Love-hate relationship with Facebook, and technology itself

Quite a few months ago, I informed my Facebook friends (editor: what? you have friends? awshutupalready!) that I was temporarily freezing my account and activities.  There is a kind of creepy feeling and shallow interactions that bothered me.

After a blissful existence in the world outside of Facebook, I am now back there again.  However, every single day, there is an urge within me to quit Facebook for the same reasons as before.  A couple of days ago, in an email to a friend (editor: stop lying. awshutupalready!) "There are moments when I worry about all this social media network and the internet ..."

But, I realize I can't quit Facebook--it is not any addiction on my part.  Facebook has, after all, made it easy for me to share old photos with family and friends, and to take in what they have to offer. Every once in a while there is feedback on my blog posts that are automatically routed into Facebook, and the feedback has often led to substantive discussions and learning.  And a lot more. 

I feel like the heroine in the formulaic Bollywood movies who alternates between yelling "I hate you" to the hero and "I love you" a few minutes after that!

But then this love-hate relationship with so many aspects of technology is not new to me.  Not at all.

As much as I am big time technology consumer (within my budgetary constraints, that is,) I way prefer, for instance, the paper-book in my hand instead of reading it on Kindle.  Reading the New Yorker magazine even when I get annoyed with the gazillion subscription cards is a lot more of an enjoyable experience than reading it on the computer monitor.  Heck, even playing the old vinly LPs is immensely more pleasurable then listening to Pandora. (Well, Pandora is a tough call--I do enjoy the new music that it offers me based on its understanding of my music tastes.)

These personal preferences though are trivial compared to my worries about the role that such rapidly evolving technology has on kids and youth.  In my classes, for instance, I tell students that they are adults and that, therefore, it is not my responsibility to instruct them what not to do in the classroom, as long as whatever they do doesn't distract fellow students or me from the activities that bring us together in that room.  Thus, I ignore students who seem place their smartphones on the desks and spend a lot more time and attention responding to messages there instead of focusing on the discussions in class. 

But, do/should technology developers worry about the broader ramifications?  Or, as Isaac Asimov noted about science, there is no way but onwards?

Reading the New Yoker's profile of Jaron Lanier (subscription required) and Lanier's comments there, made me feel all the better about my love-hate relationship with technology and my worries about its effects on the young.  Because, Lanier is infinitely more informed than me on this topic, and he seems to be a lot more worried as well. 

I then spent forty minutes watching and listening to this talk, available thanks to technology--see, my love aspect again--which is a discussion of his book, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto,



Lanier makes a number of points that have always bugged me.  More than anything else, I am surprised and utterly disappointed that the internet and the Web haven't unleashed the creativity of people that seemed so promising when the primitive world wide web grew up to web2.0.  Instead, whether it is students engaging in awful shortcuts to learning--plagiarism made simple--or people posting video clips of cats playing the piano, we seem to have only facilitated laziness and shallow interactions with ideas and people.  Instead of creative people working with their brains, it seems equally possible that the kids and youth of today could become more like human automatons.

Lanier argues that the nearly two decades worth of data since the birth of the www ought to make us pause and think about what kind a future we want to have:

I'm disappointed with the way the Internet has gone in the past ten years" ... "I've aways felt that he human-centered approach to computer science leads to more interesting, more exotic, more wild, and more heroic adventures than the machine-supremacy approach, where information is the highest goal.

BTW, Lanier's observations on Facebook resonate well with me--he says that the older folks get Facebook and the young don't.  Amen!