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New Intellectuals: Technology and Its Augean Stables

In order to do some work today, I have to run a search. The desktop search systems I use are from Gaviri, a system developed by my friend Dr. Emeka Akezuwa, and software from Sowsoft called Effective File Search. My hunch is that as technology awareness of search seems to expand, knowledge about specific systems like Gaviri and Effective File Search decreases. If I could figure out the “smart” software in Windows Live Writer, I would express this as an equation. But for the life of me, Windows Live Writer has a weird interface, and I just don’t have the energy to try and think like a 20- or 30-something “expert” any longer.

I thought about search and digital information when I read the quite long write up “Humanity Has Always Feared Technology. In the 21st Century, Are We Right to Be Afraid?” Right out of the gate, the headline troubled me. First, there was the categorical affirmative “always.” Okay, every time there is an innovation, “human” behaves exactly the same way—In fear. Wow. Then there was the secondary thought: Are we right to be afraid? Well, if the “always” is operative, then the author definitely wants me to cower, shake, and experience the various manifestations of fear. You will want to read the original post because it contains some narrative woven amongst quotations from experts, mavens, and satraps.

The problem is that I am not “always’ fearful. What frightens me is the type of thinking that I find in many “expert” analyses. The goal is polarization, shock, and agenda pumping.

When one considers technology, I think it is a good idea to have a point of reference. The write up does not offer the type of anchor that even a third tier university lecturer would trot out to a group of students talking in a student center over milk and cookies.

Here are three points which I noted:

First, the write up references a professor and baroness, Susan Greenfield, who is quoted as stating:

“In real life, because actions have consequences, normally there’s a pay-off. If you want to go bungie jumping, which might be very exciting, there’s an element of danger there, and risk. Alternatively, if you want to sit with your friends and play poker or bridge where there’s zero danger it might get a bit boring, but here you have the perfect world of something that’s very exciting for you but at the same time completely safe,” she says.”

Second, the six part article hurtles forward, offering references to addiction. The idea that “doing” online is similar if not congruent to taking hard drugs or gambling compulsively. Does addictive behavior result from online or is addictive behavior evident whether one has an iPad or mobile phone? My view is that addictive behavior has been around for a long time and some folks find addictive behavior satisfying. To eliminate addictive behavior, the solution seems to be to eliminate the apparent cause. So how is that working out in society? I walked through an economically challenged area of London yesterday and noted five gambling facilities, a number of establishments selling various alcoholic beverages, and I watched one drug transaction in front of a take away. Online, therefore, is likely to attract its share of reformers, but if other potential magnets for addiction are operating in a busy metropolitan area, the “intellectuals” may not make the progress desired.

Augean stables. Big job. Maybe impossible?

Addiction is one side of the coin:

Why then is there a tendency for society to view technology addiction as something negative? Part of the answer surely lies in the pejorative nature of the word ‘addiction’ – replace addiction with ‘enthusiasm’ and the emphasis is immediately very different.

Yes, humans are particularly problematic, and it is a matter of time for a new thinker to conclude that technology is neutral, the universal solvent, and all things great and beautiful. I don’t agree, but the thought is one I understand as 20 and 30 somethings try to find the knobs and dials for a Fukushima melt down world. I am not sure “addiction” captures what I see happening. Technology is a way for a person to exert apparent control over certain situations. Online shopping does the immediate gratification thing and online dating delivers a similar kick without the need to dress up and interact in a non virtual social setting. “Date” in the digital realm is in some ways less likely to generate a sharp retort, laughter and pointing, and the physical presence non digital interaction affords some.

Third, the write up mentions the digital divide. In my opinion, the focus is on the obvious digital divide. What is ignored are the people and physical locations where there is no online connectivity. The barrier may be political like some less than upscale towns in Afghanistan or financial like the unemployed, food stamp folks in Louisville, Kentucky. Either way, the always on life style is as out of reach as the vacations of Brad Pitt. Here’s the digital divide characterized in the write up:

Parents have to realize that technology is now part and parcel of the culture and that technology’s involved with education, socialization, leisure. These new technological ways of doing things have displaced old ways of doing things. [Children] texting each other or being on Facebook – it’s a different way of socializing, yet there is this technological generation gap that parents or adults who do not engage in those behaviors themselves, they tend to pathologise those behaviors and call them abnormal.–Mark Griffiths, psychologist and professor of gambling studies at Nottingham Trent University.

Fourth, because the write up is summarizing the views of a number of experts, the reader learns about the notion that the Internet helps people be less intelligent. Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows and The Big Switch opines:

But I do think that if you look at the information that’s coming at us today, particularly because people carry networked computers with them all day long, it does seem to be something unprecedented. People always felt this sense of information overload – I think what we deal with today in terms of scale is far in excess of what we’ve seen before.”

Fourth, the article turns to Clay Shirky, educator and public philosopher to help explain the digital world in which many struggle to exist and hopefully evolve:

Whereas the phone gave us the one-to-one pattern; and television, radios, magazines, books gave us the one-to-many pattern; the internet gives us the many-to-many pattern. “For the first time, media is natively good at supporting these kinds of conversations,” he says. “Media is increasingly less just a source of information and it’s increasingly more a site of co-ordination – because groups that see or hear or watch or listen to something can now gather around and talk to each other as well. The moment our historical generation is living through is the largest increase in expressive capability in human history,” he adds. “It’s as if when you bought a book they threw in the printing press for free. It’s like you had a phone that could turn into a radio if you pressed the right buttons. That is a huge change.

We have a lot of content which helps fill the “shallows” and adds to the burden of information overload.

Fifth, the fix is elusive. One path forward is set forth in this snippet attributed to Nick Tyler, Chadwick professor of civil engineering at UCL:

Increasingly, certainly in the more enlightened institutions, I think you will begin to see engineering departments that include social psychologists and anthropologists… because it’s fundamental to how engineering is done. We have to understand a lot more about those interactions between people and the environments and technologies they’re interacting with.”

The write up concludes with what I found a predictable no position type statement: “We can’t necessarily say technology’s good or bad – it just simply is.”

Now I don’t have the academic or social credentials of the experts whose remarks make up the “always” article. I would, however, like to be a baron or maybe earl. The Earl of Harrod’s Creek sounds quite nice, in my opinion.

My views on technology are not wishy washy. I am not trying to keep a lucrative consulting job, earn an academic appointment, or sell a book which explains why online makes one shallow or reduces intellectual discourse to the equivalent of waste water. Nope.

I want to point out four thoughts which I have learned through online experience which, close as I can tell at age 67, winds its way through four decades.

First, people involved in technology are least able to understand its impact on those not involved with technology. This somewhat obvious statement means that the world the goldfish sees within its bowl is different the world a fish sees in the Ohio River, assuming that Ohio River fish can survive. In technology centric disciplines such as search, the people engaged in search have a tough time understanding what a user requires. When an  “expert”—like the real ones cited in this article or the fake ones running around social media conferences doing the Facebook shuffle—talks about the Internet or online, the comments are aimed at other experts. As a result, a person not in the “culture” will ask, “What the heck is this person talking about?” We have, therefore, a built in Grand Canyon. On one side are the experts. On the other side are those looking at a big ditch. In the big ditch, there are many different features, characteristics, and phenomena at work or manifested in the reality of the Grand Canyon itself. Make all the generalizations required to communicate the aboutness of the Grand Canyon, and one is going to come up short. The map is not the territory. The talk about online is not online. What’s this mean in terms of technology? Simple. Forget explaining technology. One has to do technology. The fact that what one does is only a tiny fraction of the technological possibilities means that the doers are as clueless as those who just use the technology.

Second, the consequences of technology cannot, therefore, be accurately predicted, described, or even outlined with particular precision. What technology does is generate surprises. And the use of technology makes the once novel commonplace. The user, therefore, no longer thinks about the technology as technology. Imagine the surprise the wheel created. Who thinks about wheels? Not me. Well, I do when I get a flat tire. Any other time, the wheel is not a technology. The wheel is just part of the basic equipment for living in today’s world. What’s been the impact of the wheel? Some express the impact in terms of the traffic jam. I see the wheel only when I am forced to think in a particular way. Technology works the same way: surprise, diffusion, and invisibility. Technology which does not become invisible is an opportunity, not a final condition.

Third, when one or more people see the consequences of a technology, the next action is more technology. If there is a problem, the fix is technology. No one ignores nuclear power because of a glitch at Chernobyl or Fukushima. The fuel casks containing spent enriched uranium require a technological fix, not a termination of nuclear programs. Auto pollution is not solved by terminating transport. The fix is more technology. The problem with the technology as a fix approach is that the world now contains a large number of interdependent systems. Technology generates unexpected consequences. Residents of the Augean stables perform in a somewhat similar manner minus the technology bits. More technology produces more unexpected consequences to which the fix is more technology. As I said when I argued with the thinker who talked about “convergence.” My point was we are not talking convergence, we are talking genetic blending. Convergence implies stuff becomes one thing. Wrong. Technology stuff begets more technology stuff just like the Star Trek episode with the tribbles. With lots of technical tribbles running around, we have a complicated, unpredictable, unstable environment. For some, that’s money. For others it is unemployment, increased anomie, and what I call life at the lowest levels of the Great Chain of Being. How does it feel to be a serf in the digital stables?

A number of interesting questions exist to be discussed, not answered. “Always” arguments and the comments of those who are digital gold fish living in an Adam and Eve, pre-diluvium fall environment don’t hold my interest. I struggle to understand the implications of being a person who uses an ATM or Google and concluding that such functions make a person an expert in online systems. We do know five things about the present technological set up:

1. Social unrest is increasing in over and under developed countries. The perpetrators range from college graduates without jobs to individuals who operate outside the boundaries of what used to be called civic behavior.
2. Unemployment is increasing. Without something to replace the “work” available to individuals, humans will find things to either distract themselves or stay busy. (The cited article is focusing on the “staying busy”. I am addicted to work; others to fiddling with Facebook. Hey, that’s what happens when there is not maize to harvest by hand.
3. Changes appears to be on going and taking place at an ever faster pace. Nah, this is one of those perception phenomenon. When one is outside the laminar flow of a particular  technology, life just seems like life. To a person in the flow, life seems like life. The problem occurs when the boundaries develop gaps. The societal solution seems to be a return to a medieval type of organization with the stratification of society and minimal movement between the layers. Do you think a food stamps family will send its three children to an Ivy League school. Sure, could  happen,but I think possibility should not be confused with likelihood.  The boundaries are getting tougher to cross in my opinion. Police actions are becoming more like military actions. What’s that tell you about boundaries in some cities where there are people following the Adbusters’ Wall Street protest.
4. Inequalities are increasing. Technology rewards those who have knowledge of value and customers for that expertise. Without knowledge value, life is getting somewhat more difficult. With more technology, we get more people on the outside of technology and a smaller percentage of the total population on the inside. With technology knowledge good for 24 months, there will be once highly paid people getting into the burger flipping business. The number of people in the top spots will remain relatively small in relation to the total employment pool. Once in the top spot, remaining there will be difficult as one’s knowledge value decreases. Technology exacerbates this situation. Technology does not “fix” it.
5. True expertise becomes the key to technological success. Google can be a pretty miserable example of management. But Google’s technology based ad system is likely to keep on trucking no matter what type of wacky stuff the Googlers try to do. Once a core competency is lost, the collapse can be quick and unpleasant. Think about Research in Motion, Netflix, or Hewlett Packard. These technology centric firms are not protected by their technology. Old technology or bad technology is a guarantee of a ride on the down elevator in many situations.

What’s the net net?

The good news for me is that I am old and at the end of my career. Enough with the technology.The bad news is that many people are much younger and will be forced find a way to survive in the New Medieval World of techno feudalism. I am not comfortable with the “always” approach. I have been around long enough to know that “always” is tough to verify. I am comfortable with a realistic view of technology in the present era. Many stables must be cleaned. King Augeas’ stables yield to high tech stables.Search those with an implicit Boolean OR.

Stephen E Arnold, November 29, 2011

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