Technology 15 | unobtrusive lucidity

Social Media Voyeurism

I’ve a confession to make.

While “Inbox Zero” has been more than a bit elusive for me lately, I did manage to clear out my RSS feeds this morning. That means that, in addition to news, I read all manner of new blog posts, as well as old blog posts that I hadn’t quite gotten around to yet. Blogging, obviously, is very important to me. Yet, several posts into my reading this morning, I realized that I had only commented on two. And only one of those was substantive.

Moreover, what was missing from my feeds was further discussion on a comment chain in which I had engaged in some discussion a few days ago. I suppose I should consider that conversation dead now.

So, as much as I lament this issue in the blogosphere, I seem to have become a part of the problem on more than one occasion. You see, I’m troubled by how we read. By that, I don’t mean the distractibility that comes with jumping around with hyperlinks (a discussion in itself), but rather the idea that we “consume” our media. In fact, that is the phrase that is used to describe how we read and watch and listen in tech circles, as though the words of our authors, the conversation of our actors and hosts, and the notes of our musicians are commodities that we somehow own simply because we’ve purchased them or pay some sort of subscription or access fee. Thus, we “consume” our media. This sounds like a gluttonous act, one that makes me envision some sort of over-filled, greedy eater shoveling more and more into his mouth in order to satiate an appetite that is without end.

The difference, I’ve talked about before, is between “consuming” media, and “engaging” media. The same is true of art. We can take it in, or we can stop to think about it, appreciate it. We can go out to coffee and talk about it later. All of that has to do with “engaging” the art. The same should be true of “engaging” our media.

But what does this have to do with the blogosphere?

Excuse me, because I know I’m reprising a theme here that I’ve already discussed on more than one occasion. However, permit me to point out the obvious that a conversation cannot occur if more than one person isn’t talking. If one person is speaking (or writing) and everyone else is simply listening (or reading), then that is public address, not conversation. When we “consume” media, we read and watch and listen, and then repeat as necessary, feeling proud of all of the information and great art that we’ve taken in recently. But we haven’t stopped to really permit it to impact us. Talking with others is part of how it impacts us. The entire premise behind the Web 2.0 phenomenon was that this was media created and produced by everyone, not just professionals. In blogging (which was originally thought of as journaling), that involves two steps: reading someone’s thoughts, and then entering into conversation with that person (and others) by commenting. Otherwise, we’re missing part of what this whole thing is about.

In recent conversations with friends, I’ve compared this to an audience going to a play, and refusing to respond. Part of what makes a play such a powerful experience is that each performance is unique due to an unrepeatable synergy that occurs between the cast and the audience. Hopefully, the audience will cheer, cry, gasp, and ultimately applaud. Imagine, though, a play that received no audience reaction at all? Proverbial crickets chirping in the distance. Even an audience that booed would be preferable to that, because a silent audience brings an incomplete performance.

I would argue that the same is true of reading a book without discussing it with someone else during or after. Or, similarly, listening to music, seeing visual art…the list goes on. The important part of this process is the conversation, because that’s what makes it a complete event. Even when I don’t comment on other’s posts, I often end up discussing the ideas in that post with someone else. That’s better than silence.

Ironically, other social media platforms are experiencing similar losses of interactivity. How many “Twitter voyeurs” do you know that read what everyone else is saying without offering any words of their own? How many status updates do you actually comment on while perusing Facebook? In how many conversations do you participate on LinkedIn? We’re all to happy to watch everything go by us, somehow thinking we’re doing well to sit back and observe without actually contributing anything ourselves.

Certainly, not every post or video or update invites comment. Further, I’m not looking to place blame for this on one cultural phenomenon or the other, or to come across as whiny because I want people to comment here more (many of you do through one channel or another). The point is that we must, for the sake of ourselves and of our society, stop “consuming” media as we would any other product, because doing so cheapens it. When we “engage,” then everyone participating in the conversation is bettered by the dialogue.

That, I’m relatively certain, is the point.

Photo Attribution: gerlos

Talk Back

I hope this revelation speaks more to the amount of technological progress that my generation has witnessed than to my age, but I’m going to throw it out there anyway. I completed my undergrad in the days when email was in its infancy. Students did not have email addresses issued to us from our schools. I’m not sure professors all had email addresses. In fact, I was a senior in college before I had my first personal email address. Did I mention that I was a communication major?

In that age of yesteryear, I remember one of my professors having a humorous cartoon on his office door. The cartoon detailed the rise of communication from Neanderthal man to the present, and suddenly took an enormous plunge back to where it began when voicemail entered the picture. I didn’t truly understand the humor then…

I had a conversation with someone on Twitter a few days ago after mentioning (during one of those days) that I really shouldn’t have been answering my phone at that point (the end result was that both myself and the person calling were both hopelessly confused by the time we hung up…like I said, one of those days). He commented that he far prefers email over voicemail, and I agreed. My reasoning is that I can take the time to say exactly what I want to say in an email…the variables are removed, and I have time to edit. To a large degree, that reasoning can be applied to social networking platforms, as well. For one thing, I don’t type messages while in a moving vehicle, whereas I easily leave a voicemail while driving. Thus, I’m more likely to ramble or mis-speak something. When I’m writing that message, even in SMS, I glance back over it before sending. The odds of miscommunication and subsequent embarrassment (or flat out unprofessionalism) is significantly reduced.

I think its important to say, though, that all of these forms of communication are secondary to face-to-face communication. Hierarchically, I always place speaking with someone in person above all of the previously mentioned modalities of communication. For that matter, I would even prefer video-calling in an important situation (I’m defining important as moments of human interaction that affect who we are as people…not business transactions). The reason is that human interaction has nuances of non-verbal and paralinguistic elements that can completely alter how a message is transmitted from the sender to the receiver. Someone’s tone of voice or facial expressions make a message a thousand times more expressive than the same message in written format. In person, we instinctively interpret body posture and other clues that complete the message. Written communication does not replace this, because it can’t communicate the full message.

I think that is why live performances in theatre are more powerful than film or television. Partially because the entire person (in character, of course) is present to communicate his or her message to the audience, and, equally as important, the audience is there to respond. A play isn’t complete without an audience, because there’s a feedback loop created in which the actors feed off of the audience’s reactions. That’s why no two performances are ever exactly the same. Similarly, the same conversation will never be duplicated between two people, because those people react to each other in a unique way at that moment in time.

If I’m communicating an extremely simple personal message (like “Happy Birthday”), or a list of information or business detail, then written communication is certainly my preferred mode. Whenever possible, though, seeing and being physically present with the person to whom you are speaking is the only communication that is truly whole, that truly permits human beings to completely interact with each other at the deepest level.

Do you think we’re losing that whole communication? Replacing it with something inferior, something that was only intended to augment, and not substitute for, the real thing? Sometimes, I’m concerned that we’re doing just that.

Photo Attribution: Ed Yourdon

Playing Catch-Up

Ahh…technology. What would we do without it? And, perhaps more to the point, what are we going to do with it?

Little technological malfunctions set me on edge at times. Take last night for example. For the second time in a few months, I experienced a password glitch with my Barnes & Noble account, and I couldn’t sync a book I had just purchased with the Nook’s iPad app. Three minutes of trying later, and by the time I called customer service, I had all but announced my return to paper books out of frustration.

I’m better now, though. Thanks for wondering.

Along more academic lines, there has been a lot of interesting thought in the past few decades about the metaphysical or theological implications of technology…what we as mankind are attempting to achieve through our progress. One doesn’t have to look far for the perpetual stream of thought-provoking insight on how our technology is changing us even as we create it. What and how we invent, and the things for which we ultimately use our inventions, say a great deal about us as a people.

I remember, for example, checking a book out of the library when I was in elementary school about the city of tomorrow. The book was large, with lots of pictures. I remember that it portrayed cars that traveled on mono-rail type circuits through a futuristic city…cars that you didn’t actually have to drive, but rather simply told an address and let them take you there. Everyone used them in this book, and I remember thinking that this would be a tremendously cool experience. Of course, the concept of intelligent cars was a natural desire to take hold of the America psyche, because we love our automobiles. I remember, when I was young, my father joking about how he wanted a Knight Rider type of vehicle that would leave its parking place and come to the front of the grocery store to meet us. I remember that I sort of wanted that, too, because, again…how cool would that be?

Interestingly, now that the technology exists and is being actively tested, it turns out that there are some interesting legal ramifications involved, beyond the social questions of whether or not we trust our programmers to be able to prevent our cars from getting us into accidents.

Beyond the theological implications of technological development, there is a world of legal quagmire here. Our progress, in short, is decades ahead of our legal system. Inventors, as it were, travel at warp speed, while law-makers remain in sub-space. Nowhere can this be seen more readily that in the privacy debates that dominate our headlines on a regular basis, to say nothing of how the copyright system struggles to keep up with the unprecedented availability of music, film, and literature available at a moment’s notice.

I’m fascinated at the age in which we live. The technological advances that have occurred since my grandparents’ generation is unprecedented, and now, in my generation, the legal system is scrambling to keep up, largely at the behest of those who stand to make the most money in the new age (as usual). The number of things that could change on a moment’s notice to be no longer free, or to be completely illegal, alternately mystifies and scares me. What is constant is that I’m always amused at how the legal system perpetually moves at a proverbial snail’s pace to attempt regulation of the information sharing that has changed the face of mankind.

I think that, by the time they’ve caught up with our current position, that we’ll be decades further ahead. Which leads me to wonder: what does this sort of information and artistic availability look like with a wholly incapable system of regulation in place? I think we will continue to see the answer to that question play out in the years to come.

Photo Attribution: visual velocity pc

Physical Foundations

I keep coming back to this thought, it seems…actually, it keeps seeming to bring itself back to me, which perhaps is indication that I should be listening more carefully.

This week, it appeared in the form of a post over at Good Letters that you should take the time to read. The author is making a sound point. I previously had listened, in fact, to the interview conducted by Krista Tippett that Mr. Winters references, and it also launched this thought process into more serious motion.

Is our digital world, by definition, more at risk of being lost than a physical heritage?

In both cases, the thinkers in question speak of writing letters to their children. They argue that there is something more real to be experienced if their child is one day holding a physical letter or journal that they have written, with their perspectives, perhaps, on their children and life and any number of other things. As for me, I think of the photos and videos of mine and Karen’s adventures in our first few years of marriage. I want our child to have these as enormously important history of the family as it continues forward.

Just as Karen prefers physical books over my affinity for ebooks, so too she pines for physical photos. She fears the ease of misplacing digital files, and fears their fragility. However well and however obsessively I back up, she clings to the suspicion that they are only one hard drive failure away from being lost forever. And perhaps she’s right. We experienced a hard drive failure last year that was catastrophic in terms of data loss. Fortunately, our iMac, with a new hard drive installed, was able to easily restore from the backup I religiously make to an external hard drive. In the days it took for the repair to be completed, however…to say I was nervous that something in the restoration process would go wrong would be a severe understatement.

I suppose that this is especially at the forefront of my mind now, as I write this, because the amazing technology that we have created enabled the ultrasound image that revealed to Karen and I today that we are having a little girl. While I have been thinking of my unborn child for some months now, it is suddenly more real. That’s my little girl. I want her to have the memories of mine and Karen’s life together, of our parents’ lives together, after we are gone. That, after all, is how culture is preserved.

Tippett says she printed copies of emails for her daughter, and kept the hard copies to hand down to her later. I think it’s a bit unrealistic to return to days of hand writing letters, but I think that printing emails is a great idea, a great first step. I wonder about how my thoughts will be handed down to our daughter. Will she peruse this blog to trace my thoughts through years of life’s journey? Will she read about grad school? Will she read about when I first met Karen? Will this blog still be accessible? If not, she must have access to these thoughts, because my words are an essential statement of who I am. To know her father, she will have to know my words.

And I realize the weight of that statement, the impact that it will likely have on her, even as I type.

I’m thinking about beginning a physical journal, for her sake. A physical journal, if nothing more that type-written pages. I’m also considering loading up on printer ink and printing every single image that our iPhoto library holds.

Not for me. For her.

For us.

The future, after all, is only as solid as the past it is able to remember.

Photo Attribution: Orin Zebest

Greetings, Program!

From the first trailer forward, I couldn’t wait to get to the theatre to see Tron: Legacy. If, by some odd chance, you have haven’t seen it yet, I recommend you do so in 3D. Visually, the movie is spectacular. From a story perspective, though, it just doesn’t stand up to the original.

Now, in making the confession I’m about to make, I recognize that I will lose some serious geek cred with many readers. In the interest of truth, however, the admission must be made: I had not watched the original in so long that there were some nuances to the story that had faded from my memory. In fact, I knew that there were references going on that I should have been able to catch, but that were escaping me.

This prompted a search for a copy of the original, as I realized I could no longer be a true geek without the original movie in my library. I pre-ordered the most current re-release from Amazon, and watched with family and fellow fans last week.

And, oh, the things you see in things you haven’t seen for a while.

(I’m going to assume in what follows that you’ve seen the original Tron. If not, stop reading right now and go fix that. Seriously. Go.)

Immediately upon Flynn’s arrival in the world of the computer, one program asks another if he believes in the Users. The second program replies that he has to believe in the Users…otherwise, how could he be there if no one had written him? The “bad guys” of the MCP ridicule those who believe in the Users as engaging in silly religious superstition. Yet, Tron is driven (cheesy dialogue notwithstanding) to make contact with his User, the one that wrote him. This contact must take place at an I/O tower (Input/Output…remember, they’re in the virtual world when it was just beginning to be a virtual world). Upon making contact with his User, Tron is given the power to destroy the evil MCP and restore balance to his world.

Another critical element of the story is Flynn. Flynn is of our world, and is taken by the MCP into the world of the computer. Of course, the metaphor breaks down very quickly, but its difficult to not find incarnational imagery there.

The fact that Tron is about the triumph of faith over the attempts of those in power to destroy it escaped me when I watched the movie as a child. At that point, it was simply an amazing special effects extravaganza, the likes of which I had never before witnessed. Indeed, the movie was visually far ahead of its time. Moreover, though, Tron predicted, as good science fiction does, the world that was coming, and the danger of the computer world enslaving its creators to its bidding. This is not a new theme in science fiction, of course, but Tron portrayed it so much more realistically…futuristic, but so near-future as to be entirely plausible in the viewer’s mind.

The programs who are enslaved persist in their belief in the Users. When realizing that Flynn is a User, Tron assumes that everything he is doing is “according to a plan, right?” Flynn discounts this, saying that improvisation is his strategy. Tron is in disbelief, insisting, “That’s the way it is for programs, yes.” Flynn counters with, “Well, I hate to break it to ya, pal, but that’s usually how it is for Users, too.” At first blush, this would appear to be the writers advocating a less-than-sovereign theology of sorts. I think its more of a statement on man as a creator, though…a creator recognizing his limitations and confessing them to his creation.

The programs’ desire to communicate with their Users is essentially prayer, and the practice is prohibited by the MCP’s regime as the I/O towers, which function as temples or churches in that they are the places that this prayer occurs, are kept open but not in use. When Tron restores balance to the digital world, the first thing that the characters comment on are “all the I/O towers lighting up.”

Tron predicted a future that one could argue we’ve already realized. It also argued for the validity and perseverance of faith, as well as posing the scenario of man’s creation dividing into a good and evil: the evil attempting to rule its creator, the good taken captive but still clinging to a belief in man as its creator…and hoping for salvation from that creator. Moreover, it poses the age-old science-fiction question of, what would life look like when man creates it himself? The difference is that the image here is less fatalistic than Shelley, and much more realistic in its time.

I didn’t get half of that from watching Tron when I was young, but its so apparent now. That’s proof, I think, that the layers of a good story reveal themselves when you keep watching or reading.