To refresh your memory, here’s my “sum the sum” from part 6 of my summary of Hamlet’s Blackberry:
- There seems to be a backlash forming against digital busyness, a backlash that philanthropists could potentially support.
- Generally, one of the names this backlash goes by is the Slow Life Movement: slow food, slow parenting, slow travel, even slow sex.
- Here’s the overarching message of the Slow Life Movement: Life has simply gotten too fast.
- Non-profit groups such as Information Overload Research Group, have the specific mission to fight excessive digital connectedness.
- Whereas the alcohol industry attempts to maintain a boundary between promoting alcohol consumption (which it does) and alcoholism (which it does not), the technology industry maintains no such boundary and, as a result, promotes the digital equivalent of alcoholism (e.g., hyper connectedness).
- The technology industry regularly studies “digital alcoholism” and finds that it greatly undermines productivity costing the US millions if not billions of dollars in lost productivity.
- Technological revolutions have occurred throughout history—clay tablets, numbers, books, the printing press, railroads, the telegraph.
- It’s not necessarily a technological revolution that creates upheaval in our lives; it’s our relationship and attitude toward that revolution.
- Unique individuals throughout time have offered up helpful suggestions concerning how we might appropriately view and relate to new technological revolutions.
Lets get started with part 7 of my multi-part summary of William Powers’ book Hamlet’s BlackBerry: Building a Good Life in the Digital Age.
Before we look at Powers’ take on technological revolutions throughout time, allow me to set the stage a bit by pulling from work by Neil Postman (who has written extensively on technological revolutions: see his 1993 book Technopoly for an example). In his 1982 book Disappearance of Childhood, Postman makes an observation worth considering:
All of the psychological research on childhood that has been done in [the twentieth] century—for example, by Jean Piaget, Harry Stack Sullivan, Karen Horney, Jerome Bruner, or Lawrence Kohlberg—has been mere commentary on the basic childhood paradigm.
How true. You could very easily add John Bowlby to the above list. Bowlby was, after all, very influenced by the work of Jean Piaget. And Bowlby’s work was chiefly concerned with child development in specific and human development in general. Here’s a way of simply stating Bowlby’s theory of attachment: Early safe and secure attachment relationships with a predictable, consistent, and available attachment figure (typically the mother) often lead (if all goes well) to open and flexible Inner Working Cognitive Models later in life. Postman continues thus:
No one has disputed that children are different from adults. No one has disputed that children must achieve adulthood. No one has disputed that the responsibility for the growth of children lies with adults. In fact, no one has disputed that there is a sense in which adults are at their best, their most civilized, when tending to the nurture of children. For we must remember that the modern paradigm of childhood is also the modern paradigm of adulthood.
Here’s a “take home” statement by Postman that I would argue is well worth keeping in mind, especially if you work (or fund) in the areas of infant mental health and early childhood education:
In saying what we wish a child to become, we are saying what we are.
In other words, hopes for infants and children (like safe and secure attachment relationships) should be framed as hopes (and, hopefully, realities) for adults. If one wishes for empathetic children, one wishes for empathetic adults. If one wishes for strict children, one wishes for strict adults. This is why cognitive linguist turned political commentator George Lakoff writes extensively on the idea that progressives or liberals tend to use a Nurturant Parent Cognitive Model while traditionalists or conservatives tend to use a Strict Father Cognitive Model. It’s these cognitive models that describe particular child–adult–citizen continuums. Bowlby argues for open and flexible cognitive models (which tends to fit with a liberal worldview, an observation Lakoff makes in his work). That was Bowlby’s political bent (using Ben Mayhew’s work as a backdrop here). Pulling from Postman above, these cognitive models say what we wish for our children, and, in turn, they say who we are (or wish to be) as adults. They also say who we are as political animals. Looked at yet another way, you simply cannot say anything about how you wish infants and children to be without also saying how you wish adults to be, and, in turn, how you wish the political model that holds children and adults to be. Believers in the Nurturant model wish for nurturant children, nurturant adults, and a nurturant political model (right now president Obama is the figurehead here). Conversely, believers in the Strict Model wish for strict children, strict adults, and a strict political model (with Governor Romney currently being the figurehead here).
What does the above have to do with technological revolutions? Well as Postman puts it in Technopoly,
[e]mbedded in every tool is an ideological bias, a predisposition to construct the world as one thing rather than another, to value one thing over another, to amplify one sense or skill or attitude more loudly than another.
Simply, adopting technology (or not) expresses wishes for a particular child–adult–citizen continuum. As Lakoff points out in his work, conservatives are not anti-technology necessarily; they like technology that supports their conservative model, such as direct cause and effect technology (such as, you burn fuel, you produce energy). In contrast, liberals tend to like systems oriented technology because a systems perspective tends to support their liberal model (such as, you burn fuel, you produce energy, but you also affect the ecosystem). Lets look at a quick example.
In The Disappearance of Childhood, Postman talks about the relationship between “the nature of childhood” and the “biases of print.” Consider this quote:
For example, a child evolves toward adulthood by acquiring the sort of intellect we expect of a good reader: a vigorous sense of individuality, the capacity to think logically and sequentially, the capacity to distance oneself from symbols, the capacity to manipulate high orders of abstraction, the capacity to defer gratification. And, of course, the capacity for extraordinary feats of self-control.
OK, if you have been reading this blog series (and many of my earlier posts) then you know of which Postman writes. Yup, book learning is biased toward the development of Executive Function Skills with their focus on logical thinking, reflective thinking, delaying gratification, self-control, etc. In his book The Shallows—What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, Nicholas Carr argues that the Internet is essentially anti-book, which in turn makes it anti-Executive Functioning. The Internet “wishes” that kids become anti-book. Ergo, the Internet wishes that adults will become anti-book and, in turn, embrace the anti-book ideology and worldview. Where can this political bias possibly be coming from? Well, Carr offers up this possible answer in The Shallows:
Back in the 1980s, when schools began investing heavily in computers, there was much enthusiasm about the apparent advantages of digital documents over paper ones [the ones associated with book technologies for centuries]. Many educators were convinced that introducing hyperlinks into text displayed on computer screens would be a boon to learning [and, by extension, a new form of adult]. Hypertext would, they argued, strengthen students’ critical thinking by enabling them to switch easily between different viewpoints [but to not have one]. Freed from the lockstep reading demanded by printed page [technology], readers would make all sorts of new intellectual connections among diverse texts. The academic enthusiasm for hypertext was further kindled by the belief, in line with the fashionable postmodern theories of the day, that hypertext would overthrow the patriarchal authority of the author and shift power to the reader. It would be a technology of liberation.
Yes, hypertext, and the Internet that holds it, have both brought about liberation. Both of them have liberated us from the ideological bias of book technology, liberation of this sort being its own form of ideology (ironically). But a liberation from book technology also amounts to a liberation from development of Executive Function Skills. This social development is ironic because we need EF in order to engage in reflective or critical thinking. What the Internet and hypertext has done for us is to liberate information from such things as context, theory, and organizing cognitive models. Again, liberating information from context, theory, and even organizing cognitive models, is itself a worldview and an ideology. A bit recursive wouldn’t you say? That’s one of the overarching criticisms of postmodernism: it’s an ideology that chases its own tail.
In Technopoly Postman allows, “[A]ll theories are oversimplifications, or at least lead to oversimplification.” He continues thus:
That is the function of theories—to oversimplify, and thus to assist believers in organizing, weighting, and excluding information. Therein lies the power of theories. Their weakness is that precisely because they oversimplify, they are vulnerable to attack by new information. When there is too much information to sustain any theory, information becomes essentially meaningless.
In Technopoly, Postman argues that we are in the midst of what he calls a “psychic battle,” one where
there are many casualties—children who can’t learn to read or won’t, children who cannot organize their thought into logical structure even in a simple paragraph, children who cannot attend to [e.g., focus their attention on] lectures or oral explanations for more than a few minutes at a time. They are failures, but not because they are stupid. They are failures because there is a media war going on, and they are on the wrong side—at least for the moment.
Postman gives us this “bottom line”: “When media make war against each other, it is a case of world-views in collision.” Welcome to the analog–digital divide.
Here’s my main concern as a philanthropist: rather than adults taking responsibility for the media war they have created and waged (a war described by such social critics as Postman, Carr, and Powes), these same adults (many of whom are mental health professionals) blame children for not developing Executive Function Skills, for not being able to do well in school, for not being organized, for not being able to come up with theories or models of the world. This blame is further intensified when well-meaning medical and psychology professionals feed children copious amounts of powerful psychotropics like Prozac, Ritalin, and Adderall. Shame on us, shame on us all for scapegoating children in this way and making huge sums of money in the process.
I took the above detour to point out to the reader that technological revolutions are a huge deal fraught with battles over worldviews. A postman points out, we are in the midst of a media war big time. I tend to frame it as the analog–digital divide. As Postman puts it Technopoly, “[T]elevision [and digital screen technology in general] may bring a gradual end to the careers of schoolteachers, since school was an invention of the printing press and must stand or fall on the issue of how much importance the printed word has.” Here’s Postman’s “showstopper” statement: “A new technology does not add or subtract something. It changes everything.”
I’ll end here. Here’s my sum the sum for part 7:
- According to Neil Postman, all of twentieth century child psychology research has been mere commentary on the basic childhood paradigm.
- Here’s Bowlby’s “comment”: Early safe and secure attachment relationships with a predictable, consistent, and available attachment figure (typically the mother) often lead (if all goes well) to open and flexible Inner Working Cognitive Models later in life.
- According to Postman, in saying what we wish a child to become, we are saying what we are.
- According to Postman, embedded in every tool is an ideological bias.
- According to both Postman and Nicholas Carr, book learning is biased toward the development of Executive Function Skills with their focus on logical thinking, reflective thinking, delaying gratification, self-control, etc.
- According to both Postman and Carr, the postmodern desire for liberation from book technology also amounts to a liberation from development of Executive Function Skills, and, in specific, development of cognitive models or theories.
- According to Postman, the function of theories is to oversimplify, and thus to assist believers in organizing, weighting, and excluding information.
- However, Postman allows that a flood of information can overwhelm even the most powerful and robust model or theory.
- Postman argues that we are in the midst of a media war that expresses a desire to liberate all information from such things as context, organization, and theory.
- Sadly, children are the main casualties of this media war, rendering them incapable of learning as defined by the old print media worldview.
- Equally sad, rather than taking responsibility for their media war, adults are increasingly scapegoating children by blaming them for their inability to learn, to organize their thoughts, to form models of the world, to focus attention, etc.
- This scapegoating is mapped by the widespread practice of medical and psychology professionals feeding copious amounts of psychotropic drugs to children.
- According to Postman, a new technology does not add or subtract something. It changes everything.
Stay tuned for part 8. 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.
