Comments on: The Question Concerning Gadgetry

By: Touching Screens: Digital Natives and Their Digits | Roy Christopher

Touching Screens: Digital Natives and Their Digits | Roy Christopher — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 14:41:33 +0000

[...] Steve Jobs “coded a part of her OS” a bit much, this clip reminds me of a story by Jaron Lanier from the January, 1998 issue of Wired about children being smarter and expecting more from [...]

By: Well Red Bear » What Means These Screens? Two More Books

Well Red Bear » What Means These Screens? Two More Books — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 21:30:35 +0000

[...] these assessments are stiflingly negative and sometimes they are uselessly celebratory. Jaron Lanier’s recent book flirts with the former, while other current thinkers lean toward the latter. For instance, where [...]

By: What Means These Screens? Two More Books | Roy Christopher

What Means These Screens? Two More Books | Roy Christopher — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 19:15:14 +0000

By: Tracy Seeley

Tracy Seeley — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 01:15:14 +0000

I appreciate this thoughtful review. I’ve been thinking about many of the same issues, especially the implications of Web 2.0 on actual social interaction among people who live in physical proximity. But I also struggle with the effects of digital media and the internet on my own habits of work and thought. It’s easy to not only lose a morning of work to Arts & Letters Daily (as Steven Pinker writes in the quote above)–It’s also easy to lose my train of thought and focus because of my new brain wiring. Skim, click, move on–makes it harder and harder to dig deep and stay with an idea or story. This means more lost work than a morning, I fear, over the course of a week. At any rate, I’ll keep clicking and pondering. Thanks for this post.

By: Dave Allen

Dave Allen — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 15:41:20 +0000

Two things, both from other, brighter minds than mine.. "we break stuff before we know what replaces it, and we invent things before we know what they are for." Frank Chimero Frank Chimero article "If electronic media were hazardous to intelligence, the quality of science would be plummeting. Yet discoveries are multiplying like fruit flies, and progress is dizzying. Other activities in the life of the mind, like philosophy, history and cultural criticism, are likewise flourishing, as anyone who has lost a morning of work to the Web site Arts & Letters Daily can attest." Steven Pinker Steven Pinker op-ed

By: Roy Christopher

Roy Christopher — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 16:29:41 +0000

Agreed, Gyrus. I’m in no way advocating laissez-faire technological determinism. The current forward momentum of technology should certainly be questioned, but my position on how to do so is admittedly still developing (a lot of my recent books reviews are little pieces of this ongoing development). With that said, I haven’t seen it done in a way that I can fully subscribe to yet. I mean, I’d love to see a city built strictly for bikes and mass transit instead of for cars, but that’s my bias, my preference (though at our current rate, I might get a glimpse of one). To use that preference as a basis for critique is sloppy, selfish, and — in the case of the books above — intolerably condescending.

By: Gyrus

Gyrus — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 19:20:45 +0000

There’s a complexity hidden by Gibson’s point (which is well taken). Whenever I think of this an old silly joke comes up:

“I’m glad I wasn’t born in France.”

“Why?”

“I can’t speak French.”

What I’m getting at is, to imagine being stripped of all our technology paints an entirely false picture of whatever “pre-technological” humanity was. (Of course there’s never been any such thing – it’s entirely likely that our ancestors, like modern chimps, used tools of some sort. Let’s assume we’re talking about nomadic hunter-gatherers here – the transition to sedentary agriculture is as useful a transition in “technological intensity” to talk about as any.)

Anyway, imagining modern technology suddenly vanishing, and holding the ensuing mess as a reason to value this technology is as silly as the person in the joke thinking that not being able to speak French would be a problem if he had been born there.

In a way this backs up the maxim “there’s no way back”, in that it veers towards a kind of strong cultural relativism that makes any comparison between cultures really difficult. But “there’s no way back” shouldn’t be allowed to slide too easily into “there’s only one way forward”. I think this is the irreducible value of “luddite” critiques. Even if they fall into the delusion that we can happily reverse to a pre-industrial or pre-agricultural world, they bring into question the forward momentum of current technology.