Tag Archives: Technology

Influx

There are moments when I don’t believe that “ADHD” exists.

Truly, I don’t. I tend to suspect that it is either a label we’ve created to excuse certain behaviors, to provide an excuse to “treat” normal behaviors that we prefer to not deal with, or (at my conspiracy theorist best) an invention of pharmaceutical manufacturers so that they have a lucrative method of treatment to market. All of these make sense to me depending on the timing: “It’s not your fault, you have a disorder” makes us more comfortable, “Tired of dealing with your child? Perhaps he has a disorder” excuses poor parenting, and “Difficulty dealing with your hyper-intense lifestyle? We have a pill for that!” makes unscrupulous people very wealthy. The times when I acknowledge the possibility of its existence, however, I recognize that it’s a demon of our own design. We’re attempting to discover ways to slay the dragon that we just might have created for ourselves.

Walk with me, if you’re not unduly disturbed, into my odd fascination with the profession of law enforcement.  Mostly, I’m fascinated with the field because of their cool vehicles and toys. Decades ago (and less than that, I believe, in European countries…perhaps still in other parts of the globe), a single spinning blue bubble atop a vehicle in our rearview grabbed our attention, alerting us that we needed to stop to let an emergency responder by, or perhaps answer for our disregard of the white sign warning of “55” (all too often the latter in my post-college days). Today, emergency vehicles utilize million-candlepower LED lights that flare with so much warning power that they can be seen for blocks.

Why do emergency responders require so much more illuminating efforts to gain our attention? One of my theories is that there is so much more ambient noise. Driving down a local street a few days ago, I passed two garish digital displays, one on either side of the street, grabbing the attention of motorists and directing it to the businesses using them, along with displaying the weather and various other information. Of course, this must be identified and digested by your brain along with the podcast you’re listening to, the text message you have just received (of course you wouldn’t do that behind the wheel!), and the directions that the sexy British voice on your GPS is giving you about your upcoming turn (or is that just me?) As our over-stimulation increases, the amount of stimuli required to acquire our attention from the rest of the landscape increases proportionately. The more urban the area, the “louder” the landscape.

As I have consciously attempted to balance my affinity for technology with space for quiet and contemplation during grad school and beyond, this article in the New York Times certainly leapt out from the landscape. I have actually begun to notice my ability to initially focus on a novel without my attention drifting to be on the decline. Eventually, I become drawn into the story, but my initial focus is more easily interrupted.

Will this be similar to the hearing loss I’ve experienced from too many concerts? I mean, that I’ve lost attention span, and can only work with what I have left, as the Times article claims? That’s disturbing to me. What to do? I intentionally avoid “push” services for email and tweets and so forth: I want to know the information when I want to know it, but I don’t want it to come to me.

Have we lapsed into the role of serving our technology instead of the technology serving us? Perhaps we’ve received one too many treatments? If we have, what alternatives do we have to minimize the damage? Let me know: in what ways do you streamline the information?

Or should we just take a pill for that?

Photo Attribution: http://www.flickr.com/photos/webhostingreview/

Slated for Improvement

I touched it, and it was amazing.

Now, now, don’t let your mind go somewhere it shouldn’t. I’m talking about the huge release of the weekend…Apple’s iPad. Notice I didn’t say the huge event of the weekend. And that is sort of my point.

As some of you have guessed from my Twitter whining, I’ve been under the weather for nearly two weeks. Friday evening I decided that it wasn’t just seasonal allergies run amok, and went to the doctor, after which point I had digressed into laying on the sofa and waiting for the antibiotics to kick in. After a week that just hadn’t really gone according to schedule, especially as Holy Week observances went, this was the icing on the proverbial cake, causing me to miss the Good Friday observance that I had earnestly desired to attend. I’m normally not overly into communal religious observances, but Advent and Easter are events to be observed for my spiritual well-being, and I honestly felt as though I had neglected God this week. I know, I know…its not like He thinks less of me, but still…I felt…discombobulated.

By Saturday afternoon, thankfully, the antibiotics had caused an amazing improvement, and we were able to keep dinner plans with a friend. After, we decided to go look at the iPad, as we are all three Apple addicts…umm, I mean, fans. As we would expect from the artistry of Apple, it was gorgeous, and I can’t wait to purchase the two that Karen and I plan to obtain. Seriously, however, I am glad that she understands the spiritual responsibilities of financial impulse control, because had I still been single, I would have left with one in hand, hang the early-adopter risks and financial consequences.

She’s good for me like that.

I was happy to feel back on track by Easter morning, although still slightly off-kilter, but at least able to participate in Easter activities. After about noon, however, all of the talk seemed to be about the iPad.

As I’ve referenced before, we are created as creators…that’s part of what the Imago Dei implies. Ultimately, that’s behind the creative impulse. We design and build, draw and paint, rhyme and sing because it is inherent to us. We accept the beauty of the landscape around us, and add to it with what we build, completing that landscape, if you will, with our own cityscapes. We do this because we are not whole if we are not creating, and we long to make because we were made. Thus, all of us are creative. This is not just the realm of the so-called artists. My father is a true sculptor of wood, but none would attribute an “artistic bent” to him. Those of a more technical mindset, such as those apparently employed by Apple, design technology. That is how they create. And, might I say, they do an amazing job, every time.

Karen and I are Apple fans because we appreciate quality craftsmanship.  Whatever you do, I think it should be done to the utmost quality that you can attain. I feel that Apple accomplishes this far more than any other computer manufacturer. At the end of the day, however, it is at worst a tool, and at best a work of art.

The danger of art, as Lewis points out, is that it is so powerful, and transports us to such amazing places, that we can easily be misled into worshipping it. In the past 48-hours, I have heard the iPad referenced as a messiah to dying media producers. I’ve watched a vlogger turn her camera to the logo of the Apple store in front of which she stood and point upward to it, in a way that smacks a bit of falling before divinity. I’ve experienced the way shiny new things can pull you away from what is important, from the human beings around us. Even as I attribute to Apple’s craftsmanship the quality of art, I qualify by saying that, as amazing as the painting hanging in our dining room is, we would be amiss to be enwrapped by it at the expense of the dinner guests around our table.

Art enriches the human experience at a deeply existential, and even spiritual, level. Superb quality craftsmanship is to be respected, and I will always purchase the best quality craftsmanship that I can. The tendency I’ve seen of late, however, to place our creations on a sort of hi-tech altar, is disturbing. Even more disturbing is the thought that we may be attempting to fill a void with our own creations that can never be successfully filled in such a way.

I’m happy to be finished with that perfect storm of a week, in which the lines and priorities of events became slightly blurred, despite my best efforts. I’m not going to adopt a “work harder to be better” mentality, because that is destined for failure. I will merely hope to be cognizant of how to prioritize conflicting concerns in the future, because, at the end of the day, my world would not have ground to a halt had I not touched the revolution in tablet computing for another few days.

A belated wish for a wonderful Easter to you all.

Outside the Box…Again

The onset of Spring in the American Southeast brings about phenomenal amounts of pollen and allergens to which my system has an extremely adverse reaction. That reaction began Thursday night and reached an apex by Sunday morning, at which point I was sleeping only with the assistance of symptom reliever and way too sick to leave the apartment. That being the case, the only logical thing to do was to engage in the equivalent of what Saturday morning cartoons used to be. I logged into Netflix, browsed the animated streaming options, and settled on Batman vs. Dracula.

Once again, I’ll wait until you’re finished laughing.

Long time readers here will find it no surprise that I find inspiration in the mythology of Batman. When I need a writing exercise to get my creative juices flowing, I have been known to engage in writing my own adventures for the Dark Night Detective (good luck with me ever getting those published). In this  movie, Batman relies on science and chemistry to defeat the king of vampires. One of the characters in the movie even comments on how Bruce Wayne’s desire to save the world through his science and charitable foundations is of no surprise. A sort of triumph of man’s ingenuity over supernatural evil; we have the brains, and with them, we can overcome anything that rises against us.

After the movie finished, I was amused a bit at how a very well-animated artistic venture lauded scientific achievement so much, when the two of them seem so diametrically opposed.

Except they’re really not. I recently read Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Artist of the Beautiful, a short story in which the protagonist creates a piece of art that is nearly indescribable in both its beauty and its fragility. The protagonist is a watchmaker, and has built his artistic creation through scientific and mechanical means. There’s an unmistakeable message in the story about forgoing beauty and creativity in favor of the mechanical and utilitarian, and yet the artist creates using scientific and mechanical craftsmanship.

The time period in which Hawthorne wrote this piece was prior to science coming into its own as the discipline we know it to be. Natural philosophy was dominant at that time, and the artificial compartmentalization of disciplines had not really come into its own yet. Science, philosophy, and art were all seen as equals, and rightly so, because all involve elements of the other at some level.

My background in theatre began largely as a designer and technician. As such, my mathematics deficiencies always left me with extra hurdles to overcome in my designs, because, while I grasp technology intuitively, there is a scientific component, not to mention a mathematical component, to the lighting and sound and scenic design processes of theatre. Likewise, graphic designers and animators (like those who animated the Batman adventure I watched this morning, I’m sure) utilize both of these in their work, as do many other creative professionals and artists.

Wouldn’t it be great if we were less confined by arbitrary boxes of this-or-that specialization, or even this-or-that field? If specific degrees were no longer required to be considered proficient in certain areas, or even if we recognized what valuable contributions individuals with educational backgrounds outside of their fields could bring? If we appreciated the craftsmanship that is involved in artistry, and vice versa?

In short, if we just stopped defining things so narrowly. Doing so inhibits many from succeeding…or at least makes is substantially more difficult for them to do so.

Photo Attribution: 

If You Can Read This…

Its been a while since I’ve thought about this, at least in any sort of coherently recordable form, but yesterday I caught this article. Its worth your time to read, and is essentially arguing that technology, specifically the Internet, is actually increasing the number of people who read, at least according to a University of San Diego study. Their logic, it seems, is that words remain the dominant medium by which information is communicated through websites. Thus, the Internet is not only not doing any harm, but is, in fact, doing good toward increasing literacy.

The issue with studies like this one is that they draw broad conclusions from a very focused social observation. The argument certainly can be made that we engage in the written word more frequently than we have in the past if we spend any time at all online (which you obviously do if you’re reading this), even if its only scanning Facebook stories and Twitter updates from our friends. Many of us take the time to digest CNN or NPR or New York Times articles by way of their websites, which are still more text-based than video-based. So, by strictest definition of the term, yes…society is reading more.

My question is, though…how are we reading?

Back in the summer of 2008, The Atlantic ran a story by Nicholas Carr that gained quite a bit of traction: “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” The thrust of Carr’s argument is that the Internet is changing the way in which our brain functions during the process of reading, that we become more accustomed to reading small chunks of information broken up by tangential hyperlinks and being packaged in easily digestible formats and lengths. Thus, sitting down with, say, Tolstoy, Tolkien, Salinger or Updike, becomes more of a chore than it once was, because the length and intensity of attention required to really engage a work of literature is much more than we are used to.

I’ve experienced this as well. The bulk of the information I consume during the average day comes by way of the Internet. I read news stories in the same “inverted pyramid style” in which they are written; that is, something really has to fascinate me to get me to turn to the second full page.  More frequently than that, I  scan headlines and two-line synopses of stories in my RSS reader instead. When the blogs I follow have lengthy posts, I intentionally have to put them off until later, to make certain I give them the attention that they deserve. Even then, however, engaging a blog post for 5 minutes is significantly different than engaging a novel for two hours. I find myself agreeing with Carr at some level: it is more difficult for me to “curl up with a good book” for more than an hour or two.

The study that Wired mentions is settling for quantity over quality. Taking in more words during the course of the average day isn’t the same as actually spending time with those words, loving the language, acquainting oneself with the author and characters. As reading is taught in our public education system as a means to an end, a technical process to facilitate the hard sciences instead of an appreciation of eloquent language, so has our definition of “reading” become: utilitarian instead of something having value in itself.

Obviously, I’m not against technology. I found the Wired article by way of someone I follow on Twitter, ironically enough. I just feel that its important to not confuse the tools we use for daily communication with the validity of the language(s) we use them to facilitate. In a recent Facebook conversation, a friend referred to Twitter as a “literature sniper.”  Other friends have referred to it as the height of narcissism.  That might be a bit harsh, but it could also be true if the only reason we use our language is for basic communication, at the expense of enjoying and loving and exploring our humanity, of which our language is a part.

Illusory Endeavors

The age-old question: if you could know your future, would you really want to? Would you want to know when you would achieve major milestones in your life? Perhaps you would. Would you want to know who you were going to marry? Sort of takes the fun out of the exploration, doesn’t it? Would you want to know exactly from what profession you were going to retire? Would you want to know exactly when your life would be over, and under what circumstances?

Of course, various artists have explored this topic in depth over the decades, and humanity appears largely void of this sort of precognition…lucky us, to not have to make the call.

This story, however, makes it sound as though we may be landing in the neighborhood:

The implications of this are frightening, unethical, a direct result of our God complex, and catering to the narcissism of the parents, to say nothing of the negative ramifications on the children in question.

A valuable part of childhood is exploration. Personality develops as exploration occurs. Exploration leads to multifaceted individuals…you know, the “Renaissance person” that seems so rare as our culture forces us to mold ourselves into a single label so that everyone knows where to file us in their heads. We are so desperate for these labels that we seem to now want to confine our children before they even have a chance to explore. The scientist interviewed in this video openly states that he will encourage a specific set of parents to push their child into business pursuits, because of quantified test results that would seem to indicate that the child will be strong in this area. As though we can quantify a human being, reducing a person to numbers and formulae in order to predict what they will be most successful in pursuing.

Two goliath ethical train wrecks present themselves to me here: First, the forcing of persons into categories. I’ve spoken here before of how everything in life interweaves, becomes a lens through which we can view everything else…essentially the Burkian principle of communication theory. From a psychological perspective, I’ve often seen…especially in adolescents…the concept of a self-fulfilling prophecy take hold; that is, living out what someone has convinced you of because you aren’t aware that there is another alternative. Imagine a person with Harvard potential refusing to further their education beyond high school, even though they want to, because they have been told that their family is one of farmers, and that this person is capable of nothing other than agriculture. There is nothing wrong with agriculture…if that is what this person chooses to do. The point is that this hypothetical person’s not being encouraged to see outside of this box limits their potential in such a way that they may never even realize that they were robbed. There is a similar principal at work in diagnoses: while naming something gives you power over that thing (or problem), there comes with this power the danger of identifying yourself with that label (“oh, I can’t help it…I’m bipolar.”), and thus an absence of effort to improve or change.

This is what will be forced upon these children, based on some tests and numerical read-outs. This set of numbers, you’re an artist. This set, you’re a scientist. How about a set that indicates you should be a janitor? What happens when you know people…you know, have connections to those testing your child, who could make it really look like they could be a business administrator or national leader? Who will watch those watchmen? More practically, and from a less nihilist perspective, who will encourage the child who received numbers stating he/she should be a chemical engineer to pursue their passion for the violin? What if, in failing to do so, a future first chair for the London Philharmonic goes unrealized because the violin was considered taboo for a talented child as they were forced by parents toward being that chemical engineer?

And, at the risk of returning to my soap-box, who said you could sum up a human being in numbers, anyway? The children who are subjected to this testing are being robbed under the cruelest of circumstances: the premise that they are being given a gift.

The second ethical issue is our worship of success at the forsaking of all else. In an industrialized culture, and an increasingly industrialized world, East or West, we value people based solely upon what they can produce. The product is all-important, and if one cannot contribute, then they are less important to the society as a whole. Personal welfare and family time are expected to be sacrificed at the altar of the next business deal. Vacation? That’s for the weak. Sick time is for the weaker. After all, if you’re not at work producing something, then of what use are you?

The concept of viewing a man or woman as being of inherent beauty and worth simply because they are human has been lost in our rush to build, create, and accumulate wealth. While building and creating are natural human pursuits, and are good things in and of themselves, they are never justification for the harm of another human being. Ever.

Yet, mankind (at the risk of a sweeping cliche) now takes this one step further, not only pushing production at the expense of intrinsic human value, but programming a child from birth as to how exactly they will produce.

So, applaud this engineering marvel and scientific breakthrough, while looking at how it will benefit you, if you choose, but do so knowing that it benefits one at the expense of the humanity of another, and, in so doing, reduces the humanity of us all. I hope this is not a true prediction of our brave new world…