"The Borg have a singular goal, namely the consumption of technology, rather than wealth or political expansion as most species seek." (Star Trek Archives, CBS Paramount Television, CBS Studios 2006)It's 6 a.m., and the alarm clock glares with digital indifference to the pulsating signal of the start of your day. Somewhere between sleep and awakeness you head toward the shower when you suddenly remember, "I'm on call this week.. better take the cell phone.... just in case I get a call". Now aside from the sheer ridiculousness of this notion.. that your cell phone is suddenly waterproof and you could actually answer it while sudsing in the showering, it illustrates an even more ridiculous point.. namely, just how much technology actually controls our lives. The irony of it is this same technology was supposed to free us from the mundane and the ordinary, adding effortless convenience to our everyday lives. But at what cost? Are we truly consumers of technology, or has technology begun to consume us?
As I ask myself this question, I begin to think of HAL 9000, the AI computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). HAL, the all-seeing artificial intelligence created to help and guide the crew of Discovery, soon decided to take over the ship and terminate the humans onboard to continue the prime directive. It's interesting to note that the later of the Space Odyssey film series assimilate HAL and Bowman (his nemesis) into one being, coveying the message that man and machine, humans and the technology they create, are destined to become one (as HAL and Bowman merged to form Halman in the last film 3001: The Final Odyssey, 1997). HAL and Bowman became the first borg. But to some degree, we are all becoming like the borg, with our blue tooths and blackberrys and iPods, happly texting, tweeting, and mp3-ing to confirm our existence in a wired world. Escape from boredom is only a 3G away (downloads at blazing speeds for instant gratification).
Anthony Doerr reflects on our compulsion to stay connected to the grid in "Am I Still Here?", an article he wrote for Orion Magazine in 2007. Doerr uses vivid, delightful imagery to describe his struggle to find balance between the virtual world and his other real world responsibilities. That line is often blurred when we must connect to the wired world to meet obligations, which Doerr says leads to a rationalization process for sacrificing time away from family and significant others for online time (Doerr, 2007). Inspite of the fact that we seem to be losing more and more private time as we crowd in more and more technology in our lives, our dependence on our cell phones and pda devices seem to be growing rather than diminishing. Doerr develops an alter ego whom he calls "Z" in his article to explain the internal struggle he faces in his quest for balance. "Z", the pale and puny voice in his head that kept telling him to check his email, read a blog, or surf the net instead of engaging in other real-world activities is a very good illustration of the dilemma and the question.. are we replacing social interaction and meaningful relationships with the internet, cell phones, and online activities?
So what exactly is driving our thirst for technology and our compulsion to stay connected? In Neil Swidey's Boston Globe article, The End of Alone, Dalton Conley's observation that our obsession to stay connected may be driven by a fear that we will miss out on something may be quite true, and it may be as simple as that. Conley, a sociology professor at New York University and author of Elsewhere, U.S.A.: How We Got From the Company Man, Family Dinners, and the Affluent Society to the Home Office, BlackBerry Moms, and Economic Anxiety, believes that the act of staying connected and wired is actually creating this anxiety (Conley, 2009). Conley concludes that, "it's very hard for people to unplug and be alone -- and be with the one data stream of their mind." (Conley, 2009) Images of Stephen King's The Lawnmover Man (1992) come to mind as I reflect on Conley's observation. Job, the mildy-retarded man in the movie, is turned into a maniacal genius with CIA-sought-after powers when a brilliant scientist (Pierce Brosnan) "wires" him into a virtual reality simulator that remaps his brain. The end result was that he went from being a simple, mildly-retarded man whose main preoccupations and pleasure in life was attending mass and cutting grass to a mega-brained genius with telekenetic powers who could hear other people's thoughts and kill people with his brain. Job soon became addicted to the virtual reality experience and no longer wanted to (and for that matter no longer could) live in the real world. A striking comparison to ponder. Is Job a metaphor for what we are becoming in the wired world?
Swidey's article also included some intriguing references to research done by Milgram on the "seven degrees of separation" and Granovetter's The Strength of Weak Ties, explaining our connectedness to people we don't know that well. So, the familiar is being replaced by the unfamiliar through our online experiences, as we start to exchange information sometimes therapeutically with people in the wired world that we really don't know at all. In some cases, anonymity may be a good thing when something personal is being exchanged, but caution should always moderate self-disclosure with unknown individuals (being connected does not mean ignoring common sense).
I agree completely with Doerr's statement that our drive to stay connected is driven by our need for self-validation through the online experience. "Am I still here" translates to "does anyone remember me?".. "am I still connected?".. "am I important?" This is somewhat disturbing given that a person's self-worth could actually be tied into whether they receive an email or get a "tweet". How do we balance all this, and can we? Are we just destined to see a whole new host of technology-induced psychological disorders, or am I taking this too far? In my opinion, more and more people are seeking that validation in cyberspace because they have less-fulfilling social relationships in the real world and they feel a greater sense of disconnectiveness in their day to day lives (to some degree structural as our communities evolve, and we no longer know or want to know our neighbors, and we become megafocused on our own lives and less interested in the lives of others).
Ultimately, our need to stay connected could be creating distractions that let us tune out more important things in the real world. Clive Thompson's New York Time's article The Life Hackers evaluates research on how these distractions impact cognition. Distractability it seems has a lot to do with spatial and visual representation of data and events. The research of Czerwiski and Horvitz in the use of AI to moderate common workplace distractions that inhibit productivity mentioned in Thompson's article provided a sci-fi solution to technologically-cluttered minds. But will we awake one day to learn that all our technological advances have rendered us redundant and that technology is controlling rather than improving our day to day lives? A scary thought to ponder... as soon as I finish reading my emails and checking my text messages.
References:
"HAL 9000, 2001: A Space Odyssey" (Wikipedia)
"The Borg", Star Trek: The Next Generation (CBS Paramount Television, CBS Studios, 2006)
"The Lawn Mower Man" (IMDb, The Internet Movie Database, 1992)
"Am I Still Here?" (Doerr, Orion Magazine, 2009)
"The End of Alone" (Swidely, Boston Globe, 2008)
"Meet the Life Hackers" (Thompson, NY Times, 2005)
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