The series is really fantastic, but what I find most fascinating about it is the way in which the writers had to sift and separate which elements of the original characters and stories were truly essential, and which were merely accidental, contextual, and contingent. In other words, they had to extract and maintain what made Sherlock truly Sherlock; the rest they could then update and play with to better fit our current context. Writers are, of course, the best equipped to do this kind of thing with stories, as they have the skills and sensitivities necessary to analyze the various components and ascertain which elements must remain, and which could be different.

In a similar way, engineers are the best equipped to do this same kind of work with technology. Engineers are trained to look inside the “black box” of a given device or system and separate which features are absolutely necessary to its function, and which are the products of relatively arbitrary decisions made by the original designers. In other words, engineers are uniquely equipped to look deep inside a given technology and highlight the aspects that could be changed without sacrificing the device’s core function.

This, I think, is one of the reasons why engineers need to get involved in the Christian commentary on technology. Too often, technological critics treat the targets of their ire as black boxes, failing to separate the things that are essential to the way something works from those things that could easily be modified and reshaped. In this kind of analysis, one is often left with the impression that the entire device must be resisted if any of its present behaviors are found to be undesirable. But if those undesirable behaviors are not really essential to the way the device functions, a new possibility emerges: we can domesticate the device by altering those accidental behaviors so that they better fit with our existing social values.

Let me try to make this more concrete with an example. In his book, The Shallows, Nicholas Carr argues that hypertext is inherently more difficult to read than traditional linear text because each hyperlink requires the extra cognitive task of deciding whether to follow the link or not (126-129). He supports this argument by citing a number of studies where researchers asked one group of students to read a story in a traditional printed form, and another group to read the same story decorated with hyperlinks that when clicked, took them to different parts of the narrative. Those who read the hyperlinked version tended to score lower on comprehension tests administered after reading, and several subjects complained that the story was hard to follow. Conclusion: hypertext is inherently distracting and harder to read.

I have a lot of sympathy for this conclusion, as I too have experienced my fair share of badly-designed hypertext that I found frustrating to read. But notice the way that Carr is treating “hypertext” as a black box. There is no discussion here of how the particular text was designed: how many links there were, whether the links took the reader to something related or helpful versus something tangential, and how the links themselves appeared and behaved on the screen. All of these things are actually quite flexible, and can be altered by the individual designer without loosing the essential feature of hypertext. In order for hypertext to be hypertext it must contains a few links, but as any web developer knows, the design of those links can make an enormous difference in how effective the text is.

In the early days of the World Wide Web, developers actually had very little control over how hyperlinks were formatted on screen. Web browsers almost universally rendered them in bright blue, heavily underlined text, which made them stand out from the other text on the page (sadly, this is also the style used by this WordPress template, and writing this post has made me realize I need to change that). This kind of styling made the links not only highly noticeable, but also visually distracting, resulting in the kind of extra cognitive load that Carr describes. But starting in the mid-1990s, browsers began to support features that enable page developers to control the visual appearance of hyperlinks, allowing one to style links in more subtle and less visually distracting ways. One can even make links look very similar, or even identical, to the surrounding text, but then become more noticeable when the reader hovers the mouse pointer over the link. This sort of styling allows readers to generally ignore the links until they decide to interact with them. Browsers also added scripting features that have further enabled developers to alter the behavior of an activated link—I’ve seen several sites that display a definition for the word clicked upon in a small floating panel in the same page, so that the reader does not navigate away and lose context.

The structure of a hypertext—how many links are used and what those links connect to—also makes a significant difference in how one experiences the content. Excessive use of links, or links that take the reader to seemingly unrelated pages, commonly lead to confusion and lack of comprehension. In the early 1990s, page designs tended to use hyperlinks like Visual Basic developers used 3D effects when they were first introduced—far too often and without consideration of whether the effect was actually improving usability or just creating unnecessary visual distraction. A more judicious use of subtly-styled links that connect to truly useful and related content would no doubt result in hypertexts that would fare better in the kinds of studies that Carr refers to.

After looking through Carr’s footnotes and doing some searching (which, I must say, would have been much easier had I been able to click on the footnote as a hyperlink, and then click on his citation to view the original paper), I found some of the studies he referred to, and as I suspected, their results were actually a bit more nuanced than what he portrays in his book. Although the stories the researchers tested were harder to read in hypertext than traditional linear form, the researchers also noted “Hypertexts that were structured to capitalize on the inherent organization of the domain (usually hierarchical structures for information content) often resulted in better comprehension, memory, and navigation” (DeStefano & LeFevre 2007, 1636). Extra markers that indicated the kind of content a given hyperlink would lead to also improved navigation and learning. Sadly, the researchers did not explore whether more visually-subtle link styles decreased distraction and improved comprehension, but one would assume that these kinds of links would require less cognitive load than highly-noticeable ones.

My point is really just this: when we critique new technologies, we need to separate between the elements that are truly essential to their functions, and those that are more accidental, contextual, and contingent. In many cases, the latter can easily be changed so that the devices fit better into our lives. Engineers are well-equipped to make these kinds of distinctions, which is why, I think, more engineers need to get involved in the Christian commentary on technology. Additionally, if we fail to make these kinds of distinctions, those who do understand these technologies will no doubt find our critiques to be short-sighted, and therefore dismissible.

If you’re an engineer and you’re now convinced that you’d like to get involved in the Christian commentary on technology, there is an excellent opportunity to do so coming up very soon: The Digital Society Conference, which will be held June 22-23 on the Seattle Pacific University campus. You can read more about our motivations in my blog post about the conference, and get more details and register on the conference web site. Hope to see you there!

Over a year ago now, I wrote a couple of posts about Moog (rhymes with ‘rogue’) and his synthesizer. The first was inspired by a documentary about Moog and his work. Here is a trailer for that, in which he discusses how people reacted to the synthesizer when it was first introduced:

Moog recounts how critics at the time really didn’t know what to make of his creation. For them, “real music” came only from strings, wood, brass, or skins. These new electronic synthesizers seemed more like sophisticated noise-makers, something useful for sound-effects engineers, but hardly something that could be categorized as a “musical instrument.” Moog’s most strident critics actually accused him of “destroying music” by introducing a most “unnatural” device.

The synthesizer’s shift from “noise-maker” to “musical instrument” is captured well in Pinch and Trocco’s book Analog Days, which was the subject of my second post on Moog. These authors trace the early days of the Moog, describing how it quickly became a staple feature for psychedelic rock bands of the late 1960s. But in the fall of 1968, a recording was released that completely changed how people thought about what the synthesizer was, and was good for. It was called Switched on Bach, and as the title implies, it featured the works of Johann Sebastian Bach performed entirely on the synthesizer. The album was an instant hit, and was one of the first classical recordings to ever go platinum. That album inspired many other keyboardists to explore the potential of the synthesizer and integrate it into their creative work.

I think the history of the synthesizer is valuable for two reasons. First, it reminds us to be careful about conflating the concepts of “natural” and “traditional.” The synthesizer was certainly untraditional when it was introduced, but is was just as much an artifact, and therefore unnatural, as a violin or saxophone. And instead of destroying music, it opened up entirely new sonic possibilities that helped expand the creative potential of musicians. We need to be careful when making dire predictions about how this or that new device will destroy some aspect of our traditional culture—it may very well turn out to be quite the opposite.

Second, the synthesizer, like the iPad or the telephone, is the kind of device that requires a bit of “working out” before a culture decides what it actually is and what it’s good for. The synthesizer’s social meaning was underdetermined and somewhat flexible when it was first introduced, and the way it turned out was influenced just as much by its initial users as it was by those who designed, produced and marketed it. Early adopters often play key roles in redefining and reshaping new devices so that they better fit into the target culture.

OK, enough theorizing—now go make some music!

A little over a year ago, I attended a conference on technology, culture, and Christian spirituality down at Laity Lodge in Texas. That conference featured Albert Borgmann, the well-known philosopher of technology, as well as those who have found his work to be an inspiration for their own.

It was an engaging and fun conference, but my colleague Al Erisman and I returned from that trip feeling that something was missing from the discussion. Both of us felt that the practical experiences of those who design, develop, and direct technical projects were not yet integrated into the theoretical perspectives of the academics. I also felt that the insights from more recent science and technology studies could add more nuance and balance to the discussion.

In response, I started this blog, and Al started writing some pieces for his journal Ethix. We both spent some time working out our thoughts, and when we met again last fall, we decided to organize another conference, one that would continue the great work done down at Laity, but also build upon it and push the conversation forward in light of our current context.

I want to invite you to join us at this conference. We seek to gather a diverse set of people who are interested in rethinking the Christian commentary on technology for the digital era. Our aim is to start a new conversation that blends the theoretical perspectives from academia with the practical experiences of those who actively work with and on information technologies. Al, myself, and several of our speakers have worked in both arenas, and know how valuable it is to have each of these perspectives inform the other.

The conference will be held this summer, June 22-23 on the Seattle Pacific University campus (Seattle, WA, USA). We have a fantastic set of keynote speakers, the names of which regular readers of this blog will no doubt recognize:

• Heidi Campbell – Associate Professor of Communications at Texas A&M, and author of When Religion Meets New Media
• John Dyer – Director of Web Development at Dallas Theological Seminary, and author of From the Garden to the City: The Redeeming and Corrupting Power of Technology
• Scott Griffin – Former CIO of Boeing, who is deeply reflective about how his faith and his work inform one another.

They will be joined by several other panelists who will discuss the Christian commentary on technology thus far, how communities and individuals are flourishing (or withering) in online spaces, and how we can integrate our Christian faith with our engineering practice.

Space constraints require us to limit the size of this conference, so register early to guarantee your place!

If you know someone who would be interested in this conference, please forward this post to them, or send them a direct link to the conference web site: http://www.spu.edu/digitalsociety.

I hope to see many of you at the conference!

Scattered. When I talk with friends about their lives these days, I often hear that word. They feel like there’s far too many things vying for their attention, too much information to absorb, too many things to keep track of. They wonder what happened to all that time that our labor-saving devices were supposed to reclaim for us. But more importantly, they worry about how their constant flitting from one thing to another is altering the ability to concentrate, to focus on one thing for an extended period of time. They are concerned that the manifold distractions that seem to multiply like furry tribbles are keeping them from contemplating and reflecting on what really matters most in life.

Similar concerns underlie Nicholas Carr‘s book The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to our Brains. Carr states in the introduction that over the last few years, he had noticed that he was finding it increasingly difficult to concentrate on one particular thing for any length of time. It was much harder for him to sit down and get lost in a book, or to follow an extended argument in an academic paper. Instead, he gravitated towards the short snippets of information he received via his various information technologies: emails, blog posts, web pages, tweets and the like. Although he was getting older, he suspected that the real cause of his increasingly scattered mind was those chaotic and insistent flows of information, so he set out to research what neuroscience has discovered about the ways information technologies effect our brains.

Carr’s book is essentially an attempt to put some scientific muscle behind one of Marshall McLuhan‘s most provocative statements: “The effects of technology do not occur at the level of opinions or concepts, but alter sense ratios and patterns of perception steadily and without any resistance” (Understanding Media, 31). Carr argues that these changes in “sense ratios and patters of perception” are actually material, structural changes that occur within the brain, changes that affect the way our brains work, and the kinds of tasks we are able to do.

It turns out that our brains have a certain degree of “plasticity.” That is, our brains are constantly changing, physically reacting to the stimuli we receive, the tasks we do often, and the tools we use to do those tasks. Like water carving out a channel, neural pathways that fire often become stronger and more conductive over time, making it easier for us to leverage that part of our brain in the future. Sometimes this even causes a physical enlargement of our brain cells. For example, Carr discusses how cabbies in London have a measurably larger posterior hippocampus, which is the part of the brain responsible for storing and manipulating spatial information.

But this plasticity can also have a “dark side,” Carr asserts. If we spend more and more time consuming small bits of disconnected information, our brains will physically restructure to optimize for that kind of thinking, and thus we will lose our ability to perform what he calls “deep reading.” Such a loss, Carr declares, will be detrimental not only to our creative engagement with the world, but also our general cultural wisdom.

Carr does an excellent job reviewing the scientific evidence for neuroplasticity, leaving little doubt that the things we use to convey information shape the physical makeup of our brains. He also stresses that these changes happen very rapidly, regardless of age or prior education/experience. He highlights a study in which the brain patterns of those who had not previously used the Internet began to resemble long-time users after just six days of exposure (121). In the afterword, he also makes it clear that generational differences, or the kind of education one has had, should make no difference:

I’ve always been suspicious of those who seek to describe the effects of digital media in generational terms, drawing sharp contrasts between young ‘Internet natives’ and old ‘Internet immigrants.’ Such distinctions strike me as misleading, if not specious. If you look at statistics on Web use over the past two decades, you see that the average adult has spent more time online than the average kid (226-7).

In many ways, we really shouldn’t be all that surprised that our brains physically change to accommodate new tools. Each new technology requires some getting used to, and over time we develop new skills and abilities that we didn’t have before. The question is, however, do these physical changes actually affect the way we think and behave? If so, do they do so deterministically? If six days of exposure to the world wide web were enough to make the study subjects’ brain patterns look like long-term users, does that mean that those subjects would now start to think and act just like those long-term users as well?

Carr seems to answer this in the affirmative, but I think this is where his book is the weakest. Although he includes a paragraph to acknowledge that technological determinism is problematic, he nevertheless argues like a determinist throughout the rest of the book. His basic premise seems to be that reading books always creates a linear, logical, focused, detached mind, while using the Internet (in any shape or form) always creates a non-linear, reactionary, distracted, tribal mind. This assertion, of course, is based on similar ones made by McLuhan and Ong, but I’ve always been rather suspicious of it. In addition to being a bit insulting to pre-literate societies and those who don’t typically read books, I think it also suffers from a lack of necessary distinctions.

Carr echoes the media studies claim that reading printed books always results in the same kind of psychological and cultural effects, regardless of the content of those books. He notes that “Whether a person is immersed in a bodice ripper or a Psalter, the synaptic effects are the same” (72). The implication is that synaptic effects result in psychological and behavioral effects as well, so he would expect that someone who reads mostly escapist fiction, or even pornography, should end up with the same sort of mind as someone who reads mostly philosophy. Carr takes this even further, however, and says that these same changes happen very quickly and regardless of age or previous education or experience. The implication is that if you stop reading printed books and only read on the web, you will quickly become a distracted, shallow thinker.

I remain unconvinced by this argument for a few reasons. First, Carr seems to be lumping a wide array of information technologies into what he calls “the Internet.” He makes no distinctions between demand-pull media (such as web pages and ftp file downloads) and instant-push media (such as SMS text messaging or Twitter); instead he just declares that all of it is designed to convey a constant, unstoppable stream of distractions. He also discusses eBook readers without making any distinctions between genre; escapist fiction might work perfectly fine as an eBook, while other genres might not.

Second, Carr also seems to be assuming that all people gain wisdom and creatively engage with the world in the same way. Recall that his argument hinges on the idea that physical changes to the brain will result in particular psychological effects, regardless of age or prior education/experience, and this, he warns, will result in a loss of cultural wisdom and a decline in creativity. But I have known many people that I would not hesitate to call ‘wise’ who no longer read books at all. Instead, their wisdom is of a different kind, and comes from a long and persistent engagement with the material world: gardening, farming, fishing, etc. To say that wisdom comes only from reading printed books seems to me to be a bit problematic.

Third, I find his claims about a loss of creativity to be a bit surreal given the explosion of creativity enabled by digital tools and social media. Yes, much of it is inane and derivative, but one must also consider the degree to which these tools have also enabled talented artists to make new kinds of work, and get that work in front of more people. One might try argue that on the whole, average cultural creativity is declining, but I think that would require some harder data, and I don’t think Carr provided them.

Lastly, my own experience with the book also raises questions about his thesis. I’ve used a computer since 1980, have programmed them for a living for many years, and have spent quite a lot of time on the Internet. Yet I was able to sit down and read Carr’s book over the course of a few days. I followed his argument closely, engaged critically with his claims, and creatively wrote a review of it on this blog. If, as he claims, the Internet will quickly turn me into a shallow and uncreative thinker, regardless of my age or previous experience/education, how was all of this possible?

Despite these shortcomings, Carr’s book will no doubt remain an enduring fixture in the debates surrounding the Internet, mobile communications, and social networking. Those interested in the topic will no doubt want to become familiar with the book, which is very easy to do, as Carr’s writing style is easy to read and very approachable.

I was reminded of this scene in Vonnegut’s novel after reading an article about the company Narrative Science. They have produced a software program that can automatically write news stories, in human-like prose, about sporting events and routine financial reports. They are now branching out into other genres, like in-house managerial reports, restaurant guides, and summaries of gaming tournaments. Last year they generated 400,000 such stories, all without a single human journalist.

Well, not quite. Like all software programs, their program has to be trained, not only about the rules of a particular domain, but also how to write appropriate-sounding prose for the target audience. The former is done by statisticians and programmers, but the latter requires seasoned journalists, who provide templates and style guides. Theoretically, however, once those journalists train the program to sound like them, the program could generate millions of stories all on its own.

So far, this program has been used to generate stories about minor sporting events and routine financial reports that normally would not garner the attention of a real reporter. For example, parents can capture play-by-play data about their son’s little league baseball game, and submit that to Narrative Science. In a few minutes, the program can analyze the data and generate a story that highlights pivotal moments in the game as well as the final outcome, all written in that flamboyant style of a veteran sports reporter. By looking at the earlier games in the same or previous season, the program can also comment on how the team or individual players performed relative to other games and similar match-ups.

Similarly, most corporate earnings reports go unnoticed by journalists, but this program can quickly analyze the various numbers, compare them with other firms in the same industry, and generate a story for stock holders and other interested parties that highlights important changes in the company’s performance.

Narrative Science is proud of the fact that their program has not yet put any journalists out of work, and they believe that it will be used primarily to generate stories that would normally never have been written in the first place. But when asked how long they think it will take before one of their computer-generated stories would win a Pulitzer Prize, their CTO guessed that it would be within five years.

I’m a bit dubious about that last prediction, but I do find their system very interesting. Narrative Science has essentially picked the low-hanging fruit of professional writing: those routine, boring, and generally formulaic stories that might as well be written by a computer. In some senses, their program is similar to a simple machine tool that is able to construct some particular kind of part over and over again, but in another sense, they have gone far beyond that. By combining data mining techniques with prose generation, they have created a system that can not only find new insights in large datasets, but also communicate those with a wide audience in a style that the audience will recognize and trust.

But before we start worrying about whether their program will soon put all journalists out of work, we need to realize that this kind of program only works in data-rich domains, and the kinds of insights it can generate are limited to the quantity and quality of the data it receives. It can generate insights from complex data sets that a human might not notice, but it can’t really understand those irrational and mirky depths of human emotions, motivations, and desires. I have a hard time, for example, seeing how it could cover a complex public policy debate, or ask tough questions about how a certain dataset was collected, and whether it might be skewed or biased in some way.

Kurt Vonnegut’s first novel, Player Piano, was written in 1952 after he saw an early machine tool quickly make a turbine part that used to require a skilled machinist much longer to accomplish. In the novel, he imagined a dystopian future where blue-collar workers had nothing left to do, and the entire society was run  by managerial technocrats. We now know that things didn’t quite turn out this way (see David Noble’s classic book Forces of Production). Similarly, I don’t think that newsroom management will ever be able to replace human reporters entirely. No doubt, some of the more routine and formulaic reporting will become automated, but the more idiosyncratic stories will still requite a reporter that understands the human condition.

Thankfully, the interviewer didn’t ask me to answer my own question. If he had, I’m not sure I could have given him a good answer at the time. These kinds of articles are, of course, nothing terribly new. I remember articles from my youth that asked if calculators were making us lazy, or if Sony Walkmans were making us socially isolated and possibly deaf. A trip through the newspaper archives would no doubt reveal similar articles surrounding the mass-adoption of just about any new technological device, especially those since the 1960s.

Instead of trying to engage the specific questions that these articles pose, I think it might be more interesting to ask, why are these authors framing their questions in this sort of yes/no, pro/con, good/bad way? And why does framing their questions in that way seem to attract a large number of readers and secondary commentary?

The economically-minded answer would probably note that these kinds of headlines are more attention-grabbing, and that the ultimate goal of any publication funded by advertising is to grab attention. I wouldn’t doubt that this is a contributing factor, and I’m happy that at least in the case of Marche’s article, he nevertheless finds a more nuanced position.

But I also wonder if technological determinism has seeped so far into the popular collective conscious that it is difficult for journalists and the public to think any other way about technology and society. This kind of framing tends to betray an underlying assumption that technology “impacts” society in a kind of one-way, deterministic relationship. Authors may debate whether those impacts are good or bad, but they tend to assume that those impacts will always be inevitable, deterministic, and irreversible.

In the introduction to the classic book Does Technology Drive History?, Merritt Roe Smith argues that Americans in particular have always been attracted to this way of thinking because our national identity has always been wrapped up with technology and the ideology of progress. Our greatest heroes have been inventors and industrialists, not artists or humanitarians, and we commonly attribute our current global hegemony to our technological prowess.

But Americans have also become more willing since the 1960s to question the supposed benefits of new innovations, and to enquire about the often undisclosed costs. Nevertheless, this seems to happen only after the innovation becomes mass-adopted. When Google first appeared on the scene, journalists praised it for its clean look, efficiency, and uncanny ability to find what it was you were really looking for. We rooted for them as the up-and-coming underdog, and we rejoiced in their algorithms’ abilities to bring some kind of order to the ever-growing morass of information on the web. But once it became so ubiquitous that it transmogrified into its own verb, we began to see articles like Nicholas Carr’s “Is Google Making Us Stupid?“

Why do we frame the questions in these ways? And why do articles that use this kind of framing generate such interest and secondary commentary? Do they poke at some deep-seated anxieties that we have about technological change? Let me know what you think.

Update: I just found a fantastic blog post by a social media researcher named Zeynep Tufekci that offers three possible answers:

1. We actually have become more isolated (in terms of strong ties) during the same period that social media has arisen, so we assume that the latter has caused the former, even though evidence to the contrary is legion.
2. Online socialization really can’t entirely replace face-to-face interaction, so we also assume that increased use of social networking causes increased feelings of isolation, even though people who are social online are also social offline.
3. “Just like we convert text (visual) into language in our head (which is all oral in the brain), we need to convert mediated-interaction to that visceral kind of sociality in our brain. And not everyone can do this equally well [a condition she calls 'cyberasociality']. And people who are cyberasocial are driving this discussion.”

See her post for more details, including links to primary research that backs up what she is saying.

At the start, I was concerned that this little experiment of mine might prove to be too difficult, as I really felt that I had become a bit too addicted to Facebook of late. Most of my work right now consists of long-term research, writing, and conference planning projects, so I would often check Facebook whenever I was a little bored, distracted, or just wanting to avoid doing my work. I wondered if I would actually make it until Easter, or if I would just cave part way through.

I have to admit that for the first couple of days, I often found my mouse impulsively shooting up to where the bookmark used to be in my browser window, only to be reminded by its absence of my Lenten fast. This impulse subsided after a few days though, and abstaining from Facebook turned out to be much easier than I thought it would be. I did break the fast once, to self-promote a piece published on Bloomberg.com, but other than that, I stayed off until Easter.

So what did I do with all that extra time? Some productive things, but also some unproductive things. On the productive side, I managed to read a number of books and articles I’ve been meaning to read for quite some time, and because I knew that I couldn’t break away and check Facebook when I became distracted, I found that I was better able to follow longer and more complex arguments. I also spent more time going on walks, thinking through problems, praying, and seeking direction. And I even got my sorely-neglected saxophone out of its case and did some practicing, which felt really good.

But if I was to be honest, I also spent quite a lot of time doing things on the web that were simply pale substitutes for checking Facebook. Instead of checking to see who interacted with my latest status update, I routinely checked the page view stats on my blog, hoping to get that same feeling of acceptance and legitimation. Instead of reading and seeing what my friends were up to, I compulsively read news sites, hoping to feel more in touch with what was going on. And instead of sharing interesting articles I came across with my Facebook friends, I tried tweeting them, but I don’t think anyone was listening.

So does Facebook cause me to be more distracted, or is it just a convenient tool for fulfilling my own desire to be distracted? Is it making me shallow and narcissistic, or is it just one of many places where I can feed my existing insecurities?

The answer is probably a bit of both. As I’ve argued before, each of us needs to be aware not only of our own personal vulnerabilities, but also whether the ways in which we are using our technologies are connecting with those vulnerabilities. I could try to blame Facebook for my foibles, but it’s probably more accurate to say that affordances of Facebook are very well aligned with my some of my existing vulnerabilities. If Facebook didn’t exist, I would still have those vulnerabilities, but I also need to recognize that particular ways of using Facebook might also be making them worse.

Now that Lent is over and I’m back on Facebook, I’ve been much more conscious of the ways in which it can often hit my vulnerabilities. I’ve decided to limit my usage not just in terms of time, but also in terms of what I am trying to get from it. I’ll still post things that I think others will find interesting, but I’m trying not to care how many “likes” I get, or how many comments it might solicit. I still enjoy reading what my friends are doing, but I will try not to compare myself to them and feel inadequate when I don’t measure up. In other words, I don’t simply need to use Facebook less—I need to use it differently.

In a word, I’m domesticating Facebook, altering my usage of it so that it fits better into my life, and aligns better to my stated social values. Instead of knee-jerk reactions that decry how Facebook is ruining our youth, we need to be encouraging each other to do this hard work of self-examination, being honest with ourselves about our personal vulnerabilities and the ways in which the devices and systems we use might be exacerbating those. For some, Facebook might pose little problem, but for others, some changes are probably in order. Let’s get to it.

It sounds utterly utopian, doesn’t it? Of course, visions like these typically revel in the positives while completely ignoring the possible consequences, but that is often necessary in the early stages in order to capture the imagination. It’s only later that the messy details rise to the surface, and we as a culture have to conduct a frank discussion about decidedly untechnical things like safety, responsibility, and liability.

A case in point is the promotion of Google’s self-driving car prototype. Google released a new video this week that was picked up by a few news outlets, in which they show a legally blind man using the car to get a taco and pick up his dry cleaning. Here’s the video:

Although Google is famous for their April Fool’s jokes, this isn’t one of them. Google has been testing their self-driving car for a while now, and this latest video is an attempt to show one possible use for such a product: restoring mobility and independence to those who can no longer drive. But this is really only the tip of the iceberg. What the creators of  Google’s self-driving car want to do is far more profound. They want to revolutionize transportation for everyone. This video explains:

In many ways, the idea of a driverless transportation system is not really new. Various forms of driverless subways are already in operation in many parts of the world. In the 1970s, the French attempted to build a driverless transportation system that featured individual cars that could join together to form quasi-trains when they reached a major arterial (see Latour’s book Aramis, or the Love of Technology). One can now ride fully-automated “pod” cards between terminals at London’s Heathrow airport. And a few high-end luxury vehicles already feature the ability to parallel park automatically.

While Google’s self-driving car takes this vision much further, there is a basic assumption that underlies all of these projects: humans are fallible, so dangerous things like driving should be given over to computerized automation, which is assumed to be perfect. As the rhetoric goes, computers don’t get tired or distracted, and they always make the logical choice.

But this, of course, assumes that the humans who program those computers and design those automated systems do not make any mistakes either. Computers don’t do things on their own—they follow the explicit instructions given to them by a human programmer. Anyone who has worked in the software industry knows that programmers are just as fallible as anyone else. Programmers get tired, distracted, and make mistakes, just like drivers do. Even when the programmer is concentrating fully, it’s sometimes impossible to see all the ramifications of a small change made to an obscure part of the code. Even if you get all the code right, there’s no guarantee that the connection between the computerized controller and the actual mechanics won’t break down or malfunction. And even if all that is working properly, one still has to worry about purposeful malicious behavior; consider for a minute what would happen if someone managed to hack into a self-driving car’s control system.

When I was in graduate school, I participated in a research network that was investigating ways to make computer-based systems highly dependable. Some researchers reported on ways in which actual systems had failed in practice, helping us learn from our mistakes. Others studied systems that had managed to achieve a remarkable level of dependability, trying to discern what factors in particular led to that achievement. What became obvious rather quickly was that dependability required far more than just good technique and well-engineered artifacts. It also required a highly disciplined social organization to operate that technical infrastructure, keeping it in good repair, and making sure it does what it’s suppose to do.

When I apply this to self-driving cars, it raises a number of questions for me. Who will verify that the control systems are correctly designed and implemented? If problems are detected after manufacture, how will they be updated, and how will those updates be tested? When the system starts to fail, either due to software problems or mechanical issues, will it fail gracefully, and will drivers know how and be ready to resume control? And when the first accident occurs involving a self-driven car, who will be found liable? The driver? The manufacturer? The software developers?

I’m not saying that these problems are insurmountable, only that we will be forced to consider them before any kind of widespread revolution in transport can occur. The airline industry has traveled this road before, and the auto industry will no doubt learn from their mistakes and achievements. In the meantime, buckle up, and watch out for those self-driving cars!

Update: Although the self-driving Prius is real, Google’s April Fool’s day joke this year takes it to a whole new level: a self-driving NASCAR.

After the film, there was a panel discussion during which one of the panelists offhandedly mentioned something that peaked my curiosity: a study that had been done on how the introduction of television to a rural Fijian area had affected the way adolescent girls thought about their bodies and eating habits. I did some searching when I got home, and found the original study, as well as a followup article that delved more deeply into the links between television and body image.

It turns out that Fiji is a perfect place to investigate this. Unlike Europeans and Americans, Fijians traditionally encouraged and celebrated what the primary author describes as “robust appetites and body shapes” (Becker et al, 2002: 509). A bit of girth was conventionally associated with strength and hard work, not laziness, and attempts to purposely reshape one’s body through dieting or exercise were typically discouraged. Prior to the introduction of television, there had been only one reported case of anorexia in all of Fiji, and other kinds of eating disorders were almost non-existent.

Given this kind of cultural foundation, the researches asked, what kind of influence would television have? Would Fijian women and girls become increasingly body conscious and develop eating disorders like their Americans and European counterparts? Or would they retain their traditional body aesthetic and eating habits?

I should also note at this point that it wasn’t just the general technology of television that was being introduced to Fiji—it was also television shows and advertisements created in the United States, New Zealand, and Australia. With the exception of a short local newscast, all the programming came from cultures where the definition of a beautiful body was thin, tall, and fit. The popular shows in Fiji were ones that many of us have also seen or at least heard of: Xena, Warrior Princess; Beverly Hills 90210; Melrose Place; and the Australian dramatic series Shortland Street. All of them starred men and women who had a distinctly different body type than the typical Fijian. And interspersed throughout these shows were advertisements, most of which featured…you guessed it…exercise equipment and diet formulas.

The researchers conducted two studies of adolescent Fijian girls, one in 1995 just after television was introduced, and one three years later. In addition to capturing basic body measurements and TV watching behavior, the participants also responded to an “eating attitudes test” that included questions about binging and purging. Those who indicated that they had binged or purged were then interviewed to learn more about why they did it, and wether exposure to these TV programs may have played a role.

The results are pretty shocking. In those short three years, the percentage of families with a TV rose from 41% to 70%, and the percentage of girls who had unhealthy scores on the eating attitudes test had also risen from about 12% to nearly 30%. The use of self-induced vomiting, which none had admitted to in the first study, had risen to just over 11%. A feeling that one should eat less was also significantly higher, and 74% of the girls reported that they now felt like they were “too fat.”

Now, we should also temper this with all the caveats, most of which are noted in the original study. The number of participants was relatively low, just over 60, and not exactly the same between the two measurements. The participants were also self-reporting, which can often skew results. Not all forms of disordered eating behaviors rose (the use of laxatives and diuretics did not change, nor did incidents of binge eating). Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, the introduction of television was not the only aspect of Fijian culture that was changing during this period. Fiji, like most places in the world, was rapidly changing due to globalization, and Fijian girls had already been exposed to American culture via magazine and other print media long before TV arrived.

Nevertheless, these rapid and significant changes in eating habits certainly require explanation, and this is where the in-depth interviews with girls who reported binging or purging came into play. It is pretty clear from the quotes highlighted in the second article that many of the girls were trying to loose weight because they wanted to emulate the characters they saw on TV, primarily because those characters seemed so powerful, successful, and confident. The girls assumed that these qualities naturally flowed from the actresses’ tall, thin, and fit body shapes, and that reshaping their own bodies to match would be necessary in order to be competitive and ultimately successful in a quickly globalizing economy.

Of particular interest was the girls’ desire to be more like Xena, who they saw as a strong and powerful woman who could successfully compete in a man’s world. In this sense, Xena provided a powerful feminist role model, but again the assumption was that her power came from her thin, athletic body, and not from her intelligence or integrity.

So what should we take away from all of this? Should we blame the medium of television for these rather sudden changes in eating habit and body image? Or could that medium have been used to convey shows featuring other types of body shapes? For example, would the results have been different if the programming shown had been made in Polynesia or the UK? Or does television, as a predominantly visual medium, naturally favor actors who resemble the producing culture’s ideal body shape, and thus end up determining the content that comes across it?

Regardless of how you answer these questions for yourself, I encourage you to watch the film Miss Representation and talk about it with your daughters, nieces, and friends. We need to help young women see through the impossible standard of beauty that is paraded constantly before them, and find other kinds of powerful, confident women that they can turn to for role models.

I still listen to both programs, and this week’s show on This American Life was electrifying. It was a little unusual, in that the whole show was devoted to a retraction of a story they had previously aired about the working conditions at the Chinese factories that build Apple’s most beloved gadgets. The original story was told by Mike Daisey, an actor and activist who wrote the monologue The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, in which Daisey purportedly describes his own experiences of visiting these factories and talking with the workers.

The monologue, as well as the story he told on This American Life, lays out a number of shocking accusations: at the gates of the infamous Foxconn factory, he talked with a group of underaged workers who were 12-14 years old; he met with workers who had been poisoned by n-hexane, a powerful neurotoxin that is used to clean iPhone screens; he showed an iPad to a man who’s hand had been destroyed by the machine used to make the case; he saw the inside of worker dormitories that had bunk beds stacked to the ceiling and cameras that observed their every move; and he saw the guards at the factory gates brandishing guns to keep prying eyes away. All of this was capped off with the chilling rhetorical question: “do you really think that Apple doesn’t know?”

Unfortunately for Mr Daisey, the Chinese correspondent for the popular business and finance show Marketplace, Rob Schmitz, heard this story and had a hard time reconciling these claims with what he had observed and reported on over the last few years. Yes, Apple’s Chinese suppliers had routinely violated Apple’s own labor practice standards, the working conditions are notoriously harsh, and there had been a few terrible accidents, including the n-hexane poisoning. But several of the details in Daisey’s story just didn’t seem probable. Only the police and military are allowed to have guns in China, so corporate security guards brandishing firearms would be highly unlikely, and Schmitz had never seen such a thing before. There have been problems with underage workers in Chinese factories, but Apple in particular had been fairly aggressive in stopping that practice at their suppliers, and it would highly unlikely for an underage worker to openly admit to being so to a strange American with a Chinese interpreter.

After some quick searching, Schmitz found the interpreter that Daisey used while in China. Schmitz sent her Daisey’s monologue and asked her if she could corroborate the details. She replied that most of the details were at least exaggerated, if not completely fabricated. They had gone to the gates of Foxconn, but didn’t encounter any underage workers. They had met some disgruntled employees who were trying to form an illegal union, but there were only a couple of workers there, and none of them had the injuries he described. The guards at the gates did not have guns, and Daisey was never allowed in the dormitories, so he couldn’t have known what they looked like.

Schmitz and Ira Glass confronted Daisey about all of this, and to their dismay, Daisey admitted to representing various stories he had heard only second-hand as if he had seen or heard them himself. His reasoning was that it was all “true” and that he represented these events that way for theatrical purposes. He thought that relaying his experiences accurately would “unpack the complexities” in such a way that it would make the narrative arc more confusing and less effective.

The confrontation between Schmitz, Glass, and Daisey was certainly worth listening to, but the part of the show that I found most interesting was how Glass tried to grapple with Daisey’s claims that his story could be considered “true” in a theatrical context, but not in a journalistic one. Daisey admitted that he took “a few shortcuts in my pasion to be heard” but that he was proud of his use of “the tools of the theater and memoir to achieve [the story's] dramatic arc…because it made you care, Ira.”

In other words, Daisey is claiming that a “true” story in the theater is one that makes you care, not one that is accurate in a literal sense. Daisey then expressed regret because he brought that story into a journalistic context, a context where what counts as a “true” story is significantly different. Exasperated by this, Glass chided Daisey that he was kidding himself if he thought that his audience understood this distinction. Glass himself attended the show and concluded “I thought it was true because you were on stage saying ‘this happened to me.’ I took you at your word.”

All of this raises an interesting question: how, if at all, does a medium affect what is considered a “true” story? (The term ‘medium’ is notoriously slippery, but I’m using it here in the same sense that Daisey was using the term ‘context’.) Can a story be true in the medium of theater, and then become less or untrue when it is moved to the medium of journalism? Does what counts as a true story differ between journalism and history? Do you assay the truth of a story differently when you hear it in the theater, on film, in journalistic print, or in academic discourse?