Reflections of an Armchair Luddite

.
First we must remember that the Luddites were not opposed to technology that made people’s lives better; they were opposed to the implementation of technology that bruised the lives of human beings. The conflict that lent their name to history occurred in the early 1800s, when they demonstrated a disturbing tendency to burn down the factories housing the mechanized looms that, they asserted, were stealing their jobs and hence degrading the quality of human life.

And now Apple has introduced the iPhone 4S. The S stands, I assume, for Siri – the artificial intelligence-like “assistant” that allows you to talk to your phone, a function not to be confused with using your phone to actually talk to other human beings. In the cool video on Apple’s home page, [http://www.apple.com/iphone/] Siri does the communicating to distant others:

Jogging Guy speaks: “Siri, read me my messages.”
Siri replys: “Great news, we got the go ahead on the project. Can you meet at 10?”
Jogging Guy: “You bet! See you there.”
Siri: Sent.
Jogging Guy: “Siri, text my wife. Tell her I’m going to be thirty minutes late.
Siri: I’m sorry Dave, I can’t do that.

All right, I made that last part up. Unlike Hal in 2001: A Space Odyssey, Siri seems quite compliant. But you can probably see where I am going with this. Actually, I’m headed in two directions. First is that potentially “Hal-ish” path that asks that we at least reflect on the notion of technological dependency. Consider the fact that we no longer know anyone’s phone number. To call them we just hit speed dial, or touch their picture on the screen, or select their name from a list. We forget that the “code” that Skynet recognizes is a string of numbers. That is, we forget it until we let our cell phone battery run down and we are forced to use another phone, one without our “contacts." We stare at the strange grid of numbers and wonder which ones to push.  And then, of course, there is GPS.   I drove around Chicago last week as if I had lived there for years; a task I could not repeat sans GPS for all the money in the world. Recalculating, recalculating.

I believe those technologies to be helpful. They free up grey matter for more complex tasks; for those issues at the top of the “thought pyramid,” if you will. If I don’t have to worry about the base of the pyramid – phone numbers, addresses, my library card number etc., I can devote my attention to upper level issues; my lecture for this afternoon, an idea for a painting, or wondering about the nature of dark energy. I like that. What does concern me is the extent to which Siri, and his/her even more powerful kin over on the Android platform, are creeping up the pyramid, sucking up more and more “helpful tasks.” Apple’s video goes on to demonstrate:

“Will I need an umbrella?”
“No.”
“What the weather like in San Francisco?”
“Should be nice, highs in the mid-sixties.”
“How many ounces in a cup?”
“Let me think, 8 ounces.”
“Set my timer for 30 minutes.”
“Thirty minutes and counting.”

I worry about what happens if Siri’s battery runs down after we have given it responsibility for much of the seemingly trivial portions of the thought pyramid:

“Siri, where do I keep my shoes?”
Silence.
“Siri, how do I turn on the cable system?”
Silence.
“Siri, what is my credit card number?”
Silence.
“Siri, what was the make of my first car?”
Silence.
“Siri, where is the hospital?”
Silence.

I worry that “If we don’t use it, we will lose it.” And we are talking about our minds. Lurking in the back of my non-Siri mind is what Eric Schmidt of Google once said: "More and more searches are done on your behalf without you needing to type. I actually think most people don't want Google to answer their questions. They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.”

“Siri, I’m bored – what do I want to do?”
“I’m sorry, Dave, I don’t know.”

My second concern is less dark, but more likely. The Apple videos show Jogging Man wearing ear buds and the other Siri users chatting away with Siri in the privacy of their own homes. Somehow I don’t see it working out that way.   Jogging Man will join the growing legions of Bluetooth users who spew their self-important conversations, Tourette-like, into the air; toxic vapors vented into the sphere of public silence. And can you imagine sitting in your favorite coffee shop surrounded by hordes of “Siri speakers”? Will the phones get confused if they “overhear” other “masters” talking to their “Siris”? Will people have to name their Siris to avoid confusion? Can you imagine how that will work in our celebrity-obsessed world?

“Leonardo, turn on the microwave.”
“Beyonce, put more starch in my shirts.”
“Mr. President, text my mother, tell her I’ll be late for dinner.”

Don’t get me wrong – I like my technology for the most part. Much of my life would be far more difficult – at times impossible - without it. But I would remind us that technology has a way of drifting into spaces either unintended, or at least unheralded, by its creators. I remember, in much the same hazy way I remember watching The Mickey Mouse Club, a time when parents assumed that if their children were using the computer they were doing their homework, because it was, after all, just a computer.
.

On Life and Dreaming

.
Hopefully, committing this to words will stop it from swirling around my mind.  It all began sometime yesterday.  I was reading an article about chimpanzees in the latest Smithsonian.  The TV was playing in the background, and a cell phone ad squeezed in around my concentration.  The tag ran something like this  “ .  .  . texting, the Internet, and video.  All without lifting your face from your phone!”  I wish I could be more exact – but I can’t find the ad online.

Equally frustrating was my subsequent inability to nail down a bit of dialogue about the nature life and dreams that had been flitting through the cobwebs of my brain since hearing the phone ad.  I thought the source must have been film or video since I seem to “hear” the words. Lord of the Rings? Watership Down?  Hamlet?  I didn’t know.  Then it came to me this afternoon, nothing that lofty, Heaven Can Wait, 1978, with Warren Beatty.  When Beatty’s character finds himself in heaven after a car wreck, he asserts it has to be a dream; the supervising angel says:

“Now, Joe, you know this is not a dream, you know this is real.  There is a certain quality to dreaming and a certain quality to life.  This is life.”

The issue, of course, is the interplay between those two perspectives.  There is a certain quality to life that separates it from dreaming.  That is what makes a dream that approaches the borderline so powerful.  In its aftermath, you lie there, staring at the space around you, letting reality reaffirm its dominance.  You take comfort from the feel of cloth upon your skin, the breeze upon your face; welcoming even the poke of a bedspring or an unreachable itch – you find comfort in the insistence of the landscape.  You sense that “quality of life that separates it from dreaming.”

The inverse can be equally powerful.  A dream in which you are free from pain, again in the presence of one once loved and now departed, when you are whole and lithe and laughing can give way to a far more desolate life.  But, however distressing, again there is that affirmation of difference, of qualities that separate life from dreaming.

How do we know the difference?  It seems true that we do, but how did we come to understand, identify, perceive those defining, differentiating qualities of life versus dream?

I am caught by the notion that we learn the qualities of life by living in the landscape.  We learn “real life” through the physicality of touching, smelling, tasting, by seeing and by hearing.  Goosebumps on our arms, tears on our cheeks.  Pleasure and pain, experience and learning are writ upon our bodies.

I find it intriguing and somehow disturbing that life lived with “our face to our phone” engages only two elements – sight and hearing.  I am concerned that with so much of our lives being delivered to us by screens and speakers that we may begin to perceive with less clarity those qualities that separate life from dreaming.  Very Matrix.

I realize that there is a kernel of positive potential in this fuzzier, two-dimensional, landscape.  For those in pain, disabled and despairing, there may well be therapeutic aspects to an immersive dreamlike alternative.  But those are not, for the most part, the folks living life with their faces to their phones.  I am concerned that the kids “t’wixt twelve and twenty” are losing time in the landscape and touching only a truncated version of life.  And I wonder if one casualty of such a youth will be the clear, intuitive understanding of the qualities that separate life from dreaming.
.

Fear of Phoning

.
I have always had a penchant for solitude.  As a child I delighted in “not being seen.”  I loved to hide among the bushes outside the house, or up in the branches of low hanging tree, observing the ebb and flow of the neighborhood.  I had no interest in eavesdropping or stealing secrets.  There was just something soothing in the notion that nobody knew where I was, that I could observe the world at my leisure and think unhurried thoughts.  It is an inclination that has remained with me throughout my life.  Even during high school and college, when I spent much of my time as an actor, there was a special peace to be found high up in the catwalks above the stage, seeing but not seen.


I am still drawn to solitude, to times when I am either unobserved or merely unnoticed.  Neither judging nor be judged.  Just quietly “being.”  I was struck by the notion strongly, yet somewhat paradoxically, yesterday during a visit to Graceland Cemetery in Chicago.  It isn’t the Valley of the Kings, but it is probably as close as we get here in America.  The rich and powerful of this city of broad shoulders - Pullman, McCormick, Fields, et. al. - lie beneath obelisks and mausoleums beside tranquil ponds.  It is a pool of solitude in the midst of a teeming metropolis.  You do not take notice of others strolling beneath the trees and they do not acknowledge you.  The dead themselves, it seems, could wander about without attracting much attention.  It is a graceful, peaceful, pasture of the dear departed.

This new attention to solitude may well be heightened by the fact that I have been without my laptop for more than a week, and my cellphone is of the old dumb variety - I use it to talk, and it occasionally surprises me with a text message from Verizon.   Hence, the distraction technologies of today’s world have been largely muted.  The silence brews a strange blend of calm and anxiety.  The calm, of course, is born of solitude.  My childhood friend wraps sweet and soothing arms around me, lulling me to soft reflection.  The anxiety springs from our digitally enhanced sense of self-importance: surely something is going on out there in the wide, wild, wired and wireless world that needs my input, my attention, my keystrokes.

I still choose to believe that participation in the digital mediascape is option not mandate.  But more and more I doubt it.  I could not do my job in a non-digital environment.  I would not sit down and put stamps on envelopes to share these reflections with you.  On this trip, Matilda, my GPS led us through the Appalachians down roads without names that are undoubtedly used as luge tracks come winter - and deposited us at the doorstep of our B&B in excellent time.  I worked through last week’ Sunday NY Times crossword puzzle with my daughter and son-in-law, and they only had to use their iPhone Google app a couple of times.  I would not choose a pre-Internet life.  Yet, I remain concerned.

The TV claimed a spot in the living room during the 1950s.  Today it has its own room.  The smart phone also now claims part of our personal space.  I was at a gathering awhile ago, peopled mostly by adults in their 30s and 40s, with kids ranging from single digits to late teens.  I was in the midst of a conversation with my hostess when another adult stepped between us to place her cellphone directly in the hostess’s line of sight. No one missed a beat.  No one, other than I, and I only in retrospect, seemed to notice, let alone find it incredibly rude.  Walk into any coffeeshop and most restaurants - certainly at lunchtime - and you will find most patrons partnered by their phones.  They are no longer nestled in pockets.  Tiny and unobtrusive phones are no longer cool.  The new largescreen varieties are positioned on the table next to their - hmm?  Which is the master?  No doubt better restaurants will soon have “phone rests” designed to match the chef’s preferred presentation.  You don’t want some clod to knock over the spun sugar sculpture because there is no space for their touchscreen sweetheart.  If you can’t beat them, guide them.

I do not wish to become one of “those people,” and yet, ironically, I must.  One cannot teach about digital culture from afar.  So, soon, I will move to a droid, having given up waiting for the iPhone to come to Verizon.  But I will seek to maintain perspective, to avoid having my phone become my new BFF.  I think I’ll be able to manage it, after all, “I’m just chipping. I can quit anytime I want.”  Who said that? Kerouac? Joplin? Jackson? I dunno .  .  .  . 
.