Against the machine: Our creepy techno fetish
Philip Primeau
Issue date: 4/24/08 Section: Opinion
Any e-mails to be read? Any widgets to be tested? If you get bored, there's always the ex's thousand Facebook photos (they haven't changed, but perhaps you have).
Click, scroll, click. Easy as that. Quick as that.
What's funny is that the more "information" you gobble up, the more hungry you become. Somehow, the more you figure out, the less you're certain of, or satisfied with, anything.
Rod Dreher, a religious commentator and journalist, wrote recently, "[It's an] interesting Information Age paradox: the more information an individual takes in, the less he knows. That is, he doesn't appreciate the difference between information and knowledge."
His observations spring from a reading of The Black Swan, by scholar Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Taleb suggests that constant evaluation of goings-on cause us to imbibe "toxic information," which has not been "properly processed, weighed, measured and placed in context."
He explains, "The more detailed knowledge one gets of empirical reality, the more one will see noise and mistake it for actual information."
It's a regular feeding frenzy, basically, on the personal and societal levels and everywhere in between. But we're feeding, you see, on rot.
A thirst for communication, knowledge and novelty is great-and new finds have always meant new questions-but sacrificing authentic inquiry and genuine conversation to gorge on anything that makes us take momentary pause is rather self-defeating. Chasing the data dragon is a downward spiral.
Today, I find myself in a ceaseless, sleepless world, bombarded by random things, by noises and images so petty and ephemeral that they lack even the constitutions to grow old. They simply appear and disappear; they are looked at and forgotten, replaced by new noises and images.
This has always been the case, of course, but the churn-over is presently sped up to a point where it's hard pressed to lay roots or establish a sensible view of what's truly real and really true.
More and more often, it seems "killing our televisions" might not be nearly enough. Imagine killing our computers ("But how would we learn?"), our iPods ("But how would we endure the gym?"), our cell phones ("But how would we talk?").
Imagine forgetting every URL, every screen name, every channel listing, every e-mail address. Imagine no rings, no updates, no backlog of voice or e-mails, no favorites list, no soft hum of the internal processor. Imagine just-slowing down.
Would life be very empty then, or very free?
Click, scroll, click. Easy as that. Quick as that.
What's funny is that the more "information" you gobble up, the more hungry you become. Somehow, the more you figure out, the less you're certain of, or satisfied with, anything.
Rod Dreher, a religious commentator and journalist, wrote recently, "[It's an] interesting Information Age paradox: the more information an individual takes in, the less he knows. That is, he doesn't appreciate the difference between information and knowledge."
His observations spring from a reading of The Black Swan, by scholar Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Taleb suggests that constant evaluation of goings-on cause us to imbibe "toxic information," which has not been "properly processed, weighed, measured and placed in context."
He explains, "The more detailed knowledge one gets of empirical reality, the more one will see noise and mistake it for actual information."
It's a regular feeding frenzy, basically, on the personal and societal levels and everywhere in between. But we're feeding, you see, on rot.
A thirst for communication, knowledge and novelty is great-and new finds have always meant new questions-but sacrificing authentic inquiry and genuine conversation to gorge on anything that makes us take momentary pause is rather self-defeating. Chasing the data dragon is a downward spiral.
Today, I find myself in a ceaseless, sleepless world, bombarded by random things, by noises and images so petty and ephemeral that they lack even the constitutions to grow old. They simply appear and disappear; they are looked at and forgotten, replaced by new noises and images.
This has always been the case, of course, but the churn-over is presently sped up to a point where it's hard pressed to lay roots or establish a sensible view of what's truly real and really true.
More and more often, it seems "killing our televisions" might not be nearly enough. Imagine killing our computers ("But how would we learn?"), our iPods ("But how would we endure the gym?"), our cell phones ("But how would we talk?").
Imagine forgetting every URL, every screen name, every channel listing, every e-mail address. Imagine no rings, no updates, no backlog of voice or e-mails, no favorites list, no soft hum of the internal processor. Imagine just-slowing down.
Would life be very empty then, or very free?
Viewing Comments 1 - 1 of 1
Monica
posted 7/19/08 @ 8:54 PM EST
I've never really thought about technology as holding me back, but that is a very interesting perspective.
Our generation really does get to the point where, we're so restricted from basically worshipping our electronics. (Continued…)
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