Don Quixote is more than a tale of man who deludes himself into believing that he is knight in the age of chivalry but an allegory about abstract knowledge and its dangers. Sleeping too little and reading too much, the man from La Mancha has much in common with the average graduate student in the social sciences or humanities. At the same time, I think that graduate students risk suffering a fate like Quixote's. Being in the midst of reading thousands of pages of social scientific research and philosophical argument for my dissertation’s literature review, quixotism is a danger never far from my mind.

The information and knowledge written down in books, of course, are sought in the hope that they will not only inform but also heighten one’s sensitivity to aspects of reality that could otherwise be overlooked. Having poured over a text about how community exists as a symbolic construction, for instance, I am encouraged to look beyond social structure when examining communities in the real world. Yet, immersing oneself in abstract knowledge also carries the risk inhibiting one’s ability to accurately interpret the world. The researcher may come to construct an imagined reality, built out of what they have read, that inaccurately colors their every observation of the world and even begins to merge with their own identity.

The stereotype of the out-of-touch academic is, unfortunately, often used by people who would rather remain ignorant or find scholarly arguments incompatible with their ideology. Nevertheless, it is not a stereotype without a hint of truth to it. Interactions with classmates in seminar and colleagues at conferences have taught me that even the most sophisticated of thinkers build vast edifices to shore up beliefs that they take as unquestioned and axiomatic.

What has struck me the most upon enrolling as a graduate student in science and technology studies is how many of my classmates discuss contemporary inequalities and injustices mainly in terms of reified abstractions. That is, such problems are caused by “the corrupt system” or “capitalism” writ large rather than some clear and nameable way that institutions and rules are designed; their theoretical concepts cease to elucidate reality but instead replace it. The whole of western modernity becomes suspect and, therefore, they leave themselves with little means of accomplishing positive change. How can one fight an enemy when it has become as abstract and as large as civilization itself?

Similarly, I have interacted with a number of scholars, typically with strong libertarian or anarchist leanings, who cannot forthrightly admit negative consequences of Internet and other contemporary communication devices on people’s lives, communities and relationships. For instance, they write off those who view such devices as too easily affording narcissism or other forms of anti-social behavior, such as using cell phones to construct elaborate barriers to intimacy with others. I suspect that these scholars lack criticality concerning the Internet because its decentralized structure parallels the ideal politically decentralized world in which such scholars would want to live. In a similar way to how Don Quixote imagines a simple barber’s basin to be Mambrino’s famous helmet, the Internet becomes imagined mainly in terms of its abstract potential rather than as the pedestrian and uninspiring thing it is. It becomes an object confused with the theoretical construct to which it only bears a resemblance.

Likewise, I am bothered by what I see as an odd degree of attention paid towards misogynistic jokes by comedians such as Daniel Tosh as driving “rape culture.” As distasteful to some as rape jokes may be, adult comedy is generally far removed from the actual processes of socialization that permit men to believe that they are entitled to take advantage of women; jokes are more likely a symptom of rape culture or a minor variable at best, hardly reason to dedicate so much energy towards it. Writers on Jezebel and other academically-rooted blogs, I fear, are like Don Quixote, tilting at windmills while believing they are attacking evil and menacing giants. Those who disagree with such writers are often viewed in such a way that the original crusade is further justified; the unwillingness of others to view the words of comedians as such a large item of concern becomes interpreted as a sign that rape culture and comedy are even further intertwined and entrenched than previously thought and gives justification for such writers to become increasing militant about joke telling[1].

In contrast, one of the most insightful blog posts I have read about the roots of rape culture is by someone who is not an academic “culture warrior” but instead simply takes note of how little boys are often allowed to behave in socially pathological ways toward little girls under the guise of "boys will be boys." This simple, everyday observation can be easily overlooked if one's view of the world is constituted only by that which can be described via abstract cultural analysis, having no role for developmental psychology.

Preventing Don Quixote from realizing that the world he believes in is not like the one he interacts with is the sophistication with which he is able to construct ad hoc theorizations to shore up his worldview, in spite of evidence to the contrary. Each defeat and beating is reinterpreted through Quixote’s vast theoretical knowledge of chivalry so that his own world view is reinforced rather than undermined. It is fairly well-known in the psychological literature that most people’s attitude toward evidence contrary to their own ideologies are more like Don Quixote’s ad-hoc rationalizations than they care to admit, even among those who consider themselves “objective” or “rational.” It is not being like the Man of La Mancha that takes genuine effort; cognitive limitations are a constant presence in human thinking. Academics, in my experience, are often more adept than the average person at such theorizing away of inconvenient arguments and observations.

As bothered as I am by the quixotic tendencies in my fellow academics, the possibility of suffering from a similar but unrecognized affliction concerns me the most. It is, of course, far easier to recognize sins of others than those perpetrated by oneself. What are the windmills and barbers’ basins in my own thinking?

I worry that too often academic training provides students with a greater repository of tools for protecting their worldview from careful self-scrutiny as much as methods for asking critical questions about the world. The quixotism of an academic is perhaps even more dangerous than the average person’s self-imposed ignorances; university trained scholars are more likely to be utterly convinced of their own rationality. Nevertheless, as I continue to read too much and sleep far too little, I hope my own mind remains more flexible and self-critical than Don Quixote’s.  


[1] To be absolutely clear, I am not defending Daniel Tosh. Rather, my problem is that too much attention is paid towards such highly visible and most obviously outrageous incidents with little concern about whether or not expressing moral outrage at comedians gets contemporary civilization anywhere closer to discouraging rape. I believe that far too many cultural critics are more concerned with taking down public figures and celebrities for their failings and/or pathologies than being effective at rooting out the behaviors and mindsets that they oppose.

Share

During debates about some contemporary scientific controversy, such as GMO foods or the effects of climate change, someone almost invariably declares at some point to be on the “right side” of science. Opponents, accordingly, are implied to be either hopeless biased or under the spell of some form of pseudoscientific legerdemain. Confronted by just such an argument this week during a discussion over Elizabeth Warren’s vote against mandating the labeling of GMO ingredients, I was mostly struck by how profoundly unscientific and ignorant of the actual functioning of science and politics this rhetorical move is.

In order to avoid overstating my case, I should make clear that some knowledge claims are fairly straightforward and obvious cases of pseudoscience. Although philosophy of science has yet to develop unproblematic criteria for demarcating science from pseudoscience, the line between scientific approaches to inquiry and pseudoscientific ideology can be fuzzily drawn around such practices and dispositions as the willingness of practitioners to subject their claims to scrutiny or admit limitations to the theories they develop. Pyramid power and astrology are typical, though somewhat trivial, examples.

The labels “scientific” and “pseudoscientific,” however, are best thought of as ideal types; the behaviors of most inquirers usually lie somewhere in between, and this is normally not a problem. Decades ago Ian Mitroff demonstrated the diversity of inquiry styles used practicing scientists. Science requires many types of researchers for its dynamism, from hardliner empiricists to armchair bound synthesizers and theoreticians – who may play more fast and loose with existing data. It is a social process that seems better characterized by the continual raising of new questions, evermore highlighting new uncertainties, complexities and limits to understanding, than the establishment of enduring and incontrovertible facts. Theories can almost always be refined or subjected to new challenges; data is invariably reinterpreted as new ideas and instruments are developed. At the same time, respected and successful scientists are generally not the exemplars of objectivity typically depicted in popular media, having pet theories and engaging in political wrangling with opponents.  

It is in light of this characterization of science that makes claims to being on the "right side of science" so troubling. The way the word “fact” is used attempts to transform the particular conclusion of scientific study from tentative conjecture based on incomplete data analyzed via inevitably imperfect techniques and technologies into something incontrovertible and unchallengeable. Even worse, it shuts down further inquiry, and there can be nothing more profoundly unscientific and epistemologically stale than eliminating the possibility for further questions or denying the inherent uncertainty and fallibilism of human claims to truth. Recognition of this, however, is frequently thrown out the window during the moments of controversy.

Some opponents of GMO labeling contend that doing so automatically implies that genetically modified ingredients are harmful and lends credence to what they see as pseudoscientific fear mongering concerning their potential effects of human health. The person I was arguing with believed that the absence of what he considered to be a “strong” linkage between human or animal well-being and GMO food in the decades since their introduction rendered their safety a scientific “fact.” To begin, it is specious reasoning to assume that the absence of evidence is automatically evidence of absence. The presumption that the current state of research already adequately explored all the risks associated with a particular technology is dangerous and should not be made lightly. The historical record is full technologies, such as pesticides (DDT), medicines (Vioxx) or industrial chemicals (BPA), at one time thought to be safe and discovered to be dangerous only after put into widespread use.  It is incredibly risky to project the universality of a particular present finding into the foreseeable future – when available methods, data and knowledge will likely be more sophisticated than in the present.

Furthermore, it is incredibly narrow-minded to assume that it is only the potential health risks posed by the ingestion of GMO’s by individual consumers that we should be worried about. Any technology, like the manipulation of recombinant DNA, is part and parcel of a larger sociotechnical system. GMO foods are, for the foreseeable future, intertwined with particular ways of farming (industrial scale monoculture), certain economic arrangements (farmers utterly dependent on biotech firms like Monsanto) and specific ways of conceiving how human beings should relate to nature and food (as a pure commodity). Citizens may be legitimately concerned about any or all of the above facets of GMO food as a technology; many of these concerns, clearly, cannot be answered or done away with by conducting a scientific experiment.

Regardless, the claim that science is on one’s side also fails to recognize how scientific studies are scrutinized in imbalanced ways and  doubt manufactured when politically useful. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the controversy surrounding Seralini’s study purporting to find a link between cancer and the ingestion of GMO and RoundUp treated corn. As numerous ensuing commentaries point out, the connections drawn in the paper remain uncertain and the experimental design seemed to lack statistical power. Yet, many critics claimed the study was rubbish for its “nonstandard” methodological choices, even though they used many of the exact same methods as industry research claiming to demonstrate the safety of GMO food.

My point is not to claim whether or not the effects observed by Seralini’s team is real or not but to note that scientists and various pundit are often incredibly inconsistent in their judgments of the flaws of a particular study or result. Imperfections tolerated in other studies seem to conveniently render controversial studies pseudoscientific when the results are incompatible with the critic’s other sociopolitical commitments, like the association of “progress” with the increasing application of biotechnology to food production, or powerful political interests.

More broadly, the desire to be on the “right side of the facts” in controversial areas often takes on the form of a fetish. Such thinking seems founded on the hope that science can free humanity of the anxieties inherent in doing politics, which I think is best framed as the process of deciding how to organize civilization in the face of uncertainty, diversity and complexity. If a particular way of designing our collective lives can become enshrined in “fact,” than we no longer have to subject the choice to the messiness of democratic decision making or pursue the reconciliation of different interests and ideas about how human beings ought to live. Yet, if a particular scientific result is, at its best, something we can be only tentatively certain about and, at its worst, a falsehood only temporarily propped up by a constellation of inadequate theorizing, techniques and methodologies – or even cultural bias or outright fabrication, it would seem that science is generally not up to the task of freeing humanity from the need for politics.

This point leads to one of the main problems with the way people tend to talk about “scientific controversies:” It is premised on a false dichotomy. Politics and good science are often taken to be polar opposites. It seems to presume that politics is the stuff of mere opinion and emotion and outside the realm of genuine inquiry. Such a dichotomy, to me, seems to do damage to our understandings of both of politics and science. The qualities celebrated in idealized versions of scientists – openness to new ways of thinking, self-reflective criticality and so on – seem to be qualities also befitting of political citizenship. At the same time, the assumption that science is the realm of absolute certainties and falsehoods – rather than the messy muddling through of various complexities, uncertainties and ignorances – leads to an interpretation of scientific findings that many practicing scientists themselves would not condone.

The greatest challenges facing technological civilization are best met through inquiry, debate and the recognition of human ignorance, not blind faith in some naïve, fairy-tale understanding of science and fact. To presume that it is more "objective" or rational to have the opinions and arguments of a particular set of men and women wearing lab coats carry the most weight in deciding our collective futures is to simply smuggle in one set of interests and ideas about the good under the guise of “just siding with the facts.” Even worse, it fails to comprehend the partially social character of fact production and the inherent fallibility of human knowledge. An understanding of politics more befitting of those claiming a “scientific outlook” on reality would recognize that citizens and decision makers are inexorably locked in conflict-ridden processes of juggling facts, interests and ideas about the good life, all fraught with uncertainty. When more participants in a scientific controversy understand this, perhaps then we can have a more fruitful public dialogue about GMO foods or natural gas hydrofracking.  


Note: I have to give credit to Canadian musician Danny Michel for the inspiration for the title of this post: "If God's on Your Side Than Who's on Mine?"

Share

In my last post, I considered some of the consequences of instantly available and seemingly endless quantities of Internet-driven novelty for the good life, particularly in the areas of story and joke telling as well as how we converse and think about our lives. This week, I want to focus more on the challenges to willpower exacerbated by Internet devices. Particularly, I am concerned with how today’s generation of parents, facing their own particular limitations of will, may be encouraging their children to have a relationship with screens that might be best described as fetishistic. My interest is not merely with the consequences for learning, although psychological research does connect media-multitasking with certain cognitive and memory deficits. Rather, I am worried about the ways in which some technologies too readily seduce their users into distracted and fragmented ways of living rather than enhancing their capacity to pursue the good life.

A recent piece in Slate overviews much of recent research concerning the negative educational consequences of media multitasking. Unsurprisingly, students who allowed their focus to be interrupted by a text or some other digital task, whether in lecture or studying, perform significantly worse. The article, more importantly, notes the special challenge that digital devices pose to self-discipline, suggesting that such devices are the contemporary equivalent to the “marshmallow test.”

The Stanford marshmallow experiment was a series of longitudinal studies that found children's capacity to delay gratification to be correlated with their later educational successes and body-mass index, among other factors. In the case of these experiments, children were rated according their ability to forgo eating a marshmallow, pretzel or cookie sitting in front of them in order to obtain two later on. Follow-up studies have shown that this capacity for self-discipline is likely as much environmental as innate; children in “unreliable environments,” where experimenters would make unrelated promises and then break them, exhibited a far lower ability to wait before succumbing to temptation.

The reader may reasonably wonder at this point, what do experiments tempting children with marshmallows have to do with iPhones? The psychologist Roy Baumeister argues that the capacity to exert willpower behaves like a limited resource, generally declining after repeated challenges. By recognizing this aspect of human self-discipline, the specific challenge of device-driven novelty is clearer. Today, more and more time and effort must be expended in exerting self-control over various digital temptations, more quickly depleting the average person's reserves of willpower. Of course, there are innumerable non-digital temptations and distractions that people are faced with everyday, but they are of a decidedly different character. I can just as easily shirk by reading a newspaper. At some point, however, I run out of articles. The particular allure of a blinking email notice or instant message that always seems to demand one’s immediate attention cannot be discounted either.

Although it is not yet clear what the broader effects of pervasive digital challenges to willpower and self-discipline will be, other emerging practices will likely only exacerbate the consequences. The portability of contemporary digital devices, for instance, has enabled the move from “TV as babysitter” to media tablet as pacifier. A significant portion of surveyed parents admit to using a smart phone or iPad in order to distract their children at dinners and during car rides. Parents, of course, should not bear all of the blame for doing so; they face their own limits to willpower due to their often hectic and stressful working lives. Nevertheless, this practice is worrisome not only because it fails to teach children ways of occupying themselves that do not involve staring into a screen but also since the device is being used foremost as a potentially pathological means of pacification.

I have observed a number of parents stuffing a smart phone in their child’s face to prevent or stop a tantrum. While doing so is usually effective, I worry about the longer term consequences. Using a media device as the sole curative to their children’s’ emotional distress and anxiety threatens to create a potentially fetishistic relationship between the child and the technology. That is, the tablet or smart phone becomes like a security blanket – an object that allays anxiety; it is a security blanket, however, that the child does not have give up as he or she gets older.

This sort of fetishism has already become fodder for cultural commentary. In the television show “The Office,” the temporary worker named Ryan generally serves as a caricature of the millennial generation. In one episode, he leaves his co-workers in the lurch during a trivia contest after being told he cannot both have his phone and participate. Forced to decide between helping his colleagues win the contest and being able to touch his phone, Ryan chooses the latter. This is, of course, a fictional example but, I think, not too unrealistic a depiction of the likely emotional response. I am unsure if many of the college students I teach would not feel a similar sort of distress if (forcibly) separated from their phones. This sort of affect-rich, borderline fetishistic, connection with a device can only make more difficult the attempt to live in any way other than by the device’s own logic or script. How easily can users resist the distractions emerging from a technological device that comes to double as their equivalent to a child’s security blanket?

Yet, many of my colleagues would view my concerns about people’s capacities for self-discipline with suspicion. For those having read (perhaps too much) Michel Foucault, notions of self-discipline tend to be understood as a means for the state or some other powerful entity to turn humans into docile subjects. In seminar discussions, places like gyms are often viewed as sites of self-repression first and promoting of physical well-being second. There is, to be fair, a bit of truth to this. Much of the design of early compulsory schooling, for instance, was aimed at producing diligent office and factory workers who followed the rules, were able to sit still for hours and could tolerate both rigid hierarchies and ungodly amounts of tedium. Yet, just because the instilling of self-discipline can be convenient for those who desire a pacified populace does not mean it is everywhere and always problematic. The ability to work for longer than five minutes without getting distracted is a useful quality for activists and the self-employed to have as well; self-discipline is not always self-stultifying. Indeed, it may be the skill needed most if one is to resist the pull of contemporary forms of control, such as advertising.

The last point is one of the critical oversights of many post-modern theorists. So concerned they are about forms of policing and discipline imposed by the state that they overlook how, as Zygmunt Bauman has also pointed out, humans are increasingly integrated into today’s social order through seduction rather than discipline, advertising rather than indoctrination. Fears about potentials for a 1984 can blind one to the realities of an emerging Brave New World. Being pacified by the equivalent of soma and feelies is, in my mind, no less oppressive than living under the auspices of Big Brother and the thought police.

Viewed in light of this argument, the desire to “disconnect” can be seen not the result of an irrational fear of the digital but is made in recognition of the particular seductive challenges that it poses for human decision making. Too often, scholars and layperson alike tend to view technological civilization through the lens of “technological liberalism,” conceptualizing technologies as simply tools that enhance and extend the individual person’s ability to choose their own version of the good life. Insofar as a class of technologies increasingly enable users to give into their most base and unreflective proclivities – such as enabling endless distraction into a largely unimportant sea of videos, memes and trivia, they seem to enhance neither a substantive form of choice nor the good life.  

Share

This experience is likely familiar to many Internet users. The hypothetical subject that I described above could have been browsing for anything really: cat videos, pornography, odd news stories, Facebook updates or symptoms of a disorder he may or may not actually have. Through it, I meant to illustrate a common practice that one could call “novelty bingeing,” an activity that may not be completely new to the human condition but is definitely encouraged and facilitated by Internet technologies. I am interested in what such practices mean for the good life. However, there is likely no need for alarmism. The risks of chronic, technologically-supported pursuit of novelty and neophilia are perhaps more likely to manifest in a numbing sense of malaise than some dramatic crisis.

Nicholas Carr, of course, has already written a great deal about his worries that many of the informational practices enabled and encouraged in surfing the Internet may be making users shallower thinkers. Research at Stanford has confirmed that chronic media multitasking appears to have lasting, negative consequences on cognitive ability. Carr is concerned that Western humanity risks slowly and collectively forgetting how to do the kind of thinking seemingly better afforded by reading in one’s living room or walking in natural environments less shaped and infiltrated by industrial and digital technologies. To the extent that more linear and more meditative forms of mental activity are valuable for living well, typical Internet practices appear to stand in the way of the good life. One must, however, consider the trade-offs: Are the barriers to greater concentration and slower, meditative thinking worth the gains?

Curiosity and neophilia are part of and parcel, in some sense, to intellectual activity writ large. Humans’ brains are attuned to novelty in order to help them understand their environments. On occasion, my own browsing of blogs and random articles has spurred thoughts that I may not have otherwise had, or at least at that moment. So it is not novelty-seeking, neophilia, in general that may be problematic for the practice of deep, broad thinking but the pursuit of decontextualized novelty for novelty’s sake. If the design of various contemporary Internet technologies can be faulted, it is for failing to provide a supporting structure for contextualizing novelty so that it does not merely serve as a pleasant distraction but also aids in the understanding of one’s own environment; in a sense, that responsibility, perhaps even burden, is shifted evermore onto users.

Yet, to only consider the effects of Internet practices on cognitive capacities, I think, is to cast one’s net too narrowly. Where do affect and meaning fit into the picture? I think a comparison with practices of consumerism or materialistic culture is apt. As scholars such as Christopher Lasch have pointed out, consumerism is also driven by the endless pursuit of novelty. Yet, digital neophilia has some major differences; the object being consumed is an image, video or text that only exists for the consumer as long as it is visible on the screen or is stored on a hard-drive, and such non-material consumables seldom require a monetary transaction. It is a kind of consumerism without physical objects, a practice of consuming without purchasing. As a result, many of the more obvious “bads” of consumer behavior no longer applicable, such as credit card debt and the consumer’s feeling that their worth is dependent on their purchasing power.

Baudrillard described consumerist behavior as the building up of a selfhood via a “system of objects.” That is, objects are valued not so much for their functional utility but as a collection of symbols and signs representing the self. Consumerism is the understanding of “being” as tantamount to “having” rather than “relating.” Digital neophilia, on the other hand, appears to be the building up of the self around a system of observations. Many heavy Internet users spend hours each day flitting from page to page and video to video; one shares in the spreading and viewing of memes in a way that parallels the sharing and chasing of trends in fashion and consumer electronics. Of which kind of “being” might such an immense investment of time and energy into pursuing endlessly-novel digital observations be in service?

Unfortunately, I know of no one directly researching this question. I can only begin to surmise a partial answer from tangential pieces of evidence. The elephant of the room is whether such activity amounts to addiction and if calling it such aids or hinders our understanding of it. The case I mentioned in my last post, the fact that Evegny Morozov locks up his wi-fi card in order to help him resist the allure of endless novelty, suggests that at least some people display addictive behavior with respect to the Net. One of my colleagues, of course, would likely warn me of the risks in bandying about the word “addiction.” It has been often used merely to police certain forms of normality and pathologize difference. Yet, I am not convinced the word wholly without merit. Danah boyd, of all people, has worried that “we’re going to develop the psychological equivalent of obesity,” if we are not mindful concerning how we go about consuming digital content; too often we use digital technologies to pursue celebrity and gossip in ways that do not afford us “the benefits of social intimacy and bonding.”

Nevertheless, the only empirical research I could find concerning the possible effects of Internet neophilia was in online pornography studies; research suggests that the viewing of endlessly novel erotica leads some men to devalue their partners in a way akin to how advertising might encourage a person to no longer appreciate their trusty, but outmoded, wardrobe. This result is interesting and, if the study is genuinely reflective of reality for a large number of men in committed relationships, worrisome.[1] At the same time, it may be too far a leap to extrapolate the results to non-erotic media forms. Does digital neophilia promote feelings of dissatisfaction with one’s proximate, everyday experiences because they fail to measure up with those viewed via online media?

Perhaps. I generally find that many of my conversations with people my own age involve more trading of stories about what one has recently seen on YouTube than stories about oneself. I hear fewer jokes and more recounting of funny Internet skits and pranks, which tend to involve people no one in the conversation actually knows. Although social media and user-generated content has allowed more people to be producers of media, it is seems to have simultaneously amplified the consumption behavior of those who continue to not produce content. To me, this suggests that, at some level, many people are increasingly encouraged to think their lives are less interesting then what they find online. If they did not view online spaces as the final arbiters of what information is interesting or worthy enough to tell others, why else would so many people feel driven to tweet or post a status update any time something the least bit interesting happens to them but feel disinclined to proffer much of themselves or their own experiences in face-to-face conversation?

I might be slightly overstating my case, but I believe the burden of evidence ought to fall on Internet-optimists. Novelty-bingeing may not be an inherent or essential characteristic of information technologies for all time, but, for the short-term, it is a dominant feature on the Net. The various harms may be subtle and difficult to measure, but it is evident in the obvious efforts of those seeking to avoid them – people who purchase anti-distraction software like “Freedom” or hide their wi-fi cards. The recognition of the consequences should not imply a wholesale abandonment of the Internet but merely to admit its current design failures. It should direct one’s attention to important and generally unexplored questions. What would an Internet designed around some conception of the good life not rooted in a narrow concern for the speed and efficiency of informational flows look like? What would it take to have one?

[1] There are, clearly, other issues with using erotic media as a comparison. Many more socially liberal or libertarian readers may be ideologically predisposed to discount such evidence as obviously motivated by antiquated or conservative forms of moralism, countering that how they explore their sexuality is their own personal choice. (The psychological sciences be damned!) In my mind, mid-twentieth century sexual “liberation” eliminated some damaging and arbitrary taboos but, to too much of an extent, mostly liberated Westerners to have their sexualities increasingly molded by advertisers and media conglomerates. It has not actually amounted to the freeing the internally-developed and independently-derived individual sexuality for the purpose of self-actualization, as various Panglossian historical accounts would have one believe. As long as people on the left retreat to the rhetoric of individual choice, they remain blind to many of the subtle social processes by which sexuality is actually shaped, which are, in many ways, just as coercive as earlier forms of taboo and prohibition.

Share

Evgeny Morozov’s disclosure that he physically locks up his wi-fi card in order to better concentrate on his work spurred an interesting comment-section exchange between him and Nicholas Carr. At the heart of their disagreement is a dispute concerning the malleability of technologies, how this plasticity ought to recognized and dealt with in intelligent discourse about their effects and how the various social problems enabled, afforded or worsened by contemporary technologies could be mitigated. Neither mentions, however, the good life.

Carr, though not ignorant of the contingency/plasticity of technology, tends to underplay malleability by defining a technology quite broadly and focusing mainly on their effects on his life and those of others. That is, he can talk about “the Net” doing X, such as contributing to increasingly shallow thinking and reading, because he is assuming and analyzing the Internet as it is presently constituted. Doing this heavy-handedly, of course, opens him up to charges of essentialism: assuming a technology has certain inherent and immutable characteristics.

Morozov criticizes him accordingly:

Morozov’s critique reflects the theoretical outlook of a great deal of STS research, particularly the approaches of “social construction of technology” and “actor-network theory.” These scholars hope to avoid the pitfalls of technological determinism – the belief that technology drives history or develops according to its own, and not human, logic – by focusing on the social, economic and political interests and forces that shape the trajectory of a technological development as well as the interpretive flexibility of those technologies to different populations. A constructivist scholar would argue that the Internet could have been quite different than it is today and would emphasize the diversity of ways in which it is currently used.

Yet, I often feel that people like Morozov often go too far and over-state the case for the flexibility of the web. While the Internet could be different and likely will be so in several years, in the short-term its structure and dynamics are fairly fixed. Technologies have a certain momentum to them. This means that most of my friends will continue to “connect” through Facebook whether I like the website or not. Neither is it very likely that an Internet device that aids rather than hinders my deep reading practices will emerge any time soon. Taking this level of obduracy or fixedness into account in one’s analysis is neither essentialism nor determinism, although it can come close.

All this talk of technology and malleability is important because a scholar’s view of the matter tends to color his or her capacity to imagine or pursue possible reforms to mitigate many of the undesirable consequences of contemporary technologies. Determinists or quasi-determinists can succumb to a kind of fatalism, whether it be in Heidegger’s lament that “only a god can save us” or Kevin Kelly’s almost religious faith in the idea that technology somehow “wants” to offer human beings more and more choice and thereby make them happy.

There is an equal level of risk, however, in overemphasizing flexibility in taking a quasi-instrumentalist viewpoint. One might fall prey to technological “solutionism,” the excessive faith in the potential of technological innovation to fix social problems – including those caused by prior ill-conceived technological fixes. Many today, for instance, look to social networking technologies to ameliorate the relational fragmentation enabled by previous generations of network technologies: the highway system, suburban sprawl and the telephone.

A similar risk is the over-estimation of the capacity of individuals to appropriate, hack or otherwise work around obdurate technological systems. Sure, working class Hispanics frequently turn old automobiles into “Low Riders” and French computer nerds hacked the Minitel system into an electronic singles’ bar, but it would be imprudent to generalize from these cases. Actively opposing the materialized intentions of designers requires expertise and resources that many users of any particular technology do not have. Too seldom do those who view technologies as highly malleable ask, “Who is actually empowered in the necessary ways to be able to appropriate this technology?” Generally, the average citizen is not.

The difficulty of mitigating fairly obdurate features of Internet technologies is apparent in the incident that I mentioned at the beginning of this post: Morozov regularly locks up his Internet cable and wi-fi card in a timed safe. He even goes so far as to include the screw-drivers that he might use to thwart the timer and access the Internet prematurely. Unsurprisingly, Carr took a lot of satisfaction in this admission. It would appear that some of the characteristics of the Internet, for Morozov, remain quite inflexible to his wishes, since he often requires a fairly involved system and coterie of other technologies in order to allay his own in-the-moment decision-making failures in using it. Of course, Morozov, is not what Nathan Jurgenson insultingly and dismissively calls a “refusenik,” someone refusing to utilize the Internet based on ostensibly problematic assumptions about addiction, or certain ascetic and aesthetic attachments. However, the degree to which he must delegate to additional technologies in order to cope with and mitigate the alluring pull of endless Internet-enabled novelty on his life is telling.

Morozov, in fact, copes with the shaping power of Internet technologies on his moral choices as philosopher of technology Peter-Paul Verbeek would recommend. Rather than attempting to completely eliminate an onerous technology from his life, Morozov has developed a tactic that helps him guide his relationship with that technology and its effects on his practices in a more desirable direction. He strives to maximize the “goods” and minimize the “bads.” Because it otherwise persuades or seduces him into distraction, feeding his addiction to novelty, Morozov locks up his wi-fi card so he can better pursue the good life.

Yet, these kinds of tactics seem somewhat unsatisfying to me. It is depressing that so much individual effort must be expended in order to mitigate the undesirable behaviors too easily afforded or encouraged by many contemporary technologies. Evan Selinger, for instance, has noted how the dominance of electronically mediated communication increasingly leads to a mindset in which everyday pleasantries, niceties and salutations come to be viewed as annoyingly inconvenient. Such a view, of course, fails to recognize the social value of those seemingly inefficient and superfluous “thank you’s” and “warmest regards’.” Regardless, Selinger is forced to do a great deal more parental labor to disabuse his daughter of such a view once her new iPod affords an alluring and more personally “efficient” alternative to hand-writing her thank-you notes. Raising non-narcissistic children is hard enough without Apple products tipping the scale in the other direction.

Internet technologies, of course, could be different and less encouraging of such sociopathological approaches to etiquette or other forms of self-centered behavior, but they are unlikely to be so in the short-term. Therefore, cultivating opposing behaviors or practicing some level of avoidance are not the responses of a naïve and fearful Luddite or “refusenik” but of someone mindful of the kind of life they want (or want their children) to live pursuing what is often the only feasible option available. Those pursuing such reactive tactics, of course, may lack a refined philosophical understanding of why they do what they do, but their worries should not be dismissed as naïve or illogically fearful simply because they struggle to articulate a sophisticated reasoning.

Too little attention and too limited of resources are focused on ways to mitigate declines in civility or other technological consequences that ordinary citizens worry about and the works of Carr and Sherry Turkle so cogently expose. Too often, the focus is on never-ending theoretical debates about how to “properly” talk about technology or forever describing all the relevant discursive spaces. More systematically studying the possibilities for reform seems more fruitful than accusations that so-and-so is a “digital dualist,” a charge that I think has more to do with the accused viewing networked technologies unfavorably than their work actually being dualistic. Theoretical distinctions, of course, are important. Yet, at some point neither scholarship nor the public benefits from the linguistic fisticuffs; it is clearly more a matter of egos and the battle over who gets to draw the relevant semantic frontier, outside of which any argument or observation can be considered too insufficiently “nuanced” to be worthy of serious attention.

 Regardless, barring the broader embrace of systems of technology assessment and other substantive means of formally or informally regulating technologies, some concerned citizen respond to tendency of many contemporary technologies to fragment their lives or distract them from the things they value by refusing to upgrade their phones or unplugging their TVs. Only the truly exceptional, of course, lock them in safes. Yet, the avoidance of technologies that encourage unhealthy or undesirable behaviors is not the sign of some cognitive failing; for many people, it beats acquiescence, and technological civilization currently provides little support for doing anything in between.

Share

The current job market is tough, especially for recent college graduates with limited experience. The unemployment and underemployment rate for twenty-somethings is around 53%. Many who are employed work jobs for which they are overqualified. My wife, for example, has a master’s degree in Biotechnology and several years experience but works part-time for fifteen dollars an hour with no benefits as a laboratory technician. It increasingly appears that most job growth is occurring in low-skilled and low-paying positions. Some rise in the demand for highly skilled technical positions, however, suggests not a rising tide but a job market becoming more and more polarized in terms of both skill level and wages.

Yet, what is most disturbing about recent job market trends is not the continuation of wage/skill polarization but the dramatic increase in highly skilled knowledge workers, what Robert Reich called “symbolic analysts,” driven to work for nothing or next to it. Some have referred to this phenomenon as the “post-income” or the “post-employment” economy. While internships and other low paying positions traditionally amounted to a form of apprenticeship and eventually led to a stable position, the economics of the recession has spurred their development into a more permanent form of employment. Yet, it would be inaccurate to blame this simply on the weak job market. These areas of the economy are winner-take-all markets, and the recession has likely just exacerbated their effects.  

Economists Robert Frank and Philip Cook both described the functioning and explained the rise of winner-take-all markets in many areas of economic life in their 1996 book The Winner-Take-All Society. Such markets exist whenever the institutional and technological circumstances are such that an economic good is enjoyed on a large scale and/or fewer producers become required to produce it. As a result of exponentially increased payoffs accruing to those you succeed in becoming one of the few producers at the top, evermore contestants enter the game and invest increasing amounts of resources towards their attempts to win the competition.

A classic example of a winner-take-all market is popular music since the advent of recording technologies. The ease of distributing music content and the low cost of duplicating performances, coupled with the small number of artists that any particular consumer can remember or remain interested in, both limits the number of pop stars at any particular moment and greatly amplifies the benefits enjoyed by those successful at becoming one. At the same time, the difference in talent between a successful pop star and someone who almost was one is close to negligible. It is this latter aspect that is critical to understanding the winner-take-all phenomenon: ever slighter differences in ability account for ever larger pay differentials. This, along with the increase in competitors and the intensity of the competition, accounts for the main negative consequences of such markets: social waste, inefficiency and augmented levels of inequality. Not only does the contemporary winner-take-all market in music waste the efforts of would-be pop musicians who over estimate their chances and never make it but also results in job markets consisting of a few super-rich and many making nothing at all, rather than a larger number of musicians of more moderate means.  

While music, art and sports have clearly been winner-take-all markets for at least a generation, their emergence in other fields is new. Increasingly, highly skilled knowledge workers work long hours for poverty wages or even no pay at all, often for years, in the hopes of winning the contest to become career Washington insiders, college professors, magazine/blog writers or attorneys. The second novelty to this growth in winner-take-all markets is that, in contrast to would-be pop singers whose talents go unheard, the fruits of these wannabe career knowledge workers do get consumed. It just so happens that much of the revenue generated from it never ends up in their pay checks. Seventy percent of college instructional faculty members, for instance, are not tenure-track, but adjuncts making as little as two thousand dollars to teach a course that twenty or more students each paid several hundred to thousand dollars to take. Contestants are not competing in these markets for the right to produce goods for them but for the chance to earn a good wage, status and job security.

There is a name for workplaces within which human beings toil for long hours creating products that are sold by their managers for ten to twenty times more than the cost to make it: sweatshops. Unsurprisingly, arguments for maintaining sweatshops for American college graduates often vary little from those mobilized in defense of those present in countries like Haiti.  Some decry the idea of raising sweatshop wages or banning unpaid internships since doing so would entail fewer positions in the short-run, seemingly implying that social utility is better maximized by large numbers of people scrapping to get by rather than some smaller number of people earning a decent paycheck. Such arguments, for either kind of sweatshop, ignore both the multiplying economic benefits of living wages and the larger problems cascading throughout economies as a result sweatshop practices, including: lower incomes for the average worker in the global/national job market and increased inequality. There are, of course, major differences between sweatshops in places like Haiti and the contemporary sweatshop for symbolic analysts. The former are simply seeking to feed and house themselves; the latter are vying against each other for a shot at a high-status and salaried job.

By many measures the growth of the symbolic analyst sweatshop market is clearly undesirable; something ought to be done about it. Free marketers, of course, will deny any problem, likely claiming that it is just the analyst’s free choice to work for very little; this position obviously ignores how the employers involved are exploiting both the human tendency to overestimate one’s abilities and chances to succeed and the psychologically seductive power of a potentially high pay-off gamble. It is one thing when the loss from a bet is the ten dollars for a lotto ticket but quite another when someone’s livelihood and several years of their life is at stake.

Regardless, Frank and Cook list several possibilities for reform. They suggest that winner-take-all markets can be mitigated through mechanisms that lower the rewards accruing to winners and reformulating incentive schemes to prevent too many people from entering the market, such as student loan and aid policies. True enough, there are likely far too many people being encouraged to pursue careers as lawyers, college professors and Washington policy analysts. Yet, the problem may be bigger than that and not solved by simply redirecting students into STEM fields. It might be that there are too many college grads seeking too few highly skilled positions. The continuing polarization of the job market and decline of moderately skilled but otherwise good jobs due to automation and other technological changes likely has only amplified the winner-take-all competition. It is one thing to give up one’s dream of becoming a college professor to be an engineer or accountant instead; graduates faced with the prospect of stocking grocery store shelves or sweeping floors for minimum wage pay are understandably desperate.

A broader view of the development of the symbolic analyst sweatshop would take account of the whole range of policies, cultural ideas and sociotechnical systems that facilitate the current ways of doing employment. Rather than aiming to make the nation as compatible as possible with the winner-take-all market of international free-trade and look appealing to global financial capital, why not use the standard of the “good job” to guide employment policy. Such a standard would take as given the desirability of a broader distribution of jobs that are mentally stimulating, connect workers to each other and their communities, and pay a living wage. CEO’s could be awarded bonuses according to the number of people making a decent wage at their firms, counteracting the tendency to slash positions to appease stockholders. Policies encouraging workplace democracy or cooperative arrangements could avoid the necessity for legislators to actually design the exact conditions for the “good job,” encouraging workers to do it for themselves. Some constellation of such changes would likely create new problems of its own but certainly could not be any worse than the status quo.

Share

I have been following the “digital dualism” debate of the last few years, which has mostly emerged from Cyborgology blog critiques of writers like Nicholas Carr and Sherry Turkle, who worry about the effects of digital technologies on human thinking and social interaction. The charge of digital dualism is relatively straightforward. Critics of digital technologies and those are concerned about their effects on everyday life are accused of setting up a false division between the virtual and the real as distinct worlds or realities; they charged with assuming that digital is, in some sense, less real or authentic. Anti-digital dualists, drawing upon the work of Donna Harraway and others, contend that it is more sensible to think of digital and non-digital as composing one completely real augmented/cyborg reality; the digital and non-digital are equally real and not easily separated. I not only find this charge of Carr’s and Turkle’s work unfounded, but also I think that the intention of the digital dualism pejorative has more do to with differing moral imaginaries than differing comprehension of the ontological effects of digital communication technologies. Not only that, I think people on both sides could benefit from considering Neil Postman's view of technological change.

I find the digital dualism debate deeply troubling, but not because I am a closeted digital dualist. Studying for a PhD in science and technology studies, I am well acquainted with the techniques used to take down dualism, whether they be online/offline, religious/secular or natural/artificial. The approach generally takes the form of placing intense focus at the fuzzy frontier between categories, highlighting how the drawing of the boundary is socially and historically contingent and unmasking its arbitrariness. That is, the dividing line between both sides of a dualism is already and always being negotiated. Bonus points are given to those who manage to unearth some unseemly genealogy that connects the dualism with sexism, racism, or another unsavory “–ism.” A short, albeit simple, example of this approach with respect to the natural/artificial dualism can be found here; this author goes so far as to claim that global climate control devices are as natural as “tribal” living.

What do culture warriors stand to gain by taking down a pesky dualism? Both the writer of natural/artificial dualism post and the Cyborgology critics direct most of their efforts towards taking down those who seek more “natural” arrangements or desire more room in technological civilization for the ability to “disconnect.” On some level, eliminating the dualism from the conversation gives rhetorical power to those who do not find ideas like global climate control devices or devoting considerable amounts of their waking hours to interfacing with screens worrisome. If the alternatives are equally natural and real, those who desire bigger and more invasive interventions by humans in climatic and other earth systems or dream up increasingly digitally-augmented futures gain the argumentative higher ground. The onus then falls on critics to mobilize some other criteria that cannot be so easily deconstructed. At its worst, the taking down of dualisms lends itself to equally fallacious continuity arguments, where problematic aspects of the present can be justified or claimed to be (mostly) innocuous by their bearing a family resemblance to instances of the past that, from contemporary eyes, no longer seem to have been all that harmful.

To staunch advocates for their elimination, dualisms are, at best, rooted in nostalgia and, at their worst, an unjust exercise of power. Yet, I worry that their concerns lead them to throw the baby out with the bath water. Yes, it is true that human categories are somewhat arbitrary and often unfair, but that does not mean they are completely unreliable fictions. True, they are leaky buckets used to imperfectly catch and organize aspects of perceived reality, but they are not always and completely independent of that reality. I view them as similar to the old quote about advertising: half (or some other percentage) of our categorizations reflect reality; the trouble is knowing which half. Yet, while strict dualisms are very obviously problematic and over-idealizing, holism can be equally misguided and inaccurate. Refusing to make any distinctions at all is simply the pursuit of ignorance.

As can be clear from later clarifications and Carr’s rebuttal, strict digital dualism and strict holism are straw man positions. Still, the argument persists when there is seemingly less and less to argue about. Critics like Carr and more techno-optimistic Cyborgology theorists seem equally interested in the dynamic interplay of offline and online spaces and technologies. As Carr points out, if online and offline were completely separate worlds there would be nothing for people like him and Turkle to write about. Can we drop this already? Could both sides agree that all human practices and activities lie on some spectrum between face-to-face, embodied interaction and relatively isolated, anonymous text chat and quit going in circles with pointless labeling? I can’t prove it, but I feel the ostensible disagreement rests on differing moral valences. Those who more optimistically view the promise in an increasingly augmented future feel threatened by those more concerned with the undesirability of some the unintended side effects.

Regardless, it is obvious that my interactions with my wife are phenomenologically different when I have my arms around her than when I send her a text message. Both are real in some sense, but I know which interaction I and most people I know would prefer. While I often enjoy Facebook and writing emails, at some critical point, the more the context of my life leads me to converse mainly through mediated channels rather than face-to-face, the less happy and more lonely I become. Yet, it is equally clear that the effect of digital communication technologies on my life is somewhat inescapable; I cannot avoid everyone who uses them and all instances where it is employed, and neither can I stop the effects such technologies have on systems and networks more distant from me that nonetheless impinge on my daily life.

In truth, I think Neil Postman’s perspective is the most apt, though some readers may find this claim to be initially perplexing. Wasn’t Postman, famous for his critical portrayal of the television’s effect on public discourse as “amusing ourselves to death,” a digital dualist bar-none and a technological determinist at that (hint: I’m not convinced he was either)? I have a soft spot for Postman; reading his books on weekends in my small house in the plains of Montana motivated me to want to study technology. As such, I tend to read him sympathetically. In spite of the fact he plays too little attention to the “interpretive flexibility” of technologies and how they are social constructed, his conceptualization of the effects of technologies, once they are constructed, is insightful. On page 18 of Technopoly he asserts: “Technological change is neither additive nor subtractive. It is ecological.”

Critics of digital technologies, at least the ones worth listening to, do not argue that they have reduced the ability to think or made us lonelier in any simple, linear, or zero-sum way. Instead, they recognize that their introduction has altered the ecology of thinking or socializing. I do not interpret Carr as arguing that his brain has an online mode and an offline mode per se. Rather, as his intellectual practices have come to be primarily mediated by his computer and the Internet, he feels it affecting his thinking in all situations. The previous ecological stasis, which he found comfortable and desirable, has been shifted and perhaps even destabilized.

In the same way, an interaction between a grizzly bear and myself is substantively different depending on whether it occurs in a Montana forest or in a zoo. Natural/artificial may ultimately fail to accurately capture the distinction, but the fact that the character of these ecologies differ significantly and are distinct in regard to how exactly they were shaped by human hands is undeniable. Those who value less mediated interactions with animals and attempting to minimize the effects of human action on their ecologies are not inevitably being dualists; they may simply value a different balance of their technological ecology because of the activities and practices (the good lives) that such a balance affords or discourages.

Of course, one can contend that Carr is making too big deal of the shift or that the effects on thinking by increased screen mediation are worth bearing because all the other benefits they might bring. However, that is moving toward a moral argument rather than an ontological one; the confusion of one for the other is what I think really lies at the heart of the digital dualism debate. The real question is: How much should a particular set of technologies be permitted to shape the characteristic ecologies of daily living? That I may disagree with Cyborgologists on the answer to this question does not mean I fail to appropriately grasp that technologies are malleable and socially constructed or that I am committing the sin of digital dualism. Rather, it simply means that I do not happen to share their vision of the good life.

Share

Many people in well-off, developed nations are afflicted with an acute myopia when it comes to their understanding of technoscience. Everyone knows, of course, that contemporary technoscientists continually produce discoveries and devices that lessen drudgery, limit suffering, and provide comfort and convenience to human lives. However, there is a pervasive failure to see science and technology as not merely contributing solutions to modern social problems but also being one of their most significant causes. Sal Restivo[1], channeling C. Wright Mills, utilizes the metaphor of the science machine. That most people tend to only see the internal mechanisms of this machine leaves them unaware of the fact that the ends to which many contemporary science machines are being directed are anything but objective and value neutral. Contemporary science too easily contributes to the making of social problems because too many people mistakenly believe it to be autonomous and self-correcting, abdicating their own share of responsibility and allowing others direct it for them. Most importantly, science machines are too often steered mainly towards developing profitable treatments of symptoms, and frequently symptoms brought on in part by contemporary technoscience itself, rather than addressing underlying causes.

The world of science is often popularly described as a marketplace for ideas. This economic metaphor conjures up an image of science seemingly guided and legitimated by some invisible hand of objectivity. Like markets, it is commonly assumed that science as an institution simply aggregates the activities of individual scientists to provide for an objectively “better” world. Unlike markets, however, scientists are assumed to be disinterested and not motivated by anything other than the desire to pursue unadulterated truth. Nonetheless, in the same way that any respectable scientist would aim to falsify an overly optimistic or unrealistic model of physical phenomena, it behooves social scientists to question such a rosy portrayal of scientific practice. Indeed, this has been the focus of the field of science and technology studies for decades.    

Like any human institution, science is rife with inequities of power and influence, and there are many socially-dependent reasons why some avenues of research flourish while others flounder. For instance, why does nanoscience garner so much research attention but “green” chemistry so little? The answer is likely not that funding providers have been thoroughly and unequivocally convinced by the weight of the available evidence; many of the over-hyped promises of nanoscience are not yet anywhere close to being fulfilled. Edward Woodhouse[2] points to a number of reasons. Pertinent to my argument is his observation of the degree of interdependence, double binds, of the chemistry discipline and industry and government with business. Clearly, there are significant barriers to shifting to a novel paradigm for defining “good” chemistry when the “needs” of the current industry shape the curriculum and the narrowness of the pedagogy inhibits the development of a more innovative chemical industry. All the while, business can shape the government’s opinion of which research will be the most profitable and productive, and the most productive research also generally happens to be whatever has the most government backing. Put simply, the trajectory of scientific research is often not directed by scientific motivations or concerns, rather it is generally biased towards maintaining the momentum of the status quo and the interests of industry.

The influence of business shapes research paradigms; focus is placed primarily on developments that can be easily marketable to private wants rather than public needs, an observation expanded upon by Woodhouse and Sarewitz[3]. Nanoscientists can promise new drug treatments and individual enhancements that will surely be expensive, although also likely beneficial, for those who can afford them. Yet, it seems that many nanomaterials will likely have toxic and/or carcinogenic effects themselves when released into the environment[4]. A world full of more benign, “green” chemicals, on the other hand, would seem to negate much of the need for some of those treatments, though only by threatening the bottom line of a pharmaceutical industry already adapted to the paradigm of symptom treatment. This illustrates the cruel joke too often played by some areas of contemporary science on the public at large. Technoscientists are busy at work to develop privately profitable treatments for the public health problems caused in part by the chemicals already developed and deployed by contemporary technoscience. It is a supply that succeeds in creating its own demand, and quite a lucrative process at that. Treating underlying causes rather than symptoms is a public good that often comes at private cost, while the current research support structure too frequently converts public tax dollars into private gain.  

It is not only in the competing paradigms of green chemistry and nanochemistry that this issue arises. Biotechnologists are genetically engineering crops to be more pest and disease resistant by tolerating or producing pesticides themselves, solving problems mostly created by moving to industrial monoculture in the first place. Yet, research into organic farming methods is poorly funded, and there are concerns that such genetic modifications and pesticide use are leading to a decline in the population of pollinating insects that are necessary for agriculture[5]. What might be the next step if biotech/agricultural research continues this dysfunctional trajectory? Genetically engineering pollinating insects to tolerate pesticides or engineering plants to not need pollinating insects at all? What unintended ecological consequences might those developments bring? The process seems to lead further and further to a point at which activities that could be relatively innocuous and straightforward, like maintaining one’s health or growing crops, are increasingly difficult without an ever expanding slew of expensive, invasive, and damaging chemicals and technologies. Goods that were once easily obtainable and cheap, though imperfect, have been transformed into specialized goods available to an ever more select few. However, the breakdown of natural processes into individual components that can each be provided by some new, specialized device or manufactured chemical obviously adds to standard economic measures of growth and progress; more holistic approaches, in comparison, are systematically devalued by such measures.

I could go on to note other examples such as how network technologies and psychiatric medicine are used to cope with the contemporary forms of isolation and alienation brought on by practices of sociality increasingly modeled after communication and transportation networks, but the underlying mechanism is the same.

If modern technoscience were to be likened to a machine; it would appear be a treadmill. As noted by Woodhouse[6], once technoscientists develop some new capacity it often becomes collectively unthinkable to forgo it. As result, the technoscience machine keeps increasing in speed, and members of technological civilization increasingly struggle to keep up. There are continually new band-aids and techno-fixes being introduced to treat the symptoms caused by previous generations of innovations, band-aids, and techno-fixes. Too little thought, energy, and research funding gets devoted to inquiring into how the dynamics of the science machine could be different: directed towards lessening the likelihood and damage of unintended consequences, removing or replacing irredeemable areas of technoscience, or addressing causes rather than merely treating symptoms.  
References
[1] Restivo, S. (1988). Modern science as a social problem. Social Problems, 35 (3), 206-225.

[2] Woodhouse, E. (2005). Nanoscience, green chemistry, and the privileged position of science. In S. Frickel, & K. Moore (Eds.), The new political sociology of science: Insitutions, networks, and power (pp. 148-181). Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press.

[3] Woodhouse, E., and Sarewitz, D. (2007). Science policies for reducing societal inequities. Science and Public Policy, 34 (3), 139-150.

[4] Becker, H., Herzberg, F., Schulte, A., Kolossa-Gehring, M. (2010). The carcinogenic potential of nanomaterials, their release from products and options for regulating them. International Journal for Hygiene and Environmental Health. 214 (3), 231-238.

[5] Suryanarayanan, S., Kleinman, D.L. (2011). Disappearing bess and reluctant regulators. Perspectives in Science and Technology Online, Summer. Retrieved from http://www.issues.org/27.4/p_suryanarayanan.html

[6] Woodhouse, E. (2005). Nanoscience, green chemistry, and the privileged position of science. In S. Frickel, & K. Moore (Eds.), The new political sociology of science: Insitutions, networks, and power (pp. 148-181). Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press.

Share

It is too often assumed that modern technologies are inherently liberating. Are they not simply tools with which individuals can pursue their own happiness? Allenby and Sarewitz certainly appear to make this assumption, in The Techno-Human Condition, by referring to technologies as “volition enhancers.” There is certainly a bit of truth to the assumption. My cell phone enables me to receive and send voice calls and text messages whenever and wherever I want. If I could muster up the dough to pay for a data plan, I could have the informational wealth of the Internet at my fingertips. Do not all these new capabilities simply improve my ability to choose and to act?

It is true that my cell phone affords me new capabilities and new freedoms, yet those affordances very easily become burdens. By making others more available to me it also makes me more available to others; I find myself answering my phone in annoyance more than not. Many decry feeling tethered to their devices, finding out that new chains have been wrought as soon as the old ones have been broken. As well, I see myself as more easily distracted and more often attempting to multitask in the belief that it will give me more time, a pursuit suggested to be futile (and maybe even cognitively damaging) by Clifford Nass and Nicholas Carr. I am struck how, when feeling lonely, I am more likely to text a quick message to my fiancé than to start up a conversation with a person sitting next to me. Mobile communication technologies enable a virtual privatization of public spaces; think about the usual scene in a Starbucks. At the same time that they have enabled users to multiply their social ties, people have increasingly used them to turn away from the public and in on themselves and their own private networks. Why venture an unsatisfying or risky conversation with a stranger when a loved one is always and instantly available?

Imagine the day you bought your first cell phone. What if the salesperson informed you that eventually you would be constantly on call and working more than ever, loved ones would be irritated or worried if you do not answer immediately, you would find yourself texting at times when you should know better, and you would become a virtual recluse out in public? Would you still have bought it? You may be throwing up your hands at this point, claiming that this not technology’s doing but a simple lack of human discipline.

Yet, social psychological research increasingly supports the view that the human will is much weaker and less rational than most people wish or think it to be. People generally choose to do what seems immediately easier in the local context, not through rationally self-interested and reflective deliberation. Jonathan Haidt, a moral psychologist, describes the human will through the metaphor of a rider on an elephant. The rational part of the self is the rider, who can only sometimes manage to steer the irrational and emotional elephant. For example, governments can easily quadruple organ donation rates by forcing people to make a check mark to opt out rather than to opt in. A popular computer program promises users the chance to reassert their mastery over their computer and conquer distraction by blocking WiFi access until the next reboot, a program ironically but aptly named “Freedom.”

Philosopher of technology Langdon Winner has cogently argued that technologies have politics. He cites the tunnels on the Long Island expressway as an example, contending they were ostensibly designed by Robert Moses to be low enough to prevent public transit and therefore minorities from having access to “his” beaches. I would go farther in arguing that technologies are also built for particular notions of a good life. Rather than being mere neutral tools, their design encourage certain ways of living over other ones. Appropriating a technology for a different kind of life than it was built for, requires enough extra discipline and effort that many, if not most, people do not bother trying. Again, the elephant leads.

If technologies often nudge people into acting in ways that they, upon reflection, would otherwise find undesirable, then it is logical to conclude that technologies could be better designed to help people live less distracted and more engaged lives. However, the contemporary culture of innovation inhibits this development. Emphasis is placed continually on more and more functionality and ostensible choices, and new “problems” are manufactured in order to justify the increase. Having to wait until arriving at home or work to check one’s email or being unable to take a picture of anything and everything did not seem to be a problem until it became part of the functionality of cell phones. Now, to some, it seems as an unreasonable inconvenience to do without. The idea that progress is the increase of complexity and functionality has been so ingrained that it has become much more difficult to buy a “simple” phone without a touch screen, keyboard, camera or innumerable other gadgets. For my last purchase, I had to settle for a brick phone with a slide out keyboard, which I subsequently taped shut since I found that the relatively more cumbersome character of traditional T9 texting encouraged me to call more and text less. Henry Ford said about the Model T, “Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black.” Today, customers can have a gadget with any amount of functionality so long as it is has more options and features than yesterday.

How can technologists better serve people who want less rather than more from their technologies? Currently, there are few incentives to promote the making of simpler technologies and even less to encourage their purchase. Increasing functionality increases profits for mobile providers because it permits the selling of extra services to the consumer. That is why they generally offer cutting edge models for free, and cheaper than simpler models, with a contract. Part of the problem is that service providers and manufacturers are too intertwined. Rather than being able to deceptively bundle a contract with a phone, the two purchases should be made separate by regulation. The bundling of phones with service providers prevents a fair and competitive phone market. Imagine if you had to buy your computer from Microsoft in order to use Windows. Going even further, the technologies should be made open enough so that small manufacturers could get in on the game or perhaps even open source cell phones would become a viable option. With the demise of the network of pay phones that once dotted public spaces, the need for affordable and simple access to mobile phone networks becomes more and more a requirement for modern living and thus a matter of the public good; it should be treated as such.     

Furthermore, phones and places should be designed to encourage people to use their phones differently or not at all. Why not require a “Do Not Disturb” setting on phones in which it does not ring unless the caller specifies, via a menu system, that the call is urgently important? Why not enforce cell-phone free zones where signal is jammed, as long as a wired phone is available nearby? If unnecessarily complex and distracting technologies already shape one’s life and behavior, are these recommendations anymore intrusive? Without more intelligent, less somnambulistic, technology policy, many people will continue to find themselves taking less time to stop and smell the roses; they will be far too busy buying bouquets with their smart phone.

Share