Posts tagged technology and change

This year I've joined a reading group at my church; last Sunday the book was an old collection of Wendell Berry's influential agrarian essays. My eleven-year-old nephew sat in on our discussion (he'd read a couple of the essays in preparation), and asked a question that gets to the well-worn stumbling block when it comes to Berry's bracing jeremiads: "But what if I want to be a computer programmer and not a farmer?" There are ways of answering that within the text, but not always satisfyingly. For me, the passage I loved most from the book was this one, the grace-note ending to Berry's essay on wilderness.

re: agriculture, horizons of the possible, margins, technology and change, wilderness

Nate:

Looking at the monocultures of industrial civilization, we yearn with a kind of homesickness for the humanness and the naturalness of a highly diversified, multipurpose landscape, democratically divided, with many margins. The margins are of the utmost importance. They are the divisions between holdings, as well as between kinds of work and kinds of land. These margins—lanes, streamsides, wooded fencerows, and the like—are always freeholds of wildness, where limits are set on human intention. Such places are hospitable to the wild lives of plants and animals and the wild play of human children. They enact, within the bounds of human domesticity itself, a human courtesy towards the world that is one of the best safeguards of designated tracts of true wilderness.

Humanoid robots often look creepy, but in person the uncanniness quickly fades and—in admittedly weird human-to-machine way—offers an opening for grace: "in person, most robots, particularly ones designed to interact with humans, are simply not scary. They're bumbling and a little helpless. Like a pet or a child, you cut them slack."

re: horizons of the possible, presence, robots, technology and change

Nate:

According to all of the roboticists and computer scientists we interviewed, the uncanny is in short supply during face-to-face contact with robots. Two of the robots that inspire the most terror—and accompanying YouTube comments—are Osaka University's CB2, a child-like, gray-skinned robot, and KOBIAN, Waseda University's hyper-expressive humanoid. In person, no one rejected the robots. No one screamed and threw chairs at them, or smiled politely and slipped out to report lingering feelings of abject horror. In one case, a local Japanese newspaper tried to force the issue, bringing a group of seniors to visit the full-lipped, almost impossibly creepy-looking KOBIAN. One senior nearly cried, claiming that she felt like the robot truly understood her. A previously skeptical journalist wound up smiling and cuddling with the ominous little CB2. The only exception was a princess from Thailand, who couldn't quite bring herself to help CB2 to its robotic feet.

Royalty notwithstanding, the uncanny effect appears to be an incredibly specific and specialized phenomenon: It seems to happen, when it does, remotely. In person, the uncanny vanishes. There's nothing in the way of peer-reviewed evidence to support this, but then, there's almost nothing to confirm the uncanny effect's existence in the first place. As an unsupported theory that has morphed into a nerdy breed of urban legend, anecdotes are all we have to work with.

It was hard to decide which part of this article to excerpt: the hilarious bombast of the opening or the all-too-prescient middle sections about the waning of everyday amateur musicianship in an age of recorded performance: "And what is the result? The child becomes indifferent to practice, for when music can be heard in the homes without the labor of study and close application, and without the slow process of acquiring a technic, it will be simply a question of time when the amateur disappears entirely, and with him a host of vocal and instrumental teachers, who will be without field or calling." Nah, I'll go with the opening. This is, after all, the guy whose fortunes rose on mass-music-publishing, who recoiled and reinvented the tuba so that you could march with it.

re: discipline, music, recording, sound, technology and change

Nate:

Sweeping across the country with the speed of a transient fashion in slang or Panama hats, political war cries or popular novels, comes now the mechanical device to sing for us a song or play for us a piano, in substitute for human skill, intelligence, and soul. Only by harking back to the day of the roller skate or the bicycle craze, when sports of admitted utility ran to extravagance and virtual madness, can we find a parallel to the way in which these ingenious instruments have invaded every community in the land. And if we turn from this comparison in pure mechanics to another which may fairly claim a similar proportion of music in its soul, we may observe the English sparrow, which, introduced and welcomed in all innocence, lost no time in multiplying itself to the dignity of a pest, to the destruction of numberless native song birds, and the invariable regret of those who did not stop to think in time.

On a matter upon which I feel so deeply, and which I consider so far-reaching, I am quite willing to be reckoned an alarmist, admittedly swayed in part by personal interest, as well as by the impending harm to American musical art. I foresee a marked deterioration in American music and musical taste, an interruption in the musical development of the country, and a host of other injuries to music in its artistic manifestations, by virtue—or rather by vice—of the multiplication of the various music-reproducing machines.

Introducing television to an area can shift the horizons of the possible radically and quickly, especially for women. It's worth noting that both the positive and negative consequences recorded in this study were by and large unintended and unforeseen.

re: brazil, soap operas, south america, technology and change, tv

Nate:

Cable and satellite television may be having an even bigger impact on fertility in rural India. As in Brazil, popular programming there includes soaps that focus on urban life. Many women on these serials work outside the home, run businesses, and control money. In addition, soap characters are typically well-educated and have few children. And they prove to be extraordinarily powerful role models: Simply giving a village access to cable TV, research by scholars Robert Jensen and Emily Oster has found, has the same effect on fertility rates as increasing by five years the length of time girls stay in school.

The soaps in Brazil and India provided images of women who were empowered to make decisions affecting not only childbirth, but a range of household activities. The introduction of cable or satellite services in a village, Jensen and Oster found, goes along with higher girls' school enrollment rates and increased female autonomy. Within two years of getting cable or satellite, between 45 and 70 percent of the difference between urban and rural areas on these measures disappears. In Brazil, it wasn't just birthrates that changed as Globo's signal spread -- divorce rates went up, too.

Committing to consuming only two-year-old media on two-year-old tech has an advantage beyond reduced prices: I'm guessing there would be a quite helpful filtering effect. A discipline of consuming the not-so-new is still, of course, a discipline of consumption—probably not the best thing to order all one's cultural interactions around.

re: computers, consumption, horizons of the possible, media, technology and change

Nate:

It seems to me that the best way to instantly raise your standard of living is to live in the past. If you subsist entirely on two-year-old entertainment, and the corresponding two-year-old technology used to power it, you’re cutting your fun budget in half, freeing up that money for more exciting expenditures like parking meters and postage.

The problem is that it’s hard living out of sync with the world around you. Just ask the Amish or Bill Cosby.

Here's the best thing about this excerpt: when you click through to the Eco's original article, right now you get this message: "This article has been removed due to web rights expiry." Frail letters indeed! But let's return to penmanship: I'm reminded of this recent New York Times Op-Art piece, a spirited call to supplant the old-style loopiness of the Palmer method of handwriting instruction with a more-legible italic script. Sounds tempting ...

re: discipline, education, horizons of the possible, ink, technology and change, umberto eco, writing

Nate:

My parents' handwriting was slightly slanted because they held the sheet at an angle, and their letters were, at least by today's standards, minor works of art. At the time, some – probably those with poor hand- writing – said that fine writing was the art of fools. It's obvious that fine handwriting does not necessarily mean fine intelligence. But it was pleasing to read notes or documents written as they should be. My generation was schooled in good handwriting, and we spent the first months of elementary school learning to make the strokes of letters. The exercise was later held to be obtuse and repressive but it taught us to keep our wrists steady as we used our pens to form letters rounded and plump on one side and finely drawn on the other. Well, not always – because the inkwells, with which we soiled our desks, notebooks, fingers and clothing, would often produce a foul sludge that stuck to the pen and took 10 minutes of mucky contortions to clean.

We count on our greatest artists to open up the horizons of the possible, showing us what we didn't know could be done. But in the realm of operatic improvisation, a great artist (in conjunction with game-changing technology), has apparently severely reduced the horizons of the possible, or at least of the desirable.

re: horizons of the possible, improvisation, music, opera, recording, technology and change

Nate:

The conductor Will Crutchfield, who specializes in bel-canto opera and doubles as a musicological detective, recently sat down to compare all extant recordings of “Una furtiva lagrima,” the plaintive tenor aria from Donizetti’s “L’Elisir d’Amore.” Crutchfield wanted to know what singers of various eras have done with the cadenza—the passage at the end of the aria where the orchestra halts and the tenor engages in graceful acrobatics. Donizetti included a cadenza in his score, and later supplied two alternative versions. Early recordings show singers trying out a range of possibilities, some contemplative, some florid, none the same. Then came Enrico Caruso. He first recorded “Una furtiva lagrima” in 1902, and returned to it three more times in the course of his epochal studio career. After that, tenors began replicating the stylish little display that Caruso devised: a quick up-and-down run followed by two slow, sighing phrases. Out of more than two hundred singers who have recorded the aria since Caruso’s death, how many try something different? Crutchfield counts four.

Further thoughts and insights on the effects of new technology, particularly Twitter and texting, from cultural commentator Michael Metzger of The Clapham Institute.

re: pop culture, social science, social science, technology and change, twitter

Christy:

Twitter has been described as perhaps one of the greatest technological innovations since the telegraph. It will better connect us. Perhaps. But what will it undo?

Benedictine monks invented the mechanical clock in the 12th century to remind workers to take periodic Sabbath breaks. They never imagined someone like Frederick Taylor, known as the Father of Scientific Management, would use clocks to time workers in order to increase productivity.

William Farish (a Cambridge University tutor) never imagined his idea of numerical grading—unheard of before his time—would eventually marginalize mentoring. Before 1792, students were evaluated through dialogue, not digits. This conversation required a tutor. Numerical grading has wiped out mentoring.

Now consider Twitter—a wonderful new technology promising us the world. It can do a lot. What might it undo? How about paying attention?

A Spanish novelist's prescription for his fear of flying: learn to love airplanes as individuals. The humanizing touch is hardly absent from the history of flight: think of Howard Hawks' classic film Only Angels Have Wings or all those pin-up models painted onto the noses of WWII bombers. And it lives on in the work of a few contemporary writers—William Langewiesche in particular—even in the serial-number world of today's commercial aviation.

re: fear, flight, love, technology and change

Nate:

We live in an age that tends to depersonalize even people and is, in principle, averse to anthropomorphism. Indeed, such a tendency is often criticized, erroneously and foolishly in my view, since that ‘rapprochement’ between the human and the non-human is quite natural and spontaneous, and far from being an attempt to deprive animals, plants and objects of their respective selves, it places them in the category of the ‘humanizable’, which is, for us, the highest and most respectable of categories.

I know people who talk to, question, spoil, threaten or even quarrel with their computers, saying things like: ‘Right now, you behave yourself,’ or thanking them for their help. There’s nothing wrong with that, it’s perfectly understandable. In fact, given how often we travel in planes, the odd thing about our relationship with them – those complex machines endowed with movement to which we surrender ourselves and that transport us through the air – is that it isn’t more ‘personal’, or more ‘animal’, or more ‘sailor-like’, if you prefer. Perhaps those who crew them haven’t known how to communicate this to us. I’ve never seen them pat a plane, as you might pat a horse to calm or reward it; I’ve never seen planes being groomed and cleaned and tidied, except very hurriedly and impatiently; I’ve never seen them loved as Conrad’s captain loved his sunken brig; I’ve never seen air hostesses – who spend a lot of time on-board – treat them with the respect and care, at once fatherly and comradely, enjoyed by ships.

I bought a used mountain bike on Craigslist three weeks ago and I've quickly become addicted to riding around my city—to work, church, the farmers' market and grocery store. As this article points out, there are plenty of dangers involved, but the exhilaration and delight far outweigh the close calls with car doors. Not to mention that my commute by bike/ferry is slightly shorter—and cheaper—than my commute by bus/ferry/subway.

re: recreation, technology and change, transport, travel

Christy:

In a metropolis known for its aggressive traffic, noise and fumes, cyclists crisscross New York City on two wheels while dodging cars, trucks, cabs, pedestrians—and even other bikers tearing around with no hands on the bar.

Despite the dangers, biking is New York City's "fastest growing mode of transportation," says City Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan, who herself bikes to work in lower Manhattan, about a mile from her Greenwich Village home.

The number of cyclists has jumped by 80 percent in the past decade—to 185,000 among the more than 8 million city denizens. City officials say they've worked to make the city more biker friendly. They note the hundreds of miles of marked bike paths created in recent years, safety awareness campaigns and handouts of free helmets to unprotected cyclists.

Is technology a moral obligation?

re: agriculture, gardens and cities, horizons of the possible, kevin kelly, technology and change

Nate:

I know the Amish, and Wendell Berry and Eric Brende, and the minimites well enough to know that they believe we don't need exploding technology to expand ourselves, at least in the proper directions. They are, after all, minimalists. They see most of the promises of freedoms from increased technology as illusionary. In their eyes, technology generates fake choices, meaningless options, or real choices that are really entrapments. This is an argument worth exploring because there is some truth in it. The technium is an autonomous system that tends to favor choices by humans that expand its own reach, which can feel like a type of entrapment. And many choices we make don't matter.

But the evidence that the technium expands real choices is voluminous. Throughout history there is a one-way march from the farm to the bustling choices of the city. That steady migration is going on today at a shocking rate; More than two million people per day decide they prefer the options that modern technology life offers, so they flee the constrained choices in a picturesque and comforting village somewhere. They can't all be bewitched. It would be a powerful spell to fool 50% of the people living on this planet.

Those million urban migrants per day have enrolled into the technium for the same reason you have (and you have if you are reading this): to increase your choices. To increase your chances of unleashing your full potential. Perhaps someday someone will invent a tool that is made just for your special combination of hidden talents. Or perhaps you will make your own tool. Most importantly, and unlike the Amish and minimites, you may invent a tool which will help unleash the fullest of someone else. Our call is not only to discover our fullest selves in the technium, but to expand the possibilities for others. We have a moral obligation to increase the amount of technology in the world in order to increase the number of possibilities for the most people. Greater technology will selfishly unleash us, but it will also unselfishly unleash others, our children and all to come.

When I worked in downtown Boston one of my favorite lunchtime outings was a walk to the corner of the Public Garden where stands the lovely and oddly orientalist Ether Monument, commemorating the pioneering demonstration of the surgical anesthetic at the Massachusetts General Hospital in the mid-1840s. Ether had been around and in use for a long time, but had previously been condemned by the medical establishment. Its "discovery" represented a cultural rather than technological innovation—perhaps rendering the monument (and MGH's preserved Ether Dome museum) more crucial than it might at first seem. Indeed, its use of Biblical texts from Isaiah ("This also cometh forth from the Lord of Hosts which is wonderful and excellent in working") and Revelation (see title) presumably was intended to undermine the lingering view that dulling physical pain contradicted God's intentions.

re: drugs, medicine, monuments, parks, technology and change

Nate:

What the great moment in the Ether Dome really marked was something less tangible but far more significant: a huge cultural shift in the idea of pain. Operating under anesthetic would transform medicine, dramatically expanding the scope of what doctors were able to accomplish. What needed to change first wasn't the technology - that was long since established - but medicine's readiness to use it.

Before 1846, the vast majority of religious and medical opinion held that pain was inseparable from sensation in general, and thus from life itself. Though the idea of pain as necessary may seem primitive and brutal to us today, it lingers in certain corners of healthcare, such as obstetrics and childbirth, where epidurals and caesarean sections still carry the taint of moral opprobrium. In the early 19th century, doctors interested in the pain-relieving properties of ether and nitrous oxide were characterized as cranks and profiteers. The case against them was not merely practical, but moral: They were seen as seeking to exploit their patients' base and cowardly instincts. Furthermore, by whipping up the fear of operations, they were frightening others away from surgery and damaging public health.

The "eureka moment" of anesthesia, like the seemingly sudden arrival of many new technologies, was not so much a moment of discovery as a moment of recognition: a tipping point when society decided that old attitudes needed to be overthrown. It was a social revolution as much as a medical one: a crucial breakthrough not only for modern medicine, but for modernity itself. It required not simply new science, but a radical change in how we saw ourselves.