Lonely and stupid here... you rang?

Two articles from The Atlantic were recently brought to my attention that deal with something I've been thinking about a lot lately; the role of innovation and technology on our lives.

Stephen Marche wrote an insightful article on social media titled: Is Facebook making us lonely? The article delves into the contemporary psyche, especially from the American standpoint. He touches on subjects that go beyond the scope of the title such as questioning what exactly makes us happy.

Here's a hint: trying to be happy doesn't make you happy.

As far as loneliness goes, we Americans the author believes, are a lonely lot by design. We value our independence and individualism over community. In other words, we choose to be lonely. It's not surprising then that Facebook, which allows us to connect with others without having any real contact with them, was born and bred in the good ol' USA.

But is there a causal effect between the social media and loneliness? On that subject, the author reluctantly seems to suggest no; you get out of Facebook what you bring to it.

I could have told him that.

The other article addresses how new computer technologies and the quest for artificial intelligence are affecting human intelligence. It was written by Nicholas Carr who wrote a book on the subject. His point in a nutshell is that our attention spans have been greatly compromised by the cacophony of information the new media bombard us with on a steady basis. See if you can prove him wrong by getting through his lengthy article provocatively titled: Is Google Making Us Stupid?

Carr's most salient point comes toward the end of the piece where he questions his own premise by noting that the inventions of writing and the printing press themselves were questioned by folks back in the day who worried about the loss of oral history and memory, the dissemination of information without appropriate instruction or background, and the spread of "sedition and debauchery." In other words, they understood that a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing.

Sound familiar? It turned out that the fears of the naysayers about the written word and printing press came true. It just so happened that the benefits from those earth shattering inventions outweighed the drawbacks.

The fact is, with every great invention created through the ages, something has been lost. Before the phonograph was invented, people entertained themselves by making their own music. Before television, people used their imagination to conjure images in their mind's eye of the characters they read about or listed to on the radio. Before the automobile, people got their exercise by walking. To escape the summer heat before air conditioning, people sat on their front stoops and talked to their neighbors. The list goes on and on...

This brings to mind the greatest invention story of all time. A very long time ago, farmers stored their grain in large earthenware pots. One day, some farmers forgot to cover the pot to protect their precious harvest from the elements. A rainstorm drenched the grain. Then the sun came out and heated the rainwater, slowly cooking the grain converting starch into sugar. After the water cooled in the evening, yeast spores suspended in the air landed in the mixture, voraciously consumed the sugars, and reproduced wildly. When the farmers discovered the uncovered pot sometime later, they assumed their harvest was ruined. That is, until one brave soul decided to try the soupy mess. It tasted peculiar, but the farmer soon discovered that drinking the concoction sure made him feel good. In fact, the more he drank, the better he felt. Soon the others tried it. You can imagine the party they had that night.

After the next morning's grogginess wore off, the farmers realized they had a good thing on their hands. The problem was, recreating it wasn't simple as they weren't around to witness the sequence of events that had to take place before their simple grain would become a magic elixir. Through experimentation by trial and error, they eventually came up with a successful batch. Many archeologists credit this as the dawn of the scientific method. Next they needed a way to remember how the heck they did it so they could repeat the process. Other than their memory, (which may have been altered by this time), there was no system to record the steps they took to create the potion.

So they had to invent one.

We know this to be true because the earliest examples of written language that archeologists have discovered are you guessed it, recipes for beer.

Now I needn't point out the obvious benefits of beer to society. As is the case with all great inventions, we lost a few things too; productivity, innocence, and countless weekends just to name a few. But the fact remains that beer's greatest contributions to society are written language, science and mathematics, (they had to keep track of all that precious brew you know).

Because of written language, we have books, and because of books we have libraries and the dissemination of knowledge. After Guttenburg's invention, knowledge was no longer the exclusive domain of a select few. Along with the rise in literacy came the fall of oligarchies, the dawn of the Enlightenment, and the rise of the arts and democracy.

Just as literature opened our minds to the ways of our world, science and mathematics gave us a greater understanding of the mechanisms of our world. The work of scientists and mathematicians opened the door for inventions that would work for the benefit, and sometimes to the detriment of society. Increasingly complicated problems required a new method to calculate mathematical equations that was quicker than the capability of the human mind. Again out of necessity, they had to invent one. They would call it the computer.

Eventually it was discovered that the computer could be used for things other than calculations, it could be used on words as well as numbers. Once that discovery was made, as with the invention of movable type some 500 years earlier, the computer forever revolutionized communication and the spread of knowledge. Soon the entire world became connected.

Then along came Google and Facebook and because of them, we all got lonely and stupid.

Just think, all that because of beer.

We beer lovers the world over realize that at some point, our preferred beverage would make us stupid and maybe a little bit lonely. Who knew it would take 5,000 years?

George Eastman

In my post about Steve Jobs and all the innovators, inventors and creative geniuses he is in company with, I forgot about poor old George Eastman.

Here is an article by Bob Greene that draws some interesting comparisons between Google and the company Eastman founded, Kodak.

Like Jobs, it was Eastman who brought his product, in his case cameras and photography, to everyday people. In the process he not only changed photography, which already had been around for a half century, but the world.

Today, photography like so many other fields of endeavor, is being transformed by the digital age. Greene makes an interesting point using traditional silver (film) based photography versus its digital based counterpart as a metaphor for our current society. In the old film era, (boy I'm really starting to feel old), you would have to wait to shoot an entire role of film, take it to the lab, then wait a few days more for the film to be processed. There was a sense of glorious anticipation in that time, wondering how the pictures would turn out. Opening that envelope with the prints, or a box with slides, would be akin to opening up a birthday present as, hoping for the best, you'd never know exactly what you'd get. All that's been lost with digital photography and its instant feedback, and gratification.

Unfortunately Kodak has not been very good at the instant gratification business. As everyone in the photography world, and the city of Rochester knows, the company has been floundering for quite some time, and may not survive. That would be a terrible shame.

Ironically, Google, the company that all but invented instant gratification, is no longer instant enough. Competition from Twitter, Facebook and others have forced Google to improve its search algorithm to make it even faster. *

Another lesson to all of us in changing times, either go with the flow or get off the boat.




* Which reminds me of an old Groucho Marx bit. While in a passionate embrace with a woman, she asks him to come closer to which he replies: "If I were any closer I'd be behind you."

In those days , they had time for everything...

...could be a comment heard today about life before the age of e-mail, the internet, and multitasking, back when people weren't teathered to their electronic devices and required to be accessible 24/7.

Isn't it ironic that the more time saving devices we have at our fingertips, the less time we seem to have at our disposal?

That sentiment is actually from a novel and later a classic movie, set at the turn of the last century. Its inspiration was not related to the computer obviously but the electric streetcar which replaced the horse drawn streetcar. Life it seems was a trifle slower in the pre-trolley days when the car pulled up to a house:

A lady could whistle to it from an upstairs window, and the car would halt at once, and wait for her while she shut the window, put on her hat and coat, went downstairs, found an umbrella, told the "girl" what to have for dinner and came forth from the house. The previous passengers made little objection to such gallantry on the part of the car: they were wont to expect as much for themselves on like occasion. 

In good weather the mule pulled the car a mile in a little less than twenty minutes, unless the stops were too long; but when the trolley-car came, doing its mile in five minutes and better, it would wait for nobody. Nor could its passengers have endured such a thing, because the faster they were carried, the less time they had to spare!

People have been grumbling about the "good old days" probably since the invention of the wheel, if not before.

The "good old days." Chicago Loop c.1900

The words are taken from the novel The Magnificent Ambersons by Booth Tarkington. It was written in 1918 and chroicles the life of once the most prominent family of an unnamed Midwestern town.* It was the story that Orson Wells chose to be the setting for his second feature film. Like Wells' first film Citizen Kane, the chief protagonist of The Magnificent Ambersons, George Amberson Minafer is a flawed individual, arrogant with a supreme sense of entitlement, who is perfectly unwilling to change along with the world around him. His stubborn attitude that, for a person of his status it was more worthwhile - to be rather than to do, made him ill suited for life in a time when his prestigious family name had lost its relevance.

George's nemesis, Eugene Morgan, was the father of George's on again off again girlfriend Lucy, but also an admirer of his widowed mother Isabel. George eventually learns what we already know, not only was the admiration mutual, but it was in fact older than George himself, and were it not for a youthful indiscretion, Eugene may very well have ended up George's father, and Lucy... well you can figure out the rest. The stuff for great melodrama to be sure but the story takes place during the period of the most radical change in the history of this country, and that turbulent era serves as the story behind the story.

Although the film and novel center around George and the self centered existence that leads to his eventual "come-upance", the most compelling character is Eugene. He is a member of the new breed of do'ers rather than be'ers, an inventor and early advocate of the automobile. While he is a lifelong friend of the Ambersons, his world and theirs collide as the progress he is in part responsible for, crushes the old way of life that sustained the family and their significance. Yet George is the only Amberson who is threatened by Eugene; by his ambition, his newfangled horseless carriage, his self-made success, and mostly by his intrusion into George's family. One evening at dinner at the Ambersons', George's grandfather and uncle engage Eugene in conversation about the growth due to all the new roads and how it has been negatively effecting property values in their part of town. Eugene assures them that it will only get worse, that roads will soon be built all the way to the edge of town and the roads already in town will be widened to accommodate the automobile. At that point, George blurts out:

Automobiles are a useless nuisance. They'll never amount to anything but a nuisance. They had no business to be invented.

George's grandfather in the book, his uncle in the movie , admonishes him for his impertinence. Seemingly unfazed, Eugene in a remarkably insightful monologue says this:

I'm not sure he's wrong about automobiles. With all their speed forward they may be a step backward in civilization - that is, in spiritual civilization. It may be that they will not add to the beauty of the world, nor to the life of men's souls. I am not sure, But automobiles have come, and they bring a greater change in our life than most of us suspect. They are here, and almost all outward things are going to be different because of what they bring. They are going to alter war, and they are going to alter peace. I think men's minds are going to be changed in subtle ways because of the automobiles; just how, though, I could hardly guess. But you can't have the immense outward changes that they will cause without some inward ones, and it may be that George is right, and that spiritual alteration will be bad for us. Perhaps, ten or twenty years from now, if we can see the inward change in men by that time, I shouldn't be able to defend the gasoline engine, but would have to agree with him that automobiles had no business to be invented.

Pretty glum words indeed, especially coming from one of the inventors of that infernal contraption.

Later in the story, George leaves for an extended trip to Europe. Upon his return five years later, he found that the familiar world he left behind, was gone forever. This is how Booth Tarkington describes George's town that had become a city upon his return:

He walked homeward slowly through what appeared to be the strange streets of a strange city... the streets were thunderous; a vast energy heaved under the universal coating of dinginess...All the people were soiled by the smoke-mist through which they hurried, under the heavy sky that hung close upon the new skyscrapers; and nearly all seemed harried by something impending.

That dinginess and harried nature of life in this new world that Tarkington describes, is associated by the new people in town, with well being and prosperity. As long as the factories and mills were belching out smoke, people were making money and all was well.

Perhaps this is the "spiritual alteration" that Eugene so prophetically alluded to in his words.

It's funny, if we were to take Eugene's cautionary statement and substitute the word computer for automobile, and digital age for gasoline engine, his comments would ring true in our day.

Being in the middle of the digital revolution, we still may not begin to understand the inward change it causes in our souls. One thing is certain, computers are here to stay and they have inexorably changed our lives.

For better and for worse.

After all, as Eugene said in the movie:

There aren't any old times. When times are gone, they're not old, they're dead. There aren't any times but new times.

* It is said that Booth Tarkington based the unnamed Midwestern town that is the setting for The Magnificent Ambersons on his home town, Woodruff Place, Indiana, which today is a neighborhood of Indianapolis. For his part, Wells may have been influenced by the town of his birth, Kenosha, Wisconsin. In reality though, the town could be Anywhere, USA.