In an effort to become more productive on this blog, I recently set up a distinctive twitter feed for it, and started following a number of tech related feeds from it. Now obviously, this led pretty much instantaneously to a TED talk waddling its way in front of me. So I said to myself "hey, why don't you watch that, and do a little response to it as a post?" I figured I could post the video, concur with some of the ideas expressed, and hopefully drum up a few page-views. I figured wrong. Just because a thing is sponsored by TED, promoted by a tech blog, and claims to be about "cleaning up" human relationships through technology does NOT mean that it in any way has a perceptive or even particularly interesting take on any of the above.
The talk is given by Dr. Sherry Turkle, an eminent and respected figure in the tech community, and someone who has been thinking and talking about the impact of technology on our daily lives for over 30 years. Which is why it is so disappointment to see her lapse into the tropes of sad, rote luditism which she employs so aggressively in the TED talk I've embedded below:
Some interesting notes on the talk:
1. It's from 2012. Why was TED promoting it today? I don't know, but hey, their choice.
2. It is a given of the modern world that technology has already changed a great deal in the 2 years since this talk was given. For one thing, ComScore estimates that smart-phone penetration has increased from 47% to 72%.
3. Dr. Turkle seems convinced that the increasing presence of digital communications technology will atomize both our attention spans and our social skills.
4. Dr. Turkle also focuses very intently on technology as it addresses what she identifies as an emotional need: our fear of being alone.
Now, while professor Turkle is no doubt substantially smarter than myself, I just can't help but feel pretty strongly that she is both missing a lot of what is going on, and missing the point of what she is catching. Does always-on communication tend to atomize our ability to focus on a single stream of data? Yes. Does this happen because we're all profoundly lonely and tragically grasping for any form of closeness, no matter how low resolution, false, or unrequited? I don't think so.
While I understand that human connection is both a universal need, and an aspect of life that must perforce intersect with our use of technology, I just don't see it as the primary driver of our current glut-o-inputs. That I put down to two, occasionally conflicting, impulses. The first is my personal favorite, the desire to make life simpler. Yes, when you can talk to people anywhere at anytime you talk to them both more frequently, and with less 'depth'. But you do this because in the old, complicated, world, you had to condense your communication into time slots in order to make the initial outreach worthwhile. Doing that was complicated. It was bound by both spatial and temporal fetters from which we are now blessedly free. The second impulse, is boredom. The reason Dr. Turkle's teenage daughter will sit in a room next to two friends and totally ignore them is because on a transaction by transaction basis, they are substantially less interesting than whatever is on her phone.
The next point of disagreement between me and the good Dr. comes up here, because at this point she makes a value judgement. Now, maybe her argument has been unfairly reduced by the limited parameters of a TED talk. To me though, it seems like throughout the video she is asserting that small batch digital communication leaves us less connected, and worse off, than large batch face to face communication, and that we need to do something about it. I'm not really sure what the philosophical taxonomy of my objections to that are, but they are strong, and they go like this: we don't get to pick how we interact with technology in that way.
In the history of the human race we have never successfully chosen to just stop using something. This is a point I will reiterate at some point in the future when discussing climate change. The only way to change how people interact with a technology is to invent a new one, one that achieves a higher rate of adoption than the one you're hoping to replace. To be a Luddite is not just silly, it is a ticket to a slow, panicked death, railing at a world that doesn't even notice your existence.
