In his book, Carr writes, “The importance of such skills [the ones fostered by computer game play] shouldn’t be taken lightly. As our work and social lives come to center on the use of electronic media, the faster we’re able to navigate those media and the more adroitly we’re able to shift our attention among online tasks, the more valuable we’re likely to become as employees and even as friends and colleagues” (140). Jane McGonigal takes this argument one step further, arguing that the skills developed in online game play are the skills that can help us save the world. Or more correctly, she believe that games reinforce behavior and attitudes that may prove necessary for solving our real world problems.

The first such attitude is what she describes as “urgent optimism.” Unfortunately, she admits, so far this urgent optimism translates into the belief that one can change the virtual world only, and not the real world (the very thing she hopes to change with her games). But the point is that, whereas in the real world we feel increasingly disempowered to make real change, paralyzed by the seeming impossibility of affecting big problems, in the game world, these players feel like nothing is impossible. I would agree that we certainly need more of this.

The second behavior is that gamers are really good at weaving a social fabric. I might suggest that the weaving of this fabric is a game in itself – strategic alliances. My real concern here is that it reinforces the slightly sick transformation of ‘friendship’ that is occurring with our social media. And the other is that this notion of geographically boundless collaboration itself has environmental implications, when we consider the resources that go in to maintaining these connections (see Mobile Lives). But I am torn here, because in my work, I’m arguing that we need greater social connections, and these gamers are doing this. I suppose the difference is that I’m suggesting that the connections are themselves better (i.e. they are more fulfilling, and meaningful), whereas she is implying that these connections need to be more numerous, and more organized, which itself betrays a worldview bias.

The third attitude is what she calls “blissful productivity.” This is the idea that humans are most human when they are being productive, and that we feel good about this. I find this funny, in that it seems like the latest transformation of the Protestant Ethic to fit our modern world. But yes, it would be nice if these productive efforts were focused on changing the world for the better, rather than on making money (and in turn, working to perpetuate the world as it is now).

And finally, she identifies “epic meaning” as being something that gamers are drawn to. When describing the appeal of her game, A World Without Oil, she says blithely that “nobody wants to change how they live because it’s good for the world, or because they’re supposed to,” but that if you immerse people in an epic game, they can in a sense be tricked into doing what’s good for the world (though she didn’t phrase it that way). I find this really sad on the one hand, because I can’t fathom why our sustainability problems are not ‘epic’ enough to engender this motivation. On the other hand, my research argues something not too dissimilar! – namely that I suggest that people need to be re-immersed (reminded in some cases) in a meaningfilled world, one that is passed down through great myths and spiritual traditions, in order that they adopt these more harmonious behaviors. (See Walker’s Sustainable By Design.) As she said, those who participated in the epic game, continued the practices learned years after the game ended. This suggests that this is likely the key, and that I am on the right track. You have to provide people with a greater reason to want to change the world. I just sort of wish it wasn’t by having them play games online.

McGonigal has to overcome many people’s kneejerk reaction to immersion. People might argue that immersion is bad – or if not inherently bad, that this amount of time immersed in a fictional world is to the detriment of real world health/happiness/productivity, etc.. I don’t think immersion is bad (see Ryan post). And I don’t think that the amount of time spent means that it is necessarily bad either. It all depends on what you are gaining from that engagement. My issue is that the games are built within the same paradigm that seems to be producing an unsustainable relationship between humans and the planet. They reinforce particular kinds of thinking (as I mentioned before about collaboration/information exchange, for example), and they increase our addiction to computer technologies, which has both psychological and environmental implications. For example, she quickly mentions how many more gamers will be using mobile devices to connect to these games, and dismisses the environmental impact by saying that the power they use will be increasingly ‘green’. I worry that there will be a point at which these lines cross on the graph, and that as we use more and more devices/energy, we are running out of time to use these games to solve these huge problems – or indeed to do anything to solve them. Increased gaming accelerates the crises in some ways, just in terms of the energy cost of doing so.

And as for the ‘escapism’ arguments against immersion, she is not advocating exodus into virtual reality. She doesn’t want to make better games so that we have a better place to escape to. She wants to make better games that help us make our real world better. I think this is a great mission.

Finally, I must come back to the question she asks, which is: In all of the zillions of hours we spend gaming, what exactly are we training for? She quotes a figure that the average young person will spend 10,000 hours gaming, which, according to Malcolm Gladwell’s research, means that we are producing a fleet of gaming ‘virtuosos’. But really, are these individuals ‘virtuosos’ or ‘idiot savants’? I guess I think that being a great computer gamer may not be that helpful when the time comes that we disengage from computer technology. If we are creating a generation of people who are excellent at solving problems specifically with computer – or a she suggests, we are evolving to think like this – then we may be in big trouble because. What happens when we try to unplug? Do we know how to function without these tools? We are not preparing ourselves for Power Down. And as Carr shows, using computers to help us solve problems does not make us better problem solvers, but worse….

A summary of:

Carr, N. (2010). The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to our Brains. W.W. Norton & Company: New York.

(Be Warned: The Internet is changing us)

The main message Carr sends in this new book is that our technology – indeed, every new medium – changes us. This is not a new idea. McLuhan, whom he cites frequently, is famous for saying that the “medium is the message”, alluding to the “transformative power of new communication technologies” (2). But this aphorism was also, according to Carr, a warning “about the threat the power poses – and the risk of being oblivious to the threat” (2). Carr suggests that often times, the introduction of a new technology sparks debate about the wrong thing, namely the content the technology conveys. Carr writes: “What both enthusiast and skeptic miss is what McLuhan saw: that in the long run a medium’s content matters less than the medium itself in influencing how we think and act. As our window onto the world, and onto ourselves, a popular medium molds what we see and how we see it – and eventually, if we use it enough, it changes who we are, as individuals and as a society” (3). Just as “When a carpenter picks up a hammer, the hammer becomes, so far as his brain is concerned, part of his hand” (208), when we use the Internet, the Internet becomes an extension of our brains.

So how does the Internet change us? Well, some cognitive skills are strengthened as we engage with the Web. These include things like “hand-eye coordination, reflex response, and the processing of visual cues” (139). As a 2003 Nature study shows, game players are more deft as shifting their visual focus and identify more items in their visual fields. The authors of this study concluded that “‘although video-game playing may seem to be rather mindless, it is capable of radically altering visual attentional processing’” (139). A similar argument has been made by Jane McGonigal (see next post). But the question is, how useful are these skills in a age when computers no longer exist? If we are training ourselves to be better and better at using computers – i.e. thinking like computers – aren’t we getting less and less good at NOT using computers? (Of course, not only are their cognitive tradeoffs to be considered with our increased Web use, there are negative psychological consequences to this as well – which is the topic of my next blog.)

Another thing that becomes clear in reading this book is that the tenets that underpin technology are self-reinforcing. For example, Carr identifies the Internet as one of many “intellectual technologies,” in that they seek to “extend or support our mental powers” (44). In using the Internet, we tacitly accept the correctness of this endeavor; and the more we use the Internet, the more we come to value its cause. Nowhere is this more evident than in Google itself. Carr quotes Richard Koman, who said that Google “‘has become a true believer in its own goodness, a belief which justifies its own set of rules regarding corporate ethics, anti-competition, customer service and its place in society’” (164). Here we see in action the reshuffling of the hierarchy of value system. Whereas once honesty and community etc. may have been at the top, here they are subordinated to freedom of information. (For evidence of this, note the many lawsuits against Google’s Book Search and their dismissive, cavalier attitude, Google’s Eric Schmidt saying: “‘Imagine the cultural impact of putting tens of millions of previously inaccessible volumes into one vast index, every word of which is searchable by anyone, rich or poor, urban or rural, First World or Third, en toute langue – and all, of course, entirely for free’” (162).) The Google Book Project vaults “data” and “information” to the top of our priorities, asserting yet again “the machine” over “the garden” (167). It is little surprise, then, that Westerners see their great philanthropic mission as being the increased access to information for supposedly ‘disadvantaged’ populations (e.g. the well-meaning but entirely misguided One Laptop Per Child Initiative; proving that poverty is measured in diminished informational resources, rather than diminished social bonds, happiness, etc.).

What is even more worrying – and frankly insulting – is the assertion by these intellectual technologies (the Web more so than others, I would argue) that we would be “‘better off’ if our brains were supplemented, or even replaced, by artificial intelligence” (173). When societies were becoming literate, there was similar debate about the impact it would have on people’s minds. Socrates feared that writing would teach people to become less dependent on their own memory, and remember things “not from within themselves, but by means of external marks” (177). And he was right. But this is ever more true with the Internet, which encourages people to completely offload their memory to the Web, to save up precious brain space. But Socrates’ wariness should prove to us just how far our line in the sand has moved, how much we have been changed by our technology. If books were at one time anathema to us, and now many of us see nothing wrong with deferring by default to Google’s search results, it should suggest to us that perhaps we need to rethink the seemingly unquestionable sense of the mission of intellectual technologies.

Another way that technology changes us is that it homogenizes us culturally, so that we lose all rich, human ways of doing as we replace them with specifically technological ways of doing. (This is another reason for my aversion to One Laptop Per Child – pushing Western values to non-Western countries.) Carr writes, “Culture is more than the aggregate of what Google describes as ‘the world’s information.’ It’s more than what can be reduced to binary code and uploaded onto the Net. To remain vital, culture must be renewed in the minds of the members of every generation. Outsource memory, and culture withers” (197). He quotes Richard Foreman, who argues that offloading memory threatens both the depth of culture and the depth of self: “‘I come from a tradition of Western culture,’ he wrote, ‘in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense and ‘cathedral-like’ structure of the highly educated and articulate personality – a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West.’ But now, he continued, ‘I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self – evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the ‘instantly available.’ As we are drained of our ‘inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance,’ Foreman concluded, we risk turning into ‘pancake people – spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button’” (196).

The final way that technology changes us is that we design our societies to function around its capabilities; or as Weizenbaum says, “Such technologies become part of ‘the very stuff out of which man builds his world” (206). Carr quotes Weizenbaum futher: “‘The computer was not a prerequisite to the survival of modern society in the post-war period and beyond,’ Weizenbaum argued; ‘its enthusiastic, uncritical embrace by the most “progressive” elements of American government, business, and industry made it a resource essential to society’s survival in the form that the computer itself had been instrumental in shaping’” (207). Carr explains further: “Comptuers would come to mediate the activities that define people’s everyday lies – how they learn, how they think, how they socialize. What the history of intellectual technologies shows us, he warned, is that ‘the introduction of computers into some complex human activities may constitute an irreversible commitment.’ Our intellectual and social lives may, like our industrial routines, come to reflect the form that the computer imposes on them” (207). Just as Carr warned from the beginning: “The computer screen bulldozes our doubts with its bounties and conveniences. It is so much our servant that it would seem churlish to notice that it is also our master” (4). This is because, “Once (206) adopted , they can never be abandoned, at least not without plunging society into ‘great confusion and possibly utter chaos.’ An intellectual technology, he wrote, ‘becomes an indispensible component of any structure once it is to thoroughly integrated with the structure, so enmeshed in various vital substructures, that it can no longer be factored out without fatally impairing the whole structure’” (207).

My concern is this: Everything we know as humans (from our spiritual traditions, social taboos, etc.) should tell us that we should resist the mesmerizing effect of these intellectual technologies, and yet we sacrifice these values because adopting them is easier to do. But like every empire, the Age of the Computer will one day fall (just as cars will as fossil fuels dry up and nuclear power cannot supply enough energy to the grid to provide for an electric car society), and when that comes, I’m afraid we’ll be very ashamed of having eschewed our human values for technological ones.

I want to end on a more positive note. The real question about the power of technology should be this: How do we use it to our advantage? Can we see hope in the transformative affects of media? Firstly, as Langdon Winner pointed out, “technologies are not merely aids to human activity, but also powerful forces acting to reshape that activity and its meaning” (47). To us, this should indicate that if we design responsibly, we can have a huge impact on our very worldview. So just as the mechanical clock “helped bring into being the scientific mind and the scientific man” (44), it is possible that a spiritualized cyberspace might create an altogether different man, perhaps an incarnation that’s more sensitive to issues of human/nature harmony. And secondly, if we recognize that the addition of a medium affects all other media – in McLuhan’s words, ‘It never ceases to oppress the older media until it finds new shapes and positions for them’ (89) – then if we create a new Internet, it has the power to affect the Internet we have now. In other words, we are not in competition with previous, highly popular incarnations of the Web. By innovating cyberspace creatively, we may ameliorate the negative impacts of the Web (as we know it today) by merely opening eyes to an alternative.