The appified life!

The pace of criticism of our computer-driven existence has picked up a great deal.  Which means the damn thing is happening way more than I can imagine and understand!

Consider, for instance, MealTribes.  I hadn't even heard about this until very recently. Recently as in yesterday!  MealTribes is an app that helps people connect with others and get together at potlucks to make friends.  Technology, which created our lonely existence, is now being tapped into for young people--who might have hundreds of virtual friends, but are lonely--to get out into the real world and connect with real people.

Founded by 28-year-old Jared Gold and some friends in 2017, MealTribes bills itself as “a better way to authentically connect with peers nearby.” Prospective diners create a profile on the online platform by answering a brief questionnaire, with some optional questions not unlike those you’d find on a dating site: Are you a “nature lover,” an “advice guru” or a “chef”? If you could live as any person for a day — dead or alive — who would it be? Users then sign up online for either a weeknight dinner or weekend brunch, with six or seven strangers.

An "authentic" way of connecting:

MealTribes is capitalizing on something else, too: the so-called “loneliness epidemic” we’re all supposedly experiencing as urban millennials, though we’re way too cool to admit it. 

Such is life in this algorithmic world!

Algorithms not only are used to connect with people in the real world, but also to shape our tastes--from what we "want" to wear to the trendy foods to whatever:

This impacts not only the artifacts we experience but also how we experience them. Think of the difference between a friend recommending a clothing brand and something showing up in targeted banner ads, chasing you around the internet. It’s more likely that your friend understands what you want and need, and you’re more likely to trust the recommendation, even if it seems challenging to you.
Maybe it’s a particularly shapeless garment or a noisy punk track. If you know the source of the suggestion, then you might give it a chance and see if it meshes with your tastes. In contrast, we know the machine doesn’t care about us, nor does it have a cultivated taste of its own; it only wants us to engage with something it calculates we might like. This is boring. “I wonder if, at the core of fashion, the reason we find it fascinating is that we know there’s a human at the end of it,” Pieratt says. “We’re learning about people. If you remove that layer of humanity from underneath, does the soul of the interest leave with it?”

I wonder how the question of "what does it mean to be human?" will be answered in the coming decades.  Come to think about it, I would rather not know!

Is boredom on its way out?

Boredom other than in my classroom, that is.  No, it is not me who is bored, but apparently students are. We are just about completing four weeks and I have already seen quite a few heads dangerously nodding.  Many eyes seem to stare vacantly. Some students take off during the break and do not come back.  I have enough and more evidence that my classes are awfully boring places.

But, in the world outside of my classroom, it has become one app after another that competes for our attention.  We do not have enough time to keep up with the text messages, Facebook status updates, Twitter conversations, Instagram, Netflix, television, ... and the real world of people.  Ask yourself when it was the last time that you sat down feeling bored out of your wits.  Again, a reminder--bored when you were not in my class!

I have blogged more than once (especially this and this) about how it has become a luxury anymore to be bored.  The subject fascinates me to no end.  When waiting for the flights, for instance, I am very happy to walk about or to merely watch people coming and going.  But, most of the rest seem to be fixated on their gadgets. With their ears also plugged into their gadgets. When there is quite a lot of life and drama happening all around them.  Why are they so afraid of not really doing anything other than while away their time?  What is the rush--we are all going to die anyway and, as far as I know, there is no prize for being the first to exit this planet or if one is the last from the group.  We may as well take it all in at a leisurely pace, right?  The gadgets are changing us, and changing us rapidly:

Virginia Woolf famously said that on or about December 1910 human character changed. We don’t yet know if the same thing happened with the release of the iPhone 5—but, as the digital and “real” worlds become harder to distinguish from each other, it seems clear that something is shifting. The ways we interact with each other and with the world have altered. 

 "All the world’s an app," yes.

what about our changing perceptions of time and space? In The App Generation, Katie Davis remarks that her younger sister has never had the experience of being lost, and probably never will, unless she loses her phone. What does never getting lost do to someone’s experience of the world? With GPS everywhere, is a forest still a forest or is it just a collection of trees? And how many other states of being are vanishing? Boyd (refreshingly) insists that “the kids are alright”—but her book also suggests that they are never really alone. Are boredom, solitude and aimlessness on their way out, too? ...
For Martin Heidegger, the feeling of profound boredom—which he felt while waiting for a train at a provincial train station, for instance—brought one closest to the kind of active attention that separates human beings from animals.

 There's something happening here But what it is ain't exactly clear.

We need more writers thinking deeply about the way the internet reorders our experience of everyday life. Not just the ways it makes tasks easier or changes the way we socialise and communicate with one another, but the way it shapes our wants, our fears, our way of thinking and talking.

I don't understand why more people aren't engaged in discussing the changes.  Instead, we seem to be more and more eager, than ever before, to wait for the next big thing, or at least the next big update.We wait in lines in the dead of the night in order to get our hands on the latest gadget.  During the break in the classes, the room gets very quiet--even quieter than the library.  Because students are busy with their smartphones. Quite a contrast to the old days when the break would make the class one awfully noisy place and I would have to yell to get their attention and remind them to pause those conversations and allow me to talk.  Maybe all that conversation was why a few years ago, it was a rare student who fell asleep in my classes?

Wait a second; you read until here?  Oh boy, you must have been really, really bored! ;)