Wired thing, You Make My Heart...
Slowly, our blind infatuation with digital technology is giving way to some obvious questions: How do we treat computers? How do computers affect us? Might we be involved in an electronic Faustian bargain?
My online friends immediately respond: “Don’t worry, the computer is just a tool.” But in “The Media Equation,” Stanford University professors Byron Reeves and Clifford Nass show that we don’t treat computers as tools. Rather, we relate to computers as if they were real people and places. Suddenly, this rationale explains plenty: the yearning for simple, user-friendly systems; the spread of Internet addiction; viewers’ hypnotic attachment to multimedia games.
The authors work in mass communications and sociology: They study computing using psychological means. In one experiment, they programmed one computer system to present a dominant style of answers, another to be more submissive. The first machine made assertions and answered questions with great confidence. The other responded with timid suggestions and a bit of wavering. Sure enough, subjects using the two systems saw the first as dominant, the second as passive. From such tests, the authors claim computers have personalities.
Computers with personalities? Indeed--we treat computers with a politeness undeserved by mere tools. The authors ran the following nifty test. After people used computer A, it asked them how it did. Computer B also asked them about computer A’s performance. The people scored computer A more highly when they were directly answering its question. They didn’t want to hurt computer A’s feelings! Reeves and Nass see this as more than simple anthropomorphism: We view computers as people, deserving of courtesy and emotional investment.
In trying to impress the importance of their conclusion, the authors stretch themselves way too far. “It’s possible to take a psychology research paper about how people respond to other people, replace the word ‘human’ with the word ‘computer’ and get the same results,” they argue. Oh? In other words, media experiences are actual human experiences. Pretty soon, you start relating to them as though they were real things. But is a video of a forest anything like a walk through the woods?
Nass and Reeves mix an academic style with an italicized breathiness that is off-putting. Missing are references to classical psychological testing--after all, isn’t a computer the ideal Skinner box for testing the effects of different stimuli? Haven’t psychologists showed that we’re far more likely to use cruelty when a person is concealed behind a machine rather than when he or she is visible? Marshall McLuhan isn’t mentioned either--perhaps his comments on media no longer matter? According to Reeves and Nass, “what seems true is more important than what is true.”
Taking the opposing view is “Tolstoy’s Dictaphone: Technology and the Muse.” Sven Birkerts has collected essays from 20 writers who use and have been used by today’s electronic machinery. This showcase of jewels glistens with insight into our social and technological worlds. Throughout these reflections, a simpler life calls--a life without the numbing glut of a thousand World Wide Web sites and 500 television channels.
Paul West’s essay, “The End of an Elite,” alone justifies this book. A prolific writer without a word processor, West sees writing as “my mystery, not computing.” He has no use for electronic crutches: Against the mediocrity of today’s literacy standards, the only reasonable response is to go down with all guns firing. West takes no prisoners: “Decadence achieves its consummation in the self-righteous banalities of National Public Radio” or “Do-gooders debate the place of prayer in schools, but who cares about the place of reading?”
Novelist Jonathan Franzen describes the warm feelings and low costs of rotary phones in “Scavenging.” Those art deco style telephones not only look proud, they last. Taiwanese touch-tones lack stamina and character. Franzen touches on a rarely spoken truth: While phones and computers may seem cheap, they’re not free. High-paid programmers don’t blink at dropping a few thousand dollars for techno-gizmos, but young artists and novelists sure do. Lynne Sharon Schwartz explores how we treat telephones and answering machines in “Only Connect?” For many, a disembodied shadow of a voice means as much as the physical presence of the actual person they’re trying to reach.
In “Nerds, Technocrats, and Enlightened Spirits,” poet Robert Pinsky recognizes the melancholy of the technocrat. With pathos and wit, he tells the story of a tinkering gadgeteer who couldn’t see around his nerdlike blinders. Despite the techie’s background, he’s more bewildered than most by the undesired consequences of highway development and television--decaying cities and lousy shows.
Much ambiguity remains in the relationship between people and technology. This circumstance is best captured by the title of Birkerts’ book, which is borrowed from Askold Melnyczuk’s essay. Thomas Alva Edison sent Tolstoy a dictaphone, but the great writer didn’t use it much. This wasn’t because he opposed technology, but because he found it “too dreadfully exciting,” and so, it offered a distraction to him as he tried to write. Tolstoy knew his relationship to new technology; today, many are still trying to figure theirs out.
