Thing #11: We all blog about technology

I've already been blogging some about technology. Most entries in this blog that are not specifically addressed to the “NLC 23 things” are about the way that digital technology has led to a new struggle about what is in the public sphere, as a variety of economic interests attempt to privatize ideas, information, and works of art, literature, and science that were formerly considered part of our common cultural heritage. My shorthand index term for these entries has been “digital enclosure,” a term that others use as well, as you can see if you follow the links in those entries.

Much of the discussion of the social, economic and cultural effects of digital technology seems shallow--in the “gee whiz, isn't it great!” and “ZOWIE guys!!! Get with it or Drop Dead!” mold. But there are exceptions. Here are some links to work that seems to me to offer intelligent, historically informed commentary on the influence of digital technology in today's world.

The first (and easiest to understand) is Dion Dennis's article The digital death rattle of the American middle class. The article is as much about the future of American education as it is about outsourcing and economic prosperity, as such. I particularly like Dennis's last two paragraphs. I have a feeling this piece, written in 2003, may age better than you might think, despite recent changes in political life due to the economic crisis and the 2008 election. Dennis is describing an ideology and a set of interests that are deeply rooted and influential in both political parties.

The most wide-ranging and sophisticated cultural critic of the way we are handling our new digital tools that I have encountered is Steve Talbott.

Here is a good on-line introduction to his approach. This includes, in a part titled “Hold a blossom to the light,” a very fine description of why an enormously skilled Waorani blowgun hunter in the Amazon rain forest really prefers to use a shotgun, although shells are expensive and hard to get, and although the gun does not serve his purpose (he knows this, too) as effectively as the traditional blowgun.

Its all about technology and how, at any level of sophistication, we can be attracted to tools that are culturally destructive.

I recently read Talbot's Devices of the Soul: Battling for Ourselves in an Age of Machines, (O'Reilly Media, 2007), and I would like to cherry pick a couple of points he makes that I especially liked.

He asks and answers the question, how much of myself do I put on the line, how much do I really commit, when I venture onto the internet? The answer is almost nothing. This is the beginning of a devastating critique of utopian visions of on-line community, though that discussion is strung out throughout the rest of the book.

He shows how we sometimes use technology to evade a true conversation with the natural world, as with each other, and describes the result at one point as “a mad, free associating soliloquy.”

Talbott draws on Jane Healy's Failure to Connect: How Computers Affect Our Children's Minds—For Better and Worse. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999), and pays close attention to how children and adults are made fit for their social world. His appreciation of the role of place in sustaining a healthy culture leads him to the conclusion that “to be a keystroke from everywhere means being nowhere in particular, and this means that making the Internet a healthy place for children is not for the time being a realistically achievable goal.”

Talbott is not a Luddite, he has been employed as a software programmer and technical writer, and through this connection, his book came to be published by O'Reilly media, a technology publisher who brings out some of the best books on computer programming.

Long ago the German writer Ernst Jünger suggested that “Our technological world is not an arena of unlimited possibilities, instead, it possesses an embryonic character which drives toward a predetermined maturity.” For Jünger this meant, in part, that technology reshapes the world only as a reflection of the human will to power. Leader of a German assault troop on the western front in World War I, wounded some 23 times in action, Jünger found great beauty in the amorality and spectacle of industrialized warfare. Jünger affirmed change, and greeted the chaos of two world wars and the rise of dictatorships in the twenties as small steps along the way to the transformation of the earth into a totally administered technological wonder, a work of pure art. His aesthetic appreciation of these changes grates on modern sensibilities. (We Americans like our history to be a moral homily, however shallow.)

Still, it is hard not to think of Jünger again: Where-ever you look at digital technology, whether at the more “populist” end of video games and on-line communities, or at the possibilities for information gathering and administrative control this technology offers to governments and corporations, or simply at the way technology enables what Steve Talbott calls “vacant efficiency,” and transforms economy and society in ways we don't anticipate, there is something embryonic in its appearance. What seems chaotic and free on the surface and at first glance, seems much less so with closer observation. As we look on, behind the chaos, bright surfaces of connective tissue self-assemble, curving back on themselves beyond our vision. Will this thing be beautiful, or a horror, or some deep hybrid of the two?