January 16, 2016--Hooked?

For some time in this place I have written about my struggles to get comfortable with the new media. Especially "mobile devices," which I understand to mean primarily smartphones, while mobile devices down here in Florida are more walkers and wheelchairs.

I am feeling left behind as the two generations succeeding mine seem so naturally comfortable with texting, tweeting, and snap-chatting. I watch them thumbing their iPhones at preternatural speed as they dodge traffic on Broadway, while eating out, and when waiting on line to get into a club or movie.

Though viscerally discomforted by this--partly, if I'm honest, largely because this feeling of being left out is more personal than technological--I have tried to see something positive deriving from all of this hardware and software.

The amateur historian in me knows that there were similar, worrisome things said about the paradigm-shifting impact on culture, society, and the Church brought about by the Gutenberg Revolution and the resulting proliferation of books.

For the most part, that worked out well. But mobile devices that are now possessed by billions around the world and hundreds of millions mainly young people here in the United States, may be turning out to be quite a different, less benign or liberating story.

Are we seeing the emergence of a passive generation of techno-zombies hooked on connectivity?

To help sketch the extent of one aspect of this, here is an excerpt from Jacob Weisberg's essay in the most recent issue of The New York Review, "We Are Hopelessly Hooked":

Hands and minds are continuously occupied texting, e-mailing, liking, tweeting, watching YouTube videos, and playing Candy Crush. 

Americans spend an average of five and a half hours a day with digital media, more than half of that time on mobile devices, according to the research firm eMarketer. Among some groups, the numbers range much higher. In one recent survey, female students at Baylor University reported using their cell phones an average of ten hours a day. Three quarters of eighteen-to-twenty-four-year-olds say that they reach for their phones immediately upon waking in the morning. Once out of bed, we check our phones 221 times a day--an average of every 4.3 minutes--according to a UK study. 

This number may actually be too low, since people tend to underestimate their own mobile usage. In a 2015 Gallup survey, 61 percent of people said they checked their phones less frequently than others they knew. . . . 

What does it mean to shift overnight from a society in which people walk down the street looking around to one in which people walk down the street looking at machines? We wouldn't be always clutching smartphones if we didn't believe they made us safer, more productive less bored, and were useful in all the ways a computer in your pocket can be useful. 

At the same time, smartphone owners describe feeling "frustrated" and "distracted." [Though] in a 2015 Pew survey, 70 percent of respondents said their phones made them feel freer while 30 percent said they felt like a leash. Nearly half the eighteen-to-twenty-nine-year olds said they used their phones to "avoid others around you."

Weisberg then cites Sherry Turkle's book, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age:

The picture she paints is both familiar and heartbreaking: parents who are constantly distracted on the playground and at the dinner table; children who are frustrated that they can't get their parents' undivided attention; gatherings where friends who are present vie for attention with virtual friends; classrooms where professors gaze out at a sea of semi-engaged multitaskers; and a dating culture in which infinite choices undermines the ability to make emotional commitments.

It does feel like a very new world. I will continue to struggle to get comfortable with it and to find good things to say about where we are headed. In the meantime I do have my books.

March 12, 2105--Remotes

Neil Postman, a good friend who died a few years ago, in 1984 wrote a prescient book about our current age--Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business.

Long before the proliferation of social media, which enable all of us to put ourselves on the air and potentially become famous (minimally among our "friends"), he spoke about the cultural impact of television. How with its almost universal availability, we could so turn ourselves over to amusements that, though it wasn't contributing to our literal death, it was having such a negative impact on our lives that by submitting ourselves to its lure we were participating in bringing about our own spiritual death. It would render us mindless.

I can only imagine what he would say about Tweets, Instagram, and such.

If you have been following me here, you know that though I share many of Neil's concerns I am attempting to understand this brave new world, looking for the positive things these media and new capabilities are bringing about. Doing this, I remind myself, as Neil once noted, that when the Gutenberg Revolution occurred, once books became widely available, traditionalists at the time decried this new power, feeling, as many again are, that it would destroy all that had been achieved during previous centuries when royal families and the Church held sway. And of course they were right. But as we look back on that powerful paradigm shift, we see things very differently. Most of that change was for the better--individuals became more powerful and as new ideas spread were able to fight to shrug off various forms of oppression.

But this is to be about television. Actually about the remote control, with little emphasis on the remote but with stress on the control.

When remotes first appeared in the mid-1950s, they led to a generation of couch potatoes. One could stretch out on the sofa, a bowl of nuts or pretzels balanced on one's chest, and change channels and adjust volume without having to drag oneself to the TV set.

A corollary benefit was that by switching from channel to channel (and there were at the time only three to ten depending on where you lived) one could get lucky and avoid seeing any ads. While I Love Lucy was taking a commercial break one could switch to Gunsmoke or Leave It to Beaver. All from a prone position.

Faced with this remote problem that empowered viewers to roam from program to program, since TV is more about making money than putting shows on the air, executives figured out a way to cooperate while competing for ratings--they agreed to air content and commercials in identical program blocks. So now when you switch around from Hardball on MSNBC when it is taking a break you find that so is OutFront on CNN and On the Record at Fox. There's nothing to watch except ads for Humira.

And as gender relations continue to evolve, when in the past men dominated the use of the remote, now more woman want equal access to it. One of our ongoing spats is about who get to control the remote control. When we're in bed together, Rona wants to catch the latest episode of Girls while I want to watch Al Jazeera America.

In the city we have just one TV so I am thinking that maybe what we need is two remotes. His and Hers.

When we get back to town I'll check with Time Warner to see what's possible. Maybe there is one designed especially for men (pretty much in the current masculine Freudian shape) while there's another, perhaps rounder, for women.

April 17, 2014--Today's Luddites

A young friend who is making his way quite nicely in the IT field (he is a software builder with investable ideas for a company of his own) was talking the other night about the Luddites.

In addition to being impressed that he knew anything at all about them, he had interesting things to say about today's version.

We began by comparing the power of the Gutenberg Revolution with the advent of the Internet--"I think," he unsurprisingly said, "that the Internet will prove to be an even more powerful cultural and work-shifting technology. Everything is and will change, from knowledge acquisition to the way work is structured."

Though two generations removed from his, though feeling threatened by so much change that I do not and never will fully understand, I agreed. But, I wondered, as we moved on to compare the structure of work brought about by the Industrial Revolution with the Cyber Revolution, that the changes we are seeing globally are likely to be much more disruptive than those brought about when we shifted, less globally, from an agriculture-based economy to one dominated by machines and mass production.

"You're making my point for me," he said, wanting to retain control of the direction of the conversation. "But though I am in my small way contributing to these paradigm-shifting developments, I am worried about some of the trends that I see, unintended consequences--there are always some--that may not turn out to be either benign or progressive."

"Say more," I said, pleased to cede the direction of the conversation to him.

"In the past, the actual, historic Luddites got it wrong. They thought that brining waterpower and machines to the manufacture of textiles would both alienate labor further and ultimately lead to fewer jobs--machines would replace workers."

"What you're saying is correct. They did go about literally and metaphorically smashing the very machines that they felt would replace them."

"And they turned out to be wrong. Right?"

"Say more."

"Rather than replacing workers, though many were dislocated and/or needed to learn machine-based skills, over time the capital invested in mechanization, which temporarily shifted the economic balance more toward capital (things like machines and factories) than workers and wages, over time--and this is important--the balance shifted: more workers were ultimately needed and the demand for them, plus unionization, led to higher wages."

"Correct. Classic economic theory," I said, wanting to sound relevant, "says this is what happens historically as the result of capital outlays and aggregation."

"But back to my but," he pressed, "I do not see this happening now. And maybe it will not happen even during the upcoming decades."

"What won't be happening?" I admitted to myself that he was leaving me behind.

"IT, information technology . . ."

"I know what IT is."

He smiled at me. "It may turn out that IT will permanently not only dislocate workers but also make much of human, hands-on work work itself redundant."

"Redundant?"

"OK, obsolete. No longer needed. And, here's the worry, this may wind up permanently replacing the old, classic economic model. We may see a longterm shift in the balance between capital and wages. A shift in the direction favoring capital. The data in many countries, very much including ours, are trending in this direction."

"OK. But what about the Luddites?"

"Well, it may be a generational thing--with people from, forgive me, your generation serving as the contemporary Luddites. You, I mean they," he smiled again, "may be decrying these cyber innovations because you, I mean they, are feeling left behind by more than age. But, they may be right."

"Slow down. You're losing me. Right about what?"

"That the new machines, actual and virtual, will in fact replace hands-on workers (except maybe in health care and restaurant work). Replace them for the foreseeable future. Maybe permanently. Maybe if displaced, redundant workers acquire new skills there may not be enough jobs for them. Look at what goes on in auto assembly plants these days. Cars are now made more and more by robots. Yes, at the moment humans have to make the robots but after they are deployed (capital investment) very few actual workers are needed. Just maybe to grease the machines and manipulate them via computers."

"Wow," I couldn't help but say. "That's quiet a future you're presenting."

"To be truthful, these are not only my ideas. There are people who know tons more than me about this who are studying what's going on and alerting us to the changes."

"I know that," I said. "I've been reading some of their stuff too."

"And I'm seeing it where I work. What in the past would have required dozens of workers requires very few. Considering the economic size and reach of a Google and a Facebook, to mention a couple, they have relatively few workers. That's one reason they're so profitable. And my own guess is that if you look at them five years from now they'll be even bigger and will have even fewer employees. This is a very big deal." I

"Could you pour me a little more wine? I need some." I slid my glass toward him.

While doing so, he concluded, "In other words, you Luddites are right!"

December 23, 2013--Social Theory

For some time I have been attempting to find ways to feel good about social networking. Up to recently, struggle as I have, everything I come up with is negative.

I'm face-to-face oriented and all this staring at smart phones, thumbs in constant motion as texts are exchanged, continues to turn me off and has me wondering what kind of people, especially young people we are becoming.

I am somewhat consoled by the fact that tweeting, texting, posting, and old-fashioned e-mailing are forms of writing. At a time when little writing is required in school and that that is is little commented upon by overburdened teachers, I'll take any shred of any kind of writing as good news.

But then I remind myself that fuddy-duddies such as I have always complained about paradigm-shifitng new technologies, ruing that they represent the end-of-civilization-as-we-know-it.

Plato, recall, wanted to ban poets and musicians from his Republic, claiming that their emotive power interferes with reasoned, philosophical discourse--it "feeds and waters the passions." And of course he is right. Though this hardly justifies banning them since in fact we need both.

And the literate priestly and royal elites of the time did not welcome Gutenberg's invention of movable type and the resulting proliferation of print material to the otherwise disenchanted. They feared that through the ideas contained in books the powerless would come to feel empowered and at some point would demand that Church and State be reformed and overthrown. Both of which, in turn, occurred.

Then there were those who opposed industrialization and the machine age--Luddites, among others--who rightly saw their widespread use presaging the end of self-sufficiency, craft, and rural yeoman life. And they were right.

So what of me now as I watch the self-hypnotized wandering up and down Broadway, eyes glued too their blue screens, thumbs tapping away?

Am I the cranky heir to Plato, the Renaissance princes, and hopeless machine-smashing Luddites? In many ways I feel I am but, knowing the history of how Plato's Republic turned out--no matter how noble it never came into existence--how after Gutenberg nothing could stem the avalanche of books and ultimately newspapers, and how the machine-driven Industrial Revolution changed everything forever worldwide, aware of these tectonic waves of culture-altering change, I am determined to try to remain relevant (at least in my own mind) and keep searching for the good that will come from the latest Internet-inspired brave new world.

Perhaps I had a glimpse on Saturday of a way to begin to feel better about the shape-shifting power of social networking.

It was a beautiful day and Rona said, "Let's finally go to Williamsburg. We're both originally from Brooklyn and haven't been to Williamsburg since all the young people moved in, displacing the Polish people and the Hassidim."

I readily agreed, feeling a little behind the times in not getting myself there to where so much is happening. "The Girls TV show is set there," I said, "and that's about as close as we've gotten to taking a look at the New Brooklyn."

"Half the best New York restaurants of the last few years are in Brooklyn and we keep going to our familiar nearby places."

If I needed additional reasons to venture across the East River, making me feel I am out of the latest hot restaurant loop was all the incentive I needed to get me headed toward the L train.

Incredibly, less than 10 minutes from Union Square, the fourth stop, Bedford Avenue plopped us down right in the middle of this remarkable urban transformation.

"Can you believe this," I said, with I am sure my jaw hanging open in wonder, "All these shops and terrific-looking young people."

The average age of those filling the streets could not have been more than twenty-five. "Can you believe it, my father's parents used to live on Bedford Avenue, not to mention all the Yeshivas that were here. Now every store is a cafe, restaurant, or clothing boutique."

"Let's wander up and down," Rona suggested. "To get a feel for what's going on."

So we did, for two hours wandering south on Bedford, across Grand Street, and then north on Union. "While we're at it, let's look for a place to have a cup of coffee."

"That's not going to be difficult to find. We've already passed at least 20," Rona said, an exaggeration but more true than not.

On Wythe Avenue we found Bakeri, an "artisanal bakery," which in fact it turned out to be. The display chest was full of wonderful-looking confections, from basic scones to fanciful tarts. It was packed with customers and it took us some time to be helped, which offered the opportunity to take in who was there.

As expected, everyone was very young and fresh from biking or jogging; and if I would have been pressed to guess, looked like they worked for IT start-ups, were living on family money, or both.

We both ordered coffee, Rona with two coconut macaroons, me an "apple cider flower," which looked like a version of Danish I used to get in my old East Flatbush bakery.

"You can sit in the garden, if you like," suggested a friendly young woman, dressed, as all the staff were, in faded-blue Bakeri coveralls. "It's such a beautiful day." She smiled to welcome us. "Find a table and I'll bring your coffee and pastries."

We squeezed by the crowd and made our way through a small passageway in which, tucked in nooks, were two tables and then down a fews steps into the garden.

"This will be beautiful in the spring," Rona said, looking up at the now bare trees, making plans to return even before tasting the coffee and macaroons. "Let's sit there," she said, pointing to a small marble-topped table nestled under the largest of the trees right by an unexpected stone pond full of golden koi.

Before we could look around and see who else was there, our coffee arrived. It was hot and delicious as were our baked goods, which we eagerly shared.

All the tables but the one next to us were occupied with yet more young people, chattering away about the weather and the trips from which they had recently returned.

"I loved Sri Lanka," said an Allison Williams lookalike. "And I can't wait to get back to the Seychelles," said a Zosia Mamet clone. "But best of all, have you been to Madagascar? The natural life there is amazing," said Lena Dunham's double.

Rona and I smiled at each other. This was even more fun than we had expected.

As I drained my final sips of coffee, scanning the garden, I asked, "Was it Thomas Wolfe who said about Brooklyn that, 'You can't go home again'"?

"I think he was referring to another place. Somewhere in the Midwest. But," Rona winked at me, "he did write that terrific short story, 'Only the Dead Know Brooklyn.'"

As by far the oldest person in the garden, I tried to get comfortable with her reference.

While we were finishing our drinks, eavesdropping on the nearby table talk, and trying to remember our Thomas Wolfe, a twenty-something woman slipped into the last unoccupied table right next to us. She was dressed in what we after a few hours in the area began to discern as Williamsburg chic--well-tailored grunge.

As has come to be usual, she did not look around but pulled her smart phone from her peacoat pocket and placed it on the table. Her tea arrived in what seemed like an instant. She didn't look up to acknowledge or thank the waitress; and before taking her first sip, was already tapping away at the screen.

Rona and I, curmudgeons together, smiled at each other.

Here she was, I thought, in this happy place, clearly among peers, in a lovely setting on an even more lovely day, and she can't even wait for a second to pick up her texts to look around, take it all in, feel good about life on such an afternoon.

As she bent closer to the screen, as if to cuddle with it, she began to chuckle. Her thumbs were now in even more rapid motion. Chuckles turned to laughter and head nodding. She took a quick sip of her tea, not taking her eyes off the glowing screen.

We had been making moves to pay the bill and leave, but without exchanging a word or glance of agreement stayed on to witness this as she eventually finished her tea, all the while smiling and talking under her breath as if to herself.

With her tea cup now drained, she took some money from her wallet. Still with her eyes on the flashing screen.

"It was Libya Hills," she said as if to no one in particular. She then half-turned toward us. "Libya Hills that Wolfe was referring to." Puzzled, we looked in her direction. "That you were wondering about. Not Brooklyn." With her free hand she gestured at the garden. And with that she was gone.

Back on the L train, Rona said, "Maybe that's where we're heading."

"I think we're heading toward Union Square. Two more stops."

"I mean culturally, silly. That girl in the garden." Getting her reference, I nodded.

"She was not there alone. Having tea by herself."

"Maybe this is our new sense of community."

"While bowling alone," Rona said, referring to a conversation we had a couple of weeks ago with a young friend from the IT world.

"But what about solitude?" I asked.

"Solitude?"

"Since we're sort of having a literary day, remember Alexander Pope's poem about solitude?"

"Vaguely."

"It goes something like--

Blest the man, who can unconcernedly find
   Hours, days, and years slide soft away,
In health of body, peace of mind,
             Quiet by day.'"

Rona slid closer to me on the subway. "You old Luddite, you."