gopnik: how the internet gets inside us and why this is really ok

This is a tangent to my previous post, but it deserves an entry of its own. I want to point out this excellent article by Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker: "How the Internet gets inside us".

Gopnik reviews a pile of recent books about the internet and society, dividing them into three themes: technology is our saviour, technology is our demise, and technology has always been met with these same two responses. Gopnik calls them "the Never-Betters, the Better-Nevers, and the Ever-Wasers". It's a perceptive and entertaining assessment of how we conceive of technology in our lives.

Here are a few bits I especially enjoyed.

One of the things that John Brockman’s collection on the Internet and the mind illustrates is that when people struggle to describe the state that the Internet puts them in they arrive at a remarkably familiar picture of disassociation and fragmentation. Life was once whole, continuous, stable; now it is fragmented, multi-part, shimmering around us, unstable and impossible to fix. The world becomes Keats’s “waking dream,” as the writer Kevin Kelly puts it.

The odd thing is that this complaint, though deeply felt by our contemporary Better-Nevers, is identical to Baudelaire’s perception about modern Paris in 1855, or Walter Benjamin’s about Berlin in 1930, or Marshall McLuhan’s in the face of three-channel television (and Canadian television, at that) in 1965. When department stores had Christmas windows with clockwork puppets, the world was going to pieces; when the city streets were filled with horse-drawn carriages running by bright-colored posters, you could no longer tell the real from the simulated; when people were listening to shellac 78s and looking at color newspaper supplements, the world had become a kaleidoscope of disassociated imagery; and when the broadcast air was filled with droning black-and-white images of men in suits reading news, all of life had become indistinguishable from your fantasies of it. It was Marx, not Steve Jobs, who said that the character of modern life is that everything falls apart.

We must, at some level, need this to be true, since we think it’s true about so many different kinds of things. We experience this sense of fracture so deeply that we ascribe it to machines that, viewed with retrospective detachment, don’t seem remotely capable of producing it. If all you have is a hammer, the saying goes, everything looks like a nail; and, if you think the world is broken, every machine looks like the hammer that broke it.

It is an intuition of this kind that moves the final school, the Ever-Wasers, when they consider the new digital age. A sense of vertiginous overload is the central experience of modernity, they say; at every moment, machines make new circuits for connection and circulation, as obvious-seeming as the postage stamps that let eighteenth-century scientists collaborate by mail, or as newfangled as the Wi-Fi connection that lets a sixteen-year-old in New York consult a tutor in Bangalore. Our new confusion is just the same old confusion.

Naturally, I love this historical perspective. One of my minor academic triumphs in grad school has been a paper arguing that the print revolution of the 1600s was a greater communications shift - a more significant information explosion relative to what preceded it, and a more cataclysmic cultural shift by far - than the one we are living through now. (Thank you, Elizabeth Eisenstein!)

This bit on how our perception of television, relative to the internet, has changed made me chuckle. I loved Gopnik's resolution, suggesting we back away from all-or-nothing thinking and, if technology is bothering us, perhaps a few small changes are in order.

It is the wraparound presence, not the specific evils, of the machine that oppresses us. Simply reducing the machine’s presence will go a long way toward alleviating the disorder. Which points, in turn, to a dog-not-barking-in-the-nighttime detail that may be significant. In the Better-Never books, television isn’t scanted or ignored; it’s celebrated. When William Powers, in “Hamlet’s BlackBerry,” describes the deal his family makes to have an Unplugged Sunday, he tells us that the No Screens agreement doesn’t include television: “For us, television had always been a mostly communal experience, a way of coming together rather than pulling apart.” (“Can you please turn off your damn computer and come watch television with the rest of the family,” the dad now cries to the teen-ager.)

Yet everything that is said about the Internet’s destruction of “interiority” was said for decades about television, and just as loudly. Jerry Mander’s “Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television,” in the nineteen-seventies, turned on television’s addictive nature and its destruction of viewers’ inner lives; a little later, George Trow proposed that television produced the absence of context, the disintegration of the frame — the very things, in short, that the Internet is doing now. And Bill McKibben ended his book on television by comparing watching TV to watching ducks on a pond (advantage: ducks), in the same spirit in which Nicholas Carr leaves his computer screen to read “Walden.”

Now television is the harmless little fireplace over in the corner, where the family gathers to watch “Entourage.” TV isn’t just docile; it’s positively benevolent. This makes you think that what made television so evil back when it was evil was not its essence but its omnipresence. Once it is not everything, it can be merely something. The real demon in the machine is the tirelessness of the user. A meatless Monday has advantages over enforced vegetarianism, because it helps release the pressure on the food system without making undue demands on the eaters. In the same way, an unplugged Sunday is a better idea than turning off the Internet completely, since it demonstrates that we can get along just fine without the screens, if only for a day.

You can read the whole thing here. It's the same New Yorker issue with the much-talked about story about Paul Haggis and Scientology. I haven't read this one yet, but several people we know have recommended it and it sounds great. Why not thank a tree and print them both?

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in which another world makes itself known to me, and i wish it would go away

My filter is malfunctioning.

My trusty filter, the one that makes possible my total ignorance of celebrity relationships, reality TV and big-budget science fiction movies, appears to be broken. This filter is the reason I can honestly claim total ignorance of Justin Bieber, Lady Gaga and Lindsay Lohan. I guess if my mental shield were invincible, I wouldn't even know those names. But come on, this filter blocked out the entire 2008 US presidential election campaign, so you know it has superhero powers.

But clearly, my filter is malfunctioning.

I have become aware that two people from the UK are getting married. Once married, they will Visit Canada, and some Canadians care. Some Canadians care quite a bit.

Luckily, plans for this Visit do not include Toronto, so we in the GTA won't have to deal with traffic and security and other annoyances, such as enthralled co-workers.

But still. The fact that some Canadians care so much about this impending Visit is depressing. I try not to be judgemental. We each have our own distractions, and some of mine are not exactly Mensa material. But for so many people, there's nothing but distraction - distraction and consumption. Work, watch, shop, repeat.

I can't help but think that a fascination with celebrity gossip somehow correlates with widespread cultural apathy and complacency. And if there's a more vacuous pasttime than celebrity worship, it's worshipping people whose fame is based on genetic lineage. I simply cannot understand why some people are thought to be inherently interesting solely because of where and to whom they were born.

I don't buy the "it's cultural" excuse. Plenty of Brits have no use for the monarchy, and plenty of Americans, whose country has no monarchist tradition, flip over anything royal. If you've got a reason we should care about the Visit, you'll have to do better than that.

For my part, I need to get my filter repaired. I don't care how many pictures of the Queen Jason Kenney puts in the Citizenship guide, I just Do. Not. Care.

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th nxt bg thng (y i dnt twt)

I'm sticking fast to my resolve to not be on Twitter. I have no doubt that it would sometimes be fun and useful. On the other hand, do I need it? The answer is most definitely no.

My life is so full of distractions. I rarely have enough time to focus clearly and at length on the things that matter most to me. I want to read in-depth articles and hefty novels, not skim headlines - in both the literal and figurative sense.

I also want quiet space. I want space in my life not spent in front of a screen of any type.

This relates to my extreme aversion to the number one scourge of modern life, an even greater annoyance than inappropriate cell phone use: background music. The music played in every store, waiting area, coffee shop, mall, in every everywhere. Every moment of our lives must be filled with some form of entertainment. We must never be alone with our thoughts. This is how I see Twitter - as if we all must have a constant scroll, a feed, a zipper, at the bottom of our life screens.

I somewhat enjoy Facebook, and I find it very useful for activism. But Facebook is also a giant time-sucking machine, a potential addiction - another distraction. I have no reason to think Twitter would be any different.

Please note: this is how I feel. This is not Twitter Is Bad. Twitter is a toy, or a tool, or a means of communication, or a method of information delivery: neither inherently good nor bad. If you enjoy it and it works for you, that's what counts.

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how do i hate christmas, let me count the ways

It appears that the tone of this post may be more angry and emotional than I intended. I wish everyone who celebrates Christmas a joyous day. I'm not ranting or raving, merely expressing my thoughts on this holiday's unique place in our world.

* * * *

I hate seeing consumer capitalism on overdrive.

I hate that a Christian holiday is a national holiday in nation where Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Jews, Sikhs, atheists, Shintos and pagans - and whoever else - are supposed to be equally welcome.

I hate being told that Christmas is no longer a Christian holiday, that it's now a secular holiday. I don't know if that's wishful thinking or amnesia or maybe guilt, but as far as I'm concerned, it's bullshit.

I hate the assumption I need to substitute some other holiday or tradition for this holiday that I don't celebrate. I know people mean well, but asking me what I celebrate instead of Christmas makes as much sense as asking my Christian neighbours what they do instead of Rosh Ha'shana.

I hate being asked "Did you have a nice Christmas?". And when I answer, "I don't celebrate Christmas, but I had a nice winter break, thanks," I hate being told, "I don't mean the holiday, I just meant the whole winter holiday season." If you meant how was my winter break, why didn't you say so?

I hate hearing about other people's Christmas shopping.

I hate being asked if I've finished my Christmas shopping.

I hate hearing Christmas muzak.

I hate people remembering food banks and other charities once a year.

During the last US presidential election, many of my Canadian friends were sick of hearing about the campaign for so long, disgusted by the volume and the omnipresence. That's how I feel about Christmas. It wouldn't be so bad if you could just tone it down. Just go have your holiday. Stop expecting everyone else to care.

I know there's no war on Christmas, only the rantings of aggrieved entitlement, people so accustomed to wielding all the power and holding all the cards that the slightest murmur of the minority viewpoint causes them to claim endangered species status. If there were a war on Christmas, I'd think about signing up.

To everyone who is celebrating today, have a happy day. Could you be a little quieter next year?

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rosie dimanno agrees with us redux: thoughts on strange bedfellows

Can hell freeze over twice in one week? Again, I thank conservative Toronto Star columnist Rosie DiManno. First DiManno called for Chief of Police Bill Blair's resignation over G20 police abuse. Now she announces that a newly acquired video corroborates key portions of Adam Nobody's account of his beating by plainclothes police officers - after he had been assaulted by uniformed cops.

DiManno's balanced column weighs the available evidence and acknowledges the possibility of doubt. But she is clearly inclined to believe Nobody's story.

Those images — a handcuffed Nobody being led out of camera range by uniformed officers, in the process of being arrested last June 26, not a drop of blood on him — support the 27-year-old’s formal complaint that he was immediately afterwards subjected to another vicious beating by a couple of plainclothes detectives behind two parked police vans.

After this second purported assault, Nobody's face was left bloodied, he says, his cheekbone shattered.

Within a week, he would undergo surgery to repair the damage.

Over the 31 hours that Nobody spent in custody — including about 13 hours when officers accompanied him to Toronto East General Hospital, where he underwent a CAT scan while still bound at the wrists and ankles — he was never out of police sight. He was their responsibility.

. . . .

In an interview with the Star last night, Nobody was sticking to his original accusations about the plainclothes officers.

"My cheek was already swelling when they got me. But they definitely put the boot to me."

Actually, he believes they were wearing running shoes. And they became angry when, after demanding he give his name, he obliged and said: "Nobody."

"The one guy, the blond guy, threw me down. He was grinding my face into the ground. He was holding me down with his foot on the back of my head, while the other one went through my backpack. Then he started kicking me too.

"I was in handcuffs already and they kept kicking me in the head, harder and harder.

"It wasn't until they put me in the van that I even realized my eye was bleeding."

Not one beating but two.

And no charges.

About a month after the G20, I hailed Conservative MPP Randy Hillier for speaking out against G20 police violence. One progressive blogger and a few of my Facebook contacts ripped me for this: how could I support this man, a bigot, a homophobe, a redneck?

First of all, I don't support Randy Hillier (or Rosie DiManno) in any larger sense. But if someone breaks out of conservative knee-jerk thinking and publicly takes a stand contrary to the party line and in support of justice, I think it is only logical and just that we praise them for doing the right thing.

In most activism I've been involved with, there are natural allies, and there are "strange bedfellow" allies. Natural allies are your base, your core support. You can't form a movement without them. But those allies that join your cause less naturally - the ones you win over from the other side, or who, for whatever reason, see the issue differently than most of their colleagues and are willing to say so - are equally valuable. Without them, your movement will never have mainstream traction. It will never move beyond "the left" or "the fringe" or however your opposition characterizes you.

If you put your supporters to a litmus test, you'll forever be shouting in the wilderness, speaking only to the converted. As redsock pointed out in that earlier post, a conservative columnist or representative speaking out accomplishes something most of us cannot: they reach people normally opposed or even hostile to our point of view.

Hillier's fans are not going to read our blogs and they are not going to subscribe to Socialist Worker. They will not attend our rallies and listen to speeches. But they listen to Hillier -- and in this case, he has done our work for us (and then some).

Maybe 95% of the people who pay attention to him ignored it outright, but I'll bet some of those other 5% got a seed planted in their brain. They might be more open to hearing about establishment abuses the next time they happen.

So thanks, Rosie DiManno, for doing the right thing, and also for inspiring this post.

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pew research: "the decline of marriage and rise of new families"

Via Andrew Sullivan, Chart Of The Day: What is a family?, from the Pew Research Center.

A majority of respondents don't consider my family a family. Although I actually don't care, because I know we are a family. (Which may make you wonder why I posted this.)

Even more interesting, 18% of respondents judged an unmarried male-female couple with children as not a family. And 12% thought a single parent with children is not a family! How do we wrap our heads around that one? It may be bigotry, but it also may be a failure of the imagination. People cannot imagine a type of family other than the kind in which they were raised. Their minds are very small.

Another interesting chart: percentage of people who think the changes in marriage and family types are a good thing, a bad thing or neither.

The summary of the report is very interesting: here. I'd like to see future surveys include polyamorous, multiple-adult households - just to piss off the bigots.

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science proves that men and women are from the same planet

The second story that confirms my beliefs touches on something more controversial and more challenging to many people. This story in The Guardian profiles scientific evidence showing that gender-based behavioural differences are not genetic, but the result of socialization.

There is almost nothing we do with our brains that is hard-wired. Every skill, attribute and personality trait is moulded by experience.

The "nature vs. nurture" debate - whether human behaviour is innate or the product of environment - is centuries old. Somewhere through the decades, the terms of the debate moved from "which" to "how much". It became widely acknowledged that human behaviour is influenced by both environment and genetics, but to what degree each affects us is still the subject of much debate.

When I was growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, the dominant trend emphasized environment. In a period of expanding civil rights and social welfare, it was seen that improving social conditions would improve lives. One famous and landmark note in this realm was Dr. Kenneth Clark's famous doll study, which concluded that educational segregation negatively affected the psyches of African-American children. The study was used as court evidence in early school desegregation cases that were direct antecedents to wide-scale social change, such as Brown vs Board of Education.

During my university years and beyond, the nature-vs.-nurture pendulum began swinging towards the innate. It's no coincidence this occurred during a rise of conservatism and right-wing-radicalism. If everything about us is innate, what need is there to concern ourselves with social inequality, or indeed with social conditions at all? If behaviour is predetermined by DNA, people will be who they will be, regardless of environment. Look at this one man who pulled himself up from his bootstraps! If he can do it, everyone can. And if you can't do it, it's your own fault. If a whole bunch of children can't do it, don't blame poor nutrition, abuse at home or grossly inferior education. Just claim it's genetic and cut social spending.

[An aside: this cross-references nicely with my thoughts on Barbara Ehrenreich's most recent book, Bright-sided, which speaks to US society's extreme emphasis on individualism and revulsion for collective solutions.]

Through the 1990s and into this century, new evidence of the genetic basis for diseases has augmented the general trend towards viewing human behaviour as innate, and thus inevitable. And it is especially popular to use this lens to view gender differences and relations between men and women.

This is a very specific subset of the society's rightward march: the backlash against feminism. Feminism teaches that women and men are equally human and should be socially equal. In order to create an equal society, where each of us can achieve our full human potential, not only do women need full access to the boardroom, the academy and the halls of political power, but men need full access to the supermarket, the vacuum, the diapers and the laundry room.

But how much easier it is to say "we were born this way"!

After all, if men and women are from different planets, no one has to change, or even seek to understand each other's needs. Women must accept the double-duty of income-earning and child-raising. Men don't need to communicate or dirty their hands with household drudgery. Boys can be forgiven violence and disrespect. Girls should accept that inferior destiny is already written in their genes.

And this supposedly dates all the way back to the cave, as pseudo-scientists cherry-pick evolutionary "evidence" to support an anti-feminist viewpoint. A former friend - a woman - once told me that the glass ceiling is natural, because women are good at repetitive tasks and men are natural planners. Her evidence? In pre-industrial societies, women gathered while men hunted.

Well, there you have it. Who cares that in modern society, income-earning is not necessarily linked to physical size and strength. Ignore the facts that the advent of reliable contraception has radically altered the modern family structure, and that modern technology means we no longer work from dawn to dusk hauling water, baking bread and weaving cloth. Throw out centuries of human experience in which women have thrived as inventors, artists, astronauts, engineers and leaders of nations. Thousands of years ago, women gathered and men hunted. So stop complaining and do your job.

While thinking about this post, I read an excellent blog post related to this on The Oscillator, part of ScienceBlogs.

Even when not discussing human evolution and inborn intelligence, studies of animal sexuality continually are framed in terms of traditional gender roles (the coy, choosy female; the aggressive, studly male) while species or individuals that don't fit this narrative are ignored. Science news stories about duck rape become hugely popular because we apologize for rape as a "natural" event caused by the male evolutionary need to spread their seed widely. Biases and prejudices become natural, women's bodies are explained as in terms of men's desires, in our culture, in our media, and too often in our science.

There is political and social advantage to be gained in claiming that a certain power structure is "natural" therefore desirable. (The conflating of those - natural and desirable - is another assumption that must be questioned.) But the movement towards viewing gender differences as innate also dovetails with anti-science and anti-intellectualism: "I don't need some expert telling me what I already see with my own eyes!"

I've heard it dozens of times: parents claim that their boy children naturally gravitated towards playing with trucks, and the girls naturally reached for the dolls. They use this "evidence" - which is not evidence at all, but personal observation - as proof that boys and girls are inherently different. Here are some questions for those parents. Were both types of toys given freely and without comment to both children? Did the children grow up seeing other boys play with dolls and other girls play with trucks? What is it about a toy truck and the way a child interacts with it that you believe is inherently male?

And another important question. Has the male child ever seen an adult male caring for a baby? When I was a nanny, I overheard my boy and his friends playing grown-up. My little guy said, "OK, you be the mommy and go to the office, I'll be the daddy and make dinner. Bye honey, don't work too late!" His friend said, "Nuh-uh, daddies can go to work, too! Both mommies and daddies can go to work." And they argued about it.

I don't think it's possible to factor out the influence of environment. Gender socialization permeates every facet of our society. It is pervasive, omnipresent, insidious, inescapable. And you know what? It just may be responsible for everything we think we know about gender.

It is the mainstay of countless magazine and newspaper features. Differences between male and female abilities – from map reading to multi-tasking and from parking to expressing emotion – can be traced to variations in the hard-wiring of their brains at birth, it is claimed.

Men instinctively like the colour blue and are bad at coping with pain, we are told, while women cannot tell jokes but are innately superior at empathising with other people. Key evolutionary differences separate the intellects of men and women and it is all down to our ancient hunter-gatherer genes that program our brains.

The belief has become widespread, particularly in the wake of the publication of international bestsellers such as John Gray's Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus that stress the innate differences between the minds of men and women. But now a growing number of scientists are challenging the pseudo-science of "neurosexism", as they call it, and are raising concerns about its implications. These researchers argue that by telling parents that boys have poor chances of acquiring good verbal skills and girls have little prospect of developing mathematical prowess, serious and unjustified obstacles are being placed in the paths of children's education.

In fact, there are no major neurological differences between the sexes, says Cordelia Fine in her book Delusions of Gender, which will be published by Icon next month. There may be slight variations in the brains of women and men, added Fine, a researcher at Melbourne University, but the wiring is soft, not hard. "It is flexible, malleable and changeable," she said.

In short, our intellects are not prisoners of our genders or our genes and those who claim otherwise are merely coating old-fashioned stereotypes with a veneer of scientific credibility. It is a case backed by Lise Eliot, an associate professor based at the Chicago Medical School. "All the mounting evidence indicates these ideas about hard-wired differences between male and female brains are wrong," she told the Observer.

"Yes, there are basic behavioural differences between the sexes, but we should note that these differences increase with age because our children's intellectual biases are being exaggerated and intensified by our gendered culture. Children don't inherit intellectual differences. They learn them. They are a result of what we expect a boy or a girl to be."

Read more here.

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