I think this Amanda Marcotte piece is pretty interesting.  She touches on the idea of work and community and how the modern workplace has, until very recently, served to cut us off entirely from our loved ones during the day.  This, she asserts, was not always the case.  People used to come into more contact with their loved ones during the day in the past and this served to create a more organic, more humane work place.  She riffs off a TED talk by Stefana Broadbent (below) which talks about how modern communication technology has actually allowed people to regain some of this ability to communicate with loved ones during the work day.

What Broadbent recorded was that the explosion in communications technologies are instead restoring a little bit of what was simply part of life 150 years ago—constant contact with your intimates during your work day.  If you’re over 30, you’ve probably marveled at how much the work day has changed because of this, and as Broadbent notes, it’s extremely different from the era when even personal phone calls were not part of life at work.  (And still aren’t in many blue collar jobs.) It used to be that once you were in the office, the outside world simply didn’t exist.  Huge news events could happen and you wouldn’t find out, and you were mostly ignorant about what your friends and relatives were up to during the day.  Now, between text messaging, cell phones, IM, and social networking, we spend huge portions of our days keeping lines of communication with our intimates open.

But of course, since the isolation was the product of culture, we can’t expect culture not to strike back.  Broadbent notes how people who work in many low status occupations, like bus drivers and factor workers, are facing increasingly punitive monitoring to make sure they don’t check in with family and friends during the day.  Broadbent treats this like a human rights violation, and I’m inclined to agree. If people are getting their work done, monitoring them to make sure they don’t use their downtime to talk to people they love is only going on in order to debase them and suggest that their personal lives don’t count.  I’ll go a step further and argue that the monitoring is valuing debasement and control of working class people over actual economic concerns like profit and saving money.  It uses resources to monitor workers, after all.  But more than that, I’m skeptical of the idea that unhappy people are better workers.  People who can’t communicate with loved ones often spend a lot of their mental energies worrying about those loved ones, in my experience.  Communication that you can control doesn’t offer nearly the distraction that your colleagues can offer by barging in and demanding your attention whenever they want, too.

This makes sense to me.  Then again, the average high school student in America spends five and a half hours a day in front of a screen, and there is little doubt in my mind that this sort of always-online-or-watching-tv culture is bad for society in the long run.  Nor is our increased sedentary lifestyle exactly beneficial to our societal health or temperament. 

That being said, I think the benefits of technology should not be overlooked either, and if new avenues of communication are allowing friends and loved ones to keep in touch more, that’s undeniably a very good thing.

I’ve always thought a more likely reason for our atomization was our car culture.  The ability for families to spread out over such long distances, and the need to drive to get anywhere at all have led to people living further and further apart from one another.  My mom had seven siblings other than herself, and each one lives in a different city now, with their own families.  Only one stayed in her home town.  This was unheard of a generation previously.  Now it is the status quo.  My family has chosen a different path, and has decided to stay in our home town where our families live so that our children will have deeper and stronger ties to their community than we did growing up. 

In any case, I think it is the physical distance we have placed between ourselves and our neighbors, families, and friends that has contributed most to our atomization, and which has led directly to the more psychological and spiritual distances we see forming – as our children are raised either in single-parent homes or without any real connections to their grandparents, aunts and uncles, and communities in general.  In some sense, then, the communication technologies we have developed allow us to compensate for this distance.  Rather than blaming social networking or other communications technology for our increased atomization, perhaps we should view them as a subconscious attempt to remedy something we, as a culture, barely understand about ourselves – as an attempt to bridge the distances between one another.

Watch the TED talk after the leap.

[Read more →]

The top 10 technologies for tyranny. I’m vaguely mortified that my favorite childhood game – Civilization II – makes a cameo appearance.

A necessary dose of reality from Evgeny Morozov on Twitter, technology, and authoritarianism.

James Matthew Wilson, an editor at Front Porch Republic, has posted the first four sections of an essay called “Art and Beauty against the Politicized Aesthetic,” and the fifth and final section is on its way. Though he’s posted excerpts for discussion at FPR, the full text is at First Principles (parts one, two, three, and four). If you’re interested in the fine arts and even a bit favorably disposed to the kind of conservatism that advocates “local and limited government founded on enduring cultural traditions, stable and self-sustaining communities, and, above all, the Christian intellectual legacy which informs all things by means of faith and reason,” it’s worth printing it all out and finding a quiet place to spend some time with the essay. By way of contrast, if you find that kind of conservatism to be a cover for all manner of nefarious schemes, you might want to do something else with your time. I suppose it’s enough to say that Wilson calls for conservatives to attend to the fine arts and also argues against theories of art that conceive of aestheticism without beauty. For the latter purpose, he draws on Jacques Maritain and, perhaps more surprisingly, Theodor Adorno. (The section on Maritain will be the final one, it will be published sometime in the next month.)

Though I’m very much an amateur when it comes to appreciation of any of the fine arts, I’ve spent some time dabbling in theological aesthetics and my Platonist side loves any project that aims for the unity of the transcendentals. I imagine a healthy artistic culture as one where the popular arts draw one’s gaze upwards, so to speak. Or, from the other direction, a healthy culture would have paths by which amateurs could approach high art: sort of an idealized version of Christendom. Our culture, I’m pretty sure, is not such a culture. Sometimes when I’m in a reflective mood I get rather stunned by the amount of repetition I’m willing to stomach in pop music: the same chord progressions, the same rhythms, the same song structures repeated again and again and again. And the same goes for the, well, artlessness of the motion pictures and television programs I so often watch. I don’t say it’s a bad thing that entertainment exists which is easy to absorb passively. What I lament is that the kinds of passive entertainments to which we expose ourselves so rarely even gesture at what is more sophisticated. Immersion in our culture’s popular entertainment rarely provides tools for understanding or approaching high art.

I want to say it doesn’t have to be this way, but I sometimes fear we’ve passed over a threshold, and the technology we structure our lives around has destroyed the conditions under which fine art and popular entertainment can be bonded together. Even as technology has empowered the amateur artist, it’s also done a great deal to render her irrelevant. For example, before the invention of the phonograph in the 1870s, if you wanted to hear music, you had to either get someone to perform it for you or learn to play it yourself. To put it simply, people must have needed more musicians, both amateur and professional, but cheap dissemination of recordings reduced this need, and thereby took away an incentive for becoming musically literate. These days, you can be a devoted music fan and still know nothing at all about how music works.

So I suppose what I’m getting at is that I’m all for a regenerated appreciation of the high arts, but it seems pretty clear to me that there’s no simple return to music or poetry or painting as it was in the past, since the forms that used to be popular arose from conditions which no longer exist.

This is something I’d like to explore in more detail, but I’m not exactly sure where to start. Further, I have no doubt that there are multiple texts I should read before opining any further, including some of what Wilson talks about in his essays. Any suggestions from the readers for books or articles on technology and the decline of art music?

(Apologies for the title. The best bloggers think of snappy quips, puns, or quotations for their post titles, but I couldn’t come up with anything like that. The choice was between weird and boring, so I chose weird. Feel free to suggest alternate titles in the comments.)

I know Freddie thinks Google wants to eat our souls (along with that nefarious Steve Jobs) but I kind of like the monolithic software company, personally.  Lately I’ve really grown attached to Google Chrome.  It’s fast, and much more responsive/intuitive than Firefox or IE.  However, I am not able to run it on my Mac yet, sadly.  Anyone know anything about Chrome for Mac?  Also, does anyone have access to Google Wave?  If so, would you mind sending me an invite?

So about a week and a half ago, I wrote a fairly glowing mini-post about the rise and use of Twitter as a means of information dissemination and analysis. My psuedo-intellectual conclusion was,

The current outage just caused a moment of reflection on how we increasingly use new forms of technology in very post-postmodern ways that intertwine the subjective and the objective in interesting ways. Truth becomes a collective excavation of infinitely networked negotiations towards a reconciliation of acceptable perspectives that cohere to a felt experience.

I tried to break down at what I was driving in the comments and, all-in-all, I remain committed to that conclusion. But one can’t deny or ignore the counter examples that fly in the face of seeing emergent technologies as wholly a good thing. To wit, I stumbled across a story about the rise and fall of rumours surrounding Sum 41 frontman Deryck Whibley’s death intentionally started by booking agent and blogger Andrew Bucket (pseudonym) on Twitter just to see how far one tweet could go.

The result? Further than you might think. [Read more →]

Dan Riehl points us to some of the neat technologies developed during the Apollo era.  They are neat, too, but I have to say – given the price-tag of the space program – you’d think we’d have come up with better stuff than scratch-resistant glasses and memory foam.  In other words, the fact that these technologies were developed during the massively expensive space program is incidental – I’m sure wireless headsets would have been invented regardless.

Matt Yglesias asks “Is bing better?” in reference to Microsoft’s new search engine which may or may not become a real competitor to Google.  Microsoft often enters these various markets with mixed success – the Zune has gained some ground recently, at least as far as I can tell speaking with friends.  I haven’t checked the data.  The Xbox remains popular and competitive against rivals Playstation and Nintendo.  And, of course, Windows is still the top dog there – for now.

But creating a competitive search engine is tricky.  Not only are there already a number of other search engines – like Ask.com and Yahoo! – but even those don’t really compete against Google in any meaningful way.  This is largely because Google has transcended mere brand status and has become a verb.  Once something becomes a sort of universal noun, that’s bad enough.  Kleenex did this in the tissue market, becoming pretty much synonymous with tissue.  So whether or not you were using a generic tissue or a Kleenex, you called it a Kleenex.  They transcended brand.  But it’s so much more potent to achieve verb status, and that’s what Google’s done.  You “google” something now – you rarely hear someone say “search.”  You never hear anyone say “just ask it” or “just yahoo it” – or at least, I never do. [Read more →]

This is what I used to do all my writing on.  And I do miss it.  Part of me just misses the fact that back in the day I didn’t have the internet to distract me.  I’d sit down with my Macintosh – the rainbow apple staring up at me – and get to the business of writing.  I had great output when I was nine and ten and really up until high school.

Of course I played games, too.  I played Sim City, and Sim Ant.  And Brickles.  I played Might & Magic II a lot – it was extremely addicting, probably one of the best RPG’s ever made – and quite frankly, they just don’t make games like that anymore.  I probably have the discs somewhere, but alas no antique Macintosh to play them on.  The puzzles were easily as good as Myst which was also a great game, but not nearly as fun as Might & Magic, which was just epic and actually had really, really hard puzzles, lots of secrets, spells, monsters…. [Read more →]

I suppose the difference for me between the adopting of these two technologies – Twitter and Kindle – neither of which I use (though we do have a Twitter account tied to this blog), is that the former replaces nothing, while Kindle replaces books.  In other words, while Kindle would require that I read books on a gizmo rather than off the printed page, Twitter requires no such sacrifice or trade-off.  And there is no reason one can’t be both a Twitterer and the proud owner of a shotgun, at least not in America.