Public Service Announcement

To My Blog Visitors:

Thank you for reading, thank you for subscribing. There are 93 subscribers! I started this blog six years ago to lament the technological takeover of everything. Didn’t tell anyone about it for two years. Over the last six years, this blog has been a hodgepodge of writings, in stops and spurts, many deleted since posting. Experimenting on how I wanted to express myself online. Over the last six years much has changed, for me and in the world.

So… I am changing gears and launching a new blog. A fresh start. A cleaner webpage and domain name. This will be the last new post you will find on this page. The site will remain active, mostly to preserve my writings on the psychological effects of the digital age, a theme that has dominated this blog.

To continue following, please read and subscribe to my new site:

• billyrobb.wordpress.com
• billyrobb.com: Also works as a link to the same site, but the mobile version doesn’t work as well. (Technology not my strength.)

My hope is to continue developing a reflective stance in a world of noise and outrage. My joy in writing is the refining process of my own thoughts. Finding out what I believe, and why. There is also joy in expression, sharing this internal processing with others.

A novella, of sorts, is also in the works. About the intersecting worlds of psychology and religion– and a young man caught in crisis between them. Publishing strategy still to be determined.

Peace,

Billy

Down for the Count

Three weeks ago I tore my Achilles playing basketball.  It’s a slow healing injury. Writing about Bill Walton’s tragically fragile feet, David Halberstam in Breaks of the Game said that Walton experienced tendinitis of the Achilles tendon, “probably from the pressure of carrying a weak foot to high levels of athletic achievement. It was sore and inflamed. There was a considerable danger of rupture, one of the most serious athletic injuries imaginable, often a career-ending injury.”

Luckily I don’t rely on my athletic prowess to sustain my career, and am already back in the classroom teaching.

I am writing about the experience and my recovery at: heelfast.blogspot.com

If you are interested in following along, please subscribe. Thanks!

 

A House Divided

In the wake of a mass shooting, the dual outrage toward mental health and gun control floods the airways. Politicians make the obligatory statement: Fix the mental health system. Ban assault weapons. These things happen, our hearts and prayers go out to the victims.

The criticism flies, blaming the gun laws for ease of access allowing crazy young men to build a deadly stockpile. The critics bemoan lack of foresight:  How couldn’t we have known that this disturbed, lonely young man might commit violence? We must find ways to distinguish the dangerous lonely and disturbed young men from the benign lonely and disturbed young men.

Obama made the most bipartisan statement after the Oregon shooting when he said, “anyone that does this has a sickness in their minds.”

Indeed, the most agreeable point in these contentious “what should we do” debates is that the individual perpetrators are bat shit crazy. They are complete aberrations. We place the maximum distance between normal and these killers who have defined themselves as criminally insane.

Sadly, though, mass shootings are becoming more and more normal. Rather than condemn and distance, we need to try to identify with the perpetrators. Empathize. What do they feel? Why do they turn to violence as their pressure release?

Their commonalities are striking. Is there any doubt in anyone’s mind, after reading the headlines, what the profile of the mass killer will be? White male from a broken home, doesn’t quite fit in, never had a girlfriend, plays violent video games, makes scary comments on social media, loves guns, and glorifies previous mass shootings.

How many young men in America feel out of place, out of touch. Frustrated and lacking an outlet. Lack of stability at home or school. Out of this subset, many turn to drugs for an escape, some turn inward and become depressed, others act out in rebellion. Out of this subset, others turn to violent outlets for an assertion of power. Some way to be in control. Finally someone will care. They will have to care. The whole world, finally feeling their pain.

In his book “Toward a Psychology of Being,” humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow defends his Hierarchy of Needs, among them the need for belonging and love, the need for respect and self-respect. These needs are the psychological equivalent to water and vitamins. To Maslow, “destructiveness, sadism, cruelty, malice, etc., seem so far to be not intrinsic but rather they seem to be violent reactions against frustration of our intrinsic needs, emotions and capacities.”

When someone is mal-adjusted, experiencing psychological problems, Maslow’s first response was not to look for a cure. Psychological problems might in fact be a healthy reaction to a psychologically damaging environment. First he investigated the  situation this person was supposed to be “well-adjusted” toward.

Mass shootings are a relatively recent, primarily American phenomenon. We can band-aid the problem through gun control laws, and we should. We can improve our mental health system, and we should.

But the real illness is the breakdown of communities, the fragmentation of the modern world, and the lack of outlets for healthy masculine development. The violence we see, either in the inner-city or the outburst in the suburbs, is the symptom of a sick society. True healing will require collective triage.

Thanks

“My brother, life just don’t make sense no more.”

Lonely, dead broke, in physical pain. Living in a bare studio apartment marginally better than the shelters and half way houses he left behind.

Chink, as he was known on the playgrounds of South Phoenix for the sound of the ball swishing through a chain net, “because I never missed a fucking shot,” reminisces over coffee. He dropped out of school in jr. high to help his dad pay rent. Later he fell in love, got married, and struggled to make ends meet raising four kids. He cries describing his wife, who died of illness at a young age. “I fell in love with her so fast.” His emptiness was filled by the bottle.

He is housed, but not whole.

And really, who is?

Thank you Albert, aka Chink, aka Bert Montana, for sharing your story with me (and giving me permission to share it with others). Yours is one of hundreds of uniquely heartbreaking stories that have been shared with me these past 8 months working for a housing program with the homeless in downtown Phoenix.

These nameless, forgotten faces. We try to look away. We call them bums. Addicts. Cautionary tales. “They” not “we.”

“We” wait until closures of decrepit, dangerous emergency shelters threaten to send more of “them” into our neighborhoods to actually respond constructively to their plight.

But really, who are we? What is it that makes our lives make sense? I don’t know, but I’m glad to have met someone with such a raw encounter with the human condition, and many more like him who struggle to retain dignity, who struggle to make sense of life in the midst of destruction and suffering.

***

Many of my clients made a strong impact on me, and their stories will remain with me for a very long time.  But a couple anecdotes I’d like to share speak more generally to the problem of homelessness that might be instructive for anyone who cares about this issue or community service:

• In an attempt to generate new clients for the housing program, my supervisor and I were walking through the “East Lot,” a gated parking lot where hundreds of people slept nightly until its closure. Someone might sleep here if they got kicked out of the main shelter for violence or contraband, if they were registered sex offenders (who aren’t allowed in the main shelter), or if the other shelters were full. It was just after dinner and people were settling in to sleep. All of a sudden, a white Cadillac SUV pulled up to the gate, and a gaggle of teenage girls piled out of the car. As a mother took pictures, the girls started throwing brown lunch bags over the chain link fence. The people inside swarmed the source of the food. After no more than ten minutes, the lunch bags were gone and the Cadillac drove away. It struck me and my supervisor as a degrading scene, liken to someone feeding caged zoo animals. No doubt this group of well-meaning, well-off citizens intended to help their community by “feeding the homeless.” But this type of “dine and dash” service reinforces the stigmas and perceptions of the outcast. It further alienates. It’s demeaning and unnecessary. By and large, the homeless in city centers have plenty access to food. The need is housing. The need is social integration. Acts of community service toward the homeless would be better keeping these ends in mind.

• Every morning on the drive to work, I would pass by the street where people congregated after breakfast. Every morning, a representative of a Christian group stood with a microphone preaching. He would be yelling Bible verses and adages over the speakers at 7:00 am. I was always offended by this, which is a microcosm, I think, of a greater sentiment felt by the population: that the homeless are homeless due to some personal moral failure. We are blaming the victim. Yes, there is often self-destructive behavior involved, but invariably, the stories I heard began from a point of poverty, neglect, abuse, betrayal, or mental or physical malady. Yes, we should work toward empowering, rather than enabling, those who don’t support themselves. But this has to come from a place of encouragement and support, not condemnation. And we need work toward enabling those who can’t support themselves. Homelessness is a social failure. It happens when someone literally has no place to turn.  Our cultural reaction is to look down on the losers of our competitive economy, but a more  humane reaction would be to wonder how we might strengthen our social nets, how we might catch people before they wind up on the streets.

Much respect to my former colleagues and all those who work day-in, day-out with this population. The people at the Lodestar Day Resource Center have huge hearts, and the agency is aligned with research-driven practices. The “Housing First” model is just from a humanitarian perspective, and a more cost-effective response for cities to take.  I don’t doubt that with the weight of public support, we can achieve the goal of ending chronic homelessness.

The Touch-Screen Generation: Article Review

In the latest issue of The Atlantic magazine, Hanna Rosin addresses the question of apps and toddlers: Do they mix? How do digital gadgets influence the minds and development of people born into this technology infused world?

The article raises some pertinent questions and appears to lay tech-phobias to rest.  By the end of the article the author is confident enough to give her 3-year old unlimited access to an iPad (one of various experiments conducted on poor little Gideon). But the question posed by the article remains unanswered. We just don’t know.

One pitfall to analyzing the effects touch screen interactions is a matter of function. Is the iPad a toy or an educational tool? It can be used for either, but most often it seems to be used for diversion. Give your restless child an interactive touch screen and enjoy some peace and quiet. He will undoubtedly be transfixed by this glowing screen.

Ideally, the iPad would be both a toy and an educational tool. What a wonderful concept– not only is the kid quietly absorbed, but it’s good for him, too! Guilt assuaged.

That’s the marketing strategy for thousands of “educational apps” that come out each year.  The author attends a conference where many of the creators of these apps are eagerly testing the products against consumers. The only creepy part is that most of the consumers are still in diapers. The scene is symbolic of what this new generation of so-called “digital natives” will be– guinea pigs. If this experiment goes wrong and this new generation develops social or mental deficits, hopefully enough of the “digital immigrants” will still be around to ring an alarm.

The technology is simply too new for us to have any longitudinal certainty. The iPad came out in 2010. Most of the current research gets compared to older studies about TV shows.  The best TV shows, like Blue’s Clues, followed a simple, real-time narrative, and asked questions allowing for viewer response. Kids older than two showed short-term cognitive gains.  Learning can similarly be shown for educational apps. But compared to what? The article does not name the control groups. Compared to neglect, of course Blue’s Clues will be better. We need to know how shows and apps compare to a human alternative. And emotional factors like empathy need to be considered along with the cognitive ones.

App developers run into the same obstacle most educators face. Learning is hard, sometimes boring, and most kids just want to have fun. As a result, many of the most popular apps have only a tenuous educational claim– the same claim that might be made for playing house or hide-and-go-seek in the real world. Either way, for both play and education, it remains uncertain whether the real world is better, worse than, or the same as its digital equivalent.

The problem I have is with the scope of the studies and the article. The research on these apps or TV shows can’t simulate the full immersion kids today make into the digital world. This new generation uses digital media not merely for diversion and school work, but for recreation, socializing, getting news, and finding information. In other words, everything. The combined effects cannot be isolated for research purposes. The true results will only be known 25 years from now when the digital natives become independently functioning adults.

Sandra Calvert, director of Georgetown’s Children’s Media Center, is quoted the following: “People say we are experimenting with our children, but from my perspective, it’s already happened, and there’s no way to turn it back. Children’s lives are filled with media at younger and younger ages, and we need to take advantage of what these technologies have to offer.”

I disagree. We have control of what media we use and what media we give to our children. We have intentionally introduced younger and younger people to digital media. Parents do this and schools do this. It is a choice. If we learn that it causes serious long-term deficits, we have the choice as a society to use technology differently.

Scientists have created something new— modern digital technology is not simply a step up on the innovation scale, but a paradigm shift  in how we learn, process information, and relate to each other. The consequences of this transition are unknown.

Hopefully the results are a net gain, or at least a wash. But we need to watch the developments closely and be prepared to make big changes if necessary.

Related posts:

Is the Onslaught Driving Us Crazy? (Article Review)

The Watson Problem

Rethinking the revolution

A vision of progress or disintegration?

In a recent NY Times piece, Thomas Friedman writes about a “revolution” of university education, a revolution he is very excited about. This revolution is a technological revolution. He presents a vision of free, top-tier higher education beamed across cyber space to anyone in the world. This vision is in the works, with MIT and Stanford pumping out coursework to millions of students.

According to Freidman, “Nothing has more potential to lift people from poverty—by providing them an affordable education to get a job or improve the job they have. Nothing has more potential to unlock a billion more brains to solve the world’s problems.”

The solution, perhaps, to the world’s problems is to plug more people into the internet and hope to produce more sophisticated ideas. Perhaps hiding in one of those billion brains “locked” by lack of an elite American college education is the golden ticket to Utopia. Perhaps we can pretend that computerized education can solve the problem of poverty, overlooking the rate at which human jobs get replaced by machines (just don’t get an online degree in education).

(On an ironic side-note, Friedman just published another column explaining that in our new hyper-connected future, with technology replacing low skilled jobs, we are “exacerbating our unemployment problem.”)

The notion of unbounded education is thrilling. I don’t deny the miraculous possibilities. Although I question the pedagogical efficacy of mass-producing education to be consumed on isolated computers, this development would level the playing field and open up diverse lines of communication.

But as we charge blindly into the global digital age, we are disconnecting from nature, from ourselves, and from each other. The long-term consequences need to be weighed as heavily as the possibilities.

In this instance, the universities are taking human relationships—the classmate relationship and the student-teacher relationship – and putting them behind the glow of a computer screen. The importance of real, face-to-face interaction gets ignored.

Sure, there is no other way to bring Princeton into an Egyptian village (to use an example Friedman provides) but is this really the solution to the world’s problems? What about Egypt’s problems?

This technological development would also take away the responsibility of communities to provide the type of education needed to meet their own means.

In essay “Word and Flesh,” author and farmer Wendell Berry presents as the myth the concept “world” problems, seeing only local problems getting intertwined and exacerbated. Writing from the perspective of personal and ecological health, he writes:

“Though we now have serious problems nearly everywhere on the planet, we have no problem that can accurately be described as  planetary…The problems are our lives. In the ‘developed’ countries, at least, the large problems occur because all of us are living either partially wrong or almost entirely wrong.

 “The planetary versions—the heroic versions—of our problems have attracted great intelligence. But these [local] problems, as they are caused and suffered in our lives, our households and our communities, have attracted very little intelligence.”

We sometimes forget we are biological creatures, subject to the laws of nature, dependent upon the land for our daily bread. We would like to escape the confines of our humanity and look beyond, to the “future,” where the streets are lined with gold,  no natural disasters strike our people, no one gets sick or old, everyone living in harmony, living forever. To chase this dream we throw our hopes into the latest innovations, the newest technologies.

That all of humanity might have access to the pinnacles of human thought would of course be a triumph. But let’s not be so deceived to think that the solution to our problems lies in this or any other technological achievement.

I also share a vision of a happier, more peaceful, more loving future. But the only means toward this future is by injecting into each person a forgiving, loving, patient, and generous spirit.

Before we look toward global technological solutions, let’s worry first about the welfare of our children, our neighbors, and our personal impact on the environment. Instead of increasing our scope of influence, let’s narrow it and focus on the problems in front of our noses—problems that can best be addressed with real human warmth and love.

Let’s look within ourselves and our communities, and change the world from the inside-out.

Identity and Insanity: Holding a mirror to a violent society

I’m reading a book titled “The Three Christs of Ypsilanti.”  It’s a sketch of a research project conducted in the 1960’s by social psychologist Milton Rokeach. In his investigation of identity, Dr. Rokeach locates three paranoid schizophrenics, each of them claiming to be Jesus Christ, and gathers them to live together at Ypsilanti State Hospital.  He wants to know if delusional belief systems will change when they encounter an impossibility: another person claiming the same identity.

The point of the whole thing is about systems of belief. Rokeach holds that we have various levels of beliefs acquired from birth, some more fundamental than others, and that we build and base our beliefs off of our encounters with stable physical and social environments. Unexpected changes in these environments create dissonance and identity confusion. Constancy is key—one comes to know his identity within society by repeatedly comparing his subjective perspective with the perspectives of others. When these align, a person develops confidence in his identity and his role in society and the well-adjusted person goes about his normal business. A disruption of a core belief would lead a person “to question the validity of his senses, his competence to cope with reality, or even his sanity.”

Two weeks ago a 24 year old man accumulated assault weapons, booby-trapped his apartment with explosives, dyed his hair red,  went to a movie theatre, and killed innocent people right before the premier of The Dark Knight Rises. During police interrogations he called himself the Joker.

I don’t know much else about James Holmes, so I am not prepared to comment on the psychology, motives, or causes of this specific case, but I want to reflect on this tragedy in a deeper realm than the tired gun control banter.

Many topics enter into conversations when shootings happen. We want to punish the people who pull the trigger. We want to outlaw guns or we want everyone to carry guns so that someone could have taken out the s.o.b pulling the trigger. We ask questions: What kind of films did he watch? Was he playing violent video games? What did his parents do wrong? Why didn’t his teachers notice his disordered tendencies? Could we have stopped this tragedy? What can we do to make sure this never happens again? We rationalize: It was just a psycho dude who snapped. Mass murders will be mass murders.

We need to take a deeper, more critical, more thorough, look at our society. And as we do, let’s look through this lens: We are profoundly influenced by our circumstances. We as a species have the consciousness and cognitive ability to create our circumstances.

Let’s stop and think about that a little more. We control our social environment. Our social environment directly, profoundly, influences our lives.

Would you prefer to live in a hateful, violent world or a peaceful, loving world?

This is not a blame game because no one created our current world, but it is a matter of choice. We create our social environment. What kind of world will we choose?

I used to teach high school psychology. When my students reached the topic of media and violence, I started the discussion by playing the Jack Johnson song, Cookie Jar.  The song illustrates a blame-shifting game reaction to a school shooting. The kid says he’s too young and was just releasing his anger. The parents blame the TV. The media man says he just points the camera to what the people want to see. The maker of the movie which the kid based his life on says he was just producing entertainment. The song concludes:

“It was you it was me it was every man

We’ve all got the blood on our hands

We only receive what we demand

And if we want hell, then hell’s what we’ll have.”

I was thoroughly entertained by Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy.

Roman citizens were once thoroughly entertained by watching Christians and thieves bloody each other and get mauled by animals in the Coliseum.

Outrageous comparison?

Maybe. The social world of the Roman Empire was much different than ours. Our world is by comparison significantly less violent than any other world that has ever existed.

But violence still happens. Murders and shootings and armed robbery explode across our news headlines. Aurora now claims the worst mass shooting in U.S. history.  Abuse still happens. The death penalty still happens. We live in a social world built around anger and vengeance and punishment. Existence-threatening violence lies stockpiled in military strongholds across the world.

My guess is that James Holmes encountered some dissonance in his life. Most of us do. Everyone is wired differently of course, and everyone responds differently to their worlds. Maybe insanity is an organic inevitability.

What forms identity, though, is nothing except the immediate physical and social world.

In the case of the three Christs, each person responded to some combination of environmental dissonance and genetic make-up to identify with a religious messiah.

James Holmes apparently identified with a twisted, murderous, uncompromising villain who was shown in gruesome detail stabbing, shooting, and blowing people up without so much as blinking an eye. During the sequel to the “movie which he based his life on,” a 24 year old man called himself by the name of this villain and unloaded his ammunition, injuring 59 human beings and ending the lives of 12 human beings.

A significant social environment of violence exists in our culture. People’s behavior, video games, movies, television, the news media collaborate to sustain this culture. We make violence and consume violence.

So, is media a mirror that reflects our society or does it shape our society?

Yes. We create and consume and are affected by a violent social environment.

If a totally peaceful society ever exists on this planet, its people will not consume violence; they will not be watching violent TV, they will not be killing each other in digital online worlds, and they will not be watching movie productions starring raving, murderous lunatics.

Is the onslaught making us crazy? (Article Review)

The cover story of the latest Newsweek magazine suggests that excessive use of gadgets and  digital social media causes mental disorders, specifically anxiety, depression, OCD, ADHD, and even psychosis. The article raises excellent questions, but like most articles and books I’ve seen on this topic, fails to provide irrefutable evidence.

Now, if you know me at all, or have read anything on this blog, you know that I think modern ubiquitous technology is spiritually and psychologically destructive. How do I know? I don’t. It just seems that way to me. I have experienced various levels of tech engagement and feel mentally oppressed when I start to indulge beyond my comfort zone. This usually creates an overreaction where I turn off my phone for a while or delete my Facebook account. From observation, the people more tuned-in to the digital world seem to be less connected to reality or nature.

I have been waiting for some research to point to and say, “Look everyone, evidence! Unplug!”

I am still waiting.

The article starts with the anecdotal evidence of Jason Russel suffering a manic episode a month after a massive, world-wide reaction to his “Kony 2012” web documentary. Apparently he glued himself to the screen, tweeting and facebooking to the point of exhaustion. Web use certainly seems to have been the avenue toward his breakdown, but his psychosis cannot indict “the internet.”

Then throughout the article, most of the referenced data are from correlation studies.  Increased web use is “related with” structural abnormalities in gray matter in the brain. Excessive online time is “linked to” compulsive behavior. Depression “is connected” to digital interactions.

The media loves correlation studies, but they do not show cause and effect. Does an impulsive person click more often on the internet or does increased internet clicking cause impulsivity? Or neither? The studies cannot say. Citing more correlation studies is more convincing, but still falls short of assigning blame.

Granted, true experiments are not always needed to show health risks. Did we conduct long term controlled experiments where we randomly assigned people to “no-smoking” or “pack-a-day smoking” groups? No, there was a strong enough link between smoking and lung cancer to convince the experts.

Psychologists already seem to be convinced of the deleterious effects of digital media consumption. Will we soon see a health advertisement campaign urging us to put away our cell phones and shut down our computers? Time will tell—this health risk is much trickier.

Although the article asserts the addiction potential and psychological harm of digital gadgets, and mentions scary sounding diagnoses like “internet-related psychosis,” “Facebook depression,” and “internet addiction disorder,” none of these hold the clinical weight of a feather.

Nothing as serious as lung cancer threatens to shock the world from their tech habits. Our gadgets have become much more than a habit, anyways. They’re interwoven into our new lifestyle, they’re essential for work, social life, financial management, bill paying, taxes. “Put away those cigarettes” is not analogous to “unplug from the grid.”  A breakaway from the online world would be radical, time consuming, difficult. Quite the opposite of the immediate, short-term rewards solicited by our blinking devices.

Psychiatrist Ian Gold claims that life in large cities harm mental health, specifically raising the risk for psychosis. He likens the web to a giant city that people enter, inflicting the same harm on the psyche.

It’s my hunch that social-tech consumption also affects a deeper sense of connectivity and that increased use would reveal decreased empathy and generosity in real world scenarios.

Russel’s “Kony 2012” video got millions of Americans to click “like” online and click another button to buy a t-shirt adorning Kony’s face.  Russel’s Lost Children brand collects millions in revenue as a non-profit to try to stop violence in Africa.

Does this count for real empathy? Does clicking a button or buying a product online take the place of time consuming, uncomfortable, face-to-face help to one’s own community, or to one’s physical neighbor? I’d be interested to find out if it has an effect, either way.

Many questions remain unanswered. I am glad, though, that they are at least being asked, and that they now grace the cover of a major news magazine.

Thankfully, the article ends by acknowledging the shortcomings in the research. It asks: Who cares what causes what? People are suffering and caught up in unhealthy digital habits. What should we do about it?

 

Some interesting highlights from the article:

• A University of Maryland research team asked teenagers to take one day away from web and mobile social technology (only one day!) and asked for their reflections, which included:
  • “I clearly am addicted and the dependency is sickening.”
  • “Most college students are not just unwilling, but functionally unable, to be without their media links to the world.”
• When associating internet use with depression, the article points out that internet use frequently replaces time spent for sleep, exercise, and face-to-face exchanges, all activities which provide essential mood boosts. I would heed the suggestion that digital use questions go into the regular feed of doctor “check-up” questions.
• A study out of UCLA measured the brain activity of infrequent web users before and after a week of moderate web use. They compared the two brain scans, and also compared them to the brain scans of heavy web users. An interesting concept, but the article only mentions “altered prefrontal cortexes” as the result. Kind of vague, and not really relevant to comparing to addicted brains, whether the addiction is to drugs, to sex, or to internet.
• Dr. Aboudjaoude from Stanford is studying whether digital selves could be counted as “legitimate, pathological, alter of sorts,” like the alter egos documented in cases of multiple personality disorder.
• The article throws out some interesting numbers about digital consumption: the average teen sends 3,700 texts a month, the average person spends 8-11 hours in front of a screen. This just shows in real terms what everyone already knows: we spend a crapload of time on digital media.  What scares me the most is that this trend has sprung up at an incredible rate, and we don’t know what it’s doing to us.

Related posts:

The Watson Problem

Seeing the world through Google Glasses

Most criticism of technological development is prefaced with phrases such as, “I am no Luddite, but…” or, “I am all for the growth of new technologies, but…” As if one must be on board with the digitalization movement to be taken seriously.

I am a semi-Luddite. I use the internet, I have a smartphone, but I feel increasingly uncomfortable with how I use them. I like to read critiques of industrialization from the likes of Wendell Berry and Daniel Quinn. I am fearful of the theorized and perhaps inevitable merging with technology, creating a posthuman race down the road. I am more fearful of the immediate social consequences of indiscriminately consuming new gadgets.

Technology is said to grow exponentially. According to futurist Ray Kurzweil, our handheld cellphones pack a thousand times more power than the room-size first computers 30 years ago, and our technologies will pack a billion times more power in the coming decades. Scientists have a fascination with creating machines that have human-like functioning, but with unbounded power. Made in our image and likeness… it sounds Biblical. Maybe it’s just the circle of life: once created by a mysterious and incomprehensible force, we are now creating a mysterious and incomprehensible force.

Rather than dwell on the possibilities of the far-future, though, let’s look at the immediate scope of new technologies.  Social-networking site Facebook is nearing a billion members. Some writers ask questions like, Does Facebook make us lonely? But all research seems inconclusive and correlational: lonely and introverted people use Facebook in lonely and introverted ways; extroverts use Facebook to augment their existing relationships.  As to the effects of other technologies such as smartphones, internet, and computer games, we similarly lack conclusive research. Gamers will preach about the cognitive benefits, teachers will complain about deteriorating attention span.

My arguments rely on anecdotal evidence. Just look around! Look at the car next to you at the stoplight—watch the son furiously texting on his screen, ignoring his mother staring silently at the intersection. Look at the table next to you at the restaurant—watch the father on the iPad, mother on the iPhone, give the kid Angry Birds to keep him occupied. Everywhere you look, eyes glued to glowing screens, waiting for the beep, waiting for the buzz, waiting for the status update.

“It’s just the new era,” people say. “We used to sit down and read the newspaper, now we look at our iPads.” What’s the difference? Well it’s fragmented, it’s disjointed. You click on this and that and shift from this and that… it never ends. You will never finish this newspaper. It’s a constant inflow of information. “That’s all for the good,” people say. “We are better informed, and we are globally informed.” Well, it’s too quick. When do you reflect? When do you actually sit with an idea and ponder the consequences? We are less affected by what we read. Everything becomes a tidbit. Clicks, continually piquing our curiosity, our minds kept from sitting and wandering.

Consider:

A friend showed me this video, and I was disgusted. I was appalled as such an encroachment on mind. But then I realized that these Google Glasses did nothing other than project onto faces what is already going on in palms. Our vision already goes to texts, directions, updates, weather, reminders. Why did it strike me differently when the text popped directly in front of the vision of my breakfast, rather than having to look down at my phone?

Change blindness is a term psychologists use to describe how small, subtle changes can occur outside of our awareness. Eventually, a scene can be drastically different, but no one noticed because the change was gradual.  Day-to-day a kid doesn’t appear to get older, or grow taller, but look at a picture two years ago and change is obvious.

Digital technology is subtly seeping into our lives. The effects on family and social life have gone unnoticed. For me, this video—a significant jump into the future of digital consumption—made obvious the changes that have already occurred.

The faster technology expands and the more aspects of life it influences, the more my instincts scream UNPLUG! Should I listen to instinct while I still have it, or acquiesce to the mechanization of mind? Given the proposed rate of technological growth, and the increased function of the digital in our world, this dilemma is real. The Google Glasses virtual display experience is called “augmented-reality.” When it comes to viewing reality, the Luddites see more clearly.

The Watson Problem

Remember Watson? IBM supercomputer Watson took down two accomplished human competitors in the trivia game show Jeopardy!, a test of wit, processing speed, and breadth of knowledge. One small loss for what human Jeopardy! champion Ken Jennings called the “puny human brain,” but one giant leap for computers toward the inevitable technological takeover of everything, rendering the human being the inadequate, unfortunate, biological little brother.

Watson came prepared with millions of downloaded resources including the entire Wikipedia, the entire Worldbook Encyclopedia, and the entire Internet Movie Database.  The computer instantly accesses and analyzes its vast resources, pinpoints one answer out of God-knows-how-many potential answers, and determines a confidence percentage for the correct answer before he buzzes in. If Watson knows the answer, he usually buzzes in first—all this is done in fractions of fractions of seconds.

Our human brain operates on a similar basis. Like Watson, we have downloaded millions of resources, from learning the ABC’s in kindergarten, to reading novels in high school, to watching specials on the History Channel, to listening to the news, to having conversations with friends. We constantly consolidate and update information. When asked a question, like a trivia question, we search through our vast memory resources to pinpoint the correct answer and simultaneously determine if we have enough confidence in this answer to say it out loud, or to buzz in. All this happens very quickly, as demonstrated when human Jeopardy! contestants often buzz in immediately after the question finishes.

In essence, the IBM scientists created a machine to do what we already do, but to do it with significantly more resources, more precise confidence analysis, and without the various cognitive slip-ups (like the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon) made by human brains. Head researcher David Ferrucci explained that although the team did not construct Watson based on the human mind, several algorithms were inspired by human problem solving. Through years of trial and error the team produced an analytical giant capable of answering an array of often nuanced Jeapordy! questions. As the final tally confirmed, the mechanized mind overpowers the most competent human opponents.

Bigger. Faster. More accurate. It seems that computers are primed to further supplant human tasks. What’s left for the human mind?

I thought about this recently while sitting in a book store reading Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut, a wildly creative mind with a gift for story making. For two hours I read, thought, people watched. One time I looked up from my book to ponder an occurrence in the story, and found myself looking across the bookstore at all those books. I could never possibly have the time to read all of them, but what if I could somehow get all of that stuff into my mind without taking the time to read? Reading seems terribly inefficient…word by word, line by line, downloading information, most of it to be lost forever.

Then something happened to me that has never happened to a computer: a thought occurred. I realized something. I had an insight. I realized that when I read, I am doing something holy, something that transcends raw data intake. I experience the words on the page. I am affected by the words on the page, depending on my current mood, my relationships, my memories– all of my mental qualities influence this experience.

And the writers of the books! They have different ways of expressing ideas that are unique to their environmental history and genetic makeup, which might affect me in way different from another author expressing the same idea.

When I read I am not downloading information. I don’t do it instantly and I don’t want to. I am experiencing a vast series of human interactions, in real time, and this changes me.  I have the opportunity to reflect on a sentence, remember a story from my childhood that in turn reminds me of a conversation with a student, and thus realize a better way to approach my class.  I can read a line, maybe a line I have read a million times, and suddenly experience a unique insight into self, God, the world, or a problem.

The human mind doesn’t remember everything. This is a blessing. Our brains unconsciously sift and sort information in ways that influence our unique personhood. We can imagine, we can be stirred, we can be shocked, we can be horrified, we can be sad, we can be elated, we can be relieved, we can be content. We are alive.

What happens in the human brain, although mechanical if analyzed piecemeal, transcends the mechanics of its functioning to produce mind, and in a deeper sense to produce soul. Our biological functions allow us to not simply exchange information with each other but to connect and understand each other. Ultimately, they allow us to love each other.

Watson-like technology prepares now, according to IBM visionaries, to take over formerly error prone human endeavors in health care and business.  Beside a doctor, Watson the physician’s assistant could access volumes of updated medical research while keeping in mind the patient’s personal medical history to create diagnostic and treatment evaluations. In the boardroom, Watson the business analyst will tell the CEO what can be cut from the budget to maximize efficiency.

IBM representative Kerrie Hollie, in a TED panel discussion about these future possibilities, detailed the questions a business man might ask the computer: would I be best to cut this program or that marketing strategy…? Afterward, host Stephen Baker cracked a joke, “or do I cut the people who are answering the questions you’re asking Watson?” Everyone on the panel shared a laugh.

These propositions conjure up memories of Vonnegut’s first novel, Player Piano, which enters a technologically driven world that runs efficiently enough without human beings poking around. The human beings are mostly out of work, with the cream of the logical-mathematical crop competing for upper-level engineering and management opportunities. The novel is aptly named for the mechanized piano that plays itself.  What will human beings do, when everything we did is done better by the machines we created? Theoretically we will kick back and smell the roses, but money makes the world go ‘round and no one gets paid for kicking back smelling roses.

In Player Piano, the protagonist finds himself leading an underground society with aims to destroy the mechanized instruments. The “Ghost Shirt Society” imagines a world removed of most technology, where everyone walks everywhere, uses wood fire to cook their food and light their homes, and reads books instead of watching television. They aim to “rediscover the two greatest wonders of the world, the human mind and hand.” The group wreaks havoc late in the book, leaving many machines smashed and smoking.  But after this moral victory, they concede that “this is like the Indians’ massacre of Custer and his men. The Little Bighorn. One isolated victory against an irresistible tide. More and more whites where Custer came from; more and more machines where these came from.”

I can’t predict the future and I can’t dream up scenarios like Kurt Vonnegut can, but I hesitate to accept this barrage of technology (Typed on a computer while intermittently browsing the internet, glancing at the television, and checking my phone for messages…sigh…)

I guess I can only make a plea.

Human innovations are advancing machines in ways previously fathomable only by science-fiction minds. Technology will continue to revolutionize the way we work and how we communicate with each other, as it has since the invention of the cotton gin and the telegram (hell, since the invention of stone tools and writing). If a threshold exists, past which further technological advancements hinder our capacity for self-actualization, we’re there. I am reminded of this every time I walk into a room unacknowledged by people lost in headphones, ipads, smartphones, or laptops. Since technology will only progress, we need to be intentional in how we use our machines. Humans still hold the biological ability for emotion, creativity, imagination, beauty, appreciation of life, love; let’s build a world to capture these things. Let’s use technology to accentuate humanity, not replace it.