I don’t want to sound alarmist, but I’m a little bit worried about how rapidly and thoroughly technology is becoming infused into our daily lives. Yes, I reap the benefits of this technology — I use the computer to contact my friends, order products, read about world events, do research, and write this blog. I recently joined the crowd, using my cellphone in a store to call home for some purchasing information.
Then I went even further and rang my husband on his blackberry while he was grocery shopping, to remind him to pick up several things we’d left off the list. OK, full confession: I called him at least three times on that shopping trip. But, really, I’ve almost never done that before. I could say it saved us gas since we didn’t have to make the extra trips back, but that would be somewhat disingenuous. In the pre-blackberry days, I knew I had to make a good shopping list in the first place, or live without the missing items for a while. So I admit, I find it very handy, very convenient. But I also feel troubled by the many questions raised by the unexamined use of these conveniences.
These questions aren’t just about the known and unknown ecological impacts of the production, use and disposal of all this technology. These loom large: the amount of fossil fuel and water used, the toxic chemicals and flame retardants outgased and offdusted, the overflowing landfills and unregulated “recycling” of hazardous components, the bombardments of micro-wave radiation and electromagnetic frequencies, and so on.
Such problems are getting some attention, as groups such as Greenpeace pressure makers like Apple to “green” their products, and organizations collect cellphones for re-use. The questions I fear we’re not pondering and discussing nearly enough — as citizens, leaders, educators, parents, neighbors, families and friends — have to do with how these technologies shape our culture and our world. It is easy for us to see what we’re gaining by this simpler, faster, connectivity; it’s harder for us to tell what we may be losing.
Hard because we’ve been conditioned for generations to think in terms of material progress. We’ve been poked and prodded by commercial culture to believe that buying it all means success. The allure has been powerful. Eco-theologian Thomas Berry argues that “the Industrial Age itself, as we have known it, can be described as a period of technological entrancement” (82, “The Dream of the Earth”). To onlookers such as the Amish, entranced is exactly how we must appear, as we navigate traffic talking on our phones, stare intently at our laptops in crowded coffeehouses, or sit on busy trains, earbuds in firmly in place, texting with great concentration.
But I think we might appear weird even to ourselves if we stepped back and took a good hard look. In an interview with Derrick Jensen in “Listening to the Land,” Jerry Mander paints a picture of us that puts it into stark perspective: “virtually all of us live inside an entirely homocentric reality — in artificial environments, interacting at all times with objects, rhythms, and environments that are completely the product of the human mind — you could say that we’re living inside our own brains … we’re co-evolving only with artifacts and environments created by our own minds” (104).
Now, I’m a fan of the products of the human mind: I love literature, music, art, architecture. But historically most, if not all, of these products have had a basis in the interaction of humans with their natural surroundings — even in the cities of the past. And when there seemed to be a trending away from that, at the dawn of the Industrial Aage, for example, there were voices like those of the Romantics — Wordsworth springs readily to mind — calling us to take heed.
Taking heed means evaluating substance, and examining questions of balance. It does not mean blanket condemnation. Even Wordsworth wrote an 1833 poem entitled “Steamboats, Viaducts, and Railways,” in which he called these Nature’s “lawful offspring in Man’s art.” Looking for balance means assessing whether we can accommodate certain technologies in certain contexts, while maintaining our humanity and our relationship with the non-human-created world that supports us.
So, to what extent are we really just “living inside our own brains,” to the exclusion of the natural world? A friend recently sent me a link to a TED talks video about a wearable new device called “Sixth Sense.” (Click here.)
This mechanism has an Internet connection and a projector, enabling the wearer to access and project data. An article on Wired.com describes the idea behind it: “Pattie Maes of the lab’s Fluid Interfaces group said the research is aimed at creating a new digital “sixth sense” for humans. In the tactile world, we use our five senses to take in information about our environment and respond to it, Maes explained. But a lot of the information that helps us understand and respond to the world doesn’t come from these senses. Instead, it comes from computers and the internet. Maes’ goal is to harness computers to feed us information in an organic fashion, like our existing senses.”
The students who created it “were thinking about how a person could be more integrated into the world around them and access information without having to do something like take out a phone.” (Click here.)
Watching the video, I felt that the device was simply the logical extension of computers and cellphones, but the tone of both the video and the Wired article seemed to herald this accessory as an evolutionary breakthrough. Donning “Sixth Sense,” we can finally avail ourselves of all the “senses” now at our command.
But just what “world around us” is it that we are going to be more integrated into with this device, and how much of a “sense” is it when it conveys more of a certain limited type of information? I suspect, along with ecological design professor David Orr, that we are already “drowning in unassimilated information, most of which fits no meaningful picture of the world” (47). Do we need more, or do we need more sorting and analyzing skills?
One of the disturbing aspects of the video was simply the name of the device, whether meant playfully or not. I’ve always thought of a “sixth sense” as that elusive, mind-body intelligence — wisdom, even — that arises in a situation, and allows us to know something more than just the raw data that presents itself or someone else’s interpretation of the facts.
This is a sense that has, to some extent, been identified with the “ways of knowing” of various indigenous peoples. For instance, the ability of the Inuit people, as Orr describes it: “They can repeat a long trek using nothing more than the memory of the same journey made years before. With eyes closed they can draw accurate maps of their coastline. And their best maps drawn long ago rival the best maps we can make with satellite data … They make little distinction between space and time. They observe details with a keenness lost to Western people” (7, “The Nature of Design”).
Some argue that these kinds of knowledge systems, arising out of direct experience with the land and the intergenerational communication of lifeways, are in fact devalued and threatened by the machine-based model of the mind associated with the rise of digital technology. C.A. Bowers’ thought-provoking article, “Using Computers in Native American Classrooms: Trojan Horse or Cultural Affirming Technology?” (click here) looks at these issues in more depth.
Others might claim that our relationship with devices like “Sixth Sense” is the modern equivalent of Inuit mapping, helping us navigate the reality we have created now that we don’t live in the kinds of landscapes traditional people inhabited. I would point out that huge portions of the globe still live in something more like the “ancient world,” and only cheap and abundant fossil fuel has enabled us to pretend that we don’t. And who knows how long we can keep it up. We’ve simultaneously created the conditions for global warming and peak oil while losing many of our basic, self-reliance skills. Try as we might to build our bubble of convenience, we still, body and soul, need the planet from which we have sprung, and it needs our care. Dependence on an Internet connection won’t get us everywhere we need to go.
How do we approach technology with our eyes open to the kinds of choices we may be making when we adopt it? Professor Orr relates how his Amish friends explain the beautiful limiting power of the horse. Knowing that they must rely on horsepower for their agriculture and transportation helps them maintain their cultural values. They won’t be tempted to overconsume or overacquire, because they simply cannot cultivate huge farms single-handedly, or haul home big consumer goods in their buggies.
In the larger culture based on growth and consumption, we’ve mostly abandoned limits in the name of modernity. What sense can we tap into for guidance on how much, and under what circumstances, we incorporate new technologies into our lives? We need to be talking about this with each other, and not just through articles, books and blogs, but face to face.
About the author: Ruth Ann Smalley, Ph.D., is an educator and a certified Eden Energy medicine practitioner with a practice in Albany. She’s also an Honest Weight Food Co-op member worker, and writes a monthly column for the co-op’s newsletter.
