The virtual is for the poor?

It was in 2011 that I first came across a reference to EM Forster's The Machine Stops, and since then I have quoted from that masterpiece many times.  I will quote from that story again in order to get you warmed up for what this post will deal with:

"You talk as if a god had made the Machine," cried the other.  "I believe that you pray to it when you are unhappy. Men made it, do not forget that. Great men, but men. The Machine is much, but it is not everything. I see something like you in this plate, but I do not see you. I hear something like you through this telephone, but I do not hear you. That is why I want you to come. Pay me a visit, so that we can meet face to face, and talk about the hopes that are in my mind." 
She replied that she could scarcely spare the time for a visit.

A century ago thinkers like Forster were worried about the potential for human-human face-to-face interaction to be replaced by human-machine interactions. We are now living that science-fiction!

Life for anyone but the very rich — the physical experience of learning, living and dying — is increasingly mediated by screens.

"For anyone but the very rich."

Consider online classes, for instance.  I have taught online classes from the bad old days when we used dial-up modems.  Even though I teach online classes, I have always argued that students are being shortchanged.  And here's how I often make that argument: Students do not go to Harvard to take online classes there.  So, if Harvard's students, who are, on an average, way more talented and able to learn with very little guidance, go to college for a learning environment that is guided by real humans and in the company of real humans, then how is it that we market online classes only to the less privileged?

Online classes are an example of contemporary life that is "increasingly mediated by screens" for those who are not rich enough. This contrast between the rich and the rest begins from a young age:

In Silicon Valley, time on screens is increasingly seen as unhealthy. Here, the popular elementary school is the local Waldorf School, which promises a back-to-nature, nearly screen-free education.
So as wealthy kids are growing up with less screen time, poor kids are growing up with more.

As it turns out, the wealthy even resort to fraud in order to get their children to colleges where real humans with real intellectual prowess will engage with students.  There is a reason they don't commit fraud in order to get their kids to my online classes!

I particularly like this point that the author makes: "Human contact is becoming a luxury good."

Sad!

You can have this virtual cake ... but, eat you cannot!

After the meeting, I was hanging out at the airport killing time by walking around and observing life.  I spotted two colleagues waiting for their flights.  I walked over and chatted with them.

One talked about how she enjoys having a second home in Brooklyn, even as she continues to work and live for the most part in a town four hours away.

"The two mortgages are tight ... sometimes I feel like I can't ever go on a real vacation.  But, then I reach Brooklyn, and my friends are right across from me, and I am happy," she said.

"Yes, ultimately it is all about the human-human interactions, right?  It is not really about the vacation travels."

People increasingly seem to be forgetting the importance of the human interaction in real time and space.  They fail to understand that virtual is not the same. It is like my favorite example that you can't eat a virtual cake.  It is only real water that quenches the thirst, not the virtual.

David Brooks writes in his column that "Online is a place for human contact but not intimacy."  But, people seem to be mistaking one for another, and fail to understand the difference between contact and intimacy, between acquaintance and friend.

There is no turning back.  The virtual will increasingly be the preferred choice, even as people know within that it is the real that they truly seek. 

And then one day in the future, humanity will run into the very scenario that E.M. Forster wrote about years before all these developed:

"You talk as if a god had made the Machine," cried the other. "I believe that you pray to it when you are unhappy. Men made it, do not forget that. Great men, but men. The Machine is much, but it is not everything. I see something like you in this plate, but I do not see you. I hear something like you through this telephone, but I do not hear you. That is why I want you to come. Pay me a visit, so that we can meet face to face, and talk about the hopes that are in my mind."
She replied that she could scarcely spare the time for a visit.

Cry is all we can do!

Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?

There are more and more homeless people in town.  And our town is no exception--growing numbers of homeless is an issue that seemingly every American city is dealing with.  At the same time, the economy is humming along and unemployment rate is down to 4.3 percent, which should convince anybody that homelessness is not simply an economic issue--it is not merely about poverty.

I do wonder whether the homeless, despite all the hardship, are more in tune with real life and what it means to be human than most of the rest of us who live disconnected from all things real.

We live increasingly in artificial environments.  We live online, via texts, blogs, emails, tweets, Instagrams, and--of course--Facebook.  Through most of our waking hours, we are completely disconnected from "real" and deal only with the virtual.

The homeless--the mentally competent and otherwise--deal with the real all the time.  Real people. Real heat. Real cold. Real hunger. ... So, who is really leading a real life?

The older I get, the more I worry about this.  The more there is technology, the more I worry about this.  I am reminded of the science fiction from a century ago, about which I have blogged before: E.M. Forster's The Machine Stops.

As I noted in this post two years ago:

We live in a world that Forster wrote about back in 1909.  Screen time of all kinds.  Instant messages.  Tweets and Facebook status reports and blog posts like this all passing of as knowledge, just as Forster had feared.  We have replaced real human interactions with virtual ones.  So "satisfied" with the virtual interactions, and thinking that the virtual even eliminates the need for real interactions, we seem to believe that visiting with parents, children, friends, is not needed anymore.  We live in our own cells.

We already live in a world in which the machine has taken over our lives.  The machine even knows way more about us than we do about ourselves.  We can try to run from it, but we can never hide from the machine.

And, of course, homelessness is especially worse in cities that are home to the creators of the machine.  Like San Francisco and the Silicon Valley.   It is a bizarre juxtaposition of affluence and unimaginable high technology, versus shaggy men and women pushing carts mumbling to themselves.

The digital high tech industry is rapidly leading us into an increasingly virtual world, where we humans become disposable.  We real humans matter less and less to the machine.  We humans, in turn, care less and less about all things real.

Cannot you see, cannot all you lecturers see, that it is we that are dying, and that down here the only thing that really lives in the Machine? We created the Machine, to do our will, but we cannot make it do our will now. It was robbed us of the sense of space and of the sense of touch, it has blurred every human relation and narrowed down love to a carnal act, it has paralysed our bodies and our wills, and now it compels us to worship it. The Machine develops - but not on our lies. The Machine proceeds - but not to our goal. We only exist as the blood corpuscles that course through its arteries, and if it could work without us, it would let us die.

PS:
Click here to read The Machine Stops, if you have never read that before.
The blog-post resulted from reading this book review essay in the LRB.

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!