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.
Monday, September 24, 2007
Tuesday, September 18, 2007
Dedication
text–script–machine is dedicated to the memory of Ronald Anderson, SJ, my friend and advisor, who passed away in June at the age of 57.
Ron was a Jesuit priest and held PhDs in physics and philosophy. His research involved applying the techniques of literary analysis to 19th century scientific texts, in order to better understand the development of electrical theory. He was also deeply interested in how the Catholic faith might respond to the challenges of postmodernism.
It was Ron who introduced me to science and technology studies, and I will sorely miss not being able to correspond with him as I set out on this endeavor.
Ron was a Jesuit priest and held PhDs in physics and philosophy. His research involved applying the techniques of literary analysis to 19th century scientific texts, in order to better understand the development of electrical theory. He was also deeply interested in how the Catholic faith might respond to the challenges of postmodernism.
It was Ron who introduced me to science and technology studies, and I will sorely miss not being able to correspond with him as I set out on this endeavor.
about that official launch...
I had intended to do a sort of “grand opening,” including a mass email announcement, a new design, and a rigorous posting schedule. But I seem to be easing into things—collecting notes for good topics to write on, letting people know one-by-one, and so on. This is working for me so far, and I think I’m going to keep it up.
I’m a trained graphic designer—if not a practicing one—so using the default blogger template bugs me. There will be a new design along at some point. I’m also going to do my best to post at least three times a week from here on out, though life will get in the way at times.
If you have a Google account, please feel free to log in and comment on or argue with any post you see here. If you’re just tuning in, the original post features some brief notes on what this blog is about.
I’m a trained graphic designer—if not a practicing one—so using the default blogger template bugs me. There will be a new design along at some point. I’m also going to do my best to post at least three times a week from here on out, though life will get in the way at times.
If you have a Google account, please feel free to log in and comment on or argue with any post you see here. If you’re just tuning in, the original post features some brief notes on what this blog is about.
Monday, September 17, 2007
Shiny plastic cases
One of the things that fascinates me about technology is what I call technological encapsulation, the process of obfuscation by which the engineering miracle is brought down to earth and made humane.
We’re really not all that interested in how the gadget got here. We only want it to exist, ready-to-hand, to help us in satisfying our wants and needs. And so we hide each of its Aristotelian causes, except the final cause, which is our own reason for employing it.
Like a grain of sand in an oyster shell, the technological artifact must be physically enclosed. Otherwise, its rude workings may remind us of the inferiority of our understanding to that of the technologists who created it. Thus its formal and material causes are hidden from view. And since we might object to the environmental or socioeconomic misdeeds that were likely involved in the creation of any modern artifact, its production process is hidden behind factory walls, in foreign nations, and concealed as an industrial secret.
Of course, we must be complicit in the process of technological encapsulation; if we wanted to open the case or research the production process, we could. And some people do—but this is a distinctly different attitude in approaching the object than the manufacturer intends, or most people practice.
If the process of encapsulation is complete, the technological artifact will enter our world as a “natural” object, or at least a humane one. But the process is almost never complete, and so most artifacts require the passing of a generation to become naturalized.
Witness, for instance, the phenomenon of typewritten text. An entire generation of writers railed against the dehumanizing aspects of the clattering mechanical beast. Of course, the pen it replaced was also unnatural, strictly speaking, but had the advantage of familiarity. Now, typewriters are quaint collectibles, calling to mind a more romantic era when the novel was king and writing was still performed with mechanical devices in physical space. And modern techies of a conservative bent swear by “plain text,” i.e., typewritten text, as the simplest, most honest incarnation of the written word.
We’re really not all that interested in how the gadget got here. We only want it to exist, ready-to-hand, to help us in satisfying our wants and needs. And so we hide each of its Aristotelian causes, except the final cause, which is our own reason for employing it.
Like a grain of sand in an oyster shell, the technological artifact must be physically enclosed. Otherwise, its rude workings may remind us of the inferiority of our understanding to that of the technologists who created it. Thus its formal and material causes are hidden from view. And since we might object to the environmental or socioeconomic misdeeds that were likely involved in the creation of any modern artifact, its production process is hidden behind factory walls, in foreign nations, and concealed as an industrial secret.
Of course, we must be complicit in the process of technological encapsulation; if we wanted to open the case or research the production process, we could. And some people do—but this is a distinctly different attitude in approaching the object than the manufacturer intends, or most people practice.
If the process of encapsulation is complete, the technological artifact will enter our world as a “natural” object, or at least a humane one. But the process is almost never complete, and so most artifacts require the passing of a generation to become naturalized.
Witness, for instance, the phenomenon of typewritten text. An entire generation of writers railed against the dehumanizing aspects of the clattering mechanical beast. Of course, the pen it replaced was also unnatural, strictly speaking, but had the advantage of familiarity. Now, typewriters are quaint collectibles, calling to mind a more romantic era when the novel was king and writing was still performed with mechanical devices in physical space. And modern techies of a conservative bent swear by “plain text,” i.e., typewritten text, as the simplest, most honest incarnation of the written word.
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
Pie in the sky
When Apollo 11 landed on the moon in 1969, it was a Copernican moment in a way. The keepers of the universe-on-paper, the universe of cosmological theory, had long ago banished the earth from its privileged position at the center of it all. The universe-as-lived, however, remained unavoidably Ptolemaic. For our ordinary comings and goings, and consequently for the liberal arts and social sciences, the earth has been the end-all and be-all.
But the moon landing, which fulfilled the project defined by Jules Verne in From the Earth to the Moon a little more than a century after he first penned it, expanded our realm of influence by a sphere. The center of gravity of human life shifted outward, and we began to think of ourselves as spacefaring.
Lately, we have begun to think of the moon—which might as well have been made of green cheese, for all we knew or cared—as a real economic resource.
As my brother reminds me, that mining the moon will ever prove worthwhile is still a long shot. But the mere fact that it has been proposed signals a sea change in our thinking.
But the moon landing, which fulfilled the project defined by Jules Verne in From the Earth to the Moon a little more than a century after he first penned it, expanded our realm of influence by a sphere. The center of gravity of human life shifted outward, and we began to think of ourselves as spacefaring.
Lately, we have begun to think of the moon—which might as well have been made of green cheese, for all we knew or cared—as a real economic resource.
As my brother reminds me, that mining the moon will ever prove worthwhile is still a long shot. But the mere fact that it has been proposed signals a sea change in our thinking.
Monday, August 27, 2007
The Spock Entity Resolution and Extraction Challenge
Newly launched people search engine Spock is offering $50,000 to the team that can create the best algorithm for identifying unique individuals from the ever-changing morass of personal data on the internet. The team of judges is composed of software engineers, computer science professors, and a venture capitalist.
It’s too bad that no philosophers or sociologists were invited to tag along. They could have advised the Spock team that personal identity poses some of the oldest problems around. A Buddhist or Heraclitean would argue that the entity Spock is chasing is a non-entity, that no enduring personality exists—only temporarily assembled bundles of individual properties.
Without going that far, one still finds it nearly impossible to identify a collection of features that an individual retains from infancy to elderhood that is unique enough to be essential to them. People change party affiliation, citizenship, gender, size, and hair color. People change interests, ideologies, addresses, names. Perhaps your DNA is coincidentally unique to you, but what if you had a twin (or a clone)? What if you changed your genetic makeup through gene therapy?
Of course, there is at least one identity that remains constant and trackable, for those of us who aren’t secret agents, at least—and I suspect it’s the one Spock is trying to identify us with. It’s the one that cashes the checks—our “official” identity for civic and financial purposes. Unfortunately for Spock, the figures that nail it down—DOB, SSN, etc.—are the ones we are well-advised to keep off the internet. And for those of us unlucky enough to have our identities stolen, even this “official” identity doesn’t always resolve to a unique individual.
Spock shows much promise. But identity as found on the internet is unavoidably a bundle of properties without a substance to adhere to. Insofar as people are multifaceted or conformist, Spock will never entirely be able to resolve them.
It’s too bad that no philosophers or sociologists were invited to tag along. They could have advised the Spock team that personal identity poses some of the oldest problems around. A Buddhist or Heraclitean would argue that the entity Spock is chasing is a non-entity, that no enduring personality exists—only temporarily assembled bundles of individual properties.
Without going that far, one still finds it nearly impossible to identify a collection of features that an individual retains from infancy to elderhood that is unique enough to be essential to them. People change party affiliation, citizenship, gender, size, and hair color. People change interests, ideologies, addresses, names. Perhaps your DNA is coincidentally unique to you, but what if you had a twin (or a clone)? What if you changed your genetic makeup through gene therapy?
Of course, there is at least one identity that remains constant and trackable, for those of us who aren’t secret agents, at least—and I suspect it’s the one Spock is trying to identify us with. It’s the one that cashes the checks—our “official” identity for civic and financial purposes. Unfortunately for Spock, the figures that nail it down—DOB, SSN, etc.—are the ones we are well-advised to keep off the internet. And for those of us unlucky enough to have our identities stolen, even this “official” identity doesn’t always resolve to a unique individual.
Spock shows much promise. But identity as found on the internet is unavoidably a bundle of properties without a substance to adhere to. Insofar as people are multifaceted or conformist, Spock will never entirely be able to resolve them.
Tuesday, June 12, 2007
The uber-gadget, deferred
By Darren Abrecht, McClatchy Interactive
Two years ago, while working and studying in Boston, I considered buying a PDA but decided to wait. I had limited space in my pack and already had to contend with a cell phone, mp3 player, digital camera, and laptop. The U.S. Army Survival Manual advises:
“In preparing your survival kit, select items you can use for more than one purpose. If you have two items that will serve the same function, pick the one you can use for another function.”
In this case, what’s good for the soldier is good for the urban commuter. At the time, I could look at the trend lines of converging device functionality and predict that, in a year or two, I would be able to replace my aging gadget fleet with a single lump of shiny plastic. This uber-gadget would perform the functions of the PDA, cell phone, internet communicator, digital music player and camera well enough for serious everyday use, even if not as well as an agglomeration of dedicated devices.
The Apple iPhone debuts at the end of this month as the much-hyped fulfillment of convergence manifest destiny. Does its advent signal a brave new era of pants with only one bulging pocket?
Alas. As I was watching my brother-in-law trying to connect his Nintendo DS to my home wireless network the other day, it occurred to me that the reality of the situation is—and could only ever have been—something quite different. While the iPhone or a similar device would allow me to do away with all the little lumps of plastic in my life, no single gadget could ever be everyone’s end-all. While many people carry around multiple pieces of personal tech, most of them have a go-to device, closer to their hearts and the center of their digital lives than the others. Ask yourself: if you could take only one gadget with you, which would it be? For most people, this would be a cell phone. For others, it might be a music player, GPS device, or handheld game console.
Instead of a single class of uber-gadget, what seems to be emerging is a plurality of multifunction device types, each organized around a different primary function. Even the iPhone is, first and foremost, a cell phone—a point underscored by Steve Jobs at its announcement, when he declared that its “killer app” is making phone calls.
Whatever your gadget of choice, the odds are good that beyond its primary function it can do many of the things that other devices can do. A few years out, devices like your favorite will almost certainly continue to exist as a class—and will take on more and more functionality that overlaps with other device classes.
Who knows? Some day, we might even see an iPod with a built-in FM radio.
©2007 McClatchy. Reprinted with permission.
Two years ago, while working and studying in Boston, I considered buying a PDA but decided to wait. I had limited space in my pack and already had to contend with a cell phone, mp3 player, digital camera, and laptop. The U.S. Army Survival Manual advises:
“In preparing your survival kit, select items you can use for more than one purpose. If you have two items that will serve the same function, pick the one you can use for another function.”
In this case, what’s good for the soldier is good for the urban commuter. At the time, I could look at the trend lines of converging device functionality and predict that, in a year or two, I would be able to replace my aging gadget fleet with a single lump of shiny plastic. This uber-gadget would perform the functions of the PDA, cell phone, internet communicator, digital music player and camera well enough for serious everyday use, even if not as well as an agglomeration of dedicated devices.
The Apple iPhone debuts at the end of this month as the much-hyped fulfillment of convergence manifest destiny. Does its advent signal a brave new era of pants with only one bulging pocket?
Alas. As I was watching my brother-in-law trying to connect his Nintendo DS to my home wireless network the other day, it occurred to me that the reality of the situation is—and could only ever have been—something quite different. While the iPhone or a similar device would allow me to do away with all the little lumps of plastic in my life, no single gadget could ever be everyone’s end-all. While many people carry around multiple pieces of personal tech, most of them have a go-to device, closer to their hearts and the center of their digital lives than the others. Ask yourself: if you could take only one gadget with you, which would it be? For most people, this would be a cell phone. For others, it might be a music player, GPS device, or handheld game console.
Instead of a single class of uber-gadget, what seems to be emerging is a plurality of multifunction device types, each organized around a different primary function. Even the iPhone is, first and foremost, a cell phone—a point underscored by Steve Jobs at its announcement, when he declared that its “killer app” is making phone calls.
Whatever your gadget of choice, the odds are good that beyond its primary function it can do many of the things that other devices can do. A few years out, devices like your favorite will almost certainly continue to exist as a class—and will take on more and more functionality that overlaps with other device classes.
Who knows? Some day, we might even see an iPod with a built-in FM radio.
©2007 McClatchy. Reprinted with permission.
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