Vine Triptych

With my Triptych I wanted to capture how my lifestyle allows me to be completely disconnected from the natural world, from where I spend my time, to what I eat/drink, and to how I can remove myself from weather. I like to think of myself as an outdoorsy person, I like backpacking and love to get out on trail, but in my day to day life I am complete removed from nature. It's something we have constructed out of convenience, and even though I like my excursions out in the wild, and I would like to spend more time without a roof over me, I'm just not willing to sacrifice all the small conveniences I have.

For my last video I actually tried to do something else first, but my questionable phone couldn't really manage cutting as fast as I needed to. What I had in mind was a series of fast cuts of my closing a car door, then my car window, then my house door, then a normal window, to show all of the conveniently closable portals we have to nature. Unfortunately my phone takes so long to start and stop recording that I couldn't do that, so I had to settle. Such is the struggle of an artist.

A reflection on the context of Ishmael as an argument

With this Ishmael discussion coming up I’ve been deciding what I think about Ishmael as an argument. I definitely like it aesthetically, and the argument flows pretty well, so I want to say that it’s effective. However I’m concerned that the argument doesn’t really have an end to which it pushes it’s reader. Not that I expect Quin to have all of the answers, as he raises very large questions, but it feels strange that he doesn't offer us anything. How can I judge the effectiveness of something that lacks an end aims to achieve? Furthermore, Ishmael doesn’t offer much that I wasn’t aware of already, and/or already believed. None of Quinn’s societal observations are particularly original or innovative, at least to his likely audience. Presumably Ishmael will be read primarily by people already concerned with or interested in environmental issues, who will already be versed in the criticisms and observations the book makes. So the I doubt the argument has many people to really win over. That’s the unfortunate thing about Ishmael and other similar persuasive novels, the book is most attractive to people who already agree with the sentiments presented. That doesn’t make them less valid, but it does call into question the purpose of the argument as a whole.  Perhaps if Quinn had incorporated more typical novel elements, and made the story side of the novel more compelling, his argument would have reached a wider range of people, and had the opportunity to actually win more people over.

There’s a funny irony that in Ishmael, Ishmael says that one cannot simply tell people to reject a story, but instead of must give them an alternate story to adopt in its place. Yet, Quinn fails to do just that. However, the book is still an interesting piece, and many of Quinn’s arguments are quite novel. I particularly liked the biblical reinterpretations, as they were so original.

If you want to win over people from the opposing viewpoint, you need to be clever about how you present your argument. As I have said I see Ishmael as dangerously close to preaching to the choir. Arguments that succeed in changing peoples mind are more like the pill you hide inside a piece of hotdog to give to your dog. The material needs to be accessible and desirable, so that it is widely disseminated to people of all viewpoints on the issue you intend to argue. Often this requires the author to dial back the volume of the argument itself, but that is far outweighed by the wider audience that is achieved. Quinn missed the hotdog around his pill, so even though its a good pill, only people who already believe it will help them will take it.  

Essentially, besides the lack of alternatives or suggestions, Quinn makes an effective and compelling argument, but its societal effectiveness may be compromised by its context and medium. Again this is not a fault of the argument itself, but a failure in the choice of how, when, and where the argument is presented.

We Live in Strange Times; An Inquiry Essay

We Live in Strange Times

“Men have become the tools of their tools.”  -Henry David Thoreau

How is emerging technology affecting the societal significance of the individual? Our visions of the future are split. Some writers show us futures where, such as in Dave Eggar’s The Circle, the ever increasing value placed on individuality and the cyber showmanship of oneself destroys the last remnants of human privacy. Others give us our classic sprawling dystopias,  always gray of course, where the omnipresence of technological institutions and the redesigning of human society as a tailorist fantasy has crushed the individual person. Before we delve too deeply into these fearsome visions we should remember to look backwards. We always nervously anticipate whatever innovations happen to loom on the horizon, building our expectations up to ridiculous proportions. We construct these radically alien visions of the future, where new technologies and scientific advancements have shattered the world as we knew it. Just look at popular visions of the future during the industrial revolution, or any other time of even moderate advancement. Groundbreaking as human innovations have been, I don’t believe they affect the human experience as intensely as we depict. The reality is much less dramatic. I think this is because no matter how quickly we can advance our tools, we ourselves do not change so rapidly. Thus, advancing technologies change how we do, not what we do. On the large scale the general themes and goals of the human experience remain stable.

Do we live in a particularly special historical moment? There will always be pressing current issues, so it will always be easy for a present observer to think we live during a historical tipping point. Unfortunately we are not all so important as we like to think. So how special is our time really? Obviously the so called digital revolution looks like one of the single greatest leaps in human history. It came out of nowhere to sweep across the globe. And on the large part I think our current understanding will stand up historically when this time period is looked back on in 100 years. The one place where I would differ is how quickly I believe our “turning point” is happening. It wouldn’t surprise me if in the future the digital revolution is viewed as a 40 year long period, or even longer. It’s easy to think that we are right on the cusp of something, but realistically this technology has been developing over the course of several decades. That in mind, the best way to examine the current changes in our relationships to technology is to look at it generationally.

How do the younger generations interact with technology differently from those before them? That path of examination should illustrate the direction in which we are heading. So for the sake of a convenient comparison,  How does my relationship with digital technology differ from my parents with it?  The classic jokes about older generations not knowing how to operate the latest and greatest technologies come to mind. However, I’m trying to think more in terms of technology’s role in our day to day lives, and how it affects our human relationships.The most obvious difference is that my parents notice their technology a lot more than I do. Many of the things that are still comparatively recent to my parents have existed for as long as I can remember, or at the very least for as long as I have been old enough to use them. For example, I have never known a time without cell phones, even iphones have been around since I was 12, so they don’t stand out to me. I don’t even find the technology particularly novel. Smartphones and cellular internet are a basic assumption for me. Of course my parents have this to some degree as well, overtime people can become accustomed to, and come to expect, anything. That being said, there is definitely a difference. What I notice most is the difference in our tolerance for spending time on the computer. If one of my parents spent 3 hours alone in a room entertaining themselves on a computer, they would start to feel a fatigue that I wouldn’t. It’s that feeling of going too long without human contact, when you just burn out on sitting in front of a screen. I just don’t experience that unless I spend at the very least an entire day in front of my computer. Of course some of that could be personal, I am more of a tech guy than my average peers, but I believe there is a significant generational difference here. It seems that digital interactions feel more like genuine human interactions to younger generations. A pattern that illustrates the increasing normalization of these digital interfaces into our lives, and the effects of growing up in the digital age.

Observing the differences in the ability of digital interactions to simulate genuine human interaction based on generation begs a further investigation of the language we use with this topic. What does genuine human interaction mean? The implication I have been making, and it is established convention, is that cyber interactions are inherently cheap, or somehow inferior to other forms of interactions. As different mediums of communication come out they take time to gain social legitimacy, both in our analyses and sentiments. Now that email and text messaging are in widespread usage, phone calls are viewed as more personal than they used to be, and the more communications system we develop the more we cherish the intimacy of paper letters. Imagine the significance and weight we associate with a handwritten letter these days, they feel so personal and “human”. Obviously when handwritten letters were the preeminent form of long distance communication they were not prized so highly. It seems strange to think now, but there was a time when sending a handwritten letter to someone that you could have gone to see in person, someone in your own city for example, was at best distant, and at worst simply rude. As new channels of communication mature they gain legitimacy, so perhaps we should not judge the newborn digital world too harshly. Forms of entertainment and mediums of storytelling follow the same pattern, progressively gaining legitimacy as the mature. Take for example, western theatre or the novel, both are now highly respected forms, and symbols of culture. When they were new, they were both regarded as cheaper, more popular forms of entertainment. Much like video games today. Given enough time I have no doubt that video games will mature as a medium, and gain greater cultural significance.

On Thoreau’s statement, “men have become the tools of their tools” It definitely holds water in a relativistic sense, but I don’t believe it should be taken absolutely. The statement is relevant and relatable at many moments in history. It is a timeless statement that every man can believe to be true about his own time, much like “we live in strange times.” The proof itself is how long ago Thoreau’s statement was made, yet when I think about it, I view it as something that is happening just now. Think of the Sight video, the technology in the video looks completely world warping. To our perspective the tech has completely surpassed the human, but wouldn’t a person living in 1950 have the same reaction if shown a vision of our present? These technologies become less imposing as we are given time to adjust to them, and fold them into our human experience.  

The Ignorance in Techno Worship

It doesn't surprise me in the least we humans are fascinated by the marvels of modern digital technology, but what does surprise me is that we can maintain such fascination while lacking any legitimate understanding of what we hold so dear. Think of the smart phones and computers that are now commonplace. Through many levels of successful abstraction, system developers have managed to move users so far "off the metal" that the average user no longer understands even the slightest operational detail of their machines. And this isn't a mistake, in fact its the goal here, and by all accounts it's a great success. The issue here though is that people are becoming increasingly dependent on the companies that make these devices and services simply to operate them. Wait, but that doesn't seem bad at all. What happens is that as we become less and less aware of the actual workings of the technologies we base our lives around, all-in-one packages become more and more attractive. 

Think of the computing products and services you would select for one of your elderly family members. It must be simple, intuitive, and integrated. You don't want a television that takes 5 remotes to operate, because grandma can't keep track of that. You look for something that has one remote to cleanly control everything she has, saving her the pain and confusion of delving into the specifics of each device. Our societal relationship to new technologies is the same situation, just look at the massive efforts of google to integrate as many different services as possible into one experience. One presence. This is even a google website right here. As technologies become increasingly more complex, we, by comparison, become ever more like this hypothetical grandmother. 

Think of any stories you have read or watched that take place in a technological dystopia. The preeminent cliched feature of the technological dystopia is the single omnipresent tech company that has expanded to, and synthesized, every aspect of life that can be digitized. This fantasy is the continuation of the current trend of ignorance in the face of ever increasing technology, allowing companies to entice individuals into trading privacy and control for easier user experiences.

I'm amazed that such a large number of people are content to not even understand any of the devices or technologies that now rule our human interactions. Sure it's easy to write off, humans don't always like getting into the nitty gritty back end of things of they are already working well, but why isn't this something that we take seriously enough to educate ourselves on, or at the very least our children. I attend a school that clearly realizes the significance of computer technology in the digital age, it would be nearly impossible not to. Every student at this school is required to purchase a laptop, yet the same institution doesn't offer a single computer science related course. How many of the people who will read this, of course on a computer, will know what a transistor is?