With all the problems in the world, all the war, genocide, economic collapse, homelessness, joblessness, and starvation, isn’t it wonderful we still have reality television? I mean with everything going on, it’s amazing the world hasn’t fallen apart, but we don’t need to worry about Survivor renewing its contract with NBC. Every time I pick up a newspaper, I have no conception of who or what could possibly be holding the fabric of humanity together. That’s when I turn on survivor. There I know what is holding that together, I know what is going on, and I understand the rules. It’s simple. In a complex world, I like a little simplicity. While I watch, to my surprise (and dismay), I actually begin thinking about what I read. I begin to notice some subtle connections between the contestants calculated relationships, and the way that President Obama recently dealt with the volatile topic of U.S. missile defense in Eastern Europe. I decided at that point, to switch over to FOX and watch Family Guy instead.
Some might label the above example as a facetious simplification of a complex issue, and frankly, that’s exactly what it is. That however, is not the point. The point I want to make is that I pulled this from a show as trivial as Survivor. Half a century ago, high- school students would be hard pressed to find a source of entertainment, which showed complex enough relationships as to break down the interaction between Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt. At the same time, what alternative was around the likes of Family Guy, which provided the necessary programming to let you escape serious issues for a little while.
Today we have a choice, but often choose that outlet for escape from the real world, because after all, we just want to chill. Those same connections from digital to reality can come from the Internet and even video games. In this paper, I will be exploring how, and why we squander that opportunity. Modern technology has opened up the prospect of putting people in greater control of their own mental development than ever before. We hinder that development by choosing to harness the technology as a means of physical disembodiment, and thus sacrifice what these devices can offer us developmentally outside of the digital world.
To begin, I want to explain the concept of disembodiment, both in general, and as it pertains to the digital world. The idea of being disembodied was originally a term associated with ghosts, death as a whole. As society evolved, the meaning of the word evolved. Today, with the emergence of screen’s and electronics, the term has become used to describe how a person can be mentally active but motionless. In this paper, I will be using disembodied to mean someone’s state of being where they are mentally active in the digital world, but neither mentally nor physically active in the physical world.
Furthermore, I want to define the term "modern", as the period from 1950, up until now (2009). Technological advances and breakthrough’s have happened with a much higher frequency than they had before 1950, but also integrated much quicker than throughout history. The time between the release of the first ipod (2001), and the ipod touch (2007), was a mere 6 years. In comparison, the Phonograph; the first device allowing recorded sound to be replayed was invented in 1878. Following that, almost 150 years later, the television came out, in 1934. The time it took for integration of sound and video was 150 years, but to integrate video and sound in a handheld device, took only 6 years,
Other things have increased dramatically since than. For one, the global temperature began to spike dramatically, as shown below in the “Hockey Stick Graph” (made famous in Al Gore’s film, “An Inconvenient Truth”), and thus the amount of greenhouse gasses have spiked in accordance with the graph. The importance of this comparison, is that we have experienced not only a technological revolution in the last half-century, but a second industrial revolution. The new revolution differs greatly from the one at the turn of the century, because it is about the development of digital technologies, to make more intuitive devices that are more user compatible. This compatibility makes the digital world seem less mechanized and more in sync with how our minds work.
The idea of this “digital revolution”, has pushed our digital world to the forefront of our lives, while we sacrifice the physical world in the process. The Morgan, Frick, Carnegie and industrial revolution made us able to do physical things faster, now we have begun adapting to our new platform for interaction; the virtual world. As we focus more on the virtual world, we focus less on our world. We make exceptions to environmental policy in order to produce more advanced (and often more harmful) devices, and that, in part is something attributable to the spike in the graph that can be seen right around the 1950’s. Interestingly enough, we don’t see any such spike around the 1900’s, which is alarming considering the clean image of electronic devices, as opposed to the steel factories that seemed so dirty and environmentally destructive.
I guess things aren’t always what they seem huh?
The book Everything Bad Is Good For You, by Steven Johnson is a research novel about the often overlooked and unexplored aspects of modern technology often said to have no intellectual value whatsoever. Johnson discusses how use of certain digital devices, such as video games, the Internet and television can be very effective in certain areas of neural-development. The thing, which he doesn’t really touch on, is that overuse, can lead to an apathetic state that renders the developmental potential of the device nonexistent. When one becomes apathetic, they still may be intellectually stimulated, but they lose the will to apply that development in the real world. The danger in overuse lies in the failure to see how you develop and become attached to the device itself. An example is television. People who watch a show like Man Vs. Wild, might be trying to learn survival skills and learn a thing or two about nature. Those people may be intrigued by the show, and want to explore say... Australia and tour the outback. Assuming that like most people, the person cannot afford a trip to Australia, they probably wont go, but they will however try and learn as much as they can about the outback if they are so inclined.
On the other end of the programming spectrum, you have shows like I Love New York. Now supposedly, if I follow the author’s logic, this show has a socially educational effect on the viewer. But look at why the person watches that show, and I almost guarantee that they will not start discussing the complex relationship between New York and the contestants, or the process which New York uses to eliminate contestants. We have command of our ability to learn and pick up very useful knowledge through everything from Man Vs. Wild, to I Love New York, but if we ignore it and just submit to watching countless hours of T.V, than we learn nothing and all that viewing has exactly no mental benefit. Subjecting ourselves to a disembodied state where we are virtually brain-dead in the digital world has no benefit in the physical world, as it stimulates no brain activity in the former either.
M.T. Anderson's novel "Feed" is an allegory about our modern society, highlighting the problems with today's American consumer culture, and our lack of concern for the world beyond ourselves. The Feed is a sort of iPhone built into your head, which allows users instant gratification, and the digital world is prevalent over the physical one. The idea of the evil corporation is hidden underneath the story, but nonetheless it is a very important layer of the story. The company that owns and operates the Feed has the sole purpose of advertising and creating consumers, while allowing users to access information, that is, if they want to. Any real information or conversation about real issues is intentionally absent from most of the book. This is a sort of acknowledgment to the lack of useful things being done with the Internet because of the choice we have to not use the Internet for intelligent things. Anderson tries to exemplify the lack of important interaction online and in the digital world. His doing so begs the question of whether disembodiment is worth the gamble of maybe stimulating intellectual growth. He poses the evil "Feed Corporation” as the antagonist trying to eliminate any intellectual pursuits in the digital world. The goal of companies like “Feed Corp.”, is obviously only to make money, as is the goal of corporations in our world. As a result, the Feed doesn't promote anything other than buying and buying and buying.
In the real world, we have a comparable problem. We have this great new technology that can be used to advance ourselves and improve our minds, but this new technology also happens to be a great marketing platform. What that does, is create a system that tries to steer us away from information, but towards products and direct the majority of the technology towards making people think they need stuff that they sometimes don't even want. The Internet can be used for just about anything and everything. The key to regulating your use, and maintaining control of your life online, is to maintain your focus; Keep in mind why you went online, do what you intended, and than log off. The problems arise when we are "bored" and instead of reading or drawing or spending time with our family, we go on You Tube and watch car crashes, or animals doing funny shit. I think that Internet use isn't about staying away from fresh direct.com, or YouTube.com or facebook.com. If you come online trying to shop for food, than by all means, go to fresh direct. If you want to talk to one of your friends, than don't hesitate to go onto facebook. What you shouldn't do is go onto the Internet and just explore. The real world is something worth exploring. On the Internet, the world is at our fingertips, but we don’t have a clue what we’re looking for. An interesting part of the Internet is how the physical and digital worlds clash, and the physical world actually manifests itself in the digital world, sometimes even playing out from one to the other. The idea of ordering food online, and having it come to your house a day later, and be physically there, is an example of digital disembodiment with tangible results.
To pose the question of; "what is digital disembodiment?" is key to assessing how thought provoking an activity reading this paper will be. I want to give you [the reader] a moment to consider the difference between the example I described above, and a person talking on iChat. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
The immediate reaction probably is to notice the similarities. Say, person-to-person interaction (you order food, someone ships and delivers food, or communicating with friends) is what I would expect. The less obvious thing to notice is how iChat is not the same [generally] as actual conversation, while ordering food online and going to the supermarket has the same end result. Either way there is food in your fridge, but either way, people talking on iChat will interact drastically differently on either a digital platform or a physical one.
An example of the idea I proposed above is something that I used to do when I was younger. When I was hungry, I used to go into my kitchen and just basically open the fridge and the freezer, and look for what I might want. It didn't matter how many times a day I did that, I always looked around like something new might show up. My point is, that this is a lot like how we surf the web. We sit in front of our computers with the browser open, looking to find something new, even if we knew that what we had been looking for initially wasn't even their. We really don't care, our only concern when we are online is to find something, anything, and no matter how unimportant or dumb it may be isn’t a concern.
There is an important question, one that often goes ignored, which lies behind literally everything we do. That question is, “Why?” Why do we use the Internet, why do we love our electronics? Some people say it’s because of emptiness in our lives, and we try to fill it with these devices. Others say that we are just lazy. I want to propose that the answer lies behind the idea that we are filling some “void”. I do think we are filling a void, but the emptiness we feel is not a sign of a real world lack of something. It is a lack of technology and a want for newer devices that is creating the void. Just as the “Feed Corporation” used the Feed to profit, companies like Apple, constantly turn out new products with cutting edge design. That is what we fill the “void” with.
The proof of this theory is self-evident. For example, if you feel like you really want an orange, you can either eat an orange, drink orange juice, or have something with orange flavoring in it. Now, suppose you really want an iphone. You’re in your house and you want it, you want a handheld computer with a cool interface and tons of features. How are you going to fill that desire? Well consider your option between; getting an iphone, and not getting an iphone. You can’t fill that emptiness any other way, a Blackberry certainly won’t do, I mean, its okay I guess, but it’s not as cool as an iphone obviously.
At this point, most people would be disappointed that they don’t have the money to get one, being that they are quite expensive toys. So now you’re on your computer looking at iphone’s on www.apple.com, or thinking of a way you might be able to get it. Than it hits you! Why am I spending time trying to get this phone when I’m not going to get it? I can just get something else instead. You want an iphone, anything else is just inferior, but you need to fill that void, even if that means getting another phone. This is the vicious cycle, the synthetic void that will never be filled, and never can be.
The “synthetic void” is the “why” that I was talking about. It is the reason why we love our iPhone’s, our Xbox 360’s, and the Internet (for the ability to at least look at what we want). The genuine belief that we “need” the new ipod is not only what drives consumerism, but also what drives us to love technology. When you settle for something, you still want the better version, and even when you have the better device, you still want a newer device the second you see it. Basically, you can’t win, because the rate of technological development has become virtually exponential at this point.
The topic of digitization I have come to realize is a very easy one to over analyze. The fact is, some people just don't actually care all that much about this. I want to make a distinction here, between not caring and not realizing. Earlier in the digital unit, I tried doing an experiment, where I refrained from using all electronic devices for 24-hours. Long story short, it failed, but not completely. I did find myself using some modern devices, but actually I was more intrigued by how I made the extra effort to be more active that day. What I concluded was, that I didn't really use a ridiculous amount of digital devices to begin with, but at the same time, I couldn't really bring myself to eliminate them completely for even one day in my life. I realized that I was not able to cut out these devices from my daily routine, but it was the fact that I didn't care which is why I feel like it wasn't such a bad thing. If you put it into perspective, the Internet has become a necessity in our society. The thing is, we are "able" to not use the Internet, but the demands of our world call for the service that it provides. We "need" the ability to access data quickly in our educational lives, personal lives, and professional lives, because it is available, we are expected to use it. The fact is, research on the Internet is much more efficient than research through books or periodicals. I needed to use the Internet, because I “needed” to do my homework, I used my phone because I needed to get in touch with my parents. Could I have gone without those things? Probably. But why would I unnecessarily complicate my day?
When I did my "Informal Research Post", I researched "cloud networks". Cloud is the term used to describe the non-physical links between computers and information that collects in a database referred to as a “cloud”. What it is, is essentially a server, owned by a company "subletting" space to paying companies who want to avoid the costs of maintaining their own server network. [If you are unsure what this is, think IBM providing online storage space to AOL for e-mail servers]. When I did this research, I looked at the definition, the uses and what companies own notable cloud networks. This led me to look at the use of “clouds” in the medical field. I found that medical records are being moved to a cloud network owned by a company recently purchased by Dell, in order to eliminate the competition to get the contract to be the main operator of the new systems. Using the Internet, this took me only about an hour or two. If I wanted to, I could have used the library, looked through articles discussing the medical cloud networks, looked at books talking about Internet business, and most likely been able to find the same stuff. That being said, all that would have taken me many hours, and probably over the span of a few days at least.
If we use the Internet to discover, and focus on one topic to learn something through the technology, we can develop, and not fall prey to the apathy that is so very tempting. By focusing and not being sidetracked, we are absolutely capable of using the Internet as a super-efficient research tool. At the same time, the lack of physical effort required to research online as opposed to at a library is a key factor in assessing how driven we are to apply ourselves. Taking that in to consideration raises the question of, whether or not online research is just lazy, or if it has real merit. This is an important distinction, because the Internet cannot be a substitute for actual research. The Internet is merely an open marketplace that researchers can use to publish physical research, thus we will always need physical sources (primary sources).
At the beginning of this course, we actually set out with the intention to get evidence we couldn’t find on the Internet. I found my primary sources walking down Park Avenue, and 23rd street, and asked them what they thought (or didn’t). Most people didn't respond, but for the most part I recognized by their facial expressions, that they were aware of what I was saying and thinking about the question, even if they didn’t actually respond to me. The fact was, most of those people didn't realize basic stuff about the world they spend most of their daily lives in. The few people, who stopped and talked to me, gave pretty generic answers, but each talked about something insightful or unique at some point. These people really didn't seem to care, they were thinking about it, but none of them really said anything about how they wanted to change their behavior, or what they felt was wrong with the digital world. The phrase "most people" was tossed around in a very defensive way, used to take the focus away from them and re assess the problem on a national or global scale.
For a point of view from someone I knew, and someone I could accurately analyze, I interviewed my brother Max. Max I realized might not have been the best person to interview for 2 reasons. First, he is a pretty active kid, who has always been social in real life, so as a result is very social online. Second, he is not really analytical and didn't actually offer me much in the way of deep personal insight. Max is a kid, who I would say has far greater interest in the physical world than the digital one, and thus rarely spends time being spread between two realities. On an ironic note, he did ask me to stop interviewing him so he could go play Xbox. A sign perhaps, that he didn’t mind being disembodied (at least for a little while). That request to go play Xbox, above all else stuck in my head as an example of digital dry-humor. Max just didn't care, he knew he used facebook, ichat, and played Xbox, but he still played baseball, skateboarded, biked, and went to school, so really this idea of the "digital world" just didn't phase him.
Immediately after writing this paper, I reached the very obvious conclusion that new technology is highly addictive. I didn’t leave my conclusion their however. I felt strongly that if I was going to write about an alternative perspective, I should at least end with something more ambiguous. I believe it is because of the appeal to our personalities on a sensory level, that we hear (ipods), feel (touch screens, Nintendo Wii), see (everything), and can emotionally connect to this technology. Without control, it is dangerous, but with control and regulation, the developmental value is potentially limitless (as far as we know).
There is a degree to which technology can replace things entirely, and another to which technology improves things. The Internet is much too vast and has to many alternatives to physical "real world" processes to be safely heralded as a replacement. Is the Internet the new library? The new supermarket? The new forum for discussion? It might be, but do you want to have a food factory, that ships out food like mail? Do you want to replace the libraries with wikipedia? I don't, that may be easier, but it just takes the feeling out of living. You go to the supermarket and the library, that in of itself is an experience, we can't simulate that, no matter how advanced we get. People addicted to living conveniently are the reason for Wall-Mart, The Mall of America and the disappearance of small businesses. This is just another drug, another way to get our "convenience fix". Living in the real world is something I really like, I don't want the physical world to go the way of the video store after Netflix, because once that’s gone, what do we have left?
Sources
- “Everything Bad is Good For You” by Steven Johnson
- “Feed” by M.T. Anderson
- “jakespersonallife.blogspot.com” by Jakob Friedman
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockey_stick_controversy (Graph)
- “sofandy.blogspot.com” Course Blog, by Andy Snyder
- http://www.sociology.org/content/2005/tier1/ajana.html (research on disembodiment)
- For sources on "cloud networks", see "Informal Research" (HW #10)
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