The lost world of physicality | Hacker News Reader

The lost world of physicality

blog.jgc.org

131 pointsjgrahamc97 comments

Since nobody else has directly brought this up so far: our perceptions are strongly distorted by our environment. If you tend to spend a lot of time at the computer, you will tend to think that everyone else spends a lot of time at the computer.

I live in a semi-rural area (Grass Valley, CA; local population approximately 25,000). Here, the neighborhood kids get together on my street and play outside. On the weekends in the Summer, the local highways have boats on trailers, headed out to the various local lakes for the day. The locals that don't have a boat all congregate at one of the various local rivers during the Summer, and hang out with their dogs off their leashes and chat with each-other and jump off of cliffs into questionable landing areas.

I needed to get away for a bit last weekend, so some friends and I went hiking deep in the mountains and bagged some 8,000-foot buttes while we were there. Along the way, we met a bunch of other people out having fun too, including a small, but full, campground of folks. Here, there are farmers' markets somewhere almost every day, and big street events downtown. There seems to be a kind of informal local contest to see who can put on the biggest events. Last weekend, while I was out hiking, we had the brew fest (which is usually a pretty big attraction), and the "Miner's Picnic", which also gets a good draw.

I have a couple of tickets to go and see a local production of "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead". I'm trying to improve my juggling skills, so I hang out with some locals for a "circus jam" in one of the local parks every Sunday afternoon. On Tuesdays and Fridays I get together with some older friends and we play Go for a few hours at one of the various cafes. My girlfriend goes out to various places throughout the week and sets up her massage chair and offers $1/minute massage to interested people.

Yes, there are people here who spend a lot of time behind computers. I'm one of them. There are kids who spend a lot of time playing video games. I've met some of them. But, that's not the whole picture, and I know it's not, because I go out and participate in and experience everything else that's going on here.

I've also seen these dichotomies-of-community in lots of other places, too: San Diego, the East Bay, Seattle.

If you feel like other people are spending too much time in the virtual world, or that the virtual world is overtaking the physical one, or that experiences are being cheapened somehow, or that there's too much fear among people ... you need to get out more. :-)

> so some friends and I went hiking deep in the mountains and bagged some 8,000-foot buttes while we were there.

It's cool that your mom and your friends get along so well.

PS: I love downvotes nearly as much as a good "your mom" joke. :)

Nah, she couldn't make it out that day. You should know that -- she was busy fixing that OBO bug in your code that you couldn't figure out.

So you're saying that kids aren't outside less than they were a generation ago? That people don't interact with the physical world less, opting instead to interact with their phones?

Are you saying I'm blind?

No. I'm saying exactly what I said.

> Yes, there are people here who spend a lot of time behind computers. I'm one of them. There are kids who spend a lot of time playing video games. I've met some of them. But, that's not the whole picture...

Fisking mode on, devils-advocate-to-some-extent option engaged.

I think that the world of TV, computers, video games has caused us to lose our connection with the physical world. Add on top of that fear: fear of letting children play in the street, fear of chemistry sets, fear of ultraviolet light. This combination means that people (and especially the young) spend hours indoors away from the physical world immersed in virtual worlds.

In my experience (and I'm only talking about my own experience), the fear is driven by "predators". People aren't significantly more worried by actual dirt than they used to be — kids in my neighborhood are filthy often. But there's a perception that there are dirty perverts behind every corner ready to snatch your kid from you — it's not so much of just a concern as much as a near-certainty. This is driven by "news" shows that focus on the handful of negative events out of the billions of positive ones - in other words, it doesn't at all reflect the reality than one sees in statistics. But, many people aren't statistically minded. Some kids are definitely losing out because of this. All we can do is allow our own kids the reasonable freedom that they're entitled to… I see many people doing so.

Books: as books move to electronic form they take on a different meaning. The words of the book transcend and the physical presentation is lost. On the Kindle every book is Twilight. In the real world the physical book has a meaning of its own: it's the book your wife gave you as an anniversary present, it's the book your late father got part way through and you dare not remove the bookmark he left in place, it's the children's book read and read until the pages are torn and worn. These physical remnants augment the book with personal meaning.

Speak for your own ebook reader - mine isn't filled with Twilight. Are more people buying Twilight than deep eternal classical philosophical works? No doubt, but that's not at all necessarily related to medium.

Sex: what happens when pornography becomes the default means of getting sexual pleasure. Does fantasy start to wither in the brain? If every fetish or desire is available (for free) at the touch of a button what happens when we are presented with a real other person to have sex with. And what's the cost of reality not matching screen fantasy?

Masturbation has always been the default means of getting sexual pleasure. It's assisted more now and I agree that's something to be cognizant of. But I remember wails a few years back of how rape was skyrocketing as corner convenience stores started selling pornography. I don't have the numbers in front of me, but my understanding is that rape, like most violent crime, is decreasing and is (in developed countries) at pretty low levels historically.

While we're theorizing, we could speculate that many peoples' sex lives are better now: as (widely-desired) taboos are normalized, more people get to engage in them. How many married couples have gone through life both wanting and desiring "more" (more pleasure, more intimacy, more "dirty", etc) but neither getting it because they both considered it off-limits? I've known far more couples whose sex lives have been improved by watching porn together than the opposite.

Making: as a child I had Lego, Play-Doh, and other toys to occupy my hands. Now imagine that these are all virtualized and I play with them on screen. There's no difference felt in my hands between them. No texture, smell and pliability of Play-Doh, no satisfying click of Lego, no hunt for the right coloured piece. If an infinite amount of virtual stuff is available does my imagination atrophy? If I can always find the right coloured, right sized Lego piece is this an advantage or a loss because I'm no longer forced to invent?

If you ever build a technological thing that makes kids not play with Lego and Play-Doh, it'll be because it's so immersive, fun, and imagination-stimulating that they don't want Lego and Play-Doh anymore. Every kid I see is surrounded by technology but still loves playing with these physical things too.

Children: as an adult man I'm now viewed by many to be a threat children. I can't be seated next to a child flying alone on a flight. I'm afraid to talk to a child in the street, and we've seen schools instituting policies against any sort of physical contact between children and teachers.

I agree: this is a huge problem. It doesn't seem, though, to be driven by technology but by its offshoot, media. I don't know what the answer is here. As above, I guess it's about making people statistically-driven rather than anecdote-driven. Good luck with that. Horror is more exciting than mundane news about the world being OK. As long as you have a free media, you're going to have this problem. Only possible remedy I see is a heavy educational emphasis on making statistically-based decisions.

Thanks for pointing out some of the more anecdotal evidence from this article. I wish there was some data to compare things instead of it seeming like 'things were better in the good old days.'

One thing that is for certain is that obesity is a huge problem for younger generations. Part of that may be from less physical activity, but it is also no doubt due to recent food innovations that taste better, are cheaper, and are way worse for you.

Yes, kids these days text more than they talk on the phone, which is more than they probably talk in person. But if you look at it from the broader picture, plenty of aspects of life are the same as they've always been. For high school and college kids, the 'epitome of fun/social' is still going to parties. We have better/more porn to watch, but the end goal will always be to have sex with real girls. Sure, some kids grow up behind a computer and become very socially awkward, but were there really no shy and awkward kids before computers?

Action sports have taken off in the past twenty years, where 'physicality' is the center of it all. And its due to no small part of technology, which creates better equipment and increases exposure to actually make the sports more physical than they ever were.

The kids are still alright. Look at what kids still value as 'cool.' Not the video gamers, but the athletes. Being fat will never be 'cool.' Real social activities are always regarded as more fun then online chatting.

> Yes, kids these days text more than they talk on the phone

OT: What age range is this?

I'm 24 and the only texts I get are from CloudKick (server warnings) and Google Voice (voicemail transcripts).

You're 24, in what way do you think your age group would be considered part of "kids".

Because my grandparents and a number of people a generation younger than them have included me in the "kids these days" group. :)

The OP would do well to read "Walden" by Henry David Thoreau or, perhaps more pointedly, read up on the teachings of Epicurus[1]. And, more generally, I highly recommend "The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work" by Alain De Botton. And then there's the defining entry from 1960's philosophy, "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" by Persig, which is precisely about the intersection between nature and technology.

These concerns with modernity go pretty far back in our history, and some very smart people have come up with workable solutions you can adopt as an individual without needing to go change society.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epicurus

Another relevant one is E.M. Forster's "The Machine Stops":

http://archive.ncsa.illinois.edu/prajlich/forster.html

Thank you both for these suggestions. I recall reading E. M. Forster's story at school and my contribution to English class was that he was wrong about there being a separate button for everything: in reality things would have been multiplexed and the person would have used a keypad or similar :-)

I have not read Walden. Will put it on my Kindle.

Upvoted for using a Kindle

"I have not read Walden. Will put it on my Kindle"

I think that sentence sort of encapsulates what you are saying in your article. It certainly pulled me up sharp.

The flip side of this is that without the Kindle, it would have been "I may go pick up a copy from the public library, if I find myself visiting it soon and remember this thread when I'm there."

He's a lot more likely to actually get around to reading it when it's instantly and freely available. Hurrah for the public domain.

I'd also highly recommend the book "Shopcraft as Soulcraft" by Matthew Crawford. It's certainly not a classic like "Walden" or "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", but I thoroughly enjoyed it, and found it very applicable to this type of philosophical discussion.

Some six years ago I bought a boat that I now live on. This means that I'm in daily contact with other people around the harbour that also live on boats. These people are outside a lot, get a lot of exercise (if you've ever owned a boat you'll know how much physical work must be endured to keep it ship-shape), and generally don't sit much behind copmuterscreens.

I've noticed that there are quite a few people that live on boats that are 70+ years old. One of my neighbours, age 69, has just come back from a 2 year solotrip from Denmark to the mediterranean and back. He sailed alone. These people are much more fit than the average 30 year old, and they're having a blast while most other people their age are sitting in a nursinghome.

Anecdotally it seems like a lot of this can be traced back to the hands-on hard outdoor life that keeps you in shape all year round.

So I'd say that getting out is much more important than people think. Especially if you're getting older.

But such anecdotal observations are often subject to "survivorship bias": you see only those who have survived and not the 30-to-70 year olds who tried and died:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias

Some quick reactions:

To have a fair discussion, you would have to look at both the problems and benefits of losing physicality. There is a danger of clinging on it to it purely for nostalgia, which I think is largely the case with books.

My hunch is that kids' imagination will actually expand with virtual worlds.

Another advantage is they will be better educated. Like my wife says, "I wish I had Google when I was a child. I wouldn't have to believe all the lies my parents told me to shut me up."

I'm not even sure we will net lose physicality. We will probably just have new types of physical objects.

It would be interesting to know what kind of behavioral changes have been seen on a mass scale in countries where computers etc are an inseparable part of life and countries where you would have to be affluent to afford a comupter ... I think that could point out some of the differences that are there ..

Rationalization? Its very much a part of our physical development to interact with the world. Also emotional formation like empathy depends upon experiencing physically the results of your actions.

Things we lose by losing physicality:

Reading, hearing stories read to you.

Interacting with others over the media you view.

Spending time in a single environment stimulates imagination, sensory acuity

Respect for the physical world - it hurts to wreck your car, shoot a man, insult someone face-to-face

The lies your parents told you (mine anyway) were designed to simplify the world for a 5-year-old. This is necessary. They are moldable, easily confused and frightened. Let the world occur to them in easy stages, not as a fire-hose of internet weirdness.

Ultimately I fear a world of socially-inept fat autistic young adults.

The cure? Go fishing. Barefoot if possible.

The trend away from physicality began long before the internet. In fact, the ability to spend mental energy and effort on non-physical things is quite possibly one of the defining features of humanity itself.

Stories, religion, relationships, philosophy, basic societal concepts such as "ownership" or "justice"... all of these are abstractions from physicality. The invention of writing allowed us to make these abstractions even more elaborate, as did the rise of the intellectual class and the invention of printing.

Electronic media is merely the next step on this same journey - it allows us to manipulate and record even more abstract ideas, and communicate them more effectively.

In my humble opinion, although physicality and its accompanying physical experiences are certainly pleasant and integral to the experience of being alive, the ability to form, manipulate and care about non-physical abstractions is one of humanity's most noble defining features, and nothing to be afraid or ashamed of.

We are physical beings, and our physical selves are wasting away the more we neglect them in favor of the electronic world.

Sigh... We were not meant to sit around and play video games all day. Our brains and bodies just don't respond effectively to it. It's not healthy.

We are physical beings, but we are not just physical beings.

Playing video games may well be a waste of time, but it's not because they're not physical. All the accomplishments which I admire most are informational or abstract in nature, not physical.

This passage seems relevant as it points at the contours of what I take to be the underlying 'problem' that the OP hints at with the litany of questions. It's also an interesting background from which to approach the writings of people like Kurzweil. There is, it seems, a deep desire to escape our bodies. The drive is present in many religions and it is present in futurism of diverse sorts. Lastly, the final sentence seems especially relevant at a time when it seems that most 'misfortunes' get transformed into 'moral failings'.

From the essay "Really Bad Infinities", in the journal parallax, written 1999:

In ‘Body Fluids’, an essay as remarkable for its prescience as for its rigour, Isabelle Stengers and Didier Gille ask in the context of what we have come to know as safer sex discourse in the AIDS pandemic:

  What will we say to those who ignore advice and continue to make contacts
  known to be at risk? Will we treat them as irresponsible, to be lectured to,
  put under observation, and converted? In that case, our future scenario is
  assured: that of the child in the glass bubble, for whom the outside envi-
  ronment means death; that of the obsessional struggle against all unmonitored
  contact as potentially the source of death.‘

Much has happened in the fourteen years since Stengers’s and Gille’s essay ﬁrst appeared. We have learned, for example, that the pandemic is interminable, that we are, and will be, in what we call our being, of AIDS (with the full force of the partitive: we belong to AIDS as its ownmost), and that we can therefore no longer think of the future as the restoration of a putatively uncontaminated past; we have learned, perhaps, that so-called safer sex is not a state of being, and that latex is no guarantee of immortality; we, some of us, have learned the hard way (there being no easy way) the existential irrelevance of both hope and despair; we have learned that the fact that we both are and possess bodies means that our bodies are our unavoidable exposure to danger, that there never is, has been, nor can be a place of safety; more, that the fact of our embodiment is the fact of our utter nontranscendence, our ﬁnitude. And we have had to live the future scenario of which Stengers and Gille warned us in 1985; absolutely nothing has happened to deprive their question and their warning of their cogency, for we have seen technical advice pertinent to our pleasures pressed into the service of a thoroughly authoritarian, albeit thoroughly stupid, moralism. Indeed, safer sex discourse, including not only verbal admonition but an entire range of material and institutional practices, has become an essential part of an entire scientific medical technology of social control such that all illness, disability, and death itself have become essentially moral failings rather than misfortunes.

Perhaps; the medical industry follows our collective choices.

Say we eat more and grow obese, industry then works hard on maintaining sclerotic, clogged arteries and other over-sizing-related sequelae. Or we choose to have unsafe sex, so we get better at treating STDs.

Ultimately, medical industry expands to support an ever-increasing number of human configurations. Financing this expansion aside, we are witnessing an evolution of the human form.

Nature doesn't provide an unchanging measure by which we can gauge our overall fitness. Luckily, the OP wishes to provide one for us.

On the Kindle every book is Twilight.

What does this even mean?

Text is already digital (made solely from a discrete alphabet), all about setting up a completely artificial virtual reality of sorts, and not fundamentally tied to any specific physical medium. Strangely, I nevertheless don't see many of these types of essays condemning novels on the same breath as social networking and video games.

I think it means that everything is mediocre crap.

(bar 1984 which goes missing).

I wonder if anyone making that claim actually owns a Kindle. After buying a Kindle, I am reading a lot of older texts that are out of copyright and are far superior to most of today's crap.

I was referring to Twilight explicitly. Agree with your point entirely.

I suppose the sort of person who always makes sure everyone can easily notice they are presently reading Gravity's Rainbow or Infinite Jest won't quite welcome the Kindle with open arms.

Well, my 3 and 1 year old also have playdoh and lego, and love playing outside. And can also play Angry Birds.

If the physical world is being 'lost' then an alternative cause (in the UK at least) might be the amount of it available per person because of increased densities of living.

Wolfram Alpha shows: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=uk+population+density

2011 - 663 people per square mile

1911 - 425 people per square mile

One thing to note is that access to "wild" land in the UK is generally a lot easier today than it would have been in 1911.

The high level population density in the UK is pretty misleading because quite significant chunks of the country are fairly lightly populated - making us all cram into what parts are left (e.g. the Central Belt of Scotland).

Wouldn't that mean the population density is underestimated?

It does, but it means it's also a misleading statistic within the context of this argument, because the high population density (600 people per square mile) would indicate that you can't ever walk 50 meters in one direction without bumping into someone. In fact, you can easily walk miles without meeting anyone - if you go into the countryside. On the other hand, you won't be able to walk anywhere near 50 metres without bumping into someone in a town centre.

I think my record, at least so far, is walking for four days in the Highlands in winter without meeting anyone. Not bad for an island that people generally consider as rather densely populated.

Yes... a flat density statistic is fairly useless to describe somewhere like Britain, although perhaps it is a weak proxy for relative density, because most places will have density variations.

p.s. did you just walk around in a circle, though?

It was a fairly devious route from Achnashellach to Ullapool stopping for a few nights at the utterly gorgeous Lochan Fada so I could climb the surrounding mountains then up to Ullapool.

It was early April, bitterly cold and very deep snow. Usually those mountains are pretty busy - but I had the whole area to myself.

> The virtual world is clean, colourful, free of danger and effortless.

Actually, the virtual world is highly dangerous: the life-long risks of sedentary inactivity are well understood. From a risk management perspective, I'll take the dangers of the real world any day.

My parents were always worried that I "spent too much time on the computer", but it was always balanced by weekend outdoor pursuits in mountains and rivers. Both did me a lot of good.

I don't want my children to live in a "risk-free" society with all the restrictions that it would imply.

We live in semi-wild country on the outskirts of a large flat city with lots of manicured lawns and pavements. When children visit from the inner suburbs they trip over a lot because they are not used to running on uneven ground. I think it's a great pity.

There was someone in a talk or podcast (damn, when can we get search engines for our memories?) who discussed the idea of creating physical tokens as representations of virtual objects or events. With the arrival of cheap 3D printers, there is now the possibility of making personalized tokens.

As for offered books, I think hardcovers will become the tokens; for example, for Cory Doctorow's With a Little Help (which I've never read), the hardcover edition comes with an SD card with the ebook and even a audiobook.

And the reality is that at least for me, only one in ten books or so actually have any meaning besides the content; most are just books I bought for myself for no special occasion, and I don't really benefit from the space they take.

jgc, some of your thoughts in this piece are worded badly, implying a (possibly subconcious) bias which I don't think you intended to be in there - though perhaps that was purposeful?

For example in paragraph three you have a list for virtual, and a list for real - "pleasure" appears in one of the lists only, and as it would be clearly incorrect to imply that virtual worlds cannot give pleasure, it was just left off that list, which is a subtle suggestion that pleasure is only found in the real world.

Books, I'm completely with you on that personally, I far prefer actual books to reading on an iPad or a Kindle, and I'm generally quite sentimental in most areas ("my dad's watch", etc.) But would losing that be a bad thing? It would for me personally, because that's how I think now, but if I was brought up not thinking of these things as sentimental for the object not just for the content, would I be worse off? Not sure.

Sex: A big leap to suggest that porn will become the default blah blah. And while I really have no idea what was in the heads of people 40, 100, 500 years ago, surely we have always been able to imagine pretty much any sexual scenario for pleasure anyway? And, porn is hardly new in the digital age (though much more easily accessible, certainly), and we haven't got there yet.

Making: My 9 year old nephew loves playing with his DS, his Xbox, he's always picked up technology (e.g. iphone use) fast, since he was young. But that doesn't mean he doesn't enjoy being read to. Or reading himself. Or playing with lego. Or playing on the swings at the park. Or playing with our train set. Sure, some kids might never leave the computer screen, but some kids will also spend all their spare time reading, that doesn't prompt blogs about books being bad.

Children: I saw your link somewhere here to the flying story, and while some people may think like that, certainly not everyone.

And ultimately, sitting in front of a screen doesn't have to be bad. Everything in moderation, etc. Playing video games with friends online is (less so now, but still to an extent) considered geeky and lacking social skills, but is it really different from playing football in the park? (Ignoring the excercise aspect). Does playing with PHP help you improve your thinking skills more or less than playing with lego? Etc.

Just to add a note of thanks to all the people who have commented in this thread. Wonderful to see the thoughtful reactions from the HN crowd. Much to think about.

Real worlds are filled with dirt, hazards, sensation, pleasure, effort and more. The virtual world is clean, colourful, free of danger and effortless.

Heh, and then come along malware authors, spammers and scammers. I doubt virtual worlds will be entire free of danger; just as it's possible to break a leg through stupidity, I imagine it'll still be just as easy to delete C:\Windows ;)

You are correct in saying that the virtual world is not free from hazards. However, the difference is in feedback and evolutionary development.

In the real world, you feel the snakebite or the hot stove burner. When approached by a stranger or walking through an unknown neighborhood, thousands of years of predator-prey evolution gives you the feeling that something is wrong and you should flee.

We haven't evolved these levels of intuition for the virtual world. I can open a harmless looking email and infect my home network with a virus and never know it happened. I can't reliably tell if the person I'm chatting with is a predator or a friend.

And here the physical world comes to the rescue - get yourself a new computer when your old one is infested with malware!

Yes, the virtual world is in no way safer, cleaner than the real world. And certainly not always more colorful. It's a bit of a misconception based on the fairytale told by marketing departments of tech companies, which try to push their happy-go-lucky walled-garden virtual worlds.

When the internet was just beginning to show up on the collective radar (ca 1997, let's say), most people saw it as an isolating, anti-social influence. You could order a pizza over the internet without ever speaking to another human being! (Except the driver, but that was a minor detail.) The internet was obviously the thin end of a wedge. Today AOL says "you've got mail," tomorrow we're all living in one-person bunkers underground, getting all the necessities of life from Amazon's delivery robots.

In 2001, I read a rebuttal by a former IT consultant in a contrarian magazine. People had the same worries about the telephone, she explained. But the urge to connect with other human beings had survived somehow, eking out a meager existence on the fringes of society. No amount of advanced technology would ever be able to kill it off completely.

If our social instincts can survive suburbs and the telephone, we'll probably find an excuse not to drift off into the ether.

I have to balance my long sessions of hacking and screen time with something physical. Gym, home projects, or something that's making my body work too. I know others have experienced the same thing, with different solutions.

Loving the virtual and code isn't a problem, as long as there's an offline component to balance things.

This struck a chord with me. I tend follow up long days at work with lifting sessions in the gym. Helps me get a grip on the world outside the computer sometimes.

I have the opposite experience: freed from absolute reliance on physical objects, my experience and enjoyment of them have multiplied. I find myself carefully selecting the objects I share space with and I have more time to wander public space because I'm not tethered to a single location.

So you've been doing the minimalist living thing? Do you find yourself spending more or less time in the virtual world, having made the physical one a little less comfortable? Also, as an aside, how do you deal with the expectations of the opposite gender?

I have considered the same thing, and it's true for me too. Take your office, for instance: I don't use folders, everything is on the computer. Same for photos and albums, I don't need to store those, or CDs, LPs and the like. I have lots of shelf space and closet space to spare.

It took me some time to "back port" the concepts I know to the situation my colleagues grew up in: they got memo's in in- and outboxes, they read, copied and replied to stuff that went in folders on a shelf, and projects contained physical snipplets from newspapers, photograps and typed files to review. (Thank Mad Men for my insight here.) These went into filing cabinets alfabetized.

I can hardly imagine the inefficiency!

This isn't that new of a concept. Parents have been lamenting kids being lazy (and too much time in front of the computer, though that's not really being lazy!) since the start of time.

Relevant to this discussion is Silicon Valley Snake Oil by Cliff Stoll. http://www.amazon.com/Silicon-Snake-Oil-Thoughts-Information...

In 1996 he predates a lot of these ideas by 15 years. And he's gone from physicist-hacker to Klein Bottle (Mobius bottle?) Maker. http://www.kleinbottle.com/

Ah, I see this is getting some love from the HN crowd. Very interested to hear people's opinions and very, very interested in original research that covers any of the topics mentioned.

You might also be interested in Nicholas Carr's blog, he writes about similar things. I think it is worth following it, if only as a contrast to the tech-utopianism of HN:

http://www.roughtype.com/index.php

To me, Carr mostly comes across as trolling.

It's not just baseless ranting (well, not all the time), as he does provide arguments. But he's very contrarian in this day and age. His views sometimes border on Luddism :-)

But there is some truth in it. In a way, in our quest for efficiency, comfort and safety, we are losing touch with nature, and even with the physical world. I feel that as we become more dependent on technology we become more like domesticated pets of "the machine".

I didn't want to call him a Luddite, as that seems rude, but I'd have to agree with you.

Of course there is some truth in saying that technology has some unwanted effects on our lives. But, the question is what alternatives or solutions does he propose, if any?

You can improve the world by solving problems for a lot of people or you can improve it by writing books about problems which new solutions may or may not create. I think Carr has chosen the less useful option, if he is indeed trying to improve the world and not just trolling.

There is quite a bit of room for interesting middle ground, I think. A lot of the public debate currently is framed more or less between the "very optimistic" and "very pessimistic" poles represented, respectively, by Clay Shirky's Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age, and Nicholas Carr's The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. They make for a nice pair of dueling books, but I'd rather read something with a bit more detailed analysis about the good and bad parts of a networked age, and in particular what meaningful choices we can make that are more fine-grained than "embrace technology" or "reject technology".

Agreed. The middle ground is where we have to deal with real data instead of justifying our preconceived notions. I think that is what the OP is trying to do with his post - a call for existing studies and data.

Sometimes describing a problem can be useful, even if you don't have a solution ready. But that's only the first step...

He's not a luddite; I think the alternative that he poses is to be more suspicious of technology and the companies that push it, judge its merits and disadvantages on a case-by-case basis. Not to entirely reject it.

Nice post. Obliquely related, but you may enjoy the PBS Frontline episode Digital Nation -- you can watch it online through the PBS website:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/digitalnation/view/

"On the Kindle every book is Twilight."

Struck me in church, standing there reading the Bible from an iPad, that the value of sacred texts may fade or alter, being indistinguishable from any other momentary array of pixels upon a slim universal reader. Being naturally physcial-focused, my toddler children may come to not grasp the "specialness" of some books - where I want them to learn value beyond bits and pixels.

But the specialness of any book is precisely related to its contents, not its physical manifestation. The Bible is thousands of years old, and yet even the oldest physical copies begin to crumble after a few hundred years.

Teaching a reverence for physical objects is in a very real sense untruthful... the ideas they contain are what should (or ought) to matter.

It's not the reverence for physical objects I'm getting at. It's that digital content is ethereal, easily lost amid the terabytes ... while physical books bring a substantial reality to the content. Ideas can be lost in the deluge of limitless content; physical manifestation thereof requires choosing and limiting which content will persist.

I think nothing of adding hundreds or thousands of books to my digital reader, and think nothing of forgetting any of them therein. I select and prune with care which ideas and content will fill the limited capacity of my hard-earned hand-made physical bookcase, keeping only the greatest ideas and making that concentration of what matters accessible to the young minds who are growing to peruse them.

I totally disagree. The immediate "specialness" of the hot coffeeshop barista is not her "spiritual manifestation". Part of the uniqueness is presentation. Size, shape, weight, age, smell...I'm talking about books... the roughness of the pages etc. Bookreaders reduce this to a lowest common denominator that limits sensory bandwidth and cheapens the experience.

Can a person have the same religious fervor with an ephemeral Bible/Koran etc on a Kindle, as they would for a leather bound, gold-edged King James Version with the red tassel bookmark? And the cutout pages that let you thumb to the right chapter? These things should only be tools because in the end we're all animals. And, trying to virtualize everything limits us to half of our birthright.

You're getting into vinyl vs CD territory here. That argument never ends well.

Those that are truly into the music won't care about the medium.

I don't disagree that a physical experience is nice, and I'm not even going to touch the "hot girl" point, since sex is one of the few things that is almost entirely physical.

But the physical experience of a book is completely orthogonal to the true nature of the book: that is, its content. I actually prefer physical books to e-texts, I like the experience better. But I don't delude myself that that's somehow more "true." I also like reading outdoors on a cool autumn day with the scent of woodsmoke in the air, but that's no more essential to a book than its physical medium.

The essence of a book is the thoughts contained therein, everything else is peripheral.

Not sure what the paragraph about talking to children has to do with the rest. But I've been seated next to children that traveled alone before so perhaps it's just your perception? Often if we feel uncomfortable with something, we make others uncomfortable, too.

No, I was referring to this: http://www.economist.com/blogs/gulliver/2010/06/british_airw... (see also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airline_sex_discrimination_poli...)

The point of the children paragraph is that many things are leading people to keep children indoors (fear of men, fear of the Sun) and this combined with a virtual world means that they are more and more cut off. At least, that's the hypothesis. Looking for data.

It sounds a lot like Asimov's novels. In Caves of Steel humanity lives under domes and feels unconfortable outside them. In Naked Sun humans inhabiting another planet have become totally reclusive and never contact others in person, but using holographic teleconference.

Whilst I don't disagree that there is a widespread culture of fear in many communities, I'm not convinced that this has manifested in a significant trend of parents not allowing children to play outside. Do you have any data for this?

I'm guessing this article is great as the site has been down a while (congrats! I think?). However, I'd like to read it :), cached version anywhere?

>Sex: what happens when pornography becomes the default means of getting sexual pleasure.

i stopped reading that rubbish here. If he can't distinguish between sex and pornography ....

A side effect of losing touch with the physical world is that it wrecks your brain. You begin to feel isolated from the rest of the world. What doesn't help is the growth of cities, and overpopulation. We start to view other people as competitors and enemies. Have you ever gone through some days when you encounter many people, whether it's in a commute, or whatever and ask why people are so useless in your life? What does he/she matter in your life? Life has become so impersonal, and it's not our fault. But I think we have to do something about it, as individuals (not as collective).

In the past, we had tribes. Small communities where everyone felt a sense of belonging. Why? Because everyone was important to the success of the whole. You could save the world, because the world was not 1 million people. Everyone mattered to each other, and everyone had stake in each other's lives.

The world has become something like this:

We RUSH and STRESS to go to places for 40 hours we hate, to work on stuff we don't like, with people we don't care about.

I don't think that being a member of a tribe enabled anyone to save the world, just their village and their families. I would argue that the internet has empowered far more people than ever.

I get the Author's point, however I think he's overexaggerating by a long shot. Kids still play with lego, adults still buy books, and certainly do still have real sex with actual people - in fact they can't get enough of it!

In a tribe, the tribe is your world (it's all you know and exposed to). Today the world is a billion people. We're surrounded by people we don't care about. We can't be compassionate to everyone. So it all ends up being impersonal

> We start to view other people as competitors and enemies.

Hold that thought.

> In the past, we had tribes.

And different tribes were enemies and competitors.

And, if you don't think that there's competition in a tribe of humans, you're claiming that groups of humans are different from every other group of animals. (Simple example - even in tribes, 40% of males don't have genetic children while only 20% of females are dead ends. That's not all boys dying before breeding age.)

Yes, true, but you still belong to 1 tribe. Nowadays we're lucky to have anyone besides family, or a S.O. who we consider a tribe. It doesn't help we spread the bulk of our days along people we don't care about too.

> Yes, true, but you still belong to 1 tribe.

Reread the parent - he led with "no enemies or competitors". It's unclear whether the tribe thing was separate or it caused "no enemies".

My point is that no enemies is clearly false in "the good old days" (when life expectancy was roughly 30). Tribes had enemies and there were enemies within tribes.

> Nowadays we're lucky to have anyone besides family, or a S.O. who we consider a tribe.

Speak for yourself. I'm reasonably anti-social yet belong to a couple of tribes.

Don't forget friends.

Probably the largest potential subset of your tribe you can form :)

Actually I omitted friends because I don't believe most friendships are that tribe-like. Friends rarely have stake in each other's success, and they don't share suffering together in each other's failures. Most friendships wither away easily as a result. What I'm aiming for are "tribal businesses" where everyone works together to make a living together.

Have you ever gone through some days when you encounter many people, whether it's in a commute, or whatever and ask why people are so useless in your life?

No, never. They all fascinate me, instead.

Try this: next time you're in a rush somewhere stop for a minute and look at the people around you. Try to figure out their stories: who are their families or friends, why are they out right now and where are they going, what do they do for a living or in their spare time? You'll rarely, if ever, guess correctly, but it really helps to remind you of the human factor of everyone around you.

We RUSH and STRESS to go to places for 40 hours we hate, to work on stuff we don't like, with people we don't care about.

This seems to be the case with far too many people, but it doesn't have to be.

I've actually tried that. It's not sustainable for me, personally to have that attitude. There's just way way too many people in this world. I just don't care about 99% of the people in this world.

The problem with cities is they tend to outbreed their space and resources, bringing rivalry due to a sense of scarcity. But the anonymity of cities enables people to reinvent themselves and explore unpopular ideas in ways that would be impossible or forbidden in the tribal environment of conformity and oppression. A tribe might be tolerable if I could choose one with smart, open-minded members, but most are trapped in the hellhole they were randomly born into.

Actually the difference is not that big. It's all in our brain anyway, and most virtual experiences evoke similar brain responses as real ones (theater, TV, cinema, mirror neurons etc). What virtual items lose is fine properties like touch, smell, permanence etc.

I think the bigger problem is both city planning and immobile technology: most of us are forced to live packed away from the nature in cities planned for the long-gone industrial era, and until recently we were forced to sit in front of our heavy information devices. I believe the mobile revolution is going to bring back a lot of those "physical" elements that we are missing now.

It's not the first time societies face transfomations. We already eat virtual food, i certainly don't remember slaughtering that many chicken, pigs and cows lately, and i 've only milked a goat once or twice in my life.

You bring up some good points with the parallels in the brain however I think more is lost in the exposure to different experiences that you simply can't replicate online.

For most, it'll be difficult to differentiate between things (physical books, library visits, spending time outdoors, etc) that we don't want to leave behind for nostalgic reasons and things that we shouldn't leave behind because they help us with maturity, growth, etc.

I'm wondering what people's thoughts are on this. Technological change is a part of society, yes, but is it always best for the individual?

Sheesh, what do people have against ebooks? And where do they all get the same fetish for fondling paper?

You can't grep dead trees. Books just aren't as effective. You also can't store tens of thousands of paper books on a tiny USB stick.

You also can't build redstone computers out of Lego bricks. Capability wasn't the author's point.

You can certainly build a computer out of legos. Or at least a Difference Engine, and what really is a better introduction to computability than making your own calculator? http://acarol.woz.org/difference_engine.html

But capability is the point of books. If you want a work of art buy a sculpture/etc.

There's a huge undercurrent of people who romanticize books, I was asking where/why they came from.

The author answers your question in the article:

"In the real world the physical book has a meaning of its own: it's the book your wife gave you as an anniversary present, it's the book your late father got part way through and you dare not remove the bookmark he left in place, it's the children's book read and read until the pages are torn and worn. These physical remnants augment the book with personal meaning."

Sure. You'd likely have as many sentimental books as you'd have sentimental tie-clips, rings, photos, favorite songs, etc. But why do some people romanticize nearly all books?

I have a couple of books I bought at library book sales years ago that are over 100 years old. I enjoy them more for their possible history than for the actual stories. The penciled-in notes, the owner's names before they were donated, the library stamps, etc. All these things give the books a sense of being "things" in their own right, with their own history, and that gives me pleasure.

Make sense?

Quite. I always wonder at the history behind left-over bookmarks, marginal notes, etc.

I'd be happy seeing a scan though. Happier actually because I could flip through other scans of other marginal notes in other copies of the same book, comparing handwriting by decade, seeing if the same things confuse or inspire multiple people, or whatever. Stuck on a dead tree it's going to get lost, scanned in and indexed it's data.

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