Today’s Daily Read is relevant to my latest post in the Technology and Its Discontents series in that it discusses the harm we are doing to ourselves through our addictions to our phones and screens. Daniel J. Levitin writes in The Guardian about the detrimental effects of information overload on our brains. In this new era of instant electronic gratification, we have fooled ourselves into thinking that we are getting more done, when in reality, the research shows that we are simply feeding our addiction to dopamine. I already know about the effects of dopamine and wrote about it here; but it’s funny how having knowledge of the harm and seeing how it affects me has still not been enough for me to stop spending so much time with screens. Levitin’s article is a bit lengthy but please don’t let that deter you; five to ten minutes of reading will reward you with some insights that may help you – or at least, inform you. Here’s a tidbit from the article that was new – and also surprising and worrying – to me: “Just having the opportunity to multitask is detrimental to cognitive performance. Glenn Wilson, former visiting professor of psychology at Gresham College, London, calls it info-mania. His research found that being in a situation where you are trying to concentrate on a task, and an email is sitting unread in your inbox, can reduce your effective IQ by 10 points. And although people ascribe many benefits to marijuana, including enhanced creativity and reduced pain and stress, it is well documented that its chief ingredient, cannabinol, activates dedicated cannabinol receptors in the brain and interferes profoundly with memory and with our ability to concentrate on several things at once. Wilson showed that the cognitive losses from multitasking are even greater than the cognitive losses from pot‑smoking.”
Tag: technology
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Daily Reads: Bored and Brilliant
Today’s Daily Read is actually a challenge. I ran across an article called The Case for Boredom from the New Tech City podcast this morning and read about an experiment they are running called Bored and Brilliant. After reading about it, I decided to join the project. Here’s the deal: according to the podcast and article, people are spending an inordinate amount of time on their cellphones. Big surprise, right? Of course not – but what’s interesting is the research showing that we are stifling our creativity by never allowing ourselves to be bored. So Manoush Zomorodi of New Tech City decided to create the Bored and Brilliant project to see if people will sign up and participate during the first week of February to see if they can change their relationship with their phone. Now, I don’t feel like I spend that much time on my phone, but part of the project involves downloading an app that tracks your actual use. I think I’ll probably be surprised to find that I use my phone much more than I realize, even though I don’t use it for anything other than email, texting, and browsing the web (e.g. no time-sucking games like Candy Crush). But I also know that when I have a few minutes of downtime – even if it’s idling at a red light – my default urge is to grab the phone and see if I have any new messages or if there are any updates on Instagram or Facebook. I know many of my friends are doing this too – and I also think many of you may want to change your relationship with your phone. So I am challenging you to join me in participating in the Bored and Brilliant project. Click the link below to learn more about the project and sign up. I think it will be fun – and revealing!
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Daily Reads: A Glass of Poop
Linda Poon of NPR uses the word poop in her headline, so I guess I can too! This article about Bill Gates drinking a glass of water derived from sewage sludge makes me very happy. This process has derisively – and misleadingly – been called “toilet to tap” (a technology I mentioned in this post), and as such it has scared people away from an extremely effective way of recycling precious water. This appears to be a different technology from the classic method of collecting and treating water from sewage, but the results are the same. This is the sort of innovation the world needs. People just need to put on their critical thinking caps and realize that the initial source, while gross to think about, is irrelevant to the ultimate product: clean, drinkable water.
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Adaptation to Extinction
I am at a climate change adaptation conference in Denver for three days, and I fully expected to come away from the experience thoroughly demoralized and depressed. At the end of day two, I find that I have both reason for hope and reason for concern. As a person who is well-versed in the scientific method, I have approached the climate change issue as a skeptic should: with a critical eye, and with a desire to hear multiple sides and multiple interpretations. It did not take much research of my own, though, for me to be convinced that climate change is occurring, and that it is extremely likely that it is being made much, much worse by human activity. Ultimately, this may well be what causes the extinction of the human species.
Scientists have determined that 99% of all species that have ever existed have gone extinct. That’s a huge number, but you have to consider that extinction is defined more broadly than the sudden disappearance of a species. Some extinctions occur through speciation; that is, an organism or group of organisms undergoes adaptation and evolution, and over time, changes enough that it is no longer the same species. For example, the common ancestor of chimps and humans, which lived about 5-7 million years ago, does not exist now; but (some) of its descendants do, in the form of Homo sapiens (humans); Pan paniscus (chimpanzees), and Pan troglodytes (bonobos). Other members of those two genera have also existed and subsequently gone extinct (e.g. H. erectus). So, extinction is not always the end of the line for an organism or group of organisms. Even the dinosaurs, many of which went extinct in the commonly perceived way (that is, they were wiped out entirely in a fairly short period of time, geologically speaking) have living descendants. We call them birds.
If things continue the way they have been, I’m not sure humans are going to have any descendants. And I also think that humans will be the first species in history who have caused their own extinction. Most species go extinct in one of two ways I described above: through adaptation and speciation; or through an inability to adapt to new or changed environmental circumstances. The dinosaurs, and many other organisms who lived 65 million years ago, were unable to adapt quickly enough to the changed environment following a catastrophic asteroid impact, and so they died. The asteroid impact was a random event over which the organisms had no control. Humans, on the other hand, are paradoxically bringing themselves (and not incidentally, many other organisms) to the brink of extinction because they are so good at adapting to their environment. This is a case of too much of a good thing, and when it happens, what used to become adaptive becomes maladaptive and starts to negatively affect the species.
How is the human ability to adapt to the environment bringing about our own potential demise? Humans are supremely skilled at technological innovation. What started with stone tools has evolved to microprocessors, digital technology, nanotechnology, genetic modification, and so on. These things are built on a basis of energy and raw materials extraction. Our technological abilities led to the ability to grow more food, have more children, live longer, and make more and more things. In biological and evolutionary terms, an organism’s ability to reproduce is measured as a level of fitness; and the more offspring you produce, the more fit you are. For many organisms, and for animals in particular, mate selection depends on fitness characteristics – males battle each other for the right to females; females select mates based on displays of desirable traits. For humans, one of the most salient traits is status. The higher an individual’s status, the more likely that individual is to mate and produce offspring – that is, the higher his or her fitness. Status is also linked to the ability to raise offspring to maturity. In humans, status is often linked to power, power is linked to wealth, and wealth is indicated by material possessions (among other things). So, the more stuff you have, the more status you have, and the more power you have, the more people – including potential mates – you control. I don’t want to be too broadly sociobiological about this, but for all intents and purposes, our incredible ability to innovate and adapt through making tools is a direct result of the biological imperative to mate and maximize our evolutionary fitness.
So, what does our drive for evolutionary fitness have to do with climate change? It’s simple, really; making tools is what we do. Gathering material things to show our status is what we do. Using yet more tools to make having more material things easier is what we do. Desiring material things to show our status is what we do. Innovating, adapting, making the path of least resistance easier and easier and easier is what we do. Competing for resources is what we do. Dividing ourselves into status hierarchies is what we do. Trying to climb higher and higher up the status pyramid is what we do. And to do these things, we have created more and more tools and technologies that are requiring more and more energy and more and more raw materials, and the technologies we use are having a hugely disproportionate impact on the global environment. Put every one of the over 7 billion people on the planet together in one place, and they don’t take up much space, in terms of square mileage; we can all fit pretty neatly standing side by side in an area about the size of Los Angeles County. But our impact – the impact of our technologies, of everything we harvest and cut and mine and burn and use – is global in scale. We have pushed the bar so high that going back seems impossible.
I know there is much, much more to it than what I have written here, but I really, truly believe that at its very core, it is the biological imperative gone to extremes that has led to the unintended consequences of humans adapting themselves into maladaptiveness. I can also have hope that our innovative, tool-making genius may save us yet. This is not the last I will have to say on this subject, but you have to start with first principles, and I believe our evolutionary history holds that position.
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Mini Rant: If A Phone Rings in the Woods
I saw a commercial today that normally would have set me off like a bomb, but I must be getting resigned because I just watched and sighed. It was for Verizon and featured a teenage boy, his dad, and the boy’s friend on a hike in the woods. The boy is schooling his dad on the use of his phone and explaining how he can still access the web even though they are in the wilderness. Meanwhile, the friend is taking video of the trees and sending it straight to his web page. In the back of my head I felt the vague urge to throw something at the TV, but inertia kept me slumped on the couch waiting to see which cell provider was responsible for this latest assault on our ability to indulge in an unplugged pursuit. I have to admit that I was less aggravated by Verizon’s ad than I am by the AT&T ads that tout “faster is better.” I know this is the world we live in now; I know the cell providers must compete with one another for our increasingly short attention spans; I know that I risk hypocrisy by ranting about media, TV, commercials, the internet, social media, et al when I use those technologies myself. Yet, I continue to be angered and saddened by what these things herald for the future. I find myself both attracted and repelled by tonight’s Oscar telecast blow-by-blow that I can read either on my friends’ Facebook feeds or on sites such as E! Online, or even on NPR of all places. And, I know that this new world of instant technological communicative semi-social gratification is not a harbinger of a complete societal breakdown; but I am sad for the quiet moments that seem to be losing ground. If a phone rings in the woods, no one should answer it.
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Communication Pandemic
As an anthropologist, I have been trained to ask, and attempt to answer, questions about human behavior. As a cultural anthropologist, my methods involve participant observation to gather the data needed to start formulating an analysis. This all sounds very dry, but in layman’s terms all it really boils down to is that I am a professional people-watcher. I became an anthropologist because I thought it would be bitchin’ to make a career out of finding answers to the questions that fascinate me. Even better, I get to teach others how to answer their own questions about why people do what they do, and open their eyes to new ways of trying to answer those questions.
So, this week the musings of the skeptical anthropologist are focused on communicative strategies and how they are changing. Or, to put it in a more entertaining way, what the hell are people thinking sometimes when they open their mouths? Or, even more so these days, when they e-mail/post/Twitter/link/YouTube/Flickr? What are we really trying to accomplish with all these new ways of communicating?
I find that there is a fascinating blend of potential motivations in what people do with the new instant-communication technologies at our fingertips. The cell phone camera/video/e-mail/upload capabilities have given us the ability to reveal ourselves and our lives in some shockingly exhibitionist ways… and some coma-inducingly boring ways, too. And, the variety of emotions we can express! I know I’m not saying anything new here, but the anonymity the internet can afford (but that actually seems less and less anonymous each day) allows people to be astonishingly raw.
So what’s my hypothesis? I haven’t settled on anything concrete yet, but I am attempting to formulate some ideas based on status-seeking behavior, and ultimately (as always with me) evolutionarily adaptive behaviors. To wit: on a venue such as Facebook, there seems to be a great deal of “look at how clever/cool/witty/educated I am” sorts of posts. There are also many “look at how virtuous/healthy/creative/thoughtful I am” posts. These posts, I need not remind, are not anonymous. Who wouldn’t want to take credit for “Just made a delicious risotto with truffle oil and chanterelle mushrooms”? Who, exactly, are we trying to impress? Facebook is also a simple way to keep friends up to date on your life, and most people seem to use it that way, but for how many is this an opportunity, however unconscious, to simply brag? And, how much of what we post is actually reflective of the life we are trying to project?
On the opposite side of that coin are anonymous posters, such as those who lurk at the San Diego Union-Tribune website. The amount of vitriol that drips from some of these posts is simply boggling. And along with the vitriol is just plain ol’ racism, sexism, and one of my favorites, stupidity. But the point is that, for the most part, people won’t flame each other on Facebook, but they will easily descend to the level of playground bullies on anonymous comment boards. No surprise there, but I can’t help wondering how many of these folks are the same as the ones posting about the truffle risotto.
Yet another area of fascination is the YouTube phenomenon. This came disgustingly home for me when my little cousin linked to a graphic video of… wait for it… a guy letting his girlfriend LANCE A BOIL on his back. There is no attempt to disguise the face of said guy, and he knows he is being filmed, and I assume he approved of having the video posted online. And yes, I watched it, in all its blood- and pus-spurting glory (which brings up another topic of fascination for me, which is our primate urge to groom each other… but I’ll save that for another post!).
What does all this new technology, these novel (but not for long) communicative strategies, mean for us and our behavior? How do we know what to trust? How do we know what to say? What will be the limits, if any, on what we will reveal? How long will it be before all this availability, visibility, and downright exhibitionism festers into its own cultural boil and pops? Or will we simply adapt, as we have for so long?
An even better question, for me personally: what makes me think anybody is interested in what I have to say in this blog (besides my mom – awww, thanks Ma!)? Hmmm… the musings continue.