A summary of:

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

(Warning: Internet causes massive brain damage?)

Having read Carr’s first book, Rewiring the World: From Edison to Google, I must say that I am wholly convinced now that Google is a very sinister company. Not only do they aspire to world domination, but they seem to have a highly objectionable vision of what their world would look like, if they got their way. They seem to have no concern for the environmental impacts of their projects, nor for the ethical implications of them, both evidenced by their new baby, the Google Book Search.

More worrying than this is their utter disregard for – and massive devaluation of – the human mind. To them, it is an imperfect machine; and I suppose the fact that their technologies may or may not be damaging it only further proves to them its need for augmentation… or replacement.

But I do care about what’s happening to our minds. And while you are immediately branded a Luddite to say so, I think the Internet may be hurting us. I think there are two kinds of effects this is having on our minds: cognitive impairment (which you would have to weigh against the clear cognitive augmentation is also provides), and damage to our emotional and psychological wellbeing. I shall take these one at a time.

Carr argues – and he is not alone in proposing this – that the Internet is “chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation” (7). He continues, “Whether I’m online or not, my mind (6) now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski” (7). Or, stated elsewhere: “Our use of the Internet involves many paradoxes, but the one that promises to have the greatest long-term influence over how we think is this one: the Net seizes our attention only to scatter it” (118). He understands this to be a result of technology’s power over us. He writes that he began to sense that the computer “was more than just a simple tool that did what you told it to do. It was a machine that, in subtle but unmistakable ways, exerted an influence over you. The more I used it, the more it altered the way I worked” (13), so that for example, “In using the word processor, I had become something of a word processor myself” (13). He also cites the interesting case of Nietzsche: when he adopted a kind of typewriter known as a writing ball, his writing style changed perceptibly. A friend of his commented that his “prose had become tighter, more telegraphic. There was a new forcefulness to it, too, as though the machine’s power – its ‘iron’ – was, through some mysterious metaphysical mechanism, being transferred into the words it pressed into the page” (Carr’s words, 18).

But the Internet is not a writing tool. It is a thinking tool. As such, it changes the way we think. Carr muses on his distracted mind, “But my brain, I realized, wasn’t just drifting. It was hungry. It was demanding to be fed the way the Net fed it – and the more it was fed, the hungrier it became. Even when I was away from my computer, I yearned to check e-mail, click links, do some Googling. I wanted to be connected. Just as Microsoft Word had turned me into a flesh-and-blood word processor, the Internet, I sensed, was turning me into something like a high-speed data processor machine a human HAL” (16). This is an interesting way of understanding what I have come to call information pleonexia. Our insatiable desire for information is in a way determined by the technology’s desire for information working through – and using – us.

There is another way of understanding this phenomenon, and that is to look at our neurobiology. Carr spends a great deal of time explaining what is called ‘neuroplasticity’, i.e. the ability of the brain to change and adapt. By studying simpler nervous systems, like that of the large sea slug, biologist Eric Kandel proved how easy it is to alter the brain. Carr writes: Kandel… found that if you touch a slug’s gill, even very lightly, the gill will immediately and reflexively recoil. But if you touch the gill repeatedly, without causing any harm to the animal, the recoiling instinct will steadily diminish. The slug will become (27) habituated to the touch and learn to ignore it. By monitoring slugs’ nervous systems, Kandel discovered that ‘this learned change in behavior was paralleled by a progressive weakening of the synaptic connections’ between the sensory neurons that ‘feel’ the touch and the motor neurons that tell the gill to retract. In a slug’s ordinary state, about ninety percent of the sensory neurons in its gill have connections to motor neurons. But after its gill is touched just forty times, only ten percent of the sensory cells maintain links to the motor cells. The research ‘showed dramatically,’ Kandel wrote, that ‘synapses can undergo large and enduring changes in strength after only a relatively small amount of training” (28).

What’s important for us to understand from this is that it is very possible, in fact very likely, that the Internet is changing the physical structure of our brains. Carr cites some other interesting examples.

• “In 2008, Small and two of his colleagues carried out the first exper-(120)iment that actually showed people’s brains changing in response to Internet use…. / The most remarkable part of the experiment came when the tests were repeated six days later. In the interim, the researches had the novices spend an hour a day online, searching the Net. The new scans revealed that the area in their prefrontal cortex that had been largely dormant now showed extensive activity – just like the activity in the brains of the veteran surfers. ‘After just five days of practice, the exact same neural circuitry in the front part of the brain became active in the Internet-naïve subjects,’ reports Small. ‘Five hours on the Internet, and the naïve subjects had already rewired their brains.’ He goes on to ask, ‘If our brains are so sensitive to just an hour a day of computer exposure, what happens when we spend more time [online]?’” (121)
• “In 2003, a Dutch clinical psychologist named Christof van Nimwegen began a fascinating study of computer-aided learning that a BBC writer would later call ‘one of the most interesting examinations of current computer use and the potential downsides of our increasing reliance on screen-based interaction with information systems.’ Van Nimwegen had two groups of volunteers work through a tricky logic puzzle on a computer…. One of the groups used software that had been designed to be as helpful as possible. It offered onscreen assistence during the course of solving the puzzle, providing visual cues, for instance, to highlight permitted moves. The other group used a bare-bones program, which provided no hints or other guidance (214). / In the early stages of solving the puzzle, the group using the helpful software made correct moves more quickly than the other group, as would be expected. But as the test proceeded, the proficiency of the members of the group using the bare-bones software increased more rapidly. In the end, those using the unhelpful program were able to solve the puzzle more quickly and with fewer wrong moves. They also reached fewer impasses – states in which no further moves were possible – than did the people using the helpful software. The findings indicated, as van Nimwegen reported, that those using the unhelpful software were better able to plan ahead and plot strategy, while those using the helpful software tended to rely on simple trial and error. Often, in fact, those with the helpful software were found ‘to aimlessly click around’ as they tried to crack the puzzle. / Eight months after the experiment, van Nimwegen reassembled the groups and had them again work on the colored-balls puzzle as well as a variation on it. He found that the people who had originally used the unhelpful software were able to solve the puzzles nearly twice as fast as those who had used the helpful software. In another test, he had a different set of volunteers use ordinary calendar software to schedule a complicated series of meeting involving overlapping groups of people. Once again, one group used helpful software that provided lots of on-screen cues, and another group used unhelpful software. The results were the same. The subjects using the unhelpful program ‘solved the problems with fewer superfluous moves [and] in a more straightforward manner,’ and they demonstrated greater ‘plan-based behavior’ and ‘smarter solution paths’” (215).

Notice that the latter of these studies seems to directly contradict Jane McGonigal’s euphoric assessment of the ways in which gaming helps us solve problems. And the former study begs even more urgently, What exactly are we training our brains FOR??? It seems to me that we are training ourselves to think like machines think… which is a futile endeavor, given that we will always be sub-par machines. Why not train our brains to think like better humans? We can excel at that!

Of course, we can’t deny that the Web helps us tremendously in doing very specific kinds of thinking. And we seem excited at the prospect of freeing up some real estate in our brains. But just as we made the mistake of thinking that labor-saving devices would free up time, we made the mistake of thinking that cognitive tools would free up our brains to do more exciting things (see p.181 for evidence of this mistake). I was surprised in particular by the study by James Evans at the University of Chicago, who looked at citations in journals from 1945 to 2005. Carr writes: “He analyzed the citations included in the articles to see if patters of citation, and hence of research, have changed as journals have shifted from being printed on paper to being published online. Considering how much easier it is to search digital text than printed text, the common assumption has been that making journals available on the Net would significantly broaden the scope of scholarly research, leading to a much more diverse set of citations. But that’s not at all what Evans discovered. As more journals moved online, scholars actually cited fewer articles than they had before. And as old issues of printed journals were digitized and uploaded to the Web, scholars cited more recent articles with increasing frequency. A broadening of available information led, as Evans described it, to a ‘narrowing of science and scholarship’. / In explaining the counterintuitive findings in a 2008 Science article, Evans noted that automated information-filtering tools, such as search engines, tend to serve as amplifiers of popularity, quickly establishing and then continually reinforcing a consensus about what information is important and what isn’t” (217). So just because doing something seems easier (I often think how difficult it would be for me to do a PhD without the Internet), that doesn’t make the product better. Perhaps humans are better versions of themselves when they have to struggle toward their goals

But again, some cognitive functions are undeniably improved by the Web. Carr writes: “While experimental evidence is sparse, it seems only logical that Web searching and browsing would also strengthen brain functions related to certain kinds of fast-paced problem solving, particularly those involving the recognition of patterns in a welter of data” (139). / “Other studies suggest that the kind of mental calisthenics we engage in online may lead to a small expansion in the capacity of our working memory. That, too, would help us to become more adept at juggling data. Such research ‘indicates that our brains learn to swiftly focus attention, analyze information, and almost instantaneously decide on a go or no-go decision,’ says Gary Small. He believes that (139) as we spend more time navigating the vast quantity of information available online, ‘many of us are developing neural circuitry that is customized for rapid and incisive spurts of directed attention’” (Carr, 140). But then he is quick to put these gains in perspective, writing, “…it would be a serious mistake to look narrowly at the Net’s benefits and conclude that the technology is making us more intelligent. Jordan Grafman, head of the cognitive neuroscience unit at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, explains that the constant shifting of our attention when we’re online may make our brains more nimble when it comes to multitasking, but improving our ability to multitask actually hampers our ability to think deeply and creatively” (140). The thing that I must reconcile in my own research is this: while I am on the one hand bemoaning what the Internet is doing to certain cognitive functions (such as creativity and attention), I am also questioning the goal of cognitive augmentation that underlies computer technology in general. So I am effectively suggesting that we shouldn’t be aiming to improve our cognitive functions. If that’s true, then do I have a right to complain that certain ones seem to be getting weaker? I think I do, actually. It’s the old Hippocratic Oath: Do no harm.

There are three other points to make about neuroplasticity:

1) It would explain why things that are anathema to us initially come to feel like human nature. We literally change. In social psychology terms, this is known as the foot-in-the-door phenomenon; i.e. as we make small concessions, we allow more and more unwanted things through the door. So while we may cringe initially at the thought of ubiquitous computers, they become acceptable through our repeated exposure to them, as our brains change and come to react less and less to this unwanted stimuli (like the sea slug no longer recoiling at touch).

2) As Carr says, “What we’re not doing when we’re online also has neurological consequences. Just as neurons that fire together wire together, neurons that don’t fire together don’t wire together. As the time we spend scanning Web pages crowds out the time we spend reading books, as the time we spend exchanging bite-sized text messages crowds out the time we spend composing sentences and paragraphs, as the time we spend hopping across links crowds out the time we devote to quiet reflection and contemplation, the circuits that support those old intellectual functions and pursuits weaken and begin to break apart. The brain recycles the disused neurons and synapses for other, more pressing work. We gain new skills and perspectives but lose old ones” (120).

3) Given the changeability of our brains, it is not far fetched to suggest that we are damaging our wellbeing through our exposure to the Internet, potentially hardwiring in anxiety, addiction, apathy, etc.. This is different from saying that technology increases our anxiety (etc.). This is saying that technology is encoding anxiety (etc.) into our brains.

So let’s get to the wellbeing implications of the Internet.

We are increasingly addicted to information. E.g., “The near-continuous stream of new information pumped out by the Web also plays to our natural tendency to ‘vastly overvalue what happens to us right now,’ as Union College psychologist Christopher Chabris explains. We crave the new even when we know that ‘the new is more often trivial than essential’” (134). This is similar to Postman’s argument about the information-action ratio, that we feel increasingly disempowered to do anything with or about the information we receive. We are, like all good addicts, consuming compulsively; and we need more and more information to satisfy our cravings, ultimately meaning that we consume, but we are doing so only to feel ‘normal’. In other words, it is not making us happy; it is not satisfying our human needs.

Secondly, we are overloaded with information, which as we know from studies affects our ability to be compassionate, or to respond to information in emotionally appropriate ways. Carr writes, “Information overload has become a permanent affliction, and our attempts to cure it just make it worse. The only way to cope is to increase our scanning and our skimming, to rely even more heavily on the wonderfully responsive machines that are the source of the problem. Today, more information is ‘available to us than ever before,’ writes Levy, ‘but there is less time to make use of it – and specifically to make use of it with any depth of reflection.’ Tomorrow, the situation will be worse still” (170).

Thirdly, technology is making it more and more difficult to be contemplative. And it is very likely that humans need these opportunities to feel fulfilled: “When carried to the realm of the intellect, the industrial ideal of efficiency poses, as Hawthorne understood, a potentially mortal threat to the pastoral ideal of meditative thought. That doesn’t mean that promoting the rapid discovery and retrieval of information is bad. It’s not. The development of a well-rounded mind requires both an ability to find and quickly parse a wide range of information and a capacity for open-ended reflection. There needs to be time for efficient data collection and time for inefficient contemplation, time to operate the machine and time to sit idly in the garden. We need to work in Google’s ‘world of numbers,’ but we also need to be able to retreat to Sleepy Hollow. The problem today is that we’re losing our ability to strike a balance between those two very different states of mind. Mentally, we’re in perpetual motion” (168).

This really does sound like I’m just a Luddite. But I don’t think it’s crazy to weigh the downsides of technology versus their supposed benefits. Otherwise, how can we give our informed consent to the objects in our world? And without this consent, of course these technologies will appear to us as techno-demons, i.e. as forces that confront us that are beyond our control. But they are in our control! And the key is to begin by being questioning. This is no easy task, especially since it is very difficult to appreciate the effects technology are having on us while we are being affected by them (it’s easier for an outsider to study this). And there is an element of denial as well, given the Sisyphean challenge of trying to stop the continued proliferation of technologies and the growing power they have over us (for example, we can’t stop the Google Book Search, no matter how damaging this may be). But I think if we face up to the difficult truths, we can start to improve our situation, and we’ll be better off.

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.

A summary of:
Lynch, G. (2007). New Spirituality: An Introduction to Belief Beyond Religion. I.B.Tauris: London.
Chapter 2 – The Ideology of Progressive Spirituality
& Chapter 3 – Progressive Spirituality and the New Generation of Progressive Religious Organizations

Lynch tries to distance his Progressive Spirituality from any religious connotations. This spirituality is closer to ‘morality’ than ‘religion.’ It is, to Lynch, an ideology (41). He writes, “Progressive spirituality can also be understood as a product of what Charles Taylor has described as the long cultural march in western modernity towards a new sense of moral order based on the rights, freedom and inherent value of the individual” (67).

As an ideology, progressive spirituality is organized around 3 key beliefs: 1) “The divine is an ineffable unity, and is both the guiding (43) intelligence behind the evolutionary processes of the universe, and (within) the material form and energy of the universe itself” (44); 2) nature is sacred (43); 3) the human self is sacred (43). In reading this book, I find it very easy to fit in this box. Not only do I agree with this ideology, but I also find it, for the most part, fairly non-controversial, i.e. I would think that almost everyone I know would probably agree (though perhaps would not use the term ‘sacred’, but instead, ‘important’ or ‘inviolable’). It makes sense that I’m concerned with human values in technology, because of (3). And I believe that in part it’s important to get this right because it is the only way I see of realistically correcting our relationship with nature… because I believe strongly in (2).

I have sometimes described my PhD aim as creating a cyber culture/environment in which spirituality can thrive – or at least does not erode spirituality. This means that I will have to give some thought to what spiritual development is. This chapter provides one definition: “Spiritual development consists of a movement beyond this false ego towards one’s true self. Unlike forms of New Age thought which describe this process in terms of a flight from the material to a higher ‘spiritual’ self, however, progressive spirituality understands this process more in terms of an authentic integration of the self which is conscious of the (58) divine presence within the complexities of embodied experience” (59). I would say that this is precisely what Lanier is getting at when he speaks of making ‘contact with the mysteries of nature’.

Yet there is, undeniably, a tension between spiritual development and technology. Many cannot conceive of a realistic marriage between the two: “At the same time, however, some writers within progressive spirituality are highly critical of new technologies – what Mary Daly calls ‘necrotechnology’ – as a source of spiritual evolution” (47). Similarly, people may question whether modern life itself is incompatible with spirituality. I think this is playing the victim, because we have the power to change aspects of our societies we don’t like. Furthermore, this stance fails to recognize the adaptive capabilities of spirituality. Our spirituality is finding ways of thriving: “Progressive spirituality is not so much postmodern, as a particular form of modernity – a softer modernism – a spiritual way of living for the modern age” (68).

We also have to recognize that we are little bricoleurs in contemporary society. We extract, we build meanings. As such, we build progressive spirituality out of bits of pieces of other spiritual traditions that make sense to us today. “William Bloom, for example, comments that holistic spirituality ‘deepens the essence of all religious traditions’ – a perspective that Paul Heelas has referred to as ‘perennialism’. This notion of the ‘essence’ of truth within all religious traditions rests on the assumption that religious traditions are meaningful and truthful precisely to the extent that they confirm the basic assumptions of progressive spirituality” (61). Given this, it would make sense – i.e. it would fit with Progressive Spirituality – to draw from spiritual traditions when applicable in my PhD research; they are part of our contemporary understanding of the world, because they are our history.

A final, small point: Lynch argues that there is a “lack of collaboration” between “organizations within the progressive milieu” because they “have a range of different priorities” (94). Given that I sympathize with this spirituality, and would like to see it flourish, it would seem that part of my mission could be to conceive of ways that the progressive milieu could collaborate better through new internet technology. But this is an entirely separate issue, namely how to make society more spiritual. If I am going to make society more spiritual, it would be a side-effect of engagement with more spiritual technology. I do not want to think of technology as a tool in this respect. I want to think of technology as an experience.

A summary of:
Lynch, G. (2007). New Spirituality: An Introduction to Belief Beyond Religion. I.B.Tauris: London.
Introduction
& Chapter 1 – The Roots of the New, Progressive Spirituality

There is a problem with the idea of taking traditional spiritual practices – like Buddhism, Sufism, Christianity, etc. – and extracting implications for modern technology, namely that they are results of entirely different worldviews, and thus don’t ‘speak’ particularly well to one another. This is not to say that traditional spirituality is irrelevant when we consider contemporary human values and how they are realized in our technology; but it makes a great deal more sense to contextualize modern technology within a modern spirituality.

I can predict objections to this approach: Modern spirituality is influenced by – perhaps corrupted by – modern technology, and if we’re trying to get more spiritual technology, we ought to decouple them in order to then create something new. To think that we could ever step outside our worldview like this, however, is naïve. We should seek to understand contemporary human values that have arisen alongside the development of technology, and aim to vault these values to the top of our priorities when developing technology. And in the words of Szerszynski (quoted in an earlier post), “So the task of technology critique cannot be to escape historical conditioning; this indeed would be once again to reproduce the promise of modern technology to overcome finitude. Instead, the very embracing of our historical conditionedness, and ultimately of our embeddedness in the ongoing transformation of the sacred, can itself be seen as an anti-technological move, a negation of the negation of finitude. Such an embracing must involve a greater awareness of the way we are constituted by our past. And the point of such awareness cannot be to overcome our conditionedness, to refuse what is handed us by the past; such is the impossible dream of Enlightenment. Instead, the task must be to receive that past more consciously and responsibly” (174). In other words, we should neither seek to return to earlier forms of spirituality – this makes no sense and is not possible – nor forcibly drag it into the future, into our technologies; rather we should understand how this spirituality has changed over time, how it is now, and apply that understanding to a critique of our current technologies.

This brings us to Lynch and his notion of Progressive Spirituality. Lynch argues that history has produced a contemporary spirituality, “the emergence of a particular ideology, a progressive spirituality, which is forming the basis for these new forms of religious identities, a diffuse sentiment of tolerance and openness amongst religious liberals but arises out of particular concerns and is organized around a common set of clearly identifiable values and beliefs. Progressive spirituality is a particular way of understanding the world shared (20) by individuals and groups across and beyond a range of religious traditions, who seek to understand their particular tradition and commitments through the lens of progressive spirituality’s basic assumptions” (21).

What are these basic assumptions? “Firstly, it normally indicates a commitment to understanding and practicing religion in the light of modern knowledge and cultural norms…. A second defining feature of ‘progressive’ religion is a sympathy with, and often active engagement in, green and left-of-center political concerns” (19). And further, the notion of God has morphed now into what Lynch calls ‘Moralistic therapeutic deism’: “This perspective can be summarized as the credo which asserts that there is a God who watches over the Earth, that God wants people to be good to each other (as each world religion teaches), that the point of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself, that God does not need to be involved in one’s life unless one has a problem and that good people go to heaven when they die” (5).

And how did this new spirituality develop? What are the roots of Progressive Spirituality?

“…it has emerged out of four key concerns: the desire for an approach to religion and spirituality that is appropriate for modern, liberal societies, the rejection of patriarchal forms of religion and the search for religious forms that are authentic and liberating for women, the move to re-sacralize science (particularly quantum physics) and contemporary theories of cosmology), and the search for a nature-based spirituality that will motivate us to try to avert the impending ecological catastrophe” (10).

I am particularly intrigued by the third of these, because it relates to Wertheim’s assertion that the soul has been squeezed out of our world by modern science. Lynch echoes this, referencing Bishop John Robinson who argued that whereas people used to think that God was, if not ‘up there’, at least ‘out there’, but, “Such a concept, Robinson argued, was no longer tenable in an age of scientific and psychological discovery, in which no home for God could be found in the universe and the suspicion grew that the God ‘out there’ was as much a projection of the human mind as a metaphysical reality” (29). But it seems the soul seems to be leaking through, adapting by changing shape. (This is the phenomenon described by Szerszynski, too, as ‘new sacralizations’.)

Some might dismiss new sacralization of science as little more than a semantic shift, a poetic interpretation (not helped by the language invoked in works such as Capra’s The Tao of Physics). But scientific discovery is in many respects validating traditional spiritual wisdom, making spirituality relevant again, if understood now in scientific terms (e.g. ‘energy’). Quantum physics, for example, affirms the notion of interconnectedness of the universe, from which we can draw moral and spiritual implications. For example,

“In 1980, the quantum theorist David Bohm published Wholeness and the Implicate Order, in which he argued for the need for a new scientific and cultural world view which emphasized the harmony and interdependence of all reality. Such a world view, Bohm suggested, could emerge out of the recognition of the common ground of reality – a higher-dimensional implicate order which organizes the enfolding and unfolding cosmos – a grounding reality that draws together and sustains all that exists” (31).

Another unintended consequence of progress in science is that, according to Catholic eco-theologian, Thomas Berry, “contemporary science is beginning to offer a new story of the universe as an emerging, meaningful, creative process that can serve as the basis of an ecologically oriented moral and spiritual life” (31). If we are co-creators, we have responsibility; it is up to us to create a heaven on earth. Thus, the “perilous choice currently facing humanity between a Technozoic era of self-destructive environmental exploitation for the sake of economic gain or an Ecozoic era based on conscious management of relations within the ecosystem for the (31) benefit of the whole” (32).

And furthermore, scientific discovery is now, ironically, weakening materiality and reinforcing subjectivity (making Heelas et al’s ‘subjective turn’ a sensible cultural shift). “As Fritjof Capra states, ‘whatever we call a part is merely a pattern that has some stability and therefore captures attention’. What we perceive as real, stable objects are, to use Capra’s phrase, multiple manifestations of the dynamic and unfolding dance of cosmic energy in which forms emerge, disintegrate and then shift into other forms” (33). The lesson in this is that there is flexibility in our designs, precisely because, as Lanier said, computers don’t really exist, so we can make them whatever we want. We should realize that we are not victims, because we are at least partly responsible for our world…. so let’s make it better!

The roots of Lynch’s Progressive Spirituality certainly implies that older spiritual / religious traditions are increasingly irrelevant to modern living: “The data of contemporary life no longer fits the paradigm of traditional religion, and this creates pressure for a new spiritual paradigm to be developed which takes better account of contemporary experiences, values and concerns” (24). In that case, it hardly makes sense to force old spirituality on modern technology. But there is a possible pathway between Progressive Spirituality and more spiritual technology.

The irony, of course, is that changing technology, making it more spiritual (i.e. incorporating Progressive Spirituality into its design), will inevitably change the nature of this contemporary spirituality. These two variables are intertwined, and in flux, which means that the job of making technology ‘spiritual’ will never be done. But we can commit to keeping attuned to changes in the spiritual milieu and adapting technology to suit this environment.

A summary of:
Zaleski, J. (1997). The Soul of Cyberspace: How New Technology Is Changing Our Spiritual Lives. HarperEdge: New York.
Reflections part 3 – Other bits and pieces of interest

I think that Zaleski asks the wrong questions a lot of the time; or at least he seems preoccupied with different things than I am. He’s interested in the question of where blurrings may occur between technology and religion (notice the emphasis is on religion, not spirituality), and specifically how technology may be blurring our notions of religious ritual. For example, he asks, “Does sacred ritual have a place in cyberspace? Is cyberspace sacred space” (6)? He is also concerned with the virtualization of the physical more generically. For example, he asks, “The online world is a world of mind alone. How will the human spirit fare in such a realm, sundered from the mystery of the flesh? And what of the artificial intelligences – bodiless minds – that are beginning to populate cyberspace? Do artificial life-forms have artificial souls” (6)?

These are not issues I want to touch with a 90-foot pole. Not only do they seem boring, but they seem contentious and confused. But finally, Zaleski hits upon the question that interests me when he asks, “What effect does surfing the Web have on mind, on consciousness, and, most importantly, on attention – the basic tool of spiritual realization?” (6); and “Does cyberspace… present a particular challenge to spiritual work” (6)?

One of the things Zaleski explores is what people get – spiritually – out of cyberspace. He interviews several religious leaders who use the Internet as an extension of their congregation/practice. Rabbi Kazen (creator of the Chabad-Lubavitch site) believes the Internet represents tremendous potential for Judaism in that it “frees” it (“‘The idea,’ Kazen decleares with a wave of his hand, ‘is that Judaism has to be free’” (14)!). The website is not used by his congregation, but it is a portal onto Judaism for those not already in the flock. Kazen also talks about ‘The Global Interactive Database of Good Deeds’, where “people will be able to participate in lighting their own menorah, by typing in an act of goodness or kindness or a positive thing that they did. And by having a map of the entire world, as every person types in something good that they did, another part of the world will be lit up” (17).

Is this what I mean when I talk about wanting more spiritual technology? No. To me it is a sort of simulacrum of ritual; and it is religious in nature, as opposed to spiritual. Kazen’s comments reveal a very objective way of understanding cyberspace – as an information transference mechanism. And the latter example reveals a very objective way of understanding spirituality – as something that you can measure by the doing of it. I’m concerned with the soul-nourishing power of spirituality.

One interviewee, Sheikh Hisham Muhammad Kabbani, seems to recognize a tension between technology and this nourishing spirituality: “I spend a fair amount of time on the computer because I write, create, design. There are many times when I question how well spent that time is, even though it’s productive time that allows me to design and create things I could not design and create any other way. I appreciate that, but I don’t think it helps my (74) inner state, and it appears that my inner state even suffers through this kind of work” (75). He explains that while it may seem as if a kind of mesmeric engagement in technology is akin to meditative or spiritual practice, “…I don’t feel any better for it [being absorbed in the screen]. I don’t think working at the computer returns as much in the realm of quality as working in a garden, or painting, or playing music, or sitting down and talking to another human being” (75).

This above quote reveals the problem with contemporary values surrounding ‘productivity.’ Productive time is time when you do stuff with information, when you make money, when you save time. But productive time is never defined as ‘spiritually nourishing.’ This is because we have been subjugated by the values of technology, which are speed, efficiency, and built on informational foundations. As John Perry Barlow says, “Cyberspace is any information space, but it’s interactive information space that is created by media that are densely enough shared so that there’s the sense of other people being present. / You could say that cyberspace is also where you are when you’re reading a book” (29). And “Wired Style: Principles of English Usage in the Digital Age… defines cyberspace [as]: ‘Information space…. The place between phones, between computers, between you and me’” (30). But in this view, there is only void between information nodes; there is no meaning in between. The space itself, in other words, is not a meaningful – or spiritual – space. To use a phrase from Woody Allen (Life and Death), it’s “an empty void.” Even Zaleski’s own definition, which lacks any informational elements, depicts such an ‘empty void’: “For the purposes of this book, cyberspace is defined as the virtual space created through the activation of a computer” (30). I would suggest that making cyberspace more spiritual might be conceived as making the spaces in between ‘nodes’ “a full void.”

The other problem with this informational understanding of cyberspace is that it makes the lack of knowledge that much more conspicuous. “Employing Lucky’s pyramidal grid, it seems that what is transmitted through cyberspace is, in most cases, information – not knowledge, and certainly not wisdom” (33)…. “mystical knowledge and wisdom are said to lie beyond the reach of logic and of binary computation, which divide unity into plurality” (33). The problem here is objectivism: information can be measured, knowledge or wisdom cannot. If it cannot be measured, how can it be bundled and passed along in cyberspace? I should clarify that I don’t think that knowledge or wisdom is never exchanged online; but I do think that this knowledge and wisdom is bundled as information for another to extract. Take, for example, The Zen Garden (http://www.nominus.com/%7Ezenyard/zenyard.htm), which packages Buddhist wisdom to be collected by viewers of the site. This is explained in greater detail in Carr’s Rewiring the World: From Edison to Google. Carr’s notions of ‘bundling’ and ‘flattening’ are a product of informationalism; the shallowness of experience makes us shallow. This objectivism and informationalism places the emphasis on quantity over quality; the result of which, in the words of John Perry Barlow, is that, “My range of possible experiences is multiplied hundreds of times. And the possibility for depth of those experiences is reduced. Considerably” (50).

The problem is that there is nothing inherently meaningful about information. If anything, it is a distraction from deeper meaning. Sheikh Hisham Muhammad Kabbani says, ”Our humanness is being eroded by our own cleverness in creating ever greater distractions for ourselves, and by a whole industry creating ever greater distractions” (78). The point is if information is meaningless we should hardly be building our world on these flimsy foundations, lest we lose all “meaningful meaning.” After all, “…there’s nothing more terrible than the loss of meaning” (78). The way to prevent this is to use technology to do greater things. For example, Kabbani says, “If my sitting at the computer is in some way an extension of my yearning, or of compassion, it may be useful” (76).

To some extent, I fear we’re asking the wrong question if we are asking how to make informational technology more spiritual. Why are we not asking the question, instead, Why does cyberspace have to be an informational technology? Can it not do more? Are we not wasting this unique space which holds the most tremendous potential for spirituality in modern society?

A summary of:
Zaleski, J. (1997). The Soul of Cyberspace: How New Technology Is Changing Our Spiritual Lives. HarperEdge: New York.
Reflections part 2 – Interviews with Jaron Lanier

I’ll begin this post where I left off at the last one, i.e. with the idea that computers are what we make them. Lanier puts this in no uncertain terms: “Computers don’t exist, to put it bluntly. Computers are just a bundle of matter, and they act as computers by virtue of cultural ability to recognize them acting as computers. So we can make of them what we will…. We have a choice here” (139).

While we have a choice, Lanier explains that it is very easy to get stuck in familiar ways of thinking, particularly the more and more we engage with technology. He uses two helpful analogies. The first is that of a trolley system: “I think there are three different things that can happen. One is that you can be just wandering around on a place, another is that you can have a map. The third, and it’s what happens with computers, is that you install a trolley system and you can go only where the trolley is going. That’s much more analogous to what happens when you create culture using programs. / As soon as a computer program becomes your tool for creation, you can create only what was conceived of in the ideas embedded in the program. That’s the nature of programs. Programs are not the same thing as nature” (185).

Lanier uses another, more colorful analogy to explain that it is very difficult to be creative (thinking outside of the box) when you are confined to the ‘box’ of the rules of computer programs: “When you try to do creative work by playing with computer programs that embed your own ideas or someone else’s ideas, it’s a little bit like hooking up a tube between your anus and your mouth to get nutrition. What you’re doing is, you’re recycling ideas instead of contacting nature and exploring it. That’s the difference between playing with musical instruments and using computers” (147).

What is this “contacting nature” business all about? Here it is again: “Essentially, if you try to do science without going back to nature, all you’re doing is reexploring human ideas that have been set down in a computer, and amplified by the simulation. So what you’re really doing is, you’re self-glorifying your own ideas that have been set down. It’s a little bit like taking a little poem that you wrote and then putting it up in a huge marquee in lights and saying, ‘Oh, wow, that’s really wise.’ It might be, or it might not be, but the point is that you’re blinding yourself. Essentially, a simulation takes a starting human idea that somebody had and amplifies it, and it looks more impressive” (148).

And again: “The way you get off the trolley system is by directly contacting the mysteries of nature. There’s nothing wrong with the trolley system as long as you get off. The problem, the nerd way of using the trolley system, to carry this metaphor on, is to stay on it all the time” (186).

Is this a useful way of defining spirituality? – making contact with (the mysteries of) nature? I suppose part of what Lanier is getting at is the sort of intangibility of reality – that we live in a constantly unfolding reality, of which we are co-creators but can never fully grasp because of its awesome complexity. This gets back to exactly what Lanier was saying about computers being a construct of our imaginations, a subjective thing. As he says, “If you think of the computer as only a conduit between people, you don’t run into this problem at all, because then you’re dealing with it as a conduit between minds. As soon as you treat the computer as an objective thing – as a real instrument, like a real person, as something that stands by itself – you run into this problem, you connect the tube to the wrong hole” (147). This almost energetic transference would be one of those mysteries of nature, and we ought to tap into that energy if we wish to do anything truly worthwhile – in a spiritual way, perhaps – with our technology.

Lanier is the Big Daddy of virtual reality, so of course he has opinions about how this relates to VR. “One way to think about a computer,” he says, “is that it’s a conduit between people. It’s a communication technology in which people can create miniature worlds that are models of things inside themselves in order to have a new form of communication in which they make up a shared objective reality in simulation instead of passing symbols between each other exclusively” (139). I really like this notion of trying to represent something “inside” yourself, because for the most part, I think that where VR and social networking and the like has failed thus far is that it only caters to representation of surface or external qualities of ourselves, e.g. Avatars that look like us, or Profiles where we fill in biographical information. But the other key aspect of this quote is that Lanier is challenging us to do great things with technology, rather than simply simulate our world. This, in fact, is the difference between someone who can draw what they see (someone who in Ellul’s terms would have mastered la technique) and a true artist, who can capture the ineffable. The latter would be spiritual, and Lanier argues that it should be the goal of technological development: “The potential does not lie, ever, in simulating something in the physical world. Because it will always either be done poorly, or if it seems it’s not being done poorly, it means you’re fooling yourself, as in the case of the music example, or this evolution-simulation example. If it seems like the (148) computer is simulating the real world, well, it just means that you’ve lost touch. / The right way to use computers is to use them to simulate alternate worlds, together with other people, as a form of communication” (149).

I struggle to think of examples where we have realized this potential on the Internet. But I can think of many where we are doing poor simulations. Facebook, for example, fosters simulated friendships which, I think we would all agree, pale in comparison to the real. We should not be content to think that this is all we can achieve with our technology, though! While it’s a far more difficult challenge – and one that may take a flash of artistic brilliance, an epiphany – we ought to be striving to create entirely new opportunities for us to think, see, communicate; and we’ll know it when we see it, just as we feel when a truly great painting moves us. This is the spiritual.

The challenge now is that computers exist within a framework that reinforces thinking about them as objective ‘things’, as the evolution of rational Western thought which is increasingly materialistic, pushing the soul and the spirit out of the picture. This makes it difficult to understand our current creations in new spiritual ways, because they were not created from a worldview that allows for this type of thinking. As Lanier himself says, “I think of virtual reality as a Western (142) idea, I make sense of it within the Western framework…. I think that the quest for the universal cultural framework that can contain everything is futile. So I don’t feel a need to try to explain prana in virtual reality. I use a different set of categories to explain virtual reality that don’t include prana. In my life, I certainly think in the larger framework that does include it” (143). To me, this means that we cannot succeed in making ‘slightly more spiritual technology’ if the underlying structure is not radically altered. We have to make “spiritual technology”, not “more spiritual technology”.

The key might lie in uncoupling technology from information. In our minds, they are the same. And immediately, information creates the alienation that would be the distancing of ourselves from (the mysteries of ) nature. Lanier explains, “…information is alienated experience. So, nothing ever goes over the wires whatsoever. But it can be whatever we wish it to be…. These are things we make up, like language” (157). His mission, therefore, is this: “What I’m trying to do is to save Western culture from being destroyed by information” (180).

In conclusion, all of Lanier’s discussions on what technology should be exposes his own spirituality which fits precisely with what Heelas et al described as the ‘subjective turn.’ In other words, Lanier is calling for a turn toward the subjective in our thinking about technology, which will thus lead to more glorious developments which nourish us in ways that technologies produced within an objective paradigm do not. This is perhaps best exemplified by Lanier’s “syncretic creation myth”. In this myth, as technology gets developed further and further along the lines it’s being created now, ‘experience’ gets squeezed out, until finally people can stand it no longer. “So they convened an emergency meeting about their lack of experience…. And as they knew there would be, there was only one solution: They got all of their machines and they put them in a great bonfire and destroyed them” (196). Call it ‘experience’, ‘subjectivity’, or ‘spirituality’, the lesson is that we need to pay attention to these needs, or else one day we will wake up to find that we are living in a prison of our own technological creations.

A summary of:
Zaleski, J. (1997). The Soul of Cyberspace: How New Technology Is Changing Our Spiritual Lives. HarperEdge: New York.
Reflections part 1 – Prana

Zaleski makes this interesting, highly questionably claim:

“Prana is a Sanskrit word sometimes translated as ‘life force,’ sometimes as ‘breath.’ It is equivalent to the Chinese concept of chi, and somewhat to the Judeo-Christian-Islamic concept of spirit. In all the major religious traditions, this force is seen as manifesting through the physical body of the human being. This view has profound implications for spiritual work in cyberspace, where the body is absent” (34).

What’s bizarre about this is that Zaleski seems to think that physicality is a necessity of spirituality… whereas most would probably say that the spiritual is fundamentally non-physical. (While I think this is a crude reductionism, take this opinion, for example: “[John Perry Barlow] But I also think that anytime you’ve got a large number of people going somewhere they can’t take their bodies, you are engaged in spiritual activity. It’s that simple” (51).) And for Zaleski, this physicality poses a particular problem to technology if we are hoping to have some kind of spiritual experience. He uses the example of an early Skype-like technology: “It seems like it’s leading toward the point where it won’t be much different than me sitting in front of you an talking like this, except for the lack of prana” (43).

I think Zaleski’s sticking point with this is that he doesn’t think it is possible for ritual sacraments, like Holy Communion, to be performed online. In response to Zaleski’s questions on the matter, John Perry Barlow responds, “If you don’t have the grounding in the wine, the physical manifestation, I can see where they would think that there’s no potential for that holy voltage between the physical symbol and the spiritual reality” (35). But we have to ask ourselves what exactly he thinks is missing (he does not clarify that well). If it is the possibility for transformation, this is clearly not true. Buddhist interviewee John Daido Loori responds, “‘That being the case, …we’d have to say there’s no chi, which is what we’d [Buddhists] call it – breath, life – there’s no chi in a work of art. And I don’t buy that for a second. I feel that art can be transformative, has been transformative’” (166).

It also seems that sometimes what Zaleski thinks is missing is the full-body engagement, the kind that would be associated with “flow” (233). In that case, we might do well to ask whether we really see any kind of spiritual difference between a computer game and a wii game, if the latter involves our whole body. I would say not.

Zaleski also defines the missing element this way: “The break with the body in cyberspace is most apparent when meeting other people through live, text-mediated chat, as in IRC or the chat rooms of AOL. The prana, the subtle energies, are lost. The incarnate being, the human being, behind the words can only be imagined, just as the reader of these words can only imagine the writer. What fills the space left by the absent prana is self-projection” (233). This, too, seems bizarre, and I guess it really depends on what you mean by ‘subtle energies’, or ‘self-projection’. As one interviewee was quoted saying, “‘I totally disagree that there’s no prana in cyberspace. That’s like saying you have to lose your humanity because you’re using a different form of communication” (253).

Zaleski softens his argument only slightly with this admission: “I believe that [prana] does break in cyberspace, limiting the medium’s potential for spiritual work in communities as well as on the individual level. But limit does not mean negate, and spiritual work, which calls upon us to accept others, to love them as ourselves, does take place in virtual communities” (254). If this is the case, then the goal is to strengthen the connections between individuals, within communities, to enhance the prana. The problem (as I will go into more depth about in further posts on Zaleski) is that cyberspace produces broad experiences, but not deep ones; so the design challenge would be to focus on creating deeper bonds between people (another way to say this is increasing strong ties, rather than weak ones).

This discussion of prana raises other interesting questions. What do we think is exchanged in a spiritual experience, for example? One interviewee, Sheikh Hisham Muhammad Kabbani, responded: “Because you know that always spirituality is high-tech. Spirituality is a kind of energy transmission from human beings to each other, if we are able to receive it, because human beings are receivers and transmitters at the same time” (61). This is fascinating, mostly because it clearly only makes sense in our modern scientific paradigm. You wouldn’t hear someone describe it like this 200 years ago, would you?

Another question this has made me consider is what I think is happening in a spiritual process. John Perry Barlow said, “So much of what the spiritual process is about is sliding up and down between those two poles of the physical and the immaterial” (35). Where does practice come into this? Some see practice as essential to spiritual growth (perhaps this is a separate question in itself?).

And this has also been helpful for helping me think about what kind of spiritual change I would like to realize in technology. Two separate ideas were raised by this book. The first is inspired by this quote from Loori: “So, how do you use them in a way that nourishes? Cyberspace is here to stay. How can we use it to nourish” (167)? That is a fabulous description of the kind of spirituality I’m aiming at. It should nourish us, nourish our souls, be, as I said, ‘soul-satisfying’.

The other idea is very different, in that it aims at the foundations of the construction. Loori said this: “Sacredness is something that’s earned through time. Kyoto is sacred. Jerusalem is sacred. Rome is sacred. Stonehenge is sacred. These are sacred places because of what has been put into them” (173). Given this, how can we design sacredness into cyberspace? Is it possible to design it in such a way as to make people treat is as sacred? Pesce, for example, tried something like this:“[Pesce] The idea was [in blessing the Internet], inasmuch as possible, to sanctify cyberspace. If we don’t bless our creations, they dehumanize us” (262). There is a big difference, however, in blessing something that is not inherently sacred, and designing something to be sacred.

The truth is that cyberspace represents tremendous opportunity, precisely because it is unbounded and emerging. It is not anything, beyond what we say it is. For example: “‘Cyberspace is a field that has been created where there is an absence of obstructions,’ explained Thomas E. Miller to me…. Miller is a Namgyal Monastery official and the man who conceived of the blessing [different from above]. ‘That’s the way cyberspace was designed. Which creates the potential for something to arise. And the nature of what will arise there is dependent upon the motivations of the people that use it’” (280). In that case, why would we ever say that we could not create an internet that allows for prana?

A summary of:
Senge, P., Scharmer, C.O., Jaworski, J. & Flowers, B.S. (2004). Presence: Exploring Profound Change in People, Organizations and Society. Nicholas Brealey Publishing: London.
Part 4 – Meeting Our Future (part 2 of 2)

The book concludes with talk about what profound shift means. Their ideal is the following: “‘The call is clear: for the whole thirteen-year period, we must do all we can to create this balance and connection with one another. ‘We’re facing these problems… because of our lack of relationship, not just with one another but with all of nature. My purpose is to help the human race understand that it is facing self-destruction unless there is a return to balance and harmony with nature’” (233).

But how can you bring this (or any change) about? The authors suggest it comes back to ‘presencing’. The authors differ in their individual definitions of the concept: 1) “‘A profound opening of the heart, carried into action’” (234); “…waking up together – waking up to who we really are by linking with and acting from our highest future Self – and by using the Self as a vehicle for bringing forth new worlds’” (234); and “…it’s the point where the fire of creation burns and enters the world through us’” (234).

This section offers an important point of clarification about this ‘presencing’ notion. Though the term seemingly implies an in-the-moment-ness, the authors define it in part as “becoming aware of ‘a future seeking to emerge’” (220), and “‘pre-sensing’ and bringing into presence – and into the present – your highest future potential” (220). This has to do with tapping into a sort of Jungian Collective Unconscious; a whole that is greater than oneself. But, again, a clarification is necessary: “‘The emerging whole manifests locally. It manifests in particular communities, groups, and, ultimately, in us as individuals’” (228). This changes our mission, if we want to change society, because global change begins locally and spreads outward to the whole (like Sheldrake’s theory of Morphic Resonance, where small change reverberates through a connected system (199)). This implies the importance of “glocalization” as a means of change.

One way to catalyze a shift is to begin a dialogue. Betty Sue Flowers (author) says, “‘Maybe that’s what we’re doing with the story of the U…. We’re trying to develop a language that can help people think and talk together about how the whole can shift. We know so much about the problems of the world today that it’s easy to fall into fear and denial. What we need is a language of hope and possibility that’s grounded in ideas and experiences emerging from innovators in science, business, and communities’” (218). At the very least, I hope that my PhD research will begin a dialogue about the need for a more spiritual approach to technological development.

Consider this as a springboard into discussion:
“Rose von Thater-Braan, one of the organizers of an integrative learning center for the study of indigenous knowledge and native science says, ‘The many differences between native science and Western science start with intent. The common purpose that drives modern Western science is to understand nature in order to better control – some would say commodify – nature.’ By contrast, in native science, ‘The fundamental intent is to become more human and to learn how to live in harmony with nature and with one another. Native scientists may invent technologies to make their life easier, but these are always secondary to human development’” (202)….

What are we aiming to do with technology? Why are we not trying to aid our human development?

A summary of:
Senge, P., Scharmer, C.O., Jaworski, J. & Flowers, B.S. (2004). Presence: Exploring Profound Change in People, Organizations and Society. Nicholas Brealey Publishing: London.
Part 4 – Meeting Our Future (part 1 of 2)

(Image: Namaste, 1994, Alex Grey)

Charles Taylor argues in his book A Secular Age that the Industrial Age changed the way we conceive of ‘meaning’, that it became inextricably linked with ‘progress’. “‘Somewhere in the last generation of two,’” says Senge, “‘the very word “old” became a pejorative term. Now it’s synonymous with worn-out and obsolete, and ‘new’ automatically means improved and superior. This might be perfectly fine in talking about machines, but tragic for living systems” (178). So this section challenges this formulation of meaning which we instinctively presume to be true. The authors quote Debashish Chatterjee in his opening remarks for a seminar on leadership at MIT: “‘I’ve been guided in my work by the notion that older is often better. If an idea has been around for a few thousand years, it’s been submitted to many tests – which is a good indicator that it might have some real merit. We’re fixated on newness, which often misleads us into elevating novelty over substance’” (179). Some would disagree with this, I realize, but it is perhaps a partial justification for turning back to spiritual traditions for inspiration and guidance.

Perhaps this modern predicament could be characterized as a lack of grounding. This happens when you are constantly into the future; you are simultaneously running away from the past, where your wisdom is located. The authors quote a “senior officer from the United Nations” who ended his presentation to the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis with this harsh evaluation: “‘I’ve dealt with many different problems around the world, and I’ve concluded that there’s only one real problem: over the past hundred years, the power that technology has given us has grown beyond anyone’s wildest imagination, but our wisdom has not. If the gap between our power and our wisdom is not redressed soon, I don’t have much hope for our prospects’” (187).

The authors see some hope in the trends in modern physics and the accompanying changes in the modern scientific worldview. The rejection of the vision of the world as “Newtonian billiard balls”, and the embracing of electromagnetic and quantum fields “transformed the Newtonian worldview of isolated particles, [and thus] potentially transforms the particle nature of the isolated self” (188). I, too, find this hopeful, in that we are beginning to wake up (again – for this was what various religious traditions told us) to the truth that we are all connected. “Connectedness is the defining feature of the new worldview – connectedness as an organizing principle of the universe, connectedness between the ‘outer world’ of manifest phenomena and the ‘inner world’ of lived experience, and, ultimately, connectedness among people and between human and the larger world. While philosophers and spiritual teachers have long spoken about connectedness, a scientific worldview of connectedness could have sweeping influence in ‘shifting the whole,’ given the role of science and technology in the modern world” (188). I cannot prove this, but I imagine that this worldview made it possible for us to embrace the Internet as a means of connecting to others in new ways. And I’ve been asked to justify my decision to focus on the Internet as a technology that I want to design more ‘spiritually’, and I think this is as good as any: that this utopian vision of the Internet as the great connector of humans amounts to huge spiritual potential, potential that I feel we have not fully realized because we have settled for it as it was first conceived.

Physicist David Bohm is quoted here saying, “‘The most important thing going forward is to break the boundaries between people so we can operate as a single intelligence.  Bell’s theorem implies that this is the natural state of the human world, separation without separateness.  The task is to find ways to break these boundaries, so we can be in our natural state’” (189).  (And, ““Einstein spoke of the ‘optical delusion of our consciousness,’ whereby we experience ourselves ‘as something separate from the rest.’  ‘Our task,’ he said, ‘must be to widen our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty’” (203).)  What does this mean if we were to apply it to the Internet?  Does the Internet really connect in this way? – or does it in fact entrench our separateness by alienating us first from ourselves (requiring the creation of avatars) and then from each other (avatars relating to one another)?  The question we should be asking is where are the opportunities for diminishing the illusion of separateness?

This section also seems to justify my mission in a more fundamental way, i.e. it calls for interdisciplinarity as a means of assuaging the problems that arise from siloed thinking. “The basic problem is ‘fragmentation,’ said [physicist David] Bohm, a way of thinking that ‘consists of false division, making a division where there is tight connection’ and of seeing separateness where there is wholeness. Bohm called fragmentation – in our view of the universe and of ourselves as separate from one another and nature – ‘the hidden source of the social, political, and environmental crises facing the world’” (190). In a sense, my research would amount to a blending of technology, modern scientific thinking, psychology, sociology, management, design and spirituality. Consider this:

“Master Nan said, ‘What has been lacking in the twentieth century is a central cultural thought that would unify all these things: economy, technology, ecology, society, matter, mind, and spirituality. There are no great philosophers or great thinkers who’ve been able to develop the thinking that unifies all these questions.’ The decline in integrative awareness and thinking has been replaced by a focus on business and making money as a default common aim. When Otto told Master Nan he thought human culture was on the verge of a new spiritual awareness, Nan agreed but said that it might not develop as most expect. It ‘will be a different spiritual route from that of the past, either in the East or West. It will be a new spiritual path’” (211). “Or, as Otto puts it, ‘What’s emerging is a new synthesis of science, spirituality, and leadership as different facets of a single way of being’” (212).

I resonated with this quote, because it seemed to imply the need for something like the HighWire programme, but also assert the need for spiritual thinking within academic discourse.