Welcome to part II of my two-part series designed to investigate the following overarching question:
Out of all the media that have existed for thousands of years why do we frame digital machine media as being “social?”
Here are two follow-up questions:
Where has this “social” frame come from?
Why has the social frame been so widely, readily, rapidly, and unreflectively accepted?
Lets get started. If you have not read part I yet, I would suggest that you do so first. But if you only read part II, you’ll get the gist.
Dr. Hicks effectively argues that machine thinking fits closely with gatherer thinking—they’re both linear, logical, technical, certain, and object oriented to the exclusion of such things as context, ambiguity, conflict, gestalts, etc. On page 138 of his book The Digital Pandemic, Hicks writes, “[M]aybe in the future, the lonely, sensitive [nerd, autistic spectrum] kid who can’t trust others will go to video game avatars instead of teddy bears.” In a short article profiling her work entitled Human–Robot Relations: Why We Should Worry, MIT researcher Sherry Turkle observes, “People used to buy pets to teach their children about life and death and loss. We are now teaching kids that real living creatures are risky, and robots are safe.” Hicks continues by lamenting (in a pro-hunter way), “Not exactly a step forward, I’d say.” He gives us this “showstopper” observation: “Gatherers … are already predisposed to machines.” In essence, gatherer thinking fits nicely with machine thinking. So, here’s my key point:
Machine thinking becomes social if and only when machine thinking is used to normalize the gatherer way of life and worldview.
Don’t get me wrong; all politics is about normalizing a particular way of life or worldview. All leaders, whether benevolent or malevolent, share one thing in common—they all wish to normalize a particular way of life or worldview. Maybe an example will help out here.
Not too long ago I attended a workshop on (the soon to disappear diagnosis) Aspergers Syndrome. Aspergers is often described as a high functioning version of autism. The presenter told us (echoing Florida’s message) that Aspergers forms of creativity are on the rise. The presenter suggested that the following captains of industry have Aspergers: the late Steve Jobs (of Apple fame), Bill Gates (of Microsoft fame), Mark Zuckerberg (of Facebook fame), and Jerry Yang (of Yahoo fame). What the presenter said next stunned me (and I paraphrase): “Mark Zuckerberg is clearly on the autism spectrum—probably Aspergers—and his brainchild, Facebook, is his attempt to normalize the world and experiences of persons on the autism spectrum.” The presenter then asked the following question, which tracks my questioning above (still paraphrasing): “What is going on in our society that hundreds of millions of people the world over wish to join Zuckerberg in his attempts to fuse people thinking with machine thinking in largely autistic ways?” Again, the “social” frame being used in a concept such as “social media” is a frame that conveys the idea that fusing together people thinking and machine thinking is good and desirable.
Is this being social? I would say no. If anything, it’s an entirely new form of what it means to be social. It’s people and machines being social (“machine culture” as Hicks calls it). The correct frame should be “human-machine media” or simply “machine media.” But why are we seeing so many people embracing and attaching to machine media or machine culture? Well, Hicks gives us a clue above when he talks about “lonely, sensitive [nerd, autistic spectrum] kid[s]” who are increasingly turning to the company of “video game avatars instead of teddy bears.” Turkle (mentioned above) in her book Alone Together looks at this trend in detail.
Turkle effectively tells us that machine thinking and machine media are perfect answers to the question asked by Bowlbian insecure attachment:
How do I secure a feeling and experience of being connected to others while at the same time not risk the pain that face-to-face, human-to-human intimacy inevitably brings?
Simply, the machine world along with its machine thinking and machine relating, offers up the promise of normalizing the insecure attachment experience. Hicks reminds us (at page 137) that “[s]timulus-bound and mesmerized, young minds are vulnerable to the machine’s control.” Locked in the object-orineted, stimulus-bound middle brain (which I have blogged about before), young kids fall in love with their machines as a way of normalizing their experience, their way of life. In essence, falling in love with machines is a good enough answer to the question that insecure attachment asks. To quote Hicks (again, at page 137)
Even though we usually talk about the stimulating and rewarding graphics found in electronic games, one of the things we relish is the control we think we have over these [digital] monsters. Being supposedly more reliable and predictable than human kind, we don’t have to worry about seemingly irrational surprises that hurt us [and disappoint us]. It’s the age-old [attachment] dilemma between trusting and taking a chance of being hurt and disappointed, or pulling back where it’s safe albeit limited and lonely.
So, social media should be correctly framed as “normalizing insecure attachment” media. That’s an ungainly frame but it’s probably fairly accurate. Using Lakoffian framing theory, there’s probably a much better, pithier frame out there. I can’t think of one offhand. If you can, leave a comment. It was Bowlby who effectively argued that the self-esteem movement (which picked up steam back in the 1970s) was chiefly about normalizing insecure attachment at the level of society. Even way back in the 1970s Bowlby recognized early attempts, such as self-esteem, resiliency, and self psychology, as attempts to normalize insecure attachment. And I would argue (as I do in Bowlby’s Battle) that Bowlby—who was there at the birth of the natural versus cybernetic systems conflict—prophetically recognized the potential danger inherent in the possibility that human thinking would become fused with machine thinking. Bowlby died in 1990. He missed seeing the self-esteem movement short-circuiting against the digital machine revolution. If he had witnessed this short-circuiting, he probably would have muttered, “Told you so.” So, yes, I would make the following comparisons:
If I had to guess I would say that Bowlby was pro-hunter. Heck, Bowlby started out as a geologist (naturalist) and did a stint in the Royal Navy on the HMS Royal Oak. When I heard Sir Richard Bowlby (John’s son) speak in Canmore, Alberta Canada back in 2005 (executive summary available), he talked about how his relatives (on his mother’s side) were big game hunters in areas of Canada not far from Canmore. It would appear that the Bowlbys were hunters both literally and psychologically. As I hint at in Bowlby’s Battle, Bowlby’s theory of attachment has fallen on hard times because most post-Bowlbians or neo-Bowlbians are gatherers. We can see the gatherer influence in such areas as “the neurobiology of attachment.” In an earlier post I wrote the following (with my additions in brackets):
Why did research funds stop flowing to an interdisciplinary [hunter] area such as primatology (which played such a huge role in the development of Bowlbian attachment theory)? [Primatologist Dario] Maestripieri reveals that one very important factor “was the rapid progress of [gatherer] biological disciplines such as genetics, molecular biology, and neuroscience and the growing popularity of scientific reductionism [the mainstay of gatherer thinking].” Maestripieri gives us this “bottom line”: “[T]he success of [gatherer] neuroscience led to the optimistic view that many important questions about behavior would eventually be answered by studies of brain anatomy and function, thus rendering [naturalistic, hunter] behavioral research less necessary.”
Is it still Bowlbian attachment theory if gatherers take it over? Outside of my brief treatment in Bowlby’s Battle, I’m not sure anyone has looked at this question. OK, wait, Jungian analyst (and one of Bowlby’s advisees) Anthony Stevens does look at this topic in his book Archetype Revisited—An Updated Natural History of the Self. I’ll refer the reader to Stevens’ book.
One final comment from my perspective as a philanthropist. There probably is not a month that goes by that I do not receive a survey asking me (or our Foundation) to what extent are we using social media to connect with the people and groups we work with. Yes, we have a web site, and, yes, we have this blog site, but that’s as far as it goes. So, I guess I could take a page out of Dick Cheney’s playbook and simply respond to these surveys by saying, “I don’t accept the ‘social media’ frame.” If you take nothing else from this post series, take this: don’t easily, readily, and unreflectively accept the social media frame. Try using frames like “machine media” or “human–machine media” or “machine culture.” Do we use machine media at our Foundation? Yes, but we try to use it in a conscious way, to consciously enter into human–machine relationships (as Powers suggests in Hamlet’s BlackBerry). So, taking a page out of Lakoff’s book on framing, question all frames. Know what they are really saying, what worldview they support and promulgate. If you desire to fuse machine thinking and human thinking, then “social media” is a good and effective frame. But if you wish to keep these two forms of thinking apart, then, simply, I don’t think the necessary frames exist. You could try “human.” Now, there’s a question I’d like to see on surveys: “How much do you use human media to connect with the people and groups you work with?”
OK, one last question: You may be asking, “Where is all this uncertainty and insecurity coming from that’s driving kids (and many adults) to fuse human thinking with machine thinking?” This is a topic that is not often looked at. The best book on the subject is probably still social commentator Peter Marris’ book The Politics of Uncertainty—Attachment in Private and Public Life (executive summary available). Another good book is economist Jeremy Rifkin’s book The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-market Era (executive summary available). You may wish to consult social commentator Francis Fukuyama’s book Our Posthuman Future—Consequences of the Technological Revolution (partial summary available). Or even Niel Postman’s book Technopoly—The Surrender of Culture to Technology (executive summary available). Here’s a partial list of the types of causes these authors point to:
automation
job insecurity
un- or underemployment
globalization
the rise of cybernetics (i.e., Internet, Google, smartphones, iTunes, Netflix, etc.)
high divorce rates
biotech
genetic engineering
women moving into the job market
crumbling families and communities
reductionist science
poor economy
failing schools
parentified kids (even Bowlby railed against this one)
various bubbles (housing, student debt, health costs)
When you take all of the above causes together as a whole, it is no wonder that people wish to become posthuman by fusing their human thinking with machine thinking.
Postscript—just before this post went live, I came across an article that talks about how the Obama administration wishes to approve $3 billion dollars to in effect throw a bunch of people into MRI brain scanners. The idea is to create a Brain Activity Map (not unlike the Human Genome Project). Here’s the article: Why Some Scientists Aren’t Happy About Obama’s $3 Billion Brain Research Plan. I won’t go into my reasoning but suffice it to say that, in my opinion, this is a great example of attempts to normalize the gatherer way of life and worldview. I think philanthropists would be well served by reading Hicks’ book and gaining an understanding of the gatherer worldview versus the hunter worldview. Trust me when I say that gatherer philanthropy is much different than hunter philanthropy. In many cases, the two worlds simply collide (not unlike the current “sequestration” collision in Washington). And it’s too bad because as Hicks points out, both worlds should ideally work together. When they don’t, gatherers become more susceptible to being manipulated and controlled (e.g., easily duped) while hunters become more cutthroat and cunning. Welcome to the world of bubbles: economic, housing, medical, education, etc.
Postscript II – I should mention that Hicks does put President Obama in the gatherer category. Interestingly, he puts Governor Romney in the gatherer category as well. In essence, the last presidential campaign featured two gatherers, and clearly President Obama is the better gatherer. Hicks tells us that there have been only two presidents in modern times who could embrace and join together the gatherer and hunter worlds: President John F. Kennedy and President Bill Clinton. Hicks (correctly) suggests that a true leader must be able to embrace and join together the gatherer and hunter worlds. Lets hope that such a leader appears before the next presidential race.
(Feel free to contact the Foundation for a copy of any of the executive summaries mentioned in this post series.)
What’s So Social About Machine Media? (2 of 2)
Welcome to part II of my two-part series designed to investigate the following overarching question:
Here are two follow-up questions:
Lets get started. If you have not read part I yet, I would suggest that you do so first. But if you only read part II, you’ll get the gist.
Dr. Hicks effectively argues that machine thinking fits closely with gatherer thinking—they’re both linear, logical, technical, certain, and object oriented to the exclusion of such things as context, ambiguity, conflict, gestalts, etc. On page 138 of his book The Digital Pandemic, Hicks writes, “[M]aybe in the future, the lonely, sensitive [nerd, autistic spectrum] kid who can’t trust others will go to video game avatars instead of teddy bears.” In a short article profiling her work entitled Human–Robot Relations: Why We Should Worry, MIT researcher Sherry Turkle observes, “People used to buy pets to teach their children about life and death and loss. We are now teaching kids that real living creatures are risky, and robots are safe.” Hicks continues by lamenting (in a pro-hunter way), “Not exactly a step forward, I’d say.” He gives us this “showstopper” observation: “Gatherers … are already predisposed to machines.” In essence, gatherer thinking fits nicely with machine thinking. So, here’s my key point:
Don’t get me wrong; all politics is about normalizing a particular way of life or worldview. All leaders, whether benevolent or malevolent, share one thing in common—they all wish to normalize a particular way of life or worldview. Maybe an example will help out here.
Not too long ago I attended a workshop on (the soon to disappear diagnosis) Aspergers Syndrome. Aspergers is often described as a high functioning version of autism. The presenter told us (echoing Florida’s message) that Aspergers forms of creativity are on the rise. The presenter suggested that the following captains of industry have Aspergers: the late Steve Jobs (of Apple fame), Bill Gates (of Microsoft fame), Mark Zuckerberg (of Facebook fame), and Jerry Yang (of Yahoo fame). What the presenter said next stunned me (and I paraphrase): “Mark Zuckerberg is clearly on the autism spectrum—probably Aspergers—and his brainchild, Facebook, is his attempt to normalize the world and experiences of persons on the autism spectrum.” The presenter then asked the following question, which tracks my questioning above (still paraphrasing): “What is going on in our society that hundreds of millions of people the world over wish to join Zuckerberg in his attempts to fuse people thinking with machine thinking in largely autistic ways?” Again, the “social” frame being used in a concept such as “social media” is a frame that conveys the idea that fusing together people thinking and machine thinking is good and desirable.
Is this being social? I would say no. If anything, it’s an entirely new form of what it means to be social. It’s people and machines being social (“machine culture” as Hicks calls it). The correct frame should be “human-machine media” or simply “machine media.” But why are we seeing so many people embracing and attaching to machine media or machine culture? Well, Hicks gives us a clue above when he talks about “lonely, sensitive [nerd, autistic spectrum] kid[s]” who are increasingly turning to the company of “video game avatars instead of teddy bears.” Turkle (mentioned above) in her book Alone Together looks at this trend in detail.
Turkle effectively tells us that machine thinking and machine media are perfect answers to the question asked by Bowlbian insecure attachment:
Simply, the machine world along with its machine thinking and machine relating, offers up the promise of normalizing the insecure attachment experience. Hicks reminds us (at page 137) that “[s]timulus-bound and mesmerized, young minds are vulnerable to the machine’s control.” Locked in the object-orineted, stimulus-bound middle brain (which I have blogged about before), young kids fall in love with their machines as a way of normalizing their experience, their way of life. In essence, falling in love with machines is a good enough answer to the question that insecure attachment asks. To quote Hicks (again, at page 137)
So, social media should be correctly framed as “normalizing insecure attachment” media. That’s an ungainly frame but it’s probably fairly accurate. Using Lakoffian framing theory, there’s probably a much better, pithier frame out there. I can’t think of one offhand. If you can, leave a comment. It was Bowlby who effectively argued that the self-esteem movement (which picked up steam back in the 1970s) was chiefly about normalizing insecure attachment at the level of society. Even way back in the 1970s Bowlby recognized early attempts, such as self-esteem, resiliency, and self psychology, as attempts to normalize insecure attachment. And I would argue (as I do in Bowlby’s Battle) that Bowlby—who was there at the birth of the natural versus cybernetic systems conflict—prophetically recognized the potential danger inherent in the possibility that human thinking would become fused with machine thinking. Bowlby died in 1990. He missed seeing the self-esteem movement short-circuiting against the digital machine revolution. If he had witnessed this short-circuiting, he probably would have muttered, “Told you so.” So, yes, I would make the following comparisons:
Gatherers = Bowlbian insecure attachment
Hunters = Bowlbian secure attachment
If I had to guess I would say that Bowlby was pro-hunter. Heck, Bowlby started out as a geologist (naturalist) and did a stint in the Royal Navy on the HMS Royal Oak. When I heard Sir Richard Bowlby (John’s son) speak in Canmore, Alberta Canada back in 2005 (executive summary available), he talked about how his relatives (on his mother’s side) were big game hunters in areas of Canada not far from Canmore. It would appear that the Bowlbys were hunters both literally and psychologically. As I hint at in Bowlby’s Battle, Bowlby’s theory of attachment has fallen on hard times because most post-Bowlbians or neo-Bowlbians are gatherers. We can see the gatherer influence in such areas as “the neurobiology of attachment.” In an earlier post I wrote the following (with my additions in brackets):
Is it still Bowlbian attachment theory if gatherers take it over? Outside of my brief treatment in Bowlby’s Battle, I’m not sure anyone has looked at this question. OK, wait, Jungian analyst (and one of Bowlby’s advisees) Anthony Stevens does look at this topic in his book Archetype Revisited—An Updated Natural History of the Self. I’ll refer the reader to Stevens’ book.
One final comment from my perspective as a philanthropist. There probably is not a month that goes by that I do not receive a survey asking me (or our Foundation) to what extent are we using social media to connect with the people and groups we work with. Yes, we have a web site, and, yes, we have this blog site, but that’s as far as it goes. So, I guess I could take a page out of Dick Cheney’s playbook and simply respond to these surveys by saying, “I don’t accept the ‘social media’ frame.” If you take nothing else from this post series, take this: don’t easily, readily, and unreflectively accept the social media frame. Try using frames like “machine media” or “human–machine media” or “machine culture.” Do we use machine media at our Foundation? Yes, but we try to use it in a conscious way, to consciously enter into human–machine relationships (as Powers suggests in Hamlet’s BlackBerry). So, taking a page out of Lakoff’s book on framing, question all frames. Know what they are really saying, what worldview they support and promulgate. If you desire to fuse machine thinking and human thinking, then “social media” is a good and effective frame. But if you wish to keep these two forms of thinking apart, then, simply, I don’t think the necessary frames exist. You could try “human.” Now, there’s a question I’d like to see on surveys: “How much do you use human media to connect with the people and groups you work with?”
OK, one last question: You may be asking, “Where is all this uncertainty and insecurity coming from that’s driving kids (and many adults) to fuse human thinking with machine thinking?” This is a topic that is not often looked at. The best book on the subject is probably still social commentator Peter Marris’ book The Politics of Uncertainty—Attachment in Private and Public Life (executive summary available). Another good book is economist Jeremy Rifkin’s book The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-market Era (executive summary available). You may wish to consult social commentator Francis Fukuyama’s book Our Posthuman Future—Consequences of the Technological Revolution (partial summary available). Or even Niel Postman’s book Technopoly—The Surrender of Culture to Technology (executive summary available). Here’s a partial list of the types of causes these authors point to:
When you take all of the above causes together as a whole, it is no wonder that people wish to become posthuman by fusing their human thinking with machine thinking.
Postscript—just before this post went live, I came across an article that talks about how the Obama administration wishes to approve $3 billion dollars to in effect throw a bunch of people into MRI brain scanners. The idea is to create a Brain Activity Map (not unlike the Human Genome Project). Here’s the article: Why Some Scientists Aren’t Happy About Obama’s $3 Billion Brain Research Plan. I won’t go into my reasoning but suffice it to say that, in my opinion, this is a great example of attempts to normalize the gatherer way of life and worldview. I think philanthropists would be well served by reading Hicks’ book and gaining an understanding of the gatherer worldview versus the hunter worldview. Trust me when I say that gatherer philanthropy is much different than hunter philanthropy. In many cases, the two worlds simply collide (not unlike the current “sequestration” collision in Washington). And it’s too bad because as Hicks points out, both worlds should ideally work together. When they don’t, gatherers become more susceptible to being manipulated and controlled (e.g., easily duped) while hunters become more cutthroat and cunning. Welcome to the world of bubbles: economic, housing, medical, education, etc.
Postscript II – I should mention that Hicks does put President Obama in the gatherer category. Interestingly, he puts Governor Romney in the gatherer category as well. In essence, the last presidential campaign featured two gatherers, and clearly President Obama is the better gatherer. Hicks tells us that there have been only two presidents in modern times who could embrace and join together the gatherer and hunter worlds: President John F. Kennedy and President Bill Clinton. Hicks (correctly) suggests that a true leader must be able to embrace and join together the gatherer and hunter worlds. Lets hope that such a leader appears before the next presidential race.
(Feel free to contact the Foundation for a copy of any of the executive summaries mentioned in this post series.)