Social Hygiene: Mary Chapin Carpenter

When I was thinking about the seven songs post, I was looking for some Mary Chapin Carpenter lyrics and happened on a This I Believe segment she recorded on NPR last year. It's called The Learning Curve of Gratitude, and she shares how experiencing a pulmonary embolism affected her life. It's worth a listen. An unabridged text version may be found at Mary Chapin Carpenter's web site.

In the blogging world, Doc Searls suffered an identical illness just about a year after Mary Chapin Carpenter's.

Cheese Sandwich: The Boss 8/15/08

I'm about to go into stupid consumer mode, as I struggle to obtain tickets to the newly added tour date here in Jacksonville. Tickets go on sale in 10 minutes, whereupon the Ticketmaster website will go into meltdown, and the phone line will go busy.

But I will get tickets. Oh yes, I will...

Update: I have tickets! Four on the floor! Woo-hoo!

Competing Messages: Stupid Google Redux

AKMA, with whom I am more often in agreement than a recent post might suggest, has offered a contrary view on whether or not Google, that is to say, ubiquitous information technology, is making us "stupid." Having just suggested that I seldom disagree with him, I'm now going to do just that.

While AKMA does not embrace the uninhibited, fully-intoxicated, irrational though ebullient, point of view of the most deeply committed, and his measured, nuanced optimism is refreshing, I think he nevertheless dismisses the potential for unintended consequences too easily.

In his balanced rebuttal, he offers:

Automobiles are terrific technology for small-group transportation, but their over-use may be contributing to catastrophic climate change.

Catastrophic climate change is due to probably more than the automobile, but even the health issues attendant to smog ought to be something to give one pause when considering the automobile and its effects on the environment. The automobile is a great example, though AKMA does not go far enough in exploring how it has changed, or distorted, life. Not only has the exhaust of the internal combustion engine changed the quality and composition of the air we breathe, the automobile itself has changed the scale of our architecture and our cities. Our urban areas are designed for the convenience of our machines, not ourselves. Though, presumably, our machines serve us, so making things more convenient for them is really making them more convenient for us, though I would dispute that. The costs attendant to those changes were, and are, enormous, and not just in the dollars and cents that go into building and maintaining infrastructure (nobody likes bridges collapsing), but also the costs to our mental health, or, if you will, our spiritual health, as we cope with the daily stresses of commuting in heavy traffic.

Also consider this: I haven't checked recently, but in my lifetime it was once common for 50,000 people or more to die each year in traffic accidents. Because of technological improvements in automobile design, many mandated by government, I believe now it's only around 40,000 people who die each year. (We won't mention how anti-lock brakes seem to have actually made people drive more recklessly.) Consider that in the five years since we went to war, because less than a tenth of that annual number were murdered, something approaching 200,000 people have died in automobile accidents.

Yet we haven't invaded Detroit! It's just something we accept. The cost of doing business. The price of progress.

We could debate whether or not our advanced, commercial, technology-intensive food supply has made us fat. Maybe I'm wrong, but I believe current rates of obesity and diabetes are unprecedented. But it's almost an inevitable consequence of the way we're encouraged to live by our marketing messages, our tools, and what we've been told is the desirable lifestyle. Nevertheless, despite epidemic rates of obesity and diabetes, intensive, expensive, technological interventions allow us to achieve ever longer life spans. What kind of life might be a matter of some debate.

But the problem with this whole debate is the way the question is framed. It's a clever quip to market a deeper question, whether information technology is leading to cognitive changes that may be adaptive for living a life in service of machines, but are not in the best interests of experiencing the full potential of what it means to be a human being. "Meaning," perhaps being a loaded term, and one constructed, or certainly mediated, largely through technological means; but it remains a serious question. Are we going to achieve the mental and spiritual equivalents obesity and diabetes? Are we going to alter our mental landscape the way the automobile altered our physical one? Is that desirable?

The question is not whether Google is making us stupid. We already are stupid, that is: ignorant. We don't know what the effects of this technology will be. We have many examples of unintended, undesirable, extremely problematic consequences to the fielding of technologies that were once believed to be unreserved boons for humanity. Nevertheless, we cannot seem to muster the intellectual rigor to critically examine the way forward. We are impelled, even compelled, by the promise of opportunities for greater wealth, to develop and field technologies and systems that offer immediate, perhaps only superficial advantages, many of them sold as competitive advantages. We simply can't pause and reflect, because some other competitor would seize that as a competitive advantage, and market the technology and reap the immediate rewards anyway, leaving the matter of consequences as something for society and government to adapt to or cope with as best they can.

We're hurtling headlong into a future we can't predict, beyond the rosy projections of someone trying to sell us something.

So, this will be one of the few areas where AKMA and I will agree to disagree.