I can't let you do that, Dave

Two articles caught my eye over the weekend because of their opposed views on the relationship of society to technology: Regina Lynn’s “Rude People, Not Tech, Cause Bad Manners” at Wired.com and George Johnson’s “An Oracle for Our Time, Part Man, Part Machine,” at NYTimes.com.

Lynn’s column argues against a common complaint: that an increasing number of people defer face-to-face interaction in order to connect via IM, cell phones, etc., often leading to obliviousness of people in their immediate, physical vicinity.

According to Lynn, technology doesn’t impede, but only enables interpersonal relationships. An IM-only friend is as real as an in-the-flesh friend. Indeed, for the socially awkward, electronically mediated relationships may be deeper and more open than those conducted face-to-face. And the real problem with too-loud-in-public cell phone conversations is less the gadget than the oaf holding it.

I tend to agree, with some reservations. If technology is capable of enabling “good” socialization, it must likewise be capable of magnifying our rudeness.

Lynn sees us as in control of our actions. The technology has no insidious impact on human behavior. It is powerless and thus blameless: cell phones don’t offend people, people offend people. Yet no one can claim that antipathy towards public cell phone use isn’t a social phenomenon, or that it could exist if there were no cell phones.

Johnson’s piece begins by breaking down the etymology of “algorithm” before omenously announcing, “It was the Internet that stripped the word of its innocence.”

He takes issue with two distinct, but closely related phenomena of the internet age: the automation of judgment through the use of powerful algorithms, e.g. Google’s PageRank or NewsRank, and systems—both human- and machine-directed—which perform knowledge-intensive tasks through crowdsourcing, e.g. Wikipedia or Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.

Johnson fears that these entities are robbing of us of judgment and enslaving us to a technological hive-mind. His is less an argument than an appeal to the viscera: on his account, these entities are horror-show symbiotes of man and machine, perhaps a “buzzing mechanism with replaceable human parts”, or “an organism with an immune system of human leukocytes”. The illustrations accompanying the article belong to a type commonly seen in the media of fearful technological essentialism: crude cyborgs of human tissue and forms superficially evocative of industrial tech.

It seems unlikely that Wikipedia will overthrow the nation-state as the leading technology for the subjugation of individual will (though virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier, for one, is troubled by the possibility). Systems can and do take on a direction of their own, but they are always created to satisfy a set of human interests. Rather than framing our fears in terms of man-versus-machine, let us ask who the machine is working for, and if their values are our values.