Friday evening I sat on a panel with Professors Sherry Turkle and Nick Tyler (chaired by Prof John Naughton) at the British Library. The question we’ve been asked to consider is whether or not we are too intertwined with technology.
Given the conversation I had with Prof Turkle on Wednesday night at the RSA, I anticipated she would say that we are too intertwined. Indeed, her latest book, Alone Together is an exceptional volte face of her previous theoretical position on the subject. I look forward to the debate.
Here’s my five minutes of preamble:
Are we too intertwined with technology?
The short answer is: Yes. But not how you might think.
I believe that we have inextricably interwoven technology into our lives and that this is facilitating exceptional opportunities for human social evolution: we now have the opportunities to meet new people, collaborate across distances, and achieve real outcomes on a scale and at such speed as has never been witnessed before. Web technology is ushering in a social evolution like other technologies before it: the domestic technologies that released women from the confines from the home, the medical technologies that have extended our lives and our health, the communications technologies that have amplified voices of people who were previously unheard.
These are, of course, positive evolutions.
But with the new web technologies that we hold in our hands and on our laps, that keep us connected to a world of information at our fingertips at every moment, we are in danger of reducing our world views.
We have the greatest archive of knowledge at our disposal. But we are not machines: we cannot parse it, make sense of it, synthesise it. We are physiologically incapable of rendering it useful in a meaningful way. And yet every day, more is produced.
And so we rely upon social heuristics to determine what it is that we should pay attention to.
We have done this as human beings throughout history: our neurological systems are built to filter out noise and to help us make unconscious decisions. Our psychologies similarly generate filters, based on who we are: a consolidation of who we are now based on who we have been and who we wish to be.
We are motivated to confirm our beliefs, generating a greater sense of who we are within the social world. This serves us well in helping us make sense of the madness that surrounds us.
The new wave of web technologies explicitly encourages us to articulate who’s part of our gang, and who isn’t. We follow on Twitter people who we know, like, or wish to be seen to be like. These people reflect aspects of our selves and produce a flow of information that makes us feel like we belong, like we have a group, and we have a cornerstone for our identities.
Here’s the thing, though: every time we get a good recommendation from Amazon, a little piece of diversity dies.
The new technologies filter OUT the other, disconfirmatory beliefs and the randomness that comes from stumbling across something unexpected. The greatest potential serendipity machine is in fact, as Eli Pariser writes, a Filter Bubble.
Yet we are entangled because the machines give us what we want. This is a commercially-driven motivation based upon technology development that reduces us to databases of behaviours and intentions.
The more we rely upon the machine to dictate what we should and should not attend to, the greater our personal responsibility is in reaching out from the machine to connect with people and ideas we don’t agree with. Otherwise, we become automotons exactly like them.
Comments
Great ! You have put in words, in a stunning way, my disordered thoughts. Thanks.
Yes, we need the serendipity machine !
Can’t accept some of your phrases. It Is not true that we can not phrase the information we have access to. Of cause we can, not all but lots of it. I believe, those humans who are physiologically incapable of rendering certain information will not access it since they don’t need it. So why censuring the access to information generally?
Reading your concern about the social heuristic raised the question in me “Ho do you maintain your individuality?” Of cause, there’s lot’s of influence around us but not only in the web. The neighbours new car of the friends new TV is my produce the desire to catch up; suggestions at Amazon –sorry.
Well done on friday night for bailing out Sherry Turkle from that unanswerable question from John Naughton that sought a summary of every historical instance we had dealt with technological challenges to our pychological wellbeing!
Thanks for a thought-provoking and interesting article.
As a result of reading it some thoughts have occurred and, uncharacteristically, I thought I’d share them! I’ll begin by stating my understanding of what you’ve said and that is that by widening the network of people we know the opinions of and can be influenced by we are loosing our diversity and individuality.
At first, this didn’t make sense. However, if we consider that, in contrast to people we actually know and have a reasonable impression of how reliable their opinion is, a good recommendation on Amazon is worth so much less because we don’t have the depth of knowledge about that individual to give their recommendation context and value. It becomes a numbers game and we believe that because a significant number of people have indicated they like something then it must be likeable. Now it makes sense.
Of course, that might not have been the point you were making or the logic behind it!
Another thought that this has triggered is that for the most part we are drifting into this scenario for the most part in a fairly unthinking way. Some might consider that they are not entangled at all (e.g. the elderly without even a computer in their house) but not only are individuals becoming entangled, societies and countries are too.
Would be great to see/hear the whole debate – is it available online?
I do share your concerns I see and have read elsewhere from you, of how the interweb technology is essentially self-confirming, and the the problems that entails. My one response to that is that it is hardly anything new, and there are other more massive forces at work that may counterbalance against it.
If anything serendipity is the new force, not self-confirmation. In the very distance past cultures separated by only a few miles might be radically different, and yet each culture would remain largely the same for decades or even centuries. The cause of that was largely the self-confirmation of the limited cultural experience by the members of the group in question. It is a brand new artifact of the 20th and 21st century that there are forces of homogenization at work geographically, and yet the temporal differences in culture can be astounding. In the eighties in some of the prep circles I was in then, perms were really popular, even sometimes for guys. Big fluffy hair was in. How many photographs from that period do you think were furtively immolated by adults who just couldn’t bear the shame of being reminded. Thank God I didn’t have one, though I was a hippy, I looked pretty bad too. In 90’s Seattle we were all striving to look like heroin addicts, and if that meant buying a $65 flannel shirt with prefab stains on the elbows, so be it.
The lack of serendipity is lamentable, but hardly new, not fatal and has a way of reinserting itself into our lives (otherwise we wouldn’t call it serendipity, which is the last time I’m going to use that word, I always get confused on how to spell it towards the end). Cultural change happens, thank goodness, and there have always been bizarre eddies and backwaters, but there have also always been deep thinkers like you pointing out the fallacy of not being open to…serendipity (darn it). Intelligent people know they need it, and stupid people are more prone to it than they like to admit.
@Mac – I suppose it depends on what your definition of serendipity is…
Have you considered the relevance of Heidegger’s views on technology to the contemporary situation you examine? Just curious :)
@Mimi – no ma’am, but I will now. Thanks!
Heidegger was a very insightful man. He was also a monster, and a little too in love with an idealized version of the rural/village man. I’m no expert, and I don’t doubt there’s insight to be had there, but it’s a sticky wicket with pitfalls that led Heidegger himself to a lifelong defense of Nazi sociology.
As to my definition of what serendipity is, I’d have to preface it by saying it probably isn’t as good as yours Dr. Klotoski, and then paradoxically state that it is a phenomenon not readily defined, somewhat like intuition, but I have been giving it a decent amount of thought lately (again, probably not as well you have). Serendipity to me seems like the confluence of unexpected and/or unpredictable events, either within the spheres of action or information flow, that leads to some new event structure that exists purely as a result of preceding events but does not exist on the lines of fate that could otherwise have been predicted.
See I didn’t do that very well. Let me try and use some examples.
In an unexpected rainstorm you leap into what seems like an available taxi only to discover someone else has done exactly the same thing from the other side. It just so happens a mutual attraction exists, you marry, a century later one of your descendents becomes Prime Minister or at least a bad romance novel ensues.
That’s a terrible example. Let me use one from real life.
I used to study wildlife science at University. Though I didn’t know the graduate student in question, we shared a professor. She was studying mountain goats (Oreamnos americanus). In order to study them she frequently shot them with a tranquilizer dart, tagged them, and logged their behavior and movements. This is done in very rugged country. On one occasion she shot a mountain goat which as the tranquilizer took hold caused it to stumble over a cliff several hundred feet high. Unfortunately, it fell to it’s death (about which she felt terrible by the way), but most bizarrely of all it fell on to the hood of a car traveling a nearly deserted mountain road at about 45 mph. The car was being driven by an elderly German couple who it just so happened had diplomatic backgrounds who were understandably horrified and not so understandably vindictive. This graduate student was forced to give up her thesis, start over and study smaller mammals.
Now the example I give is somewhat negative, and for all I know this graduate student eventually discovered something astounding about voles. Here I imagine serendipity as a neutral force from which either good or bad things could happen, but to me it illustrates some of the mechanisms of what is a non-mechanical process. You are correct, if I understand you properly, that no algorithm can truly reproduce serendipity. However, you and I have also spoken briefly about whether the future is “post-human” or not, with you saying that the inputs provided by humanity are not to be underestimated. I agree. Although I am not sure that a proper definition of post-humanity is one where our humanity is fully subsumed into a mechanistic modality where carefully crafted control groups are shepherded into a reasonably defined spectrum of possible fates.
In other words I think there’s always going to be that mountain goat that falls out of the sky.
Thank you for your time.
I apologize for extending my comments beyond good taste, but I would like to distinguish my thoughts on serendipity from the related concepts of synchronicity and coincidence.
Jungian synchronicity, by my understanding, is an assertion that apparently related events are indeed related through the purposeful action of some Spiritus Mundi or other unknowable force in order to communicate a specific information content to a particular observer.
Coincidence (“if you believe in that sort of thing” as the saying goes) is exactly the opposite assertion of synchronicity. Namely, that the most unlikely thing that could happen would be if unlikely things never happened. That connections between seemingly unrelated events that still seem to convey meaning to a particular observer are a psychological artifact of the predictable occurrence of statistical anomalies, but the anomalies themselves remain within the paradigm of a mechanistic worldview.
For awhile I got a little into lottery numbers. More than once, in the same lotteries, the exact same numbers occurred on consecutive days. Synchronicity would assert the numbers were somehow meaningful to a certain observer. Coincidence would assert the reoccurring numbers were a statistical anomaly that were bound to happen given the number of the lotteries that are played on any given day.
Serendipity would be seeing the numbers one night on the news, playing them the next day, and winning.
The other two concepts are filled with value judgments, the concept of serendipity is devoid of them.