© Charles D. Hayes
A radio news broadcast recently reported
that we are using up natural resources at a pace that exceeds our planet's
largesse by half; if we continue, by 2050, we will require three planets to cover
the deficit. This was followed by a discussion about our enormous budget deficit
and political gridlock. These are formidable issues, although the evidence is overwhelming
that few people are paying close attention.
Albert Einstein was quick to argue that
the thinking required to solve problems needs to be greater in substance than
the thinking that allowed them to occur. And yet today, at a time when deep reading
and critical thinking are desperately needed, more and more people are devoting
time to 140-character hot-button discussions, leaving too little time for serious
analysis. Nietzsche's herd mentality comes to mind, and I can imagine Emerson
spinning in his grave at the very notion of a world consumed by chit-chat. He
was so incensed by small talk that I can picture him summing up today's chatter
with something like "twits tweet." Nietzsche, I suspect, would have
burst a blood vessel at the thought of millions of people following one another
for 140-character tidbits, when 140 pages of serious study would barely get the
job done.
Now I am not a luddite. I love
technology. I'm not blind to the positive effects of a world connected by
broadband. There are too many upsides to list. But there are also downsides. Increasingly
I see young people (and some not so young) spending their days flitting this
way and that, like subatomic particles being moved by unseen forces, while
focused on a hand-held gadget. An alarming number of teenagers spend their days
in a frenzy of texting that goes on into the night, sleeping with their phone
at the ready. This flurry of activity makes David Riesman's notion of
"other directedness" in his 1950 book The Lonely Crowd seem quaint and the very idea of inner-directedness
historically irrelevant.
In Hamlet's
Black Berry William Powers puts it succinctly: "Digital busyness is
the enemy of depth." He even suggests that in today's world deep reading
sometimes "feels subversive."
I retired from Alaska's North Slope oil
field in the fall of 2011. In the camp, it was not unusual to dine in the
evening with people holding a fork in one hand and a gadget in the other,
seldom taking their eyes off the latter. Many of these same people, even during
work hours, could not seem to go but a few minutes without checking or sending
text messages in dialogue so trivial in content as to amount to an
inappropriate distraction and an egregious waste of company time.
Consider the public fascination with
Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. No doubt, there are positive things that can and
are being accomplished with these kinds of media, but right now polarization
seems to be a major benefit. Political echo chambers abound as group members share
email assaults on out-groups, relentlessly making fun of their opposition while
continuously upping their levels of contempt. It's hot buttons 24/7. Us, us,
them, them. Then we wonder why we have become politically dysfunctional.
Beneath the surface of all of this
frenzy of nonsensical communication is the underlying reality that there are
literally millions of people subtly coming on to us under the pretense of
friendship with the covert motivation to sell us something. I, too, have books
and essays for sale on Amazon and other vendors, and like many authors I figure
that if people like my web posts they might be interested in reading my books. I'm
not by any means against commerce, but I can't help but think that something is
deeply disturbing about a market growing exponentially for books promising to
tell sellers how to come on to customers without seeming to, so the seller can
set the hook before the buyer recognizes the artificial pretense. So much
purposeful deception is as disappointing as it is disingenuous.
Add the scams and data phishing going on
in cyberspace to the insincere dialogue and the vicious partisan politics underway,
and it makes one wonder where we are headed. Today's gadgets are going to become
obsolete and give way tomorrow to new ones. No telling how we will use them exactly
or whether they will compensate for our Stone Age minds or add further to the
venomous political contempt we are witnessing as our current technology exacerbates
our primitive political predispositions.
Moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt
describes our human condition as a rider/elephant predicament in which the
rider represents our conscious ability to reason (with emotion) while the
elephant represents our emotions, which operate to a large extent at an unconscious
level. I would add a self and a robot to this analogy. The self, which is a
fuzzy concept neurologically, is home to both the rider and elephant, while the
robot represents our tools.
Long before the creation of cyberspace
Marshall McLuhan warned us that what enthralls us about technology is that it
represents a narcissistic extension of ourselves. The existential danger in our
enthusiasm for the latest in gadgetry is in becoming so distracted that we let
the robot take over, thus becoming lost in a maelstrom of confusion and subservient
to our tools.
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