What, then, are we to make of the two books Kelly has penned here? I remain extremely torn. I feel that the opening and closing portions of What Technology Wants are almost too silly to be taken seriously. Yet, the meat in the middle is absolutely beautiful, inspiring, and enlightening stuff.So, here’s what you do: Wait for the paperback version of What Technology Wants to be released (since it’ll be far easier for you to rip apart), and then tear off pages 1-70 and 270-360. What you’ll be left with is a terrific 200-page book that I can wholeheartedly recommend!
When interviewed while he was researching this book, Kelly, who describes himself as a devout Christian, declared that technology ‘is actually a divine phenomenon that is a reflection of God.’ And the last chapter of What Technology Wants is steeped in this bizarre neo-mystical progressivism. 'If there is a God,’ Kelly writes, 'the arc of the technium is aimed right at him.’ For Kelly, our artifacts, too, reflect the divine: 'We can see more of God in a cellphone than in a tree frog.’ (Were I religious I’d argue the opposite: no human technology can make a new frog from the raw material of flies, something that frogs do regularly.)
When professional writers, especially ones trained in the literary arts, see horrifically bad writing online, they recoil. All their training about the value of diverse (or, you know, heteroglossic) societies and the equality of classes goes flying out the window. Social media acts as a kind of truth serum, as Marshall Kirkpatrick likes to say: This is how the masses of people talk. This is how the masses of people write. Not moonlighting bloggers. Not the 20 million NPR listeners. But the other 300 million people trying to LOL their way through boring days at office jobs or in Iraq.I think we confuse the ability to see what everyday writing looks like – and probably has for a long time – with a change in how people write. Toss in that the traditional (usually religious) practices and sayings around serious topics like death or childbearing have lost valence, and you get people just saying what comes to mind. It’s not always pretty.
Professor Gleason was a bumbling biologist whom, due to his generous and ovoid physical proportions, we students had nicknamed ‘The Egg.’ He seemed to be totally baffled by his own course material, and managed quite capably to convey this bewilderment to the class, so that none of us knew what the hell was going on. I once went to his office with great trepidation to ask him to explain a challenging concept. When I arrived there he had his back to me as he stood before an elaborate apparatus of glassware, ringstands, tubes, and clamps. I recall thinking, Well, how about that? Still waters run deep. He does know what he’s doing after all. When he turned to me, however, he was stirring a cup of coffee, brewed on the intricate set-up. One day he took us down to the banks of the Hackensack River for a field trip. We helped him get the large motorboat into the water, and then the ten of us students looked on from the bank as he worked away at the engine, yanking the pull repeatedly to get it to start. He hadn’t noticed that the boat had begun to drift away, and we had no intention of alerting him. We all watched in silence (and with rising anticipation of a canceled class) as The Egg worked at the engine, his crablike arms too short to extract the pull all the way. Within ten minutes he had drifted out of sight. So we went home.
changes to the System
It’s just not in my nature, I guess, to stick with one organizational method for very long. A few months ago, I wrote about my return to Backpack. Well, it only took about two weeks for me to…
A study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has found a decided link between celibacy and good grades. Among high school students who earn mostly A’s, 32 percent have had intercourse, compared with 69 percent of their peers with D’s and F’s. And on risk-taking measures like consuming alcohol or using condoms, the better students were also the more cautious.
The Mind’s Eye would have been a disappointment had it looked no further for clinical material. But there’s a redeeming fifth case: Oliver Sacks. And when the author steps into the clinical spotlight the book comes to life. His well-documented absent-mindedness, ]what is variously called my “shyness”, my “reclusiveness”, my “social ineptitude”, my “eccentricity”, even my “Asperger’s syndrome”’, can, he thinks, be put down to lifelong face blindness. A rare consequence of brain injury, it is now understood to be quite common in the general population, varying in severity from habitual misrecognition of acquaintances to not recognising one’s own children. Sacks’s problem seems to fit at the more severe end of the spectrum, among those who are discombobulated even by their own reflection. On one occasion, he finds himself grooming his beard in a restaurant window only to realise that ‘what I had taken to be my reflection… was in fact a grey-bearded man on the other side of the window, who must have been wondering why I was preening myself in front of him’.
against humanism
The language that has been developed over the centuries for talking about the mental and spiritual side of life is not some feeble, amateurish 'folk-psychology'. It is a highly sophisticated toolbox adapted for just that difficult purpose. The vocabularies of the sciences are also well adapted for their own purposes, but this means they cannot be used anywhere else. Physical truths can only be answers to physical questions. Indeed, the great achievement of Galileo, Newton and their friends consisted in narrowing the scope of those sciences to concentrate them on topics where their methods were wholly suitable. People who are now led by that success to treat them as a panacea for other kinds of problem are being naive.The moral of all this is, I think, that Hitchens is simply wrong. The poison does not come from religion itself but from political misuses of it. The kinds of idea that we class as religious actually range from the excellent to the awful, from the poisonous to the most nourishing. But there is a general tendency for new imaginative ways of understanding life to emerge from religious thinking – that is, from thoughts which go beyond current human horizons. This is bound to happen simply because they have quite new kinds of truth to convey. Thus the Greeks, when they came to grasp the idea that the earth as a whole bountifully supplied all their needs, worshipped it under the name of Gaia, mother of gods and men. And thus Pythagoras, when he discovered a new mathematical order pervading phenomena from the heavens to the laws of sound, naturally conceived that order as something greater than humanity; something therefore that should be deeply venerated.
In this way many of the moral insights we value highly today – for instance, the coherence of the cosmos and the value of the individual soul, as well as the conviction that All is Number – have originally been shaped in religious contexts. If we decide to drop those contexts as obsolete we lose half the meaning of the ideas themselves.
And increasingly, Facebook is performing the social filtering for us, absolving us of the guilt implicit in that as well. Social media structures communication between friends so that the responsibility for listening — inescapably built into earlier mediums that structured talk between friends as person-to-person — is modulated into a vaguer injunction to respond if and when you feel like it. Because status updates and the like are not addressed to anyone specific, they don’t generate an obligation in anyone specific to pay attention. The messages instead compete in an attention marketplace that Facebook’s interface creates and moderates, in which the currency is comments and ‘likes’ and the other click-driven responses that the company can measure and process algorithmically.