Anti-Rec: Alone Together
Nov. 16th, 2011 06:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sabotabbyI used to know a guy who hung around anarchist and other activist circles when I was involved with the Anarchist Free Space back in 2001. Weird guy. We didn't get along at all, to the point where he came close to decking me over an ideological disagreement. He wasn't really an anarchist—in fact, he professed no great objection to capitalism as an economic system—but he couldn't find any takers for his bizarrely specific politics anywhere else, and anarchists are too antiauthoritarian to exclude someone from their collectives just because the person is potentially violent, doesn't share any of their ideals, blocks consensus, and is unconcerned with piddly things like personal hygiene.
This guy was the founder and sole member of a committee against technology. Don't get me wrong—he was neither a Luddite nor an anti-civ or primitivist anarchist (though I hate those guys too, don't get me started). He did not object to the technology that produced his glasses, the clothes he wore, the photocopied pamphlets he distributed. Rather, he had been laid off back in the 80s, replaced by a primitive computer, and so any technology developed subsequently was responsible for massive job loss and the destruction of humanity.
Reading Sherry Turkle's Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other, I kept being reminded of that guy. It's not that Turkle's a Luddite. It's more that she's terrified of the future, of obsolescence and irrelevance. The technology that her generation is comfortable with is just fine; the technology used by Kids These Days With Their Cellphones and Baggy Pants is going to destroy civilization as we know it.
Or something. Turkle talks a lot about the negative impact of technology on individuals, that it makes us more depressed and doesn't solve our problems, but devotes perhaps a paragraph to some vaguely worded solutions for an issue that I'm not entirely convinced exists. Nor does she amuse me by painting a vivid picture of a future Gattaca or 1984. No, she talks about sad stories of people who feel isolated or overwhelmed by technology. Occasionally, she offers a counter opinion, only to counter it with, "but is this really what we want?" Criticizing this book feels like throwing darts at Jello—there's nothing solid to even attack.
Alone Together is actually two books. One is about how robots, specifically sociable robots (I don't think Turkle objects to the robots that, say, make the car she presumably drives), are evil and are going to replace people. They will start by replacing caregivers for children and the elderly and become romantic companions for people with robot fetishes, and eventually we'll just take them for granted and even prefer them to people. The second half of the book is about social networking technologies, and in particular cell phones. Turkle isn't really a fan of those either.
A massive flaw in the book is the lack of hard facts. She's obviously done research—she's a professor at MIT after all—but much of the information in the book reads to me as incredibly anecdotal, culled from an admittedly extensive series of interviews. These interviews seem skewed towards WEIRD, and the upper-middle to upper class segment of the WEIRD population (she interviewed vastly more private school than public school students in the second half of the book, for example), and selected for a particular level of neurosis. Without stats, I have no way of determining how broad her sample is. Most of the people she talks about seem rather broken, even by my standards—abandoned children, abandoned seniors, WoW addicts, and so on. And I feel that she imposes her own neurosis on the interviews, condescending to her subjects and sounding for all the world like a concerned Jewish mother.
I'm not qualified to quibble with her discussion of robotics, which would be vastly more interesting if sociable robots were as advanced and widely used as she seems to think they are, and also if scientists had already invented a way to bridge the Uncanny Valley. I still don't buy her argument that there is a substantial difference between the way a child interacts with a Furby or Tamagotchi and the way a child interacts with some other favourite toy. She describes children experiencing severe confusion, anxiety, and overidentification with robotic toys, but I've honestly seen kids act the same way if they think a stuffed animal has gotten lost or damaged. And while I do think there are people out there who would prefer a robotic lover over a human one, I'm not sure that there's any harm in it, as they are not generally people who would be getting laid without robots.
The social networking part is what I really read the book for. You all know that I love long-form blogging, loathe Twitter, use Facebook only grudgingly, and can't figure out what to do with G+ or Tumblr.* I get frustrated when my kids are more interested in their cellphones than in my scintillating lessons. I am suspicious of e-readers, particularly those that can't manage to get line length correct. I like getting stuff in the mail, I don't own a TV, and if you phone me for no good reason, I resent it. What I'm saying is that my relationship with social technology is complicated.**
So is Turkle's, except that she won't admit it. She likes the phone a lot. Texting, e-mail, and IM are all dangerous technologies, because you can multitask rather than devote your full attention to the other person, leading to social isolation. Phones are great, though, because they mean that you are giving the person your undivided attention. Especially if it's a landline. Because apparently people never multitask while on the phone. (Pro-tip: If I've been talking to you on the phone longer than five minutes, landline or not, regardless of how much I like you, it's guaranteed I am looking at pictures of cats on the internet. And I assume that you are too.) Never mind that phones also interrupt family dinners, that they replace more "authentic" communication like face-to-face contact or handwritten letters—landlines are what Turkle's generation are comfortable with, so it is good, personal technology. Skype, which actually does guarantee undivided attention (I mean, I'm still looking at cat pictures, but Skype means I've actually made a plan to talk to someone and that someone can see if I'm not mentally present), is somehow bad because theoretically you can Skype from a cell phone, so you may be lying about your location. It's a kind of logic that isn't.
Turkle has a curious relationship with the idea of real time. Phones are real-time technology, which is why one of the reasons I hate them and she views them as authentic, allowing you to be honest and not edit. Facebook, blogs, and e-mail are not real-time, and so you create an avatar, presenting an idealized self that is edited for public consumption. She spends a lot of time extolling the virtue of the authentic, unedited self, while telling stories of teenagers who agonize about what information to include in a Facebook profile†. And yet at the end, complaining about regular Skype conversations with her daughter, she waxes nostalgic for letters and scrapbooking—edited memory, and no different in my mind to a teenager deciding to remove his zits in Photoshop or to not post that picture where she's wearing sweatpants around the house.
The author professes a good deal of concern for marginalized people, particularly the elderly and disabled (she's so much of a disability ally that she refers to one of her friends as "confined to a wheelchair"!). And yet she dismisses their voices. Again and again, it becomes clear that the dichotomy she poses is often not between a human caregiver and a mechanical/distant one, but between the mechanical/distant and nothing at all. (Though she denies this, and vaguely suggests at a paradigm shift, with a grand total of one worthwhile suggestion, which is to pay caregivers more.) Depressed people who now use PostSecret or anonymous memes to cry out for help did not, in the past, go around the corner to cry on a neighbour's shoulder. They suffered in isolation or killed themselves. The technology that she views as inherently isolating is, for people like me, incredibly liberating. If I ever end up in a position where I need to use a bedpan, you're damned right I want a robot rather than a human to change it.
The thing is, there's some value in this book. Certainly, an argument can be made around the addictiveness of technology (Turkle dismisses the addiction model, though), the shifting paradigms around privacy and anonymity, the extension of the working day through always-on technology (except Marx basically made that argument, more coherently and way before cellphones were invented), but every time she starts to get close to those arguments, there's another really cringeworthy personal anecdote coupled with a vague warning. Whatever point she's making is lost through a sheer lack of logic and consistency.
Incidentally, she's a tremendous hypocrite, and here's a low blow. This book was published in 2010. The author, who insists on authentic, hands-on human interaction and sighs over girls who make their Facebook profile pictures thinner, was born in 1948. So this is the avatar—I'm sorry, the author photo—she presents to the world on her book jacket:
There is nothing wrong with what she actually looks like. I mean, I hope I look this good at 62:
I'm just saying that presenting something other than your tangible physical presence, warts and all, is nothing new, and predates Photoshop, Facebook, and Second Life avatars. We all do it. My generation, and my kids' generation, is simply more conscious of the presentation of multiple selves, the illusion of privacy, and the fact that there may just not be anything all that special to being human.
Oh, and that anti-technology guy? Saw him last weekend, handing out the same pamphlets at the Occupy Toronto camp. You know, that protest that's part of a global movement that only exists because of widespread access to newfangled things like the internet and cell phones. The one where, in some cities, innovative activists have created bicycle-powered generators to power their laptops and allow them to share ideas, strategies, and create communities with likeminded people all over the world. So there's that.
* I'm going to point you in the direction of my favourite Tumblr of the moment: Yo, Is This Racist? I want to buy that person a drink. Several drinks, maybe.
** In other news, it's not my imagination that analog really does sound better, is it? /hipster douchebag
† I'm trying, and failing, to think of more than a handful of my kids doing this. They just put everything up and don't care if people know they like geek shit. Everyone likes geek shit.
This guy was the founder and sole member of a committee against technology. Don't get me wrong—he was neither a Luddite nor an anti-civ or primitivist anarchist (though I hate those guys too, don't get me started). He did not object to the technology that produced his glasses, the clothes he wore, the photocopied pamphlets he distributed. Rather, he had been laid off back in the 80s, replaced by a primitive computer, and so any technology developed subsequently was responsible for massive job loss and the destruction of humanity.
Reading Sherry Turkle's Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other, I kept being reminded of that guy. It's not that Turkle's a Luddite. It's more that she's terrified of the future, of obsolescence and irrelevance. The technology that her generation is comfortable with is just fine; the technology used by Kids These Days With Their Cellphones and Baggy Pants is going to destroy civilization as we know it.
Or something. Turkle talks a lot about the negative impact of technology on individuals, that it makes us more depressed and doesn't solve our problems, but devotes perhaps a paragraph to some vaguely worded solutions for an issue that I'm not entirely convinced exists. Nor does she amuse me by painting a vivid picture of a future Gattaca or 1984. No, she talks about sad stories of people who feel isolated or overwhelmed by technology. Occasionally, she offers a counter opinion, only to counter it with, "but is this really what we want?" Criticizing this book feels like throwing darts at Jello—there's nothing solid to even attack.
Alone Together is actually two books. One is about how robots, specifically sociable robots (I don't think Turkle objects to the robots that, say, make the car she presumably drives), are evil and are going to replace people. They will start by replacing caregivers for children and the elderly and become romantic companions for people with robot fetishes, and eventually we'll just take them for granted and even prefer them to people. The second half of the book is about social networking technologies, and in particular cell phones. Turkle isn't really a fan of those either.
A massive flaw in the book is the lack of hard facts. She's obviously done research—she's a professor at MIT after all—but much of the information in the book reads to me as incredibly anecdotal, culled from an admittedly extensive series of interviews. These interviews seem skewed towards WEIRD, and the upper-middle to upper class segment of the WEIRD population (she interviewed vastly more private school than public school students in the second half of the book, for example), and selected for a particular level of neurosis. Without stats, I have no way of determining how broad her sample is. Most of the people she talks about seem rather broken, even by my standards—abandoned children, abandoned seniors, WoW addicts, and so on. And I feel that she imposes her own neurosis on the interviews, condescending to her subjects and sounding for all the world like a concerned Jewish mother.
I'm not qualified to quibble with her discussion of robotics, which would be vastly more interesting if sociable robots were as advanced and widely used as she seems to think they are, and also if scientists had already invented a way to bridge the Uncanny Valley. I still don't buy her argument that there is a substantial difference between the way a child interacts with a Furby or Tamagotchi and the way a child interacts with some other favourite toy. She describes children experiencing severe confusion, anxiety, and overidentification with robotic toys, but I've honestly seen kids act the same way if they think a stuffed animal has gotten lost or damaged. And while I do think there are people out there who would prefer a robotic lover over a human one, I'm not sure that there's any harm in it, as they are not generally people who would be getting laid without robots.
The social networking part is what I really read the book for. You all know that I love long-form blogging, loathe Twitter, use Facebook only grudgingly, and can't figure out what to do with G+ or Tumblr.* I get frustrated when my kids are more interested in their cellphones than in my scintillating lessons. I am suspicious of e-readers, particularly those that can't manage to get line length correct. I like getting stuff in the mail, I don't own a TV, and if you phone me for no good reason, I resent it. What I'm saying is that my relationship with social technology is complicated.**
So is Turkle's, except that she won't admit it. She likes the phone a lot. Texting, e-mail, and IM are all dangerous technologies, because you can multitask rather than devote your full attention to the other person, leading to social isolation. Phones are great, though, because they mean that you are giving the person your undivided attention. Especially if it's a landline. Because apparently people never multitask while on the phone. (Pro-tip: If I've been talking to you on the phone longer than five minutes, landline or not, regardless of how much I like you, it's guaranteed I am looking at pictures of cats on the internet. And I assume that you are too.) Never mind that phones also interrupt family dinners, that they replace more "authentic" communication like face-to-face contact or handwritten letters—landlines are what Turkle's generation are comfortable with, so it is good, personal technology. Skype, which actually does guarantee undivided attention (I mean, I'm still looking at cat pictures, but Skype means I've actually made a plan to talk to someone and that someone can see if I'm not mentally present), is somehow bad because theoretically you can Skype from a cell phone, so you may be lying about your location. It's a kind of logic that isn't.
Turkle has a curious relationship with the idea of real time. Phones are real-time technology, which is why one of the reasons I hate them and she views them as authentic, allowing you to be honest and not edit. Facebook, blogs, and e-mail are not real-time, and so you create an avatar, presenting an idealized self that is edited for public consumption. She spends a lot of time extolling the virtue of the authentic, unedited self, while telling stories of teenagers who agonize about what information to include in a Facebook profile†. And yet at the end, complaining about regular Skype conversations with her daughter, she waxes nostalgic for letters and scrapbooking—edited memory, and no different in my mind to a teenager deciding to remove his zits in Photoshop or to not post that picture where she's wearing sweatpants around the house.
The author professes a good deal of concern for marginalized people, particularly the elderly and disabled (she's so much of a disability ally that she refers to one of her friends as "confined to a wheelchair"!). And yet she dismisses their voices. Again and again, it becomes clear that the dichotomy she poses is often not between a human caregiver and a mechanical/distant one, but between the mechanical/distant and nothing at all. (Though she denies this, and vaguely suggests at a paradigm shift, with a grand total of one worthwhile suggestion, which is to pay caregivers more.) Depressed people who now use PostSecret or anonymous memes to cry out for help did not, in the past, go around the corner to cry on a neighbour's shoulder. They suffered in isolation or killed themselves. The technology that she views as inherently isolating is, for people like me, incredibly liberating. If I ever end up in a position where I need to use a bedpan, you're damned right I want a robot rather than a human to change it.
The thing is, there's some value in this book. Certainly, an argument can be made around the addictiveness of technology (Turkle dismisses the addiction model, though), the shifting paradigms around privacy and anonymity, the extension of the working day through always-on technology (except Marx basically made that argument, more coherently and way before cellphones were invented), but every time she starts to get close to those arguments, there's another really cringeworthy personal anecdote coupled with a vague warning. Whatever point she's making is lost through a sheer lack of logic and consistency.
Incidentally, she's a tremendous hypocrite, and here's a low blow. This book was published in 2010. The author, who insists on authentic, hands-on human interaction and sighs over girls who make their Facebook profile pictures thinner, was born in 1948. So this is the avatar—I'm sorry, the author photo—she presents to the world on her book jacket:
There is nothing wrong with what she actually looks like. I mean, I hope I look this good at 62:
I'm just saying that presenting something other than your tangible physical presence, warts and all, is nothing new, and predates Photoshop, Facebook, and Second Life avatars. We all do it. My generation, and my kids' generation, is simply more conscious of the presentation of multiple selves, the illusion of privacy, and the fact that there may just not be anything all that special to being human.
Oh, and that anti-technology guy? Saw him last weekend, handing out the same pamphlets at the Occupy Toronto camp. You know, that protest that's part of a global movement that only exists because of widespread access to newfangled things like the internet and cell phones. The one where, in some cities, innovative activists have created bicycle-powered generators to power their laptops and allow them to share ideas, strategies, and create communities with likeminded people all over the world. So there's that.
* I'm going to point you in the direction of my favourite Tumblr of the moment: Yo, Is This Racist? I want to buy that person a drink. Several drinks, maybe.
** In other news, it's not my imagination that analog really does sound better, is it? /hipster douchebag
† I'm trying, and failing, to think of more than a handful of my kids doing this. They just put everything up and don't care if people know they like geek shit. Everyone likes geek shit.
no subject
Date: 2011-11-17 04:31 pm (UTC)