I hope everyone had a safe and enjoyable Thanksgiving holiday. To refresh your memory, here’s my “sum the sum” from part 8 of my summary of Hamlet’s Blackberry:
- Here are four reasons to turn off the TV: heart issues, eating issues, learning issues, and fun issues.
- One of the first communications technologies centered on the oral tradition. This technology is used today as parents read to their kids.
- Socrates developed the Socratic method of question and answer sessions. Trial lawyers and mental health therapists tend to use the Socratic method.
- According to Powers, written language came along allowing “individuals to experience other people and their ideas at a distance, in a private, reflective way.”
- According to Powers, new connective technologies come along to solve genuine problems.
- According to Powers, genuine problems usually have something to do with distance.
- I would add that solving the problem of distance usually involves levels of abstraction. In addition, when we experience people through abstraction, we are not experiencing the whole person. Something is always left out as a part of the process of going from what communications experts call “high bandwidth communication” (i.e., face-to-face interaction) to “low bandwidth communication” (i.e., the dots and dashes of Morse code).
- As we continue to investigate the analog–digital divide, it would be wise to keep the following question in mind: What’s the problem that digital technologies attempt to solve?
Lets get started with part 9 of my multi-part summary of William Powers’ book Hamlet’s BlackBerry: Building a Good Life in the Digital Age. We’ll pick up again looking at technological revolutions throughout history. As I mentioned earlier, I’ll be covering the information Powers presents on technological revolutions at a breakneck speed. If you would like to get the fuller story, grab and read a copy of Hamlet’s BlackBerry.
Allow me to start off with a quote from page 107:
The mind two thousand years ago often felt hounded … cornered, with no place to hide. And back then, as now, there was a need for creative solutions.
Powers touches on a subject that I have affectionately called “the squeeze-and-pop patterns of history.” I discovered squeeze-and-pop patterns by reading books on the subjects of cultural cognitive models and cultural cognitive mapping. For more on these subjects, see the 1996 book Changing Visions—Human Cognitive Maps: Past, Present, and Future. What cultural cognitive mappers have discovered is that when the human body is “squeezed” by some process of overcrowding, the result is a desire to escape into “imagined” or “conceptualized” spaces. Simply, as the physical body is constrained, the imagined or conceptual body opens up. Squeeze-and-pop is about how when the body is traumatized, a desire to escape into the dissociative worlds that open as a result of that trauma, is created. (This is the central theme in the 1985 Terry Gilliam movie Brazil.) Lets look at a couple of examples.
In Changing Visions, the authors talk about how Roman persecution of Jews during the time of Christ led to the opening of the conceptual world of ethics. Religious persecution during medieval times led to the opening of the conceptual world of science. Today we see the destructive side of science (weapons of mass destruction being an example) leading to the opening of the conceptual worlds known as postmodernism and posthumanism. A smaller squeeze-and-pop pattern would be how the horror of the Vietnam war led to the opening up of the psychedelic conceptual world. In his book Last Child in the Woods—Saving Our Children from Nature Deficit Disorder, Richard Louv observes that kids are increasingly afraid of the outdoors, of natural spaces (like the woods). As a result, they escape into the digital worlds afforded by all manner of screens. I would argue that squeeze-and-pop is at play here as well. One possible squeeze driving this retreat from natural environments: the Home-alone America that Mary Eberstadt describes in her book of the same title.
There can be no doubt that today we are witnessing the opening of a new conceptual world—the digital conceptual world. The question then becomes, “What’s the squeeze that has led to the opening of the conceptual world of zeros and ones?” Is it one big squeeze (like a Home-alone America) or a number of smaller squeezes over time? I think it is an important question to keep in mind as we (i.e., philanthropists, service providers, policymakers, etc.) continue to investigate the analog–digital divide in specific, and technological revolutions in general. (As a side note, trauma expert Robert Pynoos points to the Icarus myth as a trauma narrative that in large part reflects the process that I am calling squeeze-and-pop. Pynoos argues that these trauma narratives have occurred throughout history.) Back to Powers.
Here’s a great “take home” statement by Powers on page 123:
New technologies form new crowds.
This makes sense from a squeeze-and-pop perspective. If everyone is dissociating into a new conceptual world—ethics, religion, science, zeros and ones, etc.—then, eventually, that conceptual world becomes conventionalized (e.g., peopled) as a new “real” world. The insidious side of squeeze-and-pop is that the actual crowd becomes a conceptual crowd which, in turn (through conventionalization) becomes the new actual crowd. Any release through dissociation is reduced as that dissociative world becomes conventionalized, starting the pattern all over again. From an evolutionary perspective, normalizing trauma greatly increases the chances for survival. As Powers puts it, “[B]ecuase they [new technologies] tend to increase the individual’s exposure to the crowd and ramp up busyness, they strain the mind and the spirit. Thus, it becomes essential to find [new] escape hatches.” Lets fast forward to the Fifteenth Century and the time of Johann Gutenberg, best known as the inventor of the printing press.
On page 129 Powers writes, “Gutenberg saw that there was money to be made in helping those of his time deal with the challenge of crowds.” I won’t get into all the details (read Powers’ book) but here’s what was going on at that time. Pilgrims would come to the city to see religious relics. Here’s how Powers describes the scene:
What exactly were they [the pilgrims] seeking? Tradition held that the relics sent out invisible rays imbued with divine powers that could heal the sick and answer other prayers. The surest way to obtain these blessings was to touch the objects. That had once been easy to do, but as the crowds had grown over the years it had become impossible to provide physical access to everyone—too many people, too little time [e.g., the squeeze was on]. However, if you stood in the path of the rays and they hit you, it was thought to be just as good.
So, Gutenberg decided to manufacture small mirrors as a “handheld, mobile version of the relics” (quoting Powers). As long as you could see the relics in the handheld mirror, you were assured of receiving the healing rays. So, do today’s handheld, mobile devices also allow us to receive the healing powers of Internet rays? Powers connects the Guttenberg crowds with the crowds of today by observing: “We, too, are making outward journeys [e.g., pilgrimages] in pursuit of inward goals, using our ‘Jesus [i]phones’ to catch invisible signals.”
Gutenberg of course went on to invent the printing press. Recall earlier that Powers observed that written language allowed “individuals to experience other people and their ideas at a distance, in a private, reflective way.” Well, embodying words in the form of a book upped the anti of experiencing “other people and their ideas at a distance, in a private, reflective way” (quoting Powers again). In essence, books allowed us to carry with us a mobile, abstracted, objectified version of a person, a person we could turn on and off at will (not unlike turning on and off zeros and ones). As Powers observes on page 133, “The values of freedom and equality that we cherish today took root through the spread of reading [books] and the power it conferred on individuals to think for themselves.”
Powers raises two interesting topics: 1) the rise of the self goes hand-in-hand with the rise of the abstracted or objectified person, and 2) there is a continuum that connects the individual and the mass or the crowd. As Jacques Ellul reminds us, the mass depends on the individual and the individual depends on the mass. In essence, we are at the same time a mass person as well as an individual person. There is no separating the two. At best all we can hope to do is to assess individual–mass relationships. As Powers points out, “A tool of outwardness [like written language] could foster inwardness.” Looked at another way, the written words are the same for everyone; what is individual is our experience of those words. Great leaders know that they have to address a mass in such a way that a sense of individual experience is created (i.e., that the orator is speaking directly to me—think Martin Luther King or Bill Clinton or even Ronald Reagan). I can’t help but think that a safe and secure attachment relationship allows us to navigate the individual–mass continuum: moving out toward the mass and returning to the individualistic inner experience. It is beyond the scope of this post but it may well be that insecure attachment could be framed as a person being locked at some point on the individual–mass continuum (i.e., mostly individual, mostly mass, mostly nowhere, etc.).
In part 7 of this series I presented the following quote by Neil Postman:
[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.
I think this is a good way to conceptualize the book reading worldview, a worldview that has held sway for over 400 years. Here’s how the book reading worldview views us:
- We should develop a vigorous sense of individuality, a vigorous sense of self.
- We should develop an ability to think logically and sequentially.
- We should be able to distance ourselves from symbols, that is to say, not take the symbol for what is symbolized (with a tip of the hat to Joseph Campbell).
- We should be able to manipulate high orders of abstraction.
- We should be able to delay gratification (a key Executive Function Skill).
- We should be able to engage in self-control (another key Executive Function Skill).
Again, the above book reading worldview has held sway for over 400 years now. With the advent of the digital conceptual world, the book reading worldview is giving way. Honestly, I’m not sure anyone can say what will be next. But Powers gives us this omen:
Deep, private reading and thought have begun to feel subversive [because they violate] the iron rule of digital experience: Never be alone.
I do find this to be a distressing omen because it so privileges the mass or the crowd to the exclusion of the individual or the self. I don’t think you can disturb the balance of the individual–mass continuum in this way and not expect blowback or side effects. I’ll let Powers have the last word here:
A decade ago, the digital space was heralded [mainly by postmodernists] for the endless opportunities it offered for individual expression. The question now is how truly individual—as in bold, original, unique—you can be if you never step back from the crowd [e.g., move to the individual side of the individual–mass continuum].
Sadly, what we have today as the digital age continues to ascend is an illusion of liberation that actually seeks to bind one tighter to the mass mind.
I’ll end here. Here’s my sum the sum for part 9:
- Squeeze-and-pop patterns are about how when the body is traumatized, a desire to escape into the dissociative worlds that open as a result of that trauma, is created.
- Squeeze-and-pop patterns have been around since the beginning of recorded history.
- Squeeze-and-pop patterns have resulted in such conceptual systems as written language, ethics, religion, science, and now, postmodernism.
- A question that confronts us all today is, “What’s the squeeze that is opening up the digital conceptual world?”
- Authors like Mary Eberstadt argue that such things as a Home-alone America should be viewed as possible squeezes.
- Authors like Richard Louv argue that kids are being squeezed in a way that makes them afraid of natural environments (like the outdoors) while at the same time enticed by artificial, digital environments.
- Trauma expert Robert Pynoos argues that trauma narratives (such as the Icarus myth) have been around since the beginning of recorded history. In my opinion, trauma narratives reflect the process of squeeze-and-pop.
- Powers argues that new technologies will ultimately form new crowds.
- Gutenberg developed technologies, like portable relic mirrors and the printing press, to solve the crowd problem.
- Gutenberg’s printing press ushered in the conceptual world of book reading. Here are the main characteristics of the book reading worldview (according to Neil Postman):
- We should develop a vigorous sense of individuality, a vigorous sense of self.
- We should develop an ability to think logically and sequentially.
- We should be able to distance ourselves from symbols, that is to say, not take the symbol for what is symbolized (with a tip of the hat to Joseph Campbell).
- We should be able to manipulate high orders of abstraction.
- We should be able to delay gratification (a key Executive Function Skill).
- We should be able to engage in self-control (another key Executive Function Skill).
- The book reading worldview encourages development of the upper brain, Executive Function Skills of planning, delaying gratification, perspective taking, empathy, time travel, etc.
- The book reading worldview is giving way to the digital conceptual world, but I think most are hard pressed to tell us anything substantive about how the digital conceptual world should fashion the person.
- Powers simply asks, “The question now is how truly individual—as in bold, original, unique—you can be if you never step back from the crowd.”
- The opening of the digital conceptual world carries with it the illusion of liberation that actually seeks to bind one tighter to the mass mind.
Stay tuned for part 10. 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.
