such inadequacy. But what to do in the mean time? Turkle doesn't recommend eliminating robots and social media and, indeed, seems to be quite comfortable with handing them out by the dozen as part of her research.
For me, the answer has to be about recognising the capabilities and limitations of particular media, employing them for what they are good at and dispensing with them for what they are not. The saddest stories in Turkle's book involve people feeling psychologically or socially compelled to use some tool despite its evident incapacity to meet the person's needs. Someone whose only tool is a hammer, as the saying goes, struggles with tasks that don't involve nails.
Most of the people in Turkle's studies are young -- children or teenagers -- and it could be that they simply haven't yet learned which tools work best for which tasks. Even older people struggle with how best to use new tools. Perhaps it isn't so surprising that things go awry in these situations.
Towards the end of the book, Turkle writes about people who have realised that the tools they have been using aren't working for them, and have consequently developed strategies like scheduling one-on-one phone conversations and deleting their Facebook profiles. Some of these strategies are fairly crude, but I think they demonstrate an important (and possibly under-rated) mind-set: a determination to make technology serve one's needs in place of passive acceptance of what technology happens to be in vogue.
Transparent and opaque experience
Continuing the adventure of train timetables from my previous entry, I recently asked a similar group of friends if anyone could give me a lift to the nearest railway station. I was astonished to find that none of them appeared to know the location of the railway station, even though all of them drove right past it on their way home.
I suppose that my own perspective is biased by my preference to travel by foot and public transport: my car-driving friends might be similarly astonished that I can't comprehend the desire to live in or visit XXXX Heights that has never seen a bus or train, and which I think might as well be on the moon.
Nonetheless, I've long felt that car-dependent people have a somewhat less intimate understanding of geography than those of us who take the time to walk through it. I get a similar feeling after travelling by underground train in cities like London and Tokyo, where I'm effectively teleported from one part of the city to another without any experience of what lies between.
More generally, it seems that technology-dependent people have a less intimate understanding of the world around them -- at least in the sense that they don't experience it directly, even if people with modern educations have a better theoretical understanding of physics, biology, etc. than their Stone Age forebears.
This seems like a bad thing, but it is surely inevitable: no one person could experience everything we know about physics, chemistry, biology, psychology and all the rest. My mode of travel aside, I don't farm my own food, prepare my own medicines, or even build my own computers.
An early chapter of Sherry Turkle's Life on the Screen talks about people with "transparent" and "opaque" views of computers. People with transparent views are interested in how computers work, while those with an opaque view are only interested in what they can do. Before reading Life on the Screen, I sometimes characterised non-technical people as having a "magic box view" of computers.
I found Turkle's discussion refreshing in that she doesn't make one view superior to other, where computer nerds might consider the opaque view stupid and ignorant while woollier minds might disparage engineers as boring and inhuman. I've since come to think of good engineering and design, at least in part, as using the transparent view to enable the opaque view (or to enable the "magic" in my former terminology).
Perhaps the transparent view of technology (and geography) provides a more direct and complete experience of the world, and the person who took an opaque view of everything would surely be a supremely ignorant and uninquisitive one. But it clearly isn't practical to take a transparent view of everything all the time, and the opaque view is a very practical one.
