Talking at each other, instead of talking with each other

My father often notes that nobody calls anymore, and that the younger people message each other--or in groups--via WhatsApp and Facebook and more.

Phones are everywhere--sometimes people even have two phones--yet, talking to somebody else using the phone has become rare.  The word "telephone" refers to the distance (tele) and voice (phone.)  The smartphone is not a smarter way for the distance voice.  There is very little vocalization.  There is no need for "phone" in the gadget that we refer to as the smartphone!

The very idea of talking on the phone invokes horror among those who claim to loathe it. There are thousands of memes explaining the many ways that talking, not texting, is rude, basically criminal. Calling is not time-efficient, ill-suited to the attention economy, where all eyes must be on several screens at once.

Efficiency!

The psychologist Sherry Turkle has been studying the impact of computers on human psychology since the early 1980s, and in 2015 she published Reclaiming Conversation, in which she referred to “the edited life” that we live now. She spoke to teachers who observed that their students seemed to develop empathetic skills at a slower rate than they would be expected to. “Face-to-face conversation is the most human – and humanising – thing we do,” she wrote. “Fully present to one another, we learn to listen. It’s where we develop the capacity for empathy. It’s where we experience the joy of being heard, of being understood.”

An interesting essay that will be worth your time.  This is a topic about which I have blogged in plenty.  The following is a copy/paste from one of my previous posts on this; it is from six years ago:

Real world conversations seem to be getting rarer by the day.  For instance, even until a decade ago, the break during class time was when the room was noisiest thanks to students conversing with each other.  Calling the class to order typically ended that noise and it was back to me droning on and on and students trying their best to keep awake.

It is a different world, and a different classroom setting now.  The break time is often quiet--students are almost always hunched over their smartphones, texting and chatting.  Sometimes, I joke that they are probably texting students sitting only two seats away!

Such behavior is not unique in the classroom alone and is played out seemingly everywhere, sometimes even among family members in the same home.

Perhaps an irony that an introverted blogger worries about the death of conversation.  But, keep in mind that introvert does not mean anti-social ;)  While I might not be the nonstop chatterbox like, well, you know who you are (!), I love conversations.

This fascination with the trend in decreasing levels of conversation is the focus of this piece in the Atlantic:

Turkle is at work on a new book, aspirationally titled Reclaiming Conversation, which will be a continuation of her thinking in Alone Together. In it, she will out herself again, this time as “a partisan of conversation.” Her research for the book has involved hours upon hours of talking with people about conversation as well as eavesdropping on conversations: the kind of low-grade spying that in academia is known as “ethnography,” that in journalism is known as “reporting,” and that everywhere else is known as “paying attention.”
“I can’t, in restaurants, not watch families not talking to each other,” Turkle tells me. “In parks, I can’t not watch mothers not talking to their children. In streets, I can’t not watch mothers texting while they’re pushing their children.”
Her methods are contagious; once you start noticing what Turkle notices, you can’t stop. It’s a beautiful day, and we walk past boutiques, restaurants, and packed sidewalk cafés. The data are everywhere: The pair of high-school-age girls walking down Boylston Street, silent, typing. The table of brunchers ignoring their mimosas (and one another) in favor of their screens. The kid in the stroller playing with an iPad. The sea of humans who are, on this sparkling Saturday, living up to Turkle’s lament—they seem to be, indeed, alone together.

We are chatting, messaging, updating the Facebook status, tweeting, yes. But, ...

The conclusion she’s arrived at while researching her new book is not, technically, that we’re not talking to each other. We’re talking all the time, in person as well as in texts, in e-mails, over the phone, on Facebook and Twitter. The world is more talkative now, in many ways, than it’s ever been. The problem, Turkle argues, is that all of this talk can come at the expense of conversation. We’re talking at each other rather than with each other.

When I teach a class online, it is that conversation with students in the classroom that I miss.  The dialog in the classroom, the tangential comments made, the jokes, and even the wide yawns of students, make up the valuable Socratic conversation.

Conversations, as they tend to play out in person, are messy—full of pauses and interruptions and topic changes and assorted awkwardness. But the messiness is what allows for true exchange. It gives participants the time—and, just as important, the permission—to think and react and glean insights. “You can’t always tell, in a conversation, when the interesting bit is going to come,” Turkle says. “It’s like dancing: slow, slow, quick-quick, slow. You know? It seems boring, but all of a sudden there’s something, and whoa.”
Occasional dullness, in other words, is to be not only expected, but celebrated. Some of the best parts of conversation are, as Turkle puts it, “the boring bits.” 

Oh well. Maybe some day when there is a severe electromagnetic storm and we lose electronic communication, we might be forced into re-learning the art of conversation.  Unfortunately, it doesn't seem likely that we can teach the art of conversation either!

When you are with your child, put down your damned phone

The other day, we saw a three-year-old boy running excitedly on the bike path with a huge grin on his face.  His mother--we assume that was the relationship--was a few steps behind.

Nothing unnatural thus far, right?

Except that the mother was texting on her smartphone as she was walking.  And when she was done, she jogged to catch up with the boy.

If such a scene had been a rare occurrence, then I would not be worried.  But, it is not rare.  This has become the new normal, it seems.  Parents talking not to the kids but to somebody else on their smartphones.  Or texting. Or catching up on Facebook.

I suppose such highly distracted parenting will only worsen, which makes me all the more relieved that fertility rates have fallen to historic lows.  I would rather that people did not have children if they are going to be abandoning kids like this.

We have rapidly transitioned into a new world that runs against our own evolutionary mechanisms:

The new parental-interaction style can interrupt an ancient emotional cueing system, whose hallmark is responsive communication, the basis of most human learning. We’re in uncharted territory.

Unchartered, indeed!  There is decreasing levels of back-and-forth between children and adults.  I don't mean parents alone.  When I was growing up, it was not merely parents.  If they were not around, then I--like pretty much all children anywhere on this planet--was engaged in a back-and-forth with other adults or older children.  All these responsive communication helped all of us grow.

A problem therefore arises when the emotionally resonant adult–child cueing system so essential to early learning is interrupted—by a text, for example, or a quick check-in on Instagram. Anyone who’s been mowed down by a smartphone-impaired stroller operator can attest to the ubiquity of the phenomenon. ... “Toddlers cannot learn when we break the flow of conversations by picking up our cellphones or looking at the text that whizzes by our screens,” Hirsh-Pasek said.

It is all getting messed up!

Of course, parenting has always been associated with distractions.  A few days ago, a friend-couple recalled how when they were doing chores at home, their toddler daughter wandered into the yard--the door was accidentally open--and took a few sips of the lighter fluid.  Every parent has at least one awful story to tell.  But, that occasional distraction is different from the smartphone-distracted parenting of today:

A tuned-out parent may be quicker to anger than an engaged one, assuming that a child is trying to be manipulative when, in reality, she just wants attention. Short, deliberate separations can of course be harmless, even healthy, for parent and child alike (especially as children get older and require more independence). But that sort of separation is different from the inattention that occurs when a parent is with a child but communicating through his or her nonengagement that the child is less valuable than an email. A mother telling kids to go out and play, a father saying he needs to concentrate on a chore for the next half hour—these are entirely reasonable responses to the competing demands of adult life. What’s going on today, however, is the rise of unpredictable care, governed by the beeps and enticements of smartphones. We seem to have stumbled into the worst model of parenting imaginable—always present physically, thereby blocking children’s autonomy, yet only fitfully present emotionally.

All these don't add up well.  A brave new world!

From my cold, dead hands!

Remember Moses saying that?

Of course it was not Moses. It was Charleton Heston who played that role.  And, no, he did not utter those lines when walking around as Moses.  Heston was scaring the cult, er, the NRA, that the government was coming to get their guns.  This was 18 years ago, when the NRA was campaigning against Al Gore.

No, this is not a post about guns.

It is about smartphones about which most people will defiantly declare that they will never be separated from them. "From my cold, dead hands!"

More and more people are talking and writing about this smartphone addiction.

If I’m honest, much of what I did on my phone could be characterized as mindless. I can’t count the number of times I pulled out my phone just for the feeling of unlocking the screen and swiping through applications, whether out of comfort—like a baby sucking her thumb—or boredom—like a teenager at school, tapping his fingers on a desk. In those cases, I sought not mental stimulation, but physical release.

In the old days, at the airports, for instance, people might have even attempted to talk to the people next to them.  Or, maybe they walked up and down observing people and wandering into stores.  Now, it is all about the smartphone--even if they are only aimlessly and mindlessly locking and unlocking their phones!

If personal technology is improving the world of thought, what is it doing to the world of our moving, breathing bodies?

What is it doing to us?

The author of that essay has given up her smartphone.

Without my phone, I’m more fully myself, both in mind and body. And now, more than ever, I know that looking at my phone is nothing compared to looking at my daughter while the room sways as I rock her to sleep, or how shades of indigo and orange pour in through the window and cast a dusky glow over her room, or the way her warm, milky breath escapes in tiny exhalations from her lips, or how the crickets outside sing their breathless, spring lullaby.

I don't believe in giving up the smartphone.  But, I do believe in moderation. I believe in making sure that I own the phone, and that the iPhone does not own me.  Often, just to make sure I know how to operate in this world without the smartphone, I go about running errands without carrying my phone.  As much as possible, I refuse to use the map app.  I don't have to die in order to give up my iPhone.

Do you remember when ...

I love my mindful existence, which is why I tend to even remember events and people that I should have forgotten for my own well-being. 

Memories.  As the fellow-traveler in Costa Rica remarked, "when you are lying nearing your death, you cannot take your car or house or clothes.  You have only your memories with you when dying."

These days, thanks to technology, people think they are creating lots of memories when they take a gazillion photos and share with a gazillion friends via the gazillion social media platforms.  But, are they really memories?  Or is that mindless documentation?

In the old days, when we rarely took photographs, we were later able to recall the emotions of the moments when that was clicked.  A family group photo triggers various memories from that day.  The photo from a trip decades ago practically brings back the smells and sounds of the place. If you were nude sunbathing back in the day, then it was definitely a rare photo, before this age of nude-selfies and sexting.  Every one pretty much knows when those clicks happened.  Heck, we remember plenty that were never even photographed, right?

So, yes, the mere fact that a lot more photographs are being taken now does not mean that more memories are being created.  That is mere documentation.  And it is virtual.  To make things worse, what happens to all those virtual memories?

Every day about 300m digital photographs, more than 100 terabytes’ worth, are uploaded to Facebook. An estimated 204m emails are sent every minute and, with 5bn mobile devices in existence, the generation of new content looks set to continue its rapid growth.  ... Yet we overlook — at our peril — just how unstable and transient much of this information is.

I bet you have experienced that "transient nature" yourself when the site or the link does not exist anymore, or when whatever you had saved a while ago cannot be opened by the new software.  What happens to your "memory" in that case? 

The first step to forming a lasting memory is to pay attention. Without attention, our brains won’t store the sensations we experience in the world around us.
The brain stores long-term memories by linking neurons. The stronger the memory, the stronger the connections. These neurological connections link all the sensations that form a memory: what a scene looked like, what it felt like, what it smelled like.
But if we’re not paying attention — if we’re not even getting information into our short-term memories — nothing will be stored long term in our brains.

Duh!  I have been saying these for a while now.

At the end of the day, it’s just hard to know what the optimal balance of internal memory and tech-aided memory should be.
But if we want to hold on to certain memories, it’s going to take some mental effort. It means paying closer attention to our surroundings. It means using our cameras mindfully to focus on the details we truly want to remember.
It means putting down the camera for a few moments to notice what the air feels like, what the streets smell like, and writing down our feelings about being there.
Smartphones can help with this process: They can store information and serve as memory cues to help us retrieve it later on. But we can’t offload everything to them.

The more technology keeps developing new things, the more I am inclined to make sure I will have the real, tangible, documentation to augment my memories.  Still, I take comfort--even delight--in the fact that most of my memories are secure in a vault in my brain.  I will take those memories with me in slightly more than two decades.  You can try to make sense of the virtual memories that I will leave behind ;)

Source

Beware: Drug dealers all around

Remember that powerful line from The Bridge on the River Kwai?  "What have I done!"

That's the sentiment that slowly some of the technology folks are beginning to express.Like some early Facebook employees, who now worry "about the monster they have created."

As one early Facebook employee told me, “I lay awake at night thinking about all the things we built in the early days and what we could have done to avoid the product being used this way.”

It is not merely with Facebook.  It is the same with Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, ... the list is endless.

Why?  The reason is a simple one, which I have discussed a lot in this blog.  But, we need to be reminded over and over again:

One of the problems is that these platforms act, in many ways, like drugs. Facebook, and every other social-media outlet, knows that all too well. Your phone vibrates a dozen times an hour with alerts about likes and comments and retweets and faves. The combined effect is one of just trying to suck you back in, so their numbers look better for their next quarterly earnings report. Sean Parker, one of Facebook’s earliest investors and the company’s first president, came right out and said what we all know: the whole intention of Facebook is to act like a drug, by “[giving] you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever.” That, Parker said, was by design. These companies are “exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.” Former Facebook executive Chamath Palihapitiya has echoed this, too. “Do I feel guilty?” he asked rhetorically on CNN about the role Facebook is playing in society. “Absolutely I feel guilt.”

It is easy for the likes of Sean Parker to say that now, right?  After all, he has made his gazillions; Wikipedia notes that he is worth $2.4 billion!  Our addiction is their dollars.  If only users paused to question why they are getting these services for free.  No free lunch, as economists always remind us.

People who know me sometimes even make fun of my regimented life.  I stick to my eating regimen, my sleeping regimen, and ... Even when playing bridge, I commit myself to ending the playing by typing to other players that I will play one final game and after that game, well, I sign off.  It is all because I know well how delightful it is to have that extra chocolate. That extra cookie. More time in bed. One more ... We humans are wired for such addictions.  And technology is now explicitly and intentionally tapping into our addictive personalities.

So, what can be done?

[A]  rigorous technology of the mind is really what we need now as a civilization because the thing that’s killing people nowadays is too much Facebook and cheeseburgers. We solved the problems of the biological age by vaccines and antibiotics and discovering all these things, and stopping the things that were killing people, and we’re not going to find the technologies to fix these behavioral problems of addiction, technology overuse, overconsumption of everything by walking away from the technologies of the mind. We’re going to solve them by getting rigorous and having a complete science and technology so that people can reprogram themselves into the people they want to be.

We need to "reprogram" ourselves?  Ain't gonna happen!

"The art of remembering is the art of thinking."

A few days ago, I was taking a quick walk on campus, after my lunch and prior to my class.  I heard a student yell out my name from the car that was passing by.  I looked at the car.  The driver stopped the vehicle and rolled down the window.

"I didn't expect to see you here, Jessica,"

We talked for a few minutes.  She was one of the more self-motivated and smart students I have met in this university.  It has been six years since she graduated.  I inquired about her sister and her nephew and her husband. "You have a steel-trap mind," she said.

Fortunately, yes.  I pay attention to important things in life, and they register in my memory.  (I know I am setting myself up for the flip side of this: I am bound to insult somebody when I do not remember the details that are important to them, right?)

Apparently remembering is becoming even more challenging for people because of one particular development: Smartphones.  They are hijacking our minds!

Now that our phones have made it so easy to gather information online, our brains are likely offloading even more of the work of remembering to technology. If the only thing at stake were memories of trivial facts, that might not matter. But, as the pioneering psychologist and philosopher William James said in an 1892 lecture, "the art of remembering is the art of thinking." Only by encoding information in our biological memory can we weave the rich intellectual associations that form the essence of personal knowledge and give rise to critical and conceptual thinking. No matter how much information swirls around us, the less well-stocked our memory, the less we have to think with.

But, of course.  Duh!  This is exactly what I have been telling students (and anybody who asks me about this) for a few years now.  In my intuitive understanding, we need to keep working the brain and its memory functions.  However, this is not about memorizing per se.  Just as fluency with the English language is not about memorizing words in the dictionary.  All these help us think, and think clearly.

It gets even worse:

It turns out that we aren't very good at distinguishing the knowledge we keep in our heads from the information we find on our phones or computers. As Dr. Wegner and Dr. Ward explained in a 2013 Scientific American article, when people call up information through their devices, they often end up suffering from delusions of intelligence. They feel as though "their own mental capacities" had generated the information, not their devices. "The advent of the 'information age' seems to have created a generation of people who feel they know more than ever before," the scholars concluded, even though "they may know ever less about the world around them."

You can see how we were ripe for the Russian fake news campaign that gave us the fascist, who turns around and calls all the real news as "fake news."

So, what can you do?  You can read that entire WSJ essay by Nicholas Carr, whom I have cited many times before.  Or, you can do what I have been suggesting for years: Keep that smartphone away from you as much as you can.

When we constrict our capacity for reasoning and recall or transfer those skills to a gadget, we sacrifice our ability to turn information into knowledge. We get the data but lose the meaning. Upgrading our gadgets won't solve the problem. We need to give our minds more room to think. And that means putting some distance between ourselves and our phones.

Not only will that help you think clearly, it will also reduce quite a bit of angst that the smartphones give the users.  Because, our brains are wired to be hijacked, and it is our responsibility to protect our brains that can then serve us well:

Scientists have long known that the brain is a monitoring system as well as a thinking system. ...
But even in the history of captivating media, the smartphone stands out. It is an attention magnet unlike any our minds have had to grapple with before. Because the phone is packed with so many forms of information and so many useful and entertaining functions, it acts as what Dr. Ward calls a "supernormal stimulus," one that can "hijack" attention whenever it is part of our surroundings -- which it always is. Imagine combining a mailbox, a newspaper, a TV, a radio, a photo album, a public library and a boisterous party attended by everyone you know, and then compressing them all into a single, small, radiant object. That is what a smartphone represents to us. No wonder we can't take our minds off it.

Seriously, have I not been saying and writing these through all these years that you have been listening to me and reading my blog?  You don't remember? ;)

Look up ... please!

It seemed like I might have enough time to make it to the car dealer before closing time and get the much delayed oil change done.

It was a gorgeous spring day in the valley.  I drove with the sunroof open and the driver side window down, fully aware that I was inviting trouble by exposing myself to the pollen.

Trouble came from behind in the form of a car that alternated between coming dangerously close to me and falling way behind.  My immediate thought was, well, it was a trump voter who wants to intimidate me.  But, such a voter driving a Prius?  That didn't seem likely.

When the car pulled close again, I looked at the driver's face in the mirror.  It was a young woman whose head was down.  A driver whose attention was more on the smartphone in her lap than on the road ahead!

I survived the driver and reached the car service shop.  I handed the key and stood under the warm sun, and watched the mechanic open up the hood and then slide under the vehicle.

He didn't reach for the tools, however.

He got his smartphone out and texted.  And then put it back in his overalls.  He tinkered for a couple of minutes and it was back to the smartphone again.

Thank heavens I was not watching a heart or a brain surgery!  Imagine if the surgeon took a time out to check her text and to reply!

When they handed me the key back, I hoped that my loyal vehicle had survived this texting technician.  I started driving.

A pickup truck raced up in the other lane, drew parallel with me.  And then fell back.  This time I was really worried that it was a trump voter.  My heart started racing.  No wonder my muscles are stressed out all the time!

Again the pickup truck evened with me, and then kept going.  You guessed it; the driver was focused on the smartphone--which the passenger was holding up for him!  The two young men couldn't care, apparently, for the road and the traffic.

A couple minutes later, I reached the intersection as the light turned red.  I stopped, and worried about the car behind me that seemed to be coming at me at full speed.  It came to a stop only inches from my vehicle.  Phew!

And then it happened.  The car slowly moved and it gently bumped against my vehicle.  Yep.

 I knew that it could not have caused any damage at that snail crawl.  I looked into the side mirror in order to get an idea of the driver.  A young woman who seemed freaked out with the realization that she had bumped--even if only gently--my vehicle.

But, no apology hand from her.  She was too freaked out, I think.  When the light turned green, when she got the space, she shifted into the other lane and sped away.

I survived all these not-so-smart people with their smartphones!

Trust me, I know what I am talking about

"Those of you who are set on your majors based on employment opportunities now should keep in mind that the world twenty years from now--even ten years from now--will be very, very different, and your majors could become meaningless," I told the class.

I know nobody cares about these.  But, I have been telling students that for a long time.  I tell them that the focus ought to be on various kinds of skills that they need for the real world, and should not be on the jargon of the major.  I wish I didn't suffer a Cassandra's Curse situation!

"The best example is the iPhone.  Twenty years ago, such an idea might have been almost science fiction. It is now ten years old, and smartphones have dramatically changed the world," I continued.

I have never been able to understand why people--young and old--have never truly listened to me.  It is not that I am correct in every single instance; but, if I look back at my prognostications based on my understanding of the world, I have an awesome track record.  On the other hand, tens of millions of Republicans loved, loved, loved this bullshitting horrible human being and elected him the president!

Later that evening, my much older neighbor texted me, and I called her back instead of texting a reply.  "I called you because such texting is one of the many ways that the world is rapidly redefining human interactions and--more importantly--what it means to be human," I told her.  This is also an old idea that I have been saying/writing for years.  It might seem rather ironical for a hermit to be worried about human interactions, but we hermits are not misanthropes--we perhaps love humanity way more than all those social butterflies.

Smartphones are affecting human interactions in many ways, including damaging our social capital:

Could our increasing reliance on information from devices, rather than from other people, be costing us opportunities to build social capital?

Yes, of course!  I don't need any research on this.

The authors write:

Contrary to people’s expectations, casual social interactions even with strangers can be surprisingly enjoyable, and a powerful tool in building a sense of connection, community and belonging. Economists sometimes refer to these impalpable links that hold society together as “social capital.” But as intangible as they may be, these bonds between members of a society have very real consequences. When trust between people in a country goes up, for example, so does economic growth. At the individual level, people who trust others more also tend to have better health and higher well-being.

Thanks to smartphones, students in classrooms, for instance, do not even say hello to their fellow classmates.  They are almost always only interacting with their smartphones.  A contrast to the old days when students struck up conversations with the strangers that their classmates were.

Research led the authors to conclude that "people who used their phones to get information trusted strangers less."

As information technology continues to make our lives easier, our findings highlight the possible social costs of constant information access: By turning to convenient electronic devices, people may be forgoing opportunities to foster trust – a finding that seems particularly poignant in the present political climate.

Which the demagogue understood really, really, well when he proclaimed that he alone can and should be trusted.  What a tragedy that people who seem to have lost trust in fellow people are so willing to trust one awful human being whose every word--from his mouth or through his tiny fingers--can never be trusted.

la fleur du cobalt

Right from when I was a kid, I have always worried about how guilty I should feel.  As I wrote in this essay, one of my earliest lessons on this was when I realized that I was eating candies when across from me were kids my age who were begging.  I have been leading a life since then of trying to convince myself that I don't have to feel awful about everything around me.

But then that realization is also why I do what I do.  In my role as a university instructor, as an op-ed writer, as a blogger, I am able to get at least a few other people to think about the terrible stuff that is all around us and hope that as our collective awareness grows we can also address the human suffering.  

Yesterday's post was Syria.  Today, it is about Congo.  The huge country in the middle of a huge continent.  How huge is the Democratic Republic of Congo?  Think about Western Europe.  About two-thirds of Western Europe can fit into Congo.  

It is a country that is a sorry mess now.  Has been messed up for a long, long time.  And whether or not we care about the country, we are all intricately connected to it.  Here is one more way we are: Cobalt.  "60 percent of the world’s cobalt originates in Congo."

Cobalt. Who cares, right?

[It is a] mineral essential to the rechargeable lithium-ion batteries that power smartphones, laptops and electric vehicles made by companies such as Apple, Samsung and major automakers.

Without cobalt, you and I won't be in communication here--we would not have our laptops and smartphones.  Smartphones have five to ten grams of cobalt in them, while a laptop has about an ounce, the report says. "Cobalt is the most expensive raw material inside a lithium-ion battery."

Of course, this is not the first time that I am blogging about Congo.  Remember this post from a few months ago, on King Leopold's Ghost?

Under the reign of terror instituted by King Leopold II of Belgium (who ran the Congo Free State as his personal fief from 1885 to 1908), the population of the Congo was reduced by half -- as many as 8 million Africans (perhaps even 10 million, in Hochschild's opinion) lost their lives.
Some were beaten or whipped to death for failing to meet the rigid production quotas for ivory and rubber harvests, imposed by Leopold's agents. Some were worked to death, forced to labor in slavelike conditions as porters, rubber gatherers or miners for little or no pay.
Some died of the diseases introduced to (and spread throughout) the Congo by Europeans. And still others died from the increasingly frequent famines that swept the Congo basin as Leopold's army rampaged through the countryside, appropriating food and crops for its own use while destroying villages and fields.

A country that is rich in all kinds of resources, which is why the rest of the world has been messing around there for a long time.  Cobalt is merely the latest :(

Concern about how cobalt is mined “comes to the fore every now and again,” said Guy Darby, a veteran cobalt analyst with Darton Commodities in London. “And it’s met with much muttering and shaking of the head and tuttering — and goes away again.”
In the past year, a Dutch advocacy group called the Center for Research on Multinational Corporations, known as SOMO, and Amnesty International have put out reports alleging improprieties including forced relocations of villages and water pollution. Amnesty’s report, which accused Congo DongFang of buying materials mined by children, prompted a fresh wave of companies to promise that their cobalt connections were being vetted.
But the problems remained starkly evident when Post journalists visited mining operations in Congo this summer.

We mutter. We shake heads. We move on.  How awful!

So, why la fleur du cobalt in the title?  In the report, you will read about the tragic irony.  I urge you to read the entire piece, which is a phenomenal piece of investigative journalism.  And watch the videos there. And spread the awareness.  You and I could do at least that much.

SOS: The message in a bottle advises against phubbing!

"I ve tried adding ur contacts to my phone and I couldn't find you on WhatsApp" wrote one in her email to me.  And a few days ago, an old high school friend asked me via Facebook, "Do you use Whatsapp?"

It disappointed them that I do not use WhatsApp.  I don't because of a simple  reason: I already suffer from a messaging overload:

Three functional email addresses
Twitter
Facebook
My Iphone
This blog, of course.

If people cannot reach me via any of these, not to speak of the good old snail-mail, then maybe the message is not that important to begin with!

Of course, I am not the only one who suffers from this "tyranny of messaging":

These days, messages come at me from so many directions that it’s incredibly distracting and even harder to deal with. Friends, co-workers, business acquaintances and strangers contact me on multiple siloed services, which can signal subtle shades of immediacy or weight.

Exactly.  It will only get worse:

And this weird, mixed-up communications structure is about to get more complex, because U.S. tech companies — following a strong trend in Asia — are turning messaging from a service into a platform, with supposedly intelligent bots and assistants and apps built into them. Apple is beefing up iMessage. Facebook is beefing up Messenger. Google, which has been behind in messaging, is launching two new platforms: Allo for text and images and emojis, and Duo for videos.
Maybe these bots and assistants and apps will be a means to controlling and focusing your messaging and communications, but that would be a hard, tricky job. More likely, I fear, they will just spew more messages and notifications they think — wrongly — you care about.

Stop, stop, stop!

I systematically refuse to use any of the new messaging platforms for the same reason that I have intentionally scaled back my Facebook presence, where I have pruned my friends list to a manageable number (I'm sure there are "friends" who wonder why I am no longer their "friend"!):

The rabbit holes are everywhere, and it’s too easy to fall down them.

Every one of these messaging platforms is one major attention-sucker and, before I know it, I would have wasted hours with nothing but trivia, which is what I want to avoid!

In any of those platforms that I already use, I have always made sure that nothing is ever "pushed" across to me--I have to physically act to pull down the latest messages if I really cared.  I cannot imagine how people function if they are constantly pinged by the latest message on the gazillion platforms that they use.  I shudder to think about the constant interruptions; no wonder that people are all the more stressed out now.

One of the reasons that people sign up for every messaging platform: The fear of missing out, or FOMO as it is often referred to.  FOMO apparently is so overwhelming that people feel the urge to reach for their smartphones even when they are socializing in the real world with fellow humans:

According to a new study in Computers in Human Behavior, “phubbing” — snubbing someone in a social setting in favor of a phone — has evolved from a psychological habit and sign of technological maladjustment to an acceptable social norm.

FOMO leads to phubbing, of course.  

I suppose I should be happy if you read all the way till this sentence without being distracted by the notifications on your smartphone.  Hello, you there? ;)

Measuring your personal density

I read stuff.  Quality stuff, not the kind that the racist bully quotes from ;)

Even when the quality stuff is darn difficult to understand.  After all, if the world were easy to understand, then by now all of us would have known about everything there is to know, right?

One of the advantages in this approach of fumbling around in difficult essays is this: I find some wonderful ideas that make a whole lot of sense to me.  Makes the slogging worthwhile.

Like the following I came across in a lengthy essay in the NYRB:

When the smartphone brings messages, alerts, and notifications that invite instant responses—and induces anxiety if those messages fail to arrive—everyone’s sense of time changes, and attention that used to be focused more or less distantly on, say, tomorrow’s mail is concentrated in the present moment. In Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), an engineer named Kurt Mondaugen enunciates a law of human existence: “Personal density…is directly proportional to temporal bandwidth.” The narrator explains:

“Temporal bandwidth” is the width of your present, your now…. The more you dwell in the past and future, the thicker your bandwidth, the more solid your persona. But the narrower your sense of Now, the more tenuous you are.

I like how the author makes me understand with "attention that used to be focused more or less distantly on, say, tomorrow’s mail is concentrated in the present moment."  The past and the future seem to be getting obliterated with the emphasis on now.  And this dramatic and rapid transformation of the "temporal bandwidth" is seriously messing up our personae.

It is not the technology that is at fault.  The fault lies in us.  We humans can choose to use technological advancements in the manner in which it could/will strengthen us, instead of making us more vulnerable than ever before.

Every technological change that seems to threaten the integrity of the self also offers new ways to strengthen it.

Exactly!  If I were to use the "temporal bandwidth" language, I suppose the technology has made it possible for me to appreciate the past, even as I worry about the future, and appropriately think about the now.  The here and the now are not in terms of the smartphone's ability to deliver instant gratification, but in ways that help me gain inner strength.

One of my go-to-experts on such matters, Nicholas Carr, has also responded to this essay; he writes:

The intensification of communication, and the attendant flow of information, aids in the development of personal density, of inner density, but only up to a point. Then the effect reverses. One is so overwhelmed by the necessity of communication — a necessity that may well be felt as a form of pleasure — that there is no longer any time for the synthesis or consolidation needed to build density. Little adheres, less coheres. Personal density at this point becomes inversely proportional to informational density. The only way to deal with the expansion of informational bandwidth is to constrict one’s temporal bandwidth — to narrow the “Now.” We are not unbounded; tradeoffs must be made.

Yes, tradeoffs must be made about the now.  I hope I am making the right calls, at least once in a while.

Phones are newer and smarter ... this user is older and dumber!

I got into the smartphone habit much later than most in my circle.  I simply had no need for it--my old flip-phone worked fine.  My daughter was surprised; she thought I loved such gadgets.  I do.  But, when I evaluated the costs and the benefits, it just didn't seem worth it.

I finally made the switch to a smartphone.  I have now had that phone for a few years.  A couple of more generations of that phone have come and gone, but I am fine with what I have.  

In the US, most of us don't shell out the entire cost of a new smartphone.  Instead, we enter into a contract with a telephone company, which then provides the phone at a low price.  That remarkably low upfront cost makes the upgrades "easier" for customers.

With my contract, I was "eligible" for an upgrade a while ago.  I don't bother with that.  Because, I worry.  Unnecessary it might be; but, I worry.  Worry is all I seem to do, when I don't engage in sophomoric jokes ;)

The experience with the television set was tough enough.  I continued to soldier on with my cathode-ray-tube TV until the cable company's digital transmission started messing up things.  I then became the recipient of the daughter's gift!

I routinely force students to think about where their old smartphones end up when they upgrade to the latest gadget.  I have assigned essays, like this one, which then provide the context for them to pause for a few minutes and think about the resource consumption.  I practice--at least try to--what I teach.  Thus, I have a difficult time getting rid of my old smartphone even when it serves all my purposes. Last December, when I was taking photographs of the high school classmates who had come to the niece's wedding, one friend laughingly said "ever since the first time I reconnected with Sriram, he has been using the same camera."  Yes, it has been the same camera too for a few years now.  Just because it is old I should dump it?  I don't operate that way.  

I would suggest that you, too, think about those issues before you do whatever you do, especially if you are an environmental nutcase like me.  (Yes, shocking to you, eh, given my right-wing politics!)

It takes a lot of energy to use a smartphone. You charge the phone daily, you browse and exchange messages, you create tweets and Instagram posts that are saved on some faraway energy-guzzling server. Yet the biggest way to lessen the environmental impact of your phone doesn't have anything to do with how you use it, according to a new review

I have no idea why they had to do a big review to figure things out.  I have been saying the same stuff for years; oh yeah, nobody cares for what I have to say! ;)

All of that activity pales in comparison to how much energy it takes to extract and refine the dozens of precious metals that go into a smartphone. In other words, abstaining from replacing your smartphone more frequently than need be—and recycling it when you're done with it—may be the best way to make a difference.
"The current business model of mobile contracts encourages consumers to upgrade frequently, regardless of whether their current phone is fit for purpose," University of Surrey physicist James Suckling, one of the review's authors, said in a statement. "This isn't a trend that can continue if we are to have the mobile lifestyle we want, while still ensuring a sustainable future."

So, there!

I way prefer my clear approach to planned obsolescence ;)

Source