Happy New Year everyone!
To refresh your memory (after our Holiday break), here’s my “sum the sum” from part 12 of my summary of Hamlet’s Blackberry:
- Ben Franklin realized he suffered from what we would call today ADHD (attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder).
- Franklin used rituals centered on acquiring certain virtues to improve his Executive Function (EF) Skills
- Whereas before we depended on religion for EF-enhancing ritual, Franklin’s rituals came out of the Enlightenment.
- Today, corporations are putting rituals in place, such as Quiet Time and No Email Day, as a way of combating digital dependency.
- When Henry David Thoreau wrote Walden; or, Life in the Woods back in the 1850s, he was grappling with two emerging technologies: the railroad and the telegraph.
- Both the railroad and the telegraph (with its promise of instant communication over long distances) allowed us to transcend space and time and body.
- When new technologies hit the scene, we should ask ourselves one overarching question: “What kind of home makes us happy?”
- Home and body share much in common, and both our home and our body should be safe and secure.
- The analog–digital divide is about mixing the human with the non-human. These types of mixes have to be made consciously and reflectively using Executive Function (EF) Skills.
- Here’s my paraphrase of Thoreau’s mission: Build a home at a slight distance from society—disconnected, yet still connected in many ways—live there thoughtfully, and regain the depth and joy being leached out of everyday life.
- Building a home at a distance but still connected is the central challenge of most attachment relationships.
- Thoreau scholar Bradley P. Dean gives us this “take home” statement: “By simplifying our outward lives, we are freer and better able to expand and enrich our inward [e.g., return to home base] lives.”
Lets get started with part 13 of my multi-part summary of William Powers’ book Hamlet’s BlackBerry: Building a Good Life in the Digital Age.
At about page 197, Powers begins talking about the work of Marshall McLuhan. McLuhan is probably best known for coining the phrase “The medium is the message.” In other words, the transfer of a message not only includes the information itself but also information concerning the medium used. When you read a text message like “u b gr8,” there’s the explicit message of “you’re great” and the implied message of “I’m telling you you are great using a form of communication that works best with a cell or smartphone.” Why do we tend to enjoy receiving an analog greeting card (versus an eCard)? A “real” greeting card has an explicit message—get well, congratulations, thank you, happy birthday, etc.—and the following implied message: this person planned ahead (an EF Skill by the way), went to a store, spent time selecting an appropriate, thoughtful card, spent money buying the card, wrote out the message and address longhand, spent more money on postage, and made the effort to get the card to a postoffice box ahead of time so that it would arrive on time. It seems trivial but there’s a lot of EF that goes into sending out a real card. It’s that EF effort that makes receiving a real greeting card so enjoyable. And I have a friend who makes her own greeting cards. Huge EF boost there.
Here are a few bullet points that Powers makes concerning McLuhan’s work, again, at about page 197:
- McLuhan asserts that tools (especially communication tools) are really extensions of our bodies.
- Once a new tool becomes conventionalized and widespread—written language, the printing press, the telegraph, the Internet, etc.—that cosmopolitan level of acceptance creates “a new environment for the mind and for our lives” (quoting Powers). Powers continues, “We inhabit a reality shaped fundamentally by our tools.” This agrees with researchers such as Edwin Hutchins (see his book Cognition in the Wild) and Russell Barkley (see his book Executive Functions) who argue that tool use leads to the formation of culture which, in turn, extends mind out into that culture. With the advent of each new tool we should ask, “What kind of environment has been set up and how is mind doing in this new environment?” In many ways, Powers asks these questions with the introduction of new technologies over time.
- McLuhan asks us to consider the following extensions:
- telephone ==> global ears
- TV ==> global eyes and ears
- new technology ==> new person
- A new technology “produces a new kind of human being” (quoting Powers).
- New communication tools have the effect of extending “the entire central nervous system, including the brain, out into the world” (quoting Powers again).
Using McLuhan’s work as a backdrop, Powers states: “If our technologies are driving us nuts, it’s our fault for not paying attention to what they’re doing to us.” I would suggest that the same could be said of attachment patterns. Simply, Bowlbian attachment is about our attempts to extend ourselves out into the world. In other words, attachment is the emotional feedback system that provides information on how well certain extensions of mind into the world are going for us. Attachment asks us to “pay attention.” As Powers puts it at page 201, “[This is] what depth comes down to, really, taking all the stuff your mind has gathered in its travels back inside, to sort through it and see what it all [self-reflectively] means.” Powers gives us this “showstopper” statement: “Attention deficit issues, Internet addiction, and other tech-related maladies are all about being stuck in [going out] gear.” Simply, there’s no returning home, to self, to body. It’s a perpetual state of discorporation or mind separate from body. As McLuhan puts it, “We’re fascinated by new technologies because they project us beyond ourselves.” The key here is to have some way to return to self, to even remember that self is important. And it is our safe and secure attachment relationships that have the potential to keep us grounded to ourselves. I would suggest (using Bowlby’s work as a backdrop) that loss and mourning is nature’s way of making sure we don’t get too far away from ourselves, from what is truly important.
According to Powers’ research, McLuhan “defined radio as a hot medium, because it intensely floods one sense with information, leaving little for the listener to fill in.” In other words, one sense is so flooded with information that the EF process of planning, filtering, delaying gratification, setting goals, engaging in purposeful action, reflecting, etc., is essentially shutdown. As ADHD (attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder) expert Russell Barkley points out in his book Executive Functions: What They Are, How They Work, and Why They Evolved, it is through the EF process that self is expressed. Ergo, anything that has the ability to suppress EF also has the ability to suppress the expression of self. (Note: I’ll have more to say about Barkley’s book in future blog posts). Simply, technology is a wonderful thing when it helps with the expression of self as part of an EF process; it’s a terrible thing when it dampens or deadens the EF process and, in turn, one’s self.
Powers finishes his section on McLuhan’s work by observing, “Today there’s plenty of chatter about the burden of screens, but not the same kind of ritical, constructive engagement.” Sounds like a great mission statement for both foundation and non-profit alike: “Encouraging critical and constructive engagement with today’s technology.”
I’ll end here. Here’s my sum the sum for part 13:
- Marshall McLuhan is probably best known for coining the phrase “The medium is the message.”
- The transfer of a message not only includes the information itself but also information concerning the medium used.
- The medium sends implied information. As an example, sending a real analog greeting card sends the implied message that the recipient was worth the effort of a rather involved EF process involving planning, thoughtfulness, cost (time and money), appropriateness, etc.
- McLuhan asserts that tools (especially communication tools) are really extensions of our bodies. Such extensions also include extensions of the mind.
- A new technology “produces a new kind of human being” (quoting Powers). In part 11, I suggested that we are speciating into naties (people who live principally in the real world) and virties (people who live principally in virtual worlds).
- Using McLuhan’s work as a backdrop, Powers states: “If our technologies are driving us nuts, it’s our fault for not paying attention to what they’re doing to us.”
- Powers gives us this “showstopper” statement: “Attention deficit issues, Internet addiction, and other tech-related maladies are all about being stuck in [going out] gear.” Simply, there’s no returning home, to self, to body. It’s a perpetual state of discorporation or mind separate from body.
- Technology is a wonderful thing when it helps with the expression of self as part of an EF process; it’s a terrible thing when it dampens or deadens the EF process and, in turn, one’s self.
- Here’s a great mission statement for both foundation and non-profit alike: “Encouraging critical and constructive engagement with today’s technology.”
Stay tuned for part 14. I’ll try to get it out as soon as I possibly can. In the mean time, consider reading Powers’ book Hamlet’s Blackberry. If you have read Hamlet’s Blackberry, feel free to leave your comments concerning the information that Powers presents.
