The Curious Folk in the Room: A Practical Guide to Getting Smarter
An Open Mind
How Amazing Ends
Solving Tough Problems
A Little Help From Your Friends
Whimsy and Work
Wisdom on Tap
Penelope’s Shroud
I have tried valiantly and failed miserably, and I think I know why. The framework of TAPistry is no framework, it is an invitation. An invitation to discover the meaning of relationships in ways that are not common to people who search out connections. There is no grand story, no ‘big picture’ that can be encapsulated because the topics and theories are intentionally left open. There is no ‘all in one encompassing easy convenient three payments of 99.99 ‘system’’ for the way I think you are thinking about these topics. The struggle is for the reader and thinker to make the connections themselves amongst the weaves, and to, as Feynman states ‘remain open to doubt’. My analogy is Penelope’s shroud for Oddysesus when he was away at the Trojan War. She told the suitors that she would not marry them until she was done making a shroud for her husband; each day she would weave at the loom, and then each night she would undo her work. I feel a little like that; that I am relearning and unlearning at the same time. That each new connection needs to be seen in the day, and then undone and reseen again at some later point. It is frustrating and illuminating at the same time. The thinkers around these topics are both macro and micro, and are searching for understanding to things that cannot be solved through formulas, modeling or a good algorithm for predicting things. The process that these people go through, the thoughts of not only how but also why are the interesting pieces of the education itself. It is in thinking about the material that one makes connections, not in the material itself; the material demands that you think, not just be a passive recipient to the information.
So, as a failure, I have created an annotated bibliography. I don’t have much of a story to tell, because I honestly believe that I could spend all day at the loom, and deconstruct at night. The pragmatist in me thinks that this is insane, the technophile inane and the artist sublime. The actual term for this process is ‘tacking’ the Germans have a better word, which came out the idea that the truth is a headwind, and a person has to tack between the different schools of thought in order to approach truth in the bigger picture. There, I will get out of the way. Smarter men and women deserve much more space. All work is available upon request, of course.
Philosophy of Technology
There is a society for the Philosophy of Technology, which has a newsletter and a ‘what’s hot’ resources list. This group appears to be focused on the uses of technology, and the ethical quandaries that appear as new technologies develop. There are also several anthologies around the philosophy of technology, most of which look at the influence of technology and the influence that it will have on the human condition. Much of the directional influence appears to be science and technology driving individual philosophers to question ways that technology can hurt or help humanity. Things like global warming, medical innovation and farming techniques on the positive side, as well as the threats to liberty and personal safety from technology on the other side. Philosophy appears reactive to technology, as opposed to a facilitator of new directions. There are multiple books and anthologies of individuals that have written about philosophy of technology, and there is an entire discipline-based community that works on these sorts of issues that began to emerge in the 1980’s. Let me know if you want some of their works; I have tried to include their viewpoints in the following individuals.
There also seems to be some forms of discussion around the philosophy of technology. There are the pro-technology people, who say that technology is connecting, enriching and in the end, unstoppable. It is a force in and of itself, and slowing it down or stopping it is unthinkable and untenable; it is to stop evolution and the growth of humanity itself. There are also those that worry that technology is destructive and alienating, and that building a better mouse trap means potential for mass indoctrination and loss of individual freedoms (the Orwellian camp). Both camps, obviously, have their strengths, and make sound arguments for the importance of their viewpoint being heard and understood. Both also agree that technology is unstoppable as a force within the human condition. Both agree that technology has made striking progress, and that this progress will only grow stronger as we develop better tools. They differ on one main point: ethics. They either openly ignore ethics as instrumental (leaving it to someone else to decide the ethical implications of their practice) or embrace ethics as the only remaining instrument.
An interesting question that Boyle, Wheale and Strurgess asks is ‘which drives which?’ in discussing the relationship between society, people and technology. Obviously, they all are inter-related, and history has shown that they also all react to each other, but the current period of human history, especially with the end of the Cold War and advent of the internet: who drives what? Is it even an important distinction? An insight that relates to this is: invention was the best invention in the 19th century. Prior to this, tools were of necessity and out of practical applications. The 19th century created a push for new technologies that were created to fulfill needs outside of standard necessities. The phonograph, the telephone and moving pictures were not essentials of daily survival, but were new inventions whose drive for creation was driven out of creativity and a desire to see if such things would work.
Each of these authors that follow stake a specific point of view, and I will attempt to give them their best angle.
Feynman
The first person I want to talk about is Feynman, because he is an interesting person who has done some really cool things (youngest person at Los Alamos, and at the Challenger Commission he dropped an O-Ring into a cup if ice water to show the problem) and writes well about them. He has two main ideas that come out of his book ‘The Pleasure of Knowing Things’: first, a great scientist always leaves the door open for doubt. He believes that certainty is not only wrong, but dangerous. He posits that uncertainty isn’t bad, it is the driver for creativity, for curiosity and for future understanding of the world. Only in turning over each stone with precision and deliberateness can someone truly find meaning and truth. It is the pleasure in turning over each stone for the sake of wondering what is underneath that is important in science. A good scientist is daily pushing to understand the issue at hand, and does so relentlessly and with an interest in uncovering what is true about this specific issue. To take a break is to forget the finer thinking done the day before. The individual findings are of great importance, the actual testing of a specific theory by whatever tools necessary is the key to scientific progress and discovery. To him, theory is ‘sweeping the difficulties under the rug’, followed by ‘I am, of course, uncertain about that’ (a part of his Nobel Prize acceptance speech). Science is a patient discovery of the truths of reality, a mapping of the world that exists, and that we just have to uncover as we engage in the world. His second interesting takeaway is that education is important, that learning and experience are the important pieces of being good at something (he was an expert safecracker at Los Alamos, and reports studying to do it for two years). The push is that what you do with that education, for good or for evil, is important only to the individual. He alludes to the atomic bomb and his fear of the implications, but shies away from addressing this. He believes that morality is separate from science, and that other individuals should question the morality of a scientific endeavor, not the scientist him or her self. He appears to have a wonderful philosophy about the practice and use of technology, but does not burden this dynamic with questions of the greater picture.
Neil Postman
At almost the opposite end of the morality spectrum are Luddites and neo-Luddites, people who believe that technology will constrain individual freedoms and the worth of the individual, or as William Blake put, it individuals will be working in ‘Dark Satanic Mills’. My favorite is Neil Postman, who wrote Technopoly. Postman also wrote a book called ‘teaching as a subversive activity’, an interesting look at educating (let me know if you want to hear more about it). The thrust of Technopoly is that America is a hotbed for technophiles, and that while technology has brought about good things (medicine, transportation, the ability to communicate, etc), there are also profound difficulties with the things that come out of discovery (war, alienation, subversion, etc). On the plus side, technology created a rush towards independence in thought, dispelling the idea that royalty has a claim to power and wealth, as well as the ability to create communities of thinkers and like-minded individuals through printed word. At the same time, he states that the problem with technology is that it is a means that becomes an end, or that ‘the medium becomes the message’. As people with pencils write and those with cars drive, technology becomes its own use. He points to the Scopes trial as one point where technology and individual values collided, and states that individual values and ‘old-world’ beliefs were set aside for technology. He states ‘the trial had more to do with technology and faith than technology as faith’, though society began to move forward with technology as faith. The second, and to him, more crucial moment was Fredrick Taylor’s concept of scientific management. Here, humanity could be turned to service the wills of technology itself in a systematic and dehumanizing way. An interesting list of people: Nietzsche, Darwin, Marx, Freud, Watson and then Einstein destroyed certainty in understanding old world conceptualizations of the relationship between the self and the world, and that with all of this once settled understanding (God=the Guaranteor Of Design, ‘I think therefore I am’, etc.) rapidly becoming unknown, only one replacement could be found as certain: technology and invention itself.
Now here is where he pivots: he asks ‘how does this help us actually solve the problems that we face?’. How does the Middle East conflicts benefit from technology itself? Can Iran and Israel solve their problems by using more information or through technological means? He goes on to say that the individual is the mechanism that is of utmost importance, and that computers and technology are byproducts of humanity’s productivity. His sentiment is ‘garbage in, garbage out’, and that technology is a barrier that could facilitate garbage to the speed of light. The wash of information and ease that technology brings with it also brings potential stagnation, indoctrination and the potential for lazy thinking and sound bite levels of understanding. He reserves special distaste for television: he abhors what television has become, writing a book called ‘Amusing Ourselves to Death’, in which he posits that the Orwellian world of control has been created using the Huxley methods of ‘Brave New World’. Here, technology, specifically television, has become the soma that we all partake of. His viewpoint is that ‘and now…This!’ culture creates a disengaged individual who is unable to make connections to other because of the barrier of technology (‘And now…This!’ is an example for watching the news, it is the point where the program goes from horrifying event to a soap commercial).
This field of argument would say that technology has created two types of slaves: those that are slaves to consumption of technology, and those that are slaves of envy.
The Middle Way
There are also those that find a middle ground, including Bolter, who wrote Turing’s Man (Turing proposed the first artificial intelligence program and early machines). He focuses on the idea that machines are the new fulcrum for society, and makes lengthy comparisons between man and machine, eventually equating them with each other (both are information processors). He views information as the key piece of society, and that machines will help people work with and communicate information in different ways (his book was written before the internet, which makes his next statement interestingly accurate). He believes that technology and information management won’t lead to totalitarianism, but more likely anarchy, with people going in different directions without the central focal points of community and state to guide their understanding of existence. Here, technology is neither evil nor saint, but just another tool for interacting with others. Henry Jenkins would agree, and has a much more current vantage point as well.
Henry Jenkins:
Interesting insights, and a professor here at USC. He wrote a book called convergence culture, about the ways that current multi-media platforms use technology to connect individuals to each other globally. He is more of a sociologist than a philosopher, but looks at the direction that technology is taking the human experience, and borders on philosophy. He is also far more current, and looks at things like YouTube and Twitter as interesting new forms of technology for dissemination of thoughts and ideas. He tells a great story about wanting to buy a cell phone where ‘I don’t have to figure out what button to push if the thing rings’. The salesperson sneered at him. He was told that they don’t make things that are not the equivalent to an electronic Swiss Army Knife anymore. My favorite story of his is that he went to a conference which was called ‘Worship at the Altar of Convergence'. Here, record industry types and dot com leftovers mingled with each other, worrying about being ‘too late’ and also concerned about being ‘too soon’ in adopting technology. Still, they all knew that technology was a powerful force, where resources and fortunes could be plundered, if you just knew what to do. These people worried about how to make money off of music, what a newspaper would look like in 25 years and how to make this all work in the bigger picture. Writers and musicians worried right along side them, as their ability to produce their art was just as rapidly evolving around them. The fusion of technology, media, individual choice, and the freedom given to each individual is a daunting task to turn a buck off of. He uses American Idol as an example of the record industry and consumers converging to create the next platinum recording artist.
To him, people are now engaged in a participatory culture, where they can go to a newspaper article on a website and interact with the author of the piece. Blogs, chats and self-broadcasting are changing how we learn about and interact with people who are experts in topics. Technology isn’t just breaking down barriers; its bludgeoning anyone who gets in the way of them. He does not see technology as converging into one big ‘Black Box’, where we all carry around one box and everything filters through it. He is seeing more and more boxes, different ways that technology can play a role in a specific interest that we wish to follow. He is both positive and negative about technology and its effect on human interaction. He enjoys the interaction, the ability to see different ideas and experience deeper levels of connections with each other. As a self-named ‘geek’, he enjoys the multi-platforming of movies, music, video games and television, and believes that the interaction with a once static medium like television is both revolutionary and completely engaging. He also fears technological cocoons, where couples communicate hourly, see each other two or three times a day, are the first to say good morning and the last to say good night, but never see each other in real life.
YochaiBenkler (Harvard Law) extends this type of thinking in a book called ‘The Wealth of Networks’. He is slightly more focused on the applications that the internet and resulting networks can have on business and industry. He believes that large networks of individuals should be able to exercise their rights to not only prosperity, but also to expression as well. He believes that these networked communities are forces for good that the state should be supporting, but sees that the state imposes sanctions and restrictions upon these networks, usually to the detriments of individual freedoms and liberties. He believes in an open, egalitarian forum that the state supports through research and development, and that the market then takes and refines the forum to suit its needs. He is libertarian by his own admission, and hopes that the state will lay the proverbial train tracks and highways, and then allow the market and free-willed individuals to do with these tools as they wish. He obviously wants speed limits (breaking up monopolies), but hopes that the vast majority of these new networks are left to the users to figure out what to do with the uncharted realms that could be used by the general populace. He believes the technology is a good thing for humanity, but that those in power will attempt to control not only technology and its means, but the rights and liberties that individuals have. He is opposed to things like DMCA (digital copyrights), as they are impositions upon individual freedoms to use technology. His overarching philosophy is an economic/sociological approach to technology, but he is a humanist at his core. He believes the technology can be the expression of liberty and free will in the end, but is wary of the powers that corporation and the state may bring the bear upon technology in order to protect their resources. Dr. Benkler loves things like Linux and other peer/community based productions of technology outside of the power structures, and is also interested in legal freedoms.