Bringing out our Worst Selves

Many people believe that the key to effective teaching, particularly at the secondary level, depends primarily on a deep level of content knowledge.  In fact, in many ways it was that perspective that drove me to the field - I had very little background in formal teacher training, and banked my science teaching career on a physics undergraduate degree from a respected institution.  As it turned out, that was enough to get my foot in the door, but I didn't really become halfway decent at my job until I accepted the fact that understanding the way developing minds was AT LEAST as important as content specialization, if not more so.

I spent much of my first few years on the job learning the ends and outs of pedagogy: how to manage a classroom, how to break down concepts in different ways, how to create experiences that help diverse groups of young people connect the dots in their own ways, and so on.  In other words, I learned how to lead a herd of horses to water and talk them into drinking it.  That was crucial, because I assumed when I was a teacher that the horses would drink the water on their own once I told them all where to find the oasis.

Basically, I've grown to believe that a huge part of the teaching profession is facilitating that cognitive development that helps young people bridge the gap between actions and consequences.  The kids that are the most successful (and pleasant to be around) are the ones that learn these lessons quickly.  And on the flip side of that coin, the students that fail the most consistently and spectacularly are pretty much always fixated on a mission to find someone else to blame for their predicament (and in almost all cases do so with the vigorous backing of their enabling parents).

It's the eerie consistency of this pattern that has me thinking about a dark side to the technological golden age in which we currently find ourselves.  Many technologies are designed to protect us from the consequences of our own poor choices; many experts are banking on technological advancements to resolve the impacts of climate change, for instance, and many others are so convinced that we'll be able to come up with clever fixes for whatever messes we make that the idea of considering consequences seems laughable.

Given how many problems have actually been solved by technological advancements, one might be tempted to dismiss such concerns as paranoia, but I think there are at least two reasons to be concerned about the way that our own ingenuity is warping our worldview:

First, there will always be a very real chance that we'll make a mess that we won't be able to clean up.

And second, living a life where we constantly push our pleasure buttons and assume we can clean up the negative repercussions later (even if we're right about that) turns us into crappy people, on an individual and cultural level.  Self-control, thoughtful consideration, stewardship of the world around us, these are values that serve a social good above and beyond the immediate consequences that they steer us away from.  Ask yourself if you want to live in a world where these virtues will become obsolete before you put an unconditional stamp of approval on the unimpeded march of progress.

Extinction Music

I didn't want to pigeon-hole the creative energy flowing through the reflecting pool, so I've decided to mix things up yet again: February's Fiction Fridays will be presented in the form of dystopian sci-fi Elizabethan sonnets!  Presented for your reading pleasure, this month's first selection follows below.

Extinction Music

The shadows frame an otherworldly scene

of human aspirations overthrown:

Forever stilled the grinding of machines,

Forever lost electric humming tones.

For centuries our symphony had grown,

Expanding to include melodic lines

That steered our arc to swelling apex notes,

Precipitating, now, the end of time.

Beyond this brief caesura? Songs await.

The music re-establishes the beat

With new musicians raring to create

New harmonies from all of this debris.

The human theme will quickly disappear

from evolution's optimizing ear. 

Eyes Cast Skyward: Technological Relations to Reality

Brian Mahabee is a graduate of Teacher's College at Columbia University, and has been involved in the education world for nearly a decade.  Brian and I work together, and a big part of his job title involves increases the utilization of educational technology in our classrooms, so I thought he'd be the perfect person to ask for thoughts on intersections between technology and culture.

His thoughts are collected in the lovely, poetic essay which follows.

Look down, look down, and look down some more. For years we’ve been taught to look up, gaze at the stars, shoot for the clouds and rise like the sun, but nowadays all we do is look down. More and more we’re being taught to look at the screens we have. Stay connected they say, interact more, look at this new thingy that does that one thing you always wanted to do. So we look down some more. And that one thing you always wanted to do, is it really something you always wanted to do? Are more interactions actually taking place? And the ever present question, are we really interacting?

Culture in my opinion is something that is deeply rooted in a people’s being, in their beliefs and stand for something that is unique to their core. The supposed connections, interactions and new advancements in “things you always wanted to do” will soon be the culture that is passed on to following generations. So can this type of acquisition become a culture? Can making new connections and interacting virtually define a culture? Or does that dilute a culture that already exists? Many times to experience a culture, travel is presumably involved. A new place, to feel the atmosphere, to meet the people and experience the landscape. Nowadays, we are able to do similar things virtually, and what an advancement this is. However, is it a diluted experience? Many would say they would rather have the diluted over nothing at all, including myself in some cases. However, which is better? A powerful video, or no video at all. A glimpse into the Egyptian pyramids, or no view of the hidden treasures?

I recently viewed a video based on Polynesian culture, and it touched me in an emotional way that I would have never known if I wasn’t virtually connected to someone who is of Polynesian descent. With an experience like this, my apprehension slowly becomes undone. Yes looking down at our devices constantly is becoming cultural, and yes superficial connections are replacing in person deeply confirmed interactions, but the connections that give a somewhat diluted experience that nurture an appreciation for the actual thing, whether it be the Polynesian culture, the pyramids of Egypt or the interaction with a person online can have a place in cultural discovery.

A negative impact of the unlimited availability of information is easily tripping over a line that is a mile wide but an inch deep. The vast amount of knowledge is just that: vast. And with its availability users can easily jump to another resource without a depth of knowledge worth having. I now guiltily look at emails, articles and notes by skimming. I skim, then move on. This has now become my culture of reading. I fear that I am becoming acculturated to this type of reading that my breadth of knowledge spans a mile wide with an inch of depth.  I fear the same for present day peoples with the breadth of information available. I fear my reality. I fear present day culture.

Zeno's Paradox & Wall-E

Zeno's  Dichotomy Paradox is an ancient thought experiment that seems blatantly fallacious, but it's deceptively difficult to untangle.  It goes something like this:

Suppose that you wish to walk from here to there (doesn't matter where, as long as here & there aren't the same place).  You begin, and eventually you arrive at the halfway point between here and there.  And you continue, and you reach the halfway point between the first halfway point and the end point.  And you continue walking, and then reach a halfway point between the second halfway point and the ending.  And this process continues infinitely, because between any two locations there is a midpoint which must be traversed, meaning there are an infinite number of midpoints you must cross before you reach the end of your journey, which would take an infinite amount of time.  Therefore movement is impossible and displacement in space is an illusion.

I mention Zeno's Paradox because I think it mirrors the thinking demonstrated by many people I've met toward the modern sci-fi classic, Wall-E.  They've seen the movie, they've appreciated the references to the ways that the sedentary humans who live in an orbital space colony parrot some of the lazier aspects of our modern technological society, and they dismiss it as an amusing spectacle that might lurk in an impossibly distant future.  In a sense, they feel that the number of steps in human social and technological development that lie in between the status quo and the world of Wall-E is so tremendously large that the scenario doesn't bear serious consideration.  Just like Zeno suggests that we can never arrive at any destination.  In both cases, the reasoning is fatally flawed.

Converging Infinities

Let's start with Zeno.  The key to untangling his puzzle is an interrogation of the notion of infinity.  He's quite correct that numbers are infinitely divisible, so that any person traveling anywhere has to traverse an infinite number of distance increments.  The issue is that Zeno takes all infinities to be functionally equivalent, which is certainly not the case.  Infinities come in two zesty flavors: divergent infinities (like 1+2+3+.... a series that continuously grows by larger and larger values), and convergent infinities (like 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + ... which grows by smaller and smaller chunks).  If you take a calculus class, you'll learn the rules for calculating the values of such infinite series and determining whether they converge or not, and if so what value they converge on.  But long story short, the kinds of infinite series that grow by diminishing amounts eventually reach a maximum value.  That's why you can, in fact, move from one place to another (or if you can't, it isn't because Zeno's Dichotomy Paradox).

Accelerating Toward Destruction

The same mathematical logic yields a horrifying conclusion when we use it to analyze the social evolution that tracks the course from early homo sapiens to the hypothetical future humans depicted in Wall-E.

If estimates from modern hunter-gatherers function as a viable comparison, early humans probably walked anywhere from eight to twelve miles a day on average.  On the other hand, the Wall-E people, who move exclusively via hover-chair, probably walk close to zero miles per day.  That puts humans in modern America pretty close to the halfway point, according to Catrine Tudor-Locke, head of the Pennington Biomedical Research Group, who estimates that we walk between five & six miles per day (pretty appropriate for the Zeno comparison, right?).  So that makes the real question whether our path to the hover chair follows a course of a convergent or divergent infinity.

Considering the rapidly accelerating pace of technological development, it seems like a given that our evolution towards a totally sedentary state follows the convergent pattern.  That means that every step we take towards a future where our bodies become rarely-utilized accessories hastens our progress down a potentially irreversible path.  Think about that every time you take the elevator instead of the stairs; every time you troll the parking lot for a premium space so that you don't have to make the hike; every time you longingly wish for a teleportation device to expedite your daily lives.

We are the stewards of all future human society, and if we don't actively choose to embrace and preserve our biological corpus, we'll soon be living without it.

Huxley and Orwell: Two Views on Oblivion

I'll lay my cards on the table right at the start: I love both the books discussed in today's post.  A Brave New World and 1984 are both seminal, practically genre-defining works of dystopian futurism, that sub-family of science fiction that appraises the present and supposes what the world might look like after making a few pessimistic assumptions about our capacity as a species.  My appreciation for both books was deepened last year when I stumbled on this review of 1984, written as personal correspondence directly between Huxley and Orwell!

If you're the tl;dr type, Huxley's analysis of Orwell's book boils down to this: it's a great piece of literature with tremendous vision about the dangers of totalitarianism, but Huxley was pretty sure that he had the right answer when it came to the modes of control that the autocrats of tomorrow would employ to subdue the population.  The gist is captured in the following passage: Within the next generation I believe that the world's rulers will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience."

Brave New World came out in 1932.  Nineteen-Eighty-Four was released in 1949.  So now, with a respectable sixty years of buffer time since the publication of the more recent work, I think it's a fine moment to consider who was the more accurate predictor of today's modes of social control.

The Iron-fisted Master Narrative

First, let's consider Orwell's vision.  How is social control achieved in Oceania?  There are two principal means that intertwine: the crafting of an officially endorsed vision of the world (including both contemporary politics and historical events), and punitive force wielded against any that pose potential threats to the hegemonic worldview.  To what extent do these things exist in the world of today?

Any honest intellectual can accede to the reality of certain elements of Orwell's vision.  In fact, during America's Bush II years, when extraordinary rendition and Guantanamo Bay were new parts of the American conversation, direct parallels were frequently drawn between many of Bush's anti-terror tactics (which have largely continued under Obama) and the politics of Big Brother.  After the Snowden revelations, it's more clear than ever that the United States government has an interest in monitoring more information about its citizens than it's comfortable disclosing in the light of day.

There are, however, a few crucial differences.  For instance, the metadata being culled by the NSA only exists because we willingly surrender that data to corporations in exchange for access to information technology.  Likewise, many of the violently normative expressions of anger against people that dared to question government policies in the mid 2000's didn't originate from government sources, but rather from attack dogs in the media and the social sphere intent on spearheading a self-policing policy for the American electorate.  These differences hint a a fundamental miscalculation present in both works, but more on that after we turn to Huxley.

Disappear into Sweet Oblivion

Huxley thought he was right about the future because he'd considered how to make people comfortable with surrendering their meaningful political engagement - control their perceptions about the world by conditioning them from an early age, and constantly push their pleasure buttons to distract them from more significant life ambitions.

Huxley was definitely right that government has been concerned for quite a while with proper socialization of the youth to ensure the continuity of the political system; When the second generation of founding fathers were debating the merits and design of a public education system, one of the most significant arguments in favor was to control the perceptions of huddled masses, so that they would understand that the decisions being made by the political elites were being made in everyone's best interest.

And I think he's also right that to a large extent, at least in the developed world, and particularly in America, political disengagement grows in tandem with our materialistic obsessions.  Our energies and our desires are almost entirely focused on accumulating and appreciating objects of consumption; they become totems for how we measure and compare our value as humans, and our principle avenue for entertainment.  But once again, I think Huxley was wrong to suppose that it would be some kind of central governing body that would be the delivery mechanism for the hedonistic cycle.

Dollar Dollar Bills, Y'all

That's right, the real issue is capitalism.  The modes of control to which we are all subjected in the status quo are largely decentralized and exist primarily because of our "voluntary" participation.  We surrender our data for analysis, and we certainly elect to participate in the consumerist rat race, but is it really fair to say that we make these decisions freely and without coercion?  The significant alignment between the political elite and the socioeconomic elite in America means that the rules and systems that govern practically every interaction in our everyday lives pushes us to conform to the expectations of assimilation into the workforce and pacification via consumption.  We're socialized from a young age to use these metrics to measure our progress through life.

Brave New World and Nineteen-Eighty-Four are both make prescient guesses about the nature of the strings that are tied to us all now, but they misidentified who'd be yanking on the threads from the other end.

Devouring the Zeitgeist

It's a new month, a time to switch the lens the reflecting pool will gaze through as we unpack the multi-faceted phenomena of everyday life.  Last month, we talked about patriarchy, a system that arguably grows out of our evolutionary history and has infested human interactions for perhaps as long as there have been humans.  This month, we swing to the opposite end of the spectrum as we explore the cutting edge of the human tool-making process:

technology.

More particularly, I'll be putting together pieces that explore the feedback loops that exist between technology, culture, and human evolution.  If you like sci-fi, futurism, or complaining about the kids these days, February is going to be great month for you at TFP!  To get the ball rolling, I'm starting today with a broad observation about the relationship between new modes of information consumption and our understanding of the world.

Information Overload

The graphic novel and film Watchmen  [spoiler alert, this analogy contains substantial references to the plot] both prominently feature billionaire super-genius philanthropist character Adrian Veidt, a former freelance superhero who capitalized on his renown and incredible intelligence to build a corporate empire.  Veidt's many public enterprises are geared towards an overarching aim: the ultimate improvement and salvation of human civilization.  And to that end, he also conducts a series of secret operations in a Machiavellian attempt to engineer a massive global conflict that will push humankind to the brink of extinction, in order to teach them necessity of peace and cooperation.

Why would a humanist like Veidt resort to such horrific measures?  Because, in his analysis, borderline apocalypse is the only thing that could bring us all together.  In his sub-antarctic lair, Veidt often sits in front of a giant wall of televisions air broadcasts from every corner of the Earth as a means to distill and digest the global zeitgeist.  In so doing, he's confronted from all corners by narrow ideological entrenchment, hate, fearmongering, and threat construction.  Veidt is in the unique position of being able to consider all of these perspectives simultaneously, and watching from that farm removed vantage point, he's brought to the brink of despair at the prospects for successfully building bridges of mutual understanding between the various gangs of homo sapiens.

Watchmen was originally published in the late eighties and is set in the alternate nineteen-seventies, technological epochs where rapidly analyzing media from all around the world would only be possible for super-geniuses with access to massive economic resources.  In the present, the capacity to rapidly collect information from thousands of different sources and deliver it directly into one's pocket is available to any person with a twitter account and a smartphone.  The internet has exponentially increased open access to information from anywhere and everywhere, so theoretically we should all be drifting towards a more pluralistic, tolerant worldview, right?

Not really.  Where before divisions were enforced by physical proximity, now most people voluntarily segregate themselves from any meaningful engagement with viewpoints or people that make them uncomfortable.  Collectively, we've engaged in a willful balkanization that confirms and violates all of our biases, rather than challenging the perspective we carry into situations.

All of this meant to preface February discussion of technology with an overarching thought.  All technological innovations are tools.  By themselves, they are devoid of moral and ethical content, and manifest positive or negative tendencies based on the uses to which they're put.  Uninhibited global communication could bring us all together, but only if we engage with that communicative network with an appropriate attitude of ideological and emotional openness.  Our goal must not be to win, but to understand.

Liberation v. Manipulation

One morning a few years ago as I was driving to work, I was listening to NPR (as always) and I heard a piece on the Marketplace Morning Report on the new economy of in-game/in-app purchases.  It was a fascinating exploration of how the game designers can manipulate the players psychologically, getting them hooked on a free game then dramatically increasing the difficulty until purchasing special perks are all but essential to reaching new levels.  Companies' use of player data analytics to tweak playing experiences for just the right combination of satisfaction and frustration to unlock users' wallets displayed the incredible implications of the ability to collect and parse massive amounts of information: knowledge is power.

And it got me to wondering whether the internet, which for a long time I'd taken for granted would be a democratizing force, might actually shift the balance of power even farther in the direction of large institutions.

On the one hand, the internet facilitates massive information sharing.  That allows people with mutual interests communicate and coordinate; it enables coalition building, opens pathways for open-source collaboration and the development of alternate economic models, and pushes transparency and

accountability to the extent that abuses of power can be documented and widely disseminated.  It makes it harder for a single hegemonic voice to define the narrative around any particular event; the government and even the mainstream media don't get control over what gets reported in a world where anyone can take a video with their cell phone and tweet it to a million people.  So in "hard power" terms, it would seem the internet puts more power in the hands of the people.

But on the other hand, the proliferation of information on the internet has a flip-side.  Processing and analyzing huge amounts of data and using that to inform decisions is a big advantage, and its one that's only available to gigantic entities like corporations and intelligence agencies.  It's depressing to think that if all of our modern lives pass through the servers at Google, and they have the ability and intention to study it so as to perfectly tailor their sales pitches to tug at our emotions, to shape our perceptions about the world, then we might always be one step behind.  Before people are prepared to mobilize for social justice, they'll be sidetracked by amazingly relevant Facebook ads or earmarked by the NSA.  

Maybe these are melancholy exaggerations, but they illustrate a point.  The advantage that information sharing gives to the disempowered that want to band together is counterbalanced by the ability of institutions to collect and leverage all the data that passes through the networks that connect us together.  It's a thorny problem; I'm not suggesting we forsake our wi-fi connections, but I don't have any other workable solutions, either.

De-Localized

I've had some interesting conversations about the merits of technology and how our technological devices affect our lives - conversations that explored the cultural, physical and psychological connotations of constant access to global connectivity.  I've heard some fairly persuasive arguments about the ability to build connections that otherwise wouldn't be possible, to expose people to phenomena and perspectives that they would never have been able to see a hundred years ago.  And I can accede that there is some truth in these arguments.

Still, there's at least one aspect of our technological lives that I dread.  Whatever wonderful experiences come from our technological interactions, they come at an absolute trade-off: immersing our sensory and mental focus on information flowing through the internet takes it away from our immediate surroundings.  We are becoming de-localized, in almost every sense.

When I was in the Peace Corps, I lived without electricity in a country that spoke a different language from the one I grew up speaking.  Multiple layers of necessity kept my mind in the present.  And it was wonderful.  I discovered the joy inherent in a thousand simple tasks - bathing myself with a cup and a bucket, walking to the market, negotiating for produce.  Even waiting at the well line for water.  With the expectation of constant external stimulation removed, I found myself instead experiencing insignificant moments with a life-enriching relish that escapes me most of the time in my American life.

Even in the cases where digital interactions simply replace analog versions of the same activity (for instance, when we chat with people online, rather than face to face), it feels like something is lost.  Anecdotal as this may seem, consider the following - there's plenty of data to document the hormonal chain of responses that begin when you gaze into another person's eyes.  When we communicate with each other, its about more than just a simple transfer of verbal information.  We read and understand each other in countless ways that we probably haven't understood and documented.  When we cast aside that analog form of communication and replace it with text messages, we can't even quantify all the dimensions of connection that we've thrown away.

We can talk to rocks

Last month I reviewed All the Light We Cannot See; one of my favorite elements of the book is one of the youthful's character's fascination with science.  Seen through the open-minded lens of childhood, scientific explanations of phenomena seem to him not to dispel or lessen the fantastical nature of the universe, but rather to make that mysticism even more profound.  It rekindled something that lived in me once, and since then I've been looking at certain aspects of our modern technological life with a rekindled sense of wonder.

silicon - the element from which many computer components are made

For instance, if you really think about it, we've developed a language for communicating with inanimate objects - to communicate our desires to a constructed network of physical elements that will then do our bidding.  That's right - computers are really a way for human beings to talk to rocks.

Just think about it - as a species, we have learned how to manipulate the flow of subatomic particles by clever positioning of electric fields produced by particular combinations of chemical compounds.  We harness that electrical flow to sort human-generated input, push it through multiple layers of interpretation, tracing the flows of these electrons until they actually instigate physical changes in the arrangement of microscopic switches that encode binary information on a physical server perhaps thousands of miles away from the location where our thoughts are being produced.  We have crafted a mechanism for storing millions of thoughts in the rocks that we pull from the ground.  Who can say the world isn't a magical place?

And that really only describes the first layer of digital architecture.  We've moved far beyond the elementary storage of information that can be recalled an interpreted by non-human entities; we've designed non-human entities that can follow commands we issue, that can combine inputs from their human masters with digitally stored information and data collected from its surroundings to execute tasks and make decisions.

I don't know how to go on without belaboring the point, so I suppose I'll leave it at that, but doesn't it just seem like if you squint your eyes enough that science and magic, logic and mysticism are just two different languages for describing the same multi-faceted reality?

Being a Maker in the Digital World

To some, the very idea might seem like an unresolvable paradox, but the more I think about it, the more I think there is room to think of oneself as a "maker" even when working in a non-physical medium.  Namely, I think there is such a thing as a digital maker.

In a previous post, I explored the nature and motivation behind the maker movement - in my analysis, the soul of making lives in the idea of craft, creativity, and the impetus to engage directly with challenges, rather than buying a solution off the rack.  The more I think about it, the more I think that working in a digital space can still provide those experiences.

The realization first struck me when I dived into the work of re-designing the look the The Reflecting

Pool.  I was frustrated with the templates and level of customization available to me with blogging sites out of the box; after wrestling with the front-end interface, I bit the bullet and started to teach myself HTML (for the second time) and CSS (for the first time - the last time I learned HTML, style sheets weren't yet a thing).  And even though all of the products I produced were physically intangible, I still felt the same sense of accomplishment.  I could manipulate the code and see the result.  I was forced to tinker and tweak and work around bugs and syntax problems, and in the end I built something that I value and which I'll continue to try to craft with time.

In many ways, this post is an invitation from those of you out there that think of yourselves as makers to articulate what that identity means to you.  Is it possible to be a maker in a medium that doesn't allow for tactile manipulation?  I would argue that it is.  App designers are the makers of the digital age, and if we feel the need to exclude them from the movement, then the only way to be a maker is to leave behind all vestiges of technology, and the makers will have to go out into the woods and start engineering their own tools from sticks and stones.

Just sayin'.