Question Technology

Technology Invades The Bedroom?

CBS did a slightly sensationalist story this week about how peoples' love lives are suffering because they bring technology into the bedroom.  An excerpt:

Therapist Ian Kerner said BlackBerrys, cell phones and e-mail are invading the bedroom and hurting our ability to connect with out mates.

"It's part of a growing syndrome where we are tuning out of our relationships, and not tuning into each other," he said. "I think it's just a feeling of wanting to stay connected. … afraid of being alone. And sometimes you can be in the bedroom with somebody and still feel alone. Technology is a way of feeling immersed and connected and present."

Kerner offered some tips for people who want to stop technology from encroaching on their love-life.

• Reject: Get rid of everything that obstructs your relationship whether technology, TVs, piles of newspapers, and magazines.

• Redecorate: Make your bedroom your own special place with new sheets, pillows or wall art.

• Renew: Create new rules for inside the bedroom. No technology, no stressful arguments. No paying bills in bed

Link: Technology Invades The Bedroom, Gadgets Make Romance More Difficult - CBS News.

Via Regina Lynn at Wired, who says the issue has more to do with bringing work into the bedroom and not technology per se, and I tend to agree.

Anti-Tech Songs and More

Reader Mark Oshinskie pointed me to his site at humanfuture.tripod.com where he has posted original essays, reviews, and even songs about genetic engineering, reproductive technology, and other topics.

I quite like "Headless Hens":

Headless Hens make better eating
Engineered sheep, engineered feeding
Mammoth salmon spread altered genes
Big busted cows, bug killing beans
Miracle foods we’re promised if we try it
But hungry people can’t afford to buy it /p>

Labs getting profits, DNA mixing
It’s not the crops it’s the world that needs fixing.

Link: Life Is Now A Commodity.

Reinventing Technocracy

A new group called Scientists & Engineers for America aims to put science at the forefront of US politics.  From their website:

Today a group of scientists and concerned citizens launch a new organization, Scientists and Engineers for America, dedicated to electing public officials who respect evidence and understand the importance of using scientific and engineering advice in making public policy.

The principal role of the science and technology community is to advance human understanding.  But there are times when this is not enough.  Scientists and engineers have a right, indeed an obligation, to enter the political debate when the nation’s leaders systematically ignore scientific evidence and analysis, put ideological interests ahead of scientific truths, suppress valid scientific evidence and harass and threaten scientists for speaking honestly about their research.

We ask every American who values scientific integrity in decision-making to join us in endorsing a basic Bill of Rights for Scientists and Engineers.  Together we will elect new leadership beginning in 2006, and we will continue to work to elect reasonable leadership in federal, state and local elections for years to come.

Link: SEFORA,
via BoingBoing.

I'm no fan of the current administration, but I find the echoes of "technocracy" here a little alarming.  Technocracy, government by an elite group of scientists, is an old and not particularly democratic idea.

Update: Macht dissects a few of SEforA's statements on his blog and also points to an interesting free book of responses to Chris Mooney: Looking for a Fight: Is There a Republican War on Science? (pdf).

How We Love to Hate our Cellphones

Wired News posted a moderately amusing little anti-cellphone rant by Momus yesterday.  A sample:

I don't have a cell phone. In fact, I'm here today to tell you that they're the work of the devil. Switch yours off for five minutes and I'll explain why.

Interruptability

Phones have always been interrupting machines. Like a screaming baby demanding to be fed, a phone demands your attention as soon as it rings. It requires you to be interruptable. And a hell phone, unlike a house phone, tags along with you wherever you go, nagging.

Link: Wired News: Cell Phones? Hell Phones!.

You won't find much disagreement here, but then pretty much everyone agrees that cellphones are annoying.  It's so commonplace to bitch about cellphones that a commentary like this can now safely appear in Wired, of all places, without anyone batting an eye.  Just don't suggest people actually do something about it, like support a driver cellphone ban, or the techno-libertarians will be up in arms.  In fact, that's the one cellphone annoyance conspicuously absent from Momus's commentary -- the dangers of driving while on a cellphone -- obviously too sensitive a topic for Wired.

Update: Momus has set me straight in the comments.  I don't read Wired very regularly, so I haven't seen his previous columns, but I have newfound respect for him now that I've read (on his blog) that he regularly tries to "rip into a whole area of tech and tell the world it's rubbish."

Asking for Greener Apples

Speaking of the environment, Greenpeace has a very slick campaign to pressure Apple about the toxic waste in their products.  Specifically, they want Apple to:

• Remove the worst toxic chemicals from all their products and production lines.
• Offer and promote free "take-back" for all their products everywhere they are sold.

Link: "I love my Mac. I just wish it came in green."

(Via Wrote.)

Environmentalism and Digital Culture

Soenke Zehle has an excellent article at Mute magazine about two recent books, mentioned here before, concerning the ecological cost of high-tech: Elizabeth Grossman's High-Tech Trash and the collection Challenging The Chip.

Describing the books, he writes:

These two titles are not simply about the electronics industries, but about the widening scope of economic and environmental justice and creative grassroots responses to the global spread of the Silicon Valley experience. Supported by visions of technological transcendence, the electronics industry has effectively distracted public attention from the environmental and health implications of its products. Yet driven by grassroots organisations like SCCOSH the SVTC, it was Silicon Valley where the mythology of electronics manufacturing as a clean industry was first unmade. Sharing these histories, and they way they have resonated in centers of electronics manufacturing across the globe, can contribute to the a transformation of the way the electronics industry operates.

Link: Mute magazine - Culture and politics after the net.

Zehle goes further to make an appeal to activists who champion the new "digital commons" to consider the other, real commons:

Almost a decade ago, James Boyle called for a 'politics of the public domain' and suggested reinventing 'the commons' as a shared point of reference to bring about a convergence of info-political initiatives comparable to the way the novel notion of 'the environment' had succeeded in consolidating ecopolitical efforts in the 1960s.[4] Since then, the politics around the digital commons have arguably become the most vibrant and visible dynamic of net.cultural mobilisation. Perhaps the time has come to revisit the metaphor of an 'environmentalism for the net' to talk not only about multiple forms of resistance to an ever expanding intellectual property regime, but quite literally of the ecopolitical implications of the very infrastructures that facilitate and sustain the net.cultural dynamic of collaborative creation.

See also David Bollier's comments on this topic at OnTheCommons.org (which is where I spotted this): Can we have an "Environmentalism for the Net" without an "Environmentalism for the environment"?

The Future of the Internet: More Luddites?

The Pew Internet project has released another study.  This time they surveyed "internet leaders, activists, and analysts" for their predictions for what we'll see by 2020.  Here are some of their conclusions:

• A low-cost global network will be thriving and creating new opportunities in a “flattening” world.
• Humans will remain in charge of technology, even as more activity is automated and “smart agents” proliferate. However, a significant 42% of survey respondents were pessimistic about humans’ ability to control the technology in the future. This significant majority agreed that dangers and dependencies will grow beyond our ability to stay in charge of technology. This was one of the major surprises in the survey.
• Virtual reality will be compelling enough to enhance worker productivity and also spawn new addiction problems.
• Tech “refuseniks” will emerge as a cultural group characterized by their choice to live off the network. Some will do this as a benign way to limit information overload, while others will commit acts of violence and terror against technology-inspired change.

Egads!  That last one seems a tad extreme and unlikely.

Link: Pew Internet: Future of the Internet.

See also the SF Chronicle's report: Tech's experts predict future / We may become pets of robots, Pew survey says.

Second Life at On the Media

I find the whole Second Life phenomenon fascinating (and possibly a little disturbing).  It's been getting news coverage everywhere lately; NPR's On the Media had a good story about it this weekend.  They talked with Mark Warner, the first presidential hopeful ever to make a campaign appearance in a virtual world, and also with virtual-embedded reporter Wagner James Au and real-world journalist Clive Thompson.

You can listen at On the Media --September 22, 2006, or read a transcript there after Tuesday.  More at Wagner James Au's site as well: On the Media, on Second Life.

Bringing E-mail to Technophobes

That's the mission of Presto, a new company that's bringing you a digital content delivery service with the "HP printing mailbox," making it easier than ever to drag grandma into the internet age.  It plugs into a phone line and prints e-mail it receives automatically.

Are people really that lazy or busy that they can't pick up the phone or mail a letter to keep in touch with family?  Do we really need to force this crap on "technophobes" (as Wired calls them) -- perhaps it's not fear or inability; perhaps they just know something you don't.

Via Wired Gear Factor.

FDA to look at Nanomaterials in Food

From The Center for Food Safety:

The Food and Drug Administration has scheduled a its first-ever Public Meeting on October 10, 2006 to discuss the issue of nanotechnology, a powerful new technology for taking apart and reconstructing nature at the atomic and molecular level.  While this is FDA’s first meeting on nanotechnology, the agency is behind the curve: Many products are already on market shelves that contain unlabeled nanomaterials, including food and food packaging products.  Thus far, nanotechnology-laced products are treated by FDA like any other products or product ingredients; yet scientists agree that nanoparticles are fundamentally different substances that create new and unique risks to human health and the environment and need new forms of safety testing.

Link: Take Action: Tell FDA to regulate unlabeled and untested engineered nanomaterials in food!

Follow the link to learn more and send a letter to the FDA commissioner.

 

Book Notes

Some notes on new books, books I've recently read, and other bookish stuff.

• From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism by Fred Turner tells the story of how yesterday's hippie counterculture evolved into today's techno-libertarian digital culture.  The publisher's page has excerpts.



• In The Best of Technology Writing 2006, Brendan Koerner has gathered an impressive collection of technology articles from magazines and online sources.  In the introduction he says he tried to go beyond the typical gadget porn or geek ravings to stories with a deeper human element, and from a quick browse of the contents it looks to me like he did a good job. (Publisher's page.)


• I recently read the excellent biography of Norbert Wiener, Dark Hero of the Information Age: In Search of Norbert Wiener The Father of Cybernetics by Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman.  It originally came out last year, and just recently in paperback.  Wiener's ideas sparked a revolution in the design of electrical devices and in thinking about information and communication, and he had a hand in early, analog computer designs.  With his "Cybernetics" conferences he brought together experts from diverse fields spanning engineering, biology, and sociology.  After World War II and the success of the Manhattan Project, which involved many close colleagues of his such as John Von Neumann, Wiener turned against the establishment to speak out against the dangers of the new technologies and the newly forming military-industrial complex.  His technical achievements are now largely forgotten, eclipsed by the newer, digital technologies that won out over his analog designs; his real legacy is perhaps his message that technology must not be developed without an eye to its social implications. (Publisher's page.)


• Bill McKibben's 1989 classic, The End of Nature, is out in a new edition with a new introduction.  I hadn't read it before, but I've read a few of his other books.  McKibben was responsible in large part for bringing global warming to public attention.  Much of the story hasn't changed since the 80s, though then the science was more tentative and the predictions more cautious.  In 2006, global warming is well under way and there are signs that just maybe we're ready to do something about it, sort of.  This week we've seen billionaires promise to throw big money at the problem, and Google's new for-profit non-profit, Google.org, is getting in on the game too.  Where will all this money go?  Towards technological solutions like exotic alternate energy sources and hybrid cars, which can certainly help, but they don't address the root problems, and you can be sure they won't do anything that might lower profits.  As McKibben tells us, global warming is a consequence of our modern way of life that destroys the earth so that we can buy more stuff and entertain ourselves.  Humans have now altered the earth to an extent never seen before -- there's no longer any untouched, unpolluted nature left anywhere on the planet.  We might well invent clever, technological fixes to get over the current crisis, buying us more time to live recklessly off the earth and feel good doing it, but McKibben reminds us that other ways are possible. (Author's page.)


• Pamela Paul's book, Pornified: How Pornography Is Damaging Our Lives, Our Relationships, And Our Families, must have been a tough one to market.  Aside from the title, the book is not terribly anti-porn, nor is it pro-porn either.  As such, people on either side are likely to dismiss it, yet I'm sure they'd all learn something from it.  Even the most liberal among us can't deny that the Internet has changed pornography drastically.  It's truly mainstream now.  In the old days, a kid might catch an R-rated glimpse of dad's Playboy; today it's a struggle to keep kids from seeing the most graphic and violent porn, even accidentally.  Paul doesn't advocate censorship, and doesn't pretend that there are any easy solutions, but her book is valuable for bravely exposing a real and worsening problem. (Author's page.)


• Book critic Jerome Weeks, formerly of the Dallas Morning News, reflects on declining book culture in a farewell column, written after the newspaper's arts staff was cut.  Columnists were told their farewell columns would be published, but then they weren't (just one out of 111).


• Jessa Crispin of magazine/blog Bookslut, for which I've written a few book reviews, boasts of all the swag she gets from publishers in her latest column at the Book Standard.  A personal message to any publisher reps out there: I happily accept review copies of science and technology books and any other stuff you wish to send me.  This blog reaches a vast audience -- oh it must be tens by now -- of hermitic, book-buying luddites!

E-Voting Machines and their User Interfaces

Salon has an article about electronic voting machines that make it difficult, or at least incredibly tedious, to vote for "write-in" candidates because the interface is so poorly designed.  I'm sure there's a whole world of research being done on how voting interfaces affect results.  Computerization opens up vast new opportunities for bad designs that will confuse and alienate people, and just plain not work a lot of the time.

Link: Written out of the story | Salon News.

Really (not so) Simple Syndication

Back in August, Nicholas Carr started an interesting discussion on his blog by posting this image and writing:

Is it still "really simple" when it involves choosing among 35 options?
If the object is to baffle, annoy and repel the masses, then what we have here is a remarkable success.

Link: Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: The problem with RSS.

It's an excellent point, and it (and the subsequent discussion) typifies one of the big problems I have with open source software: too many choices, and all of them are mediocre.  I base that on experience not just with RSS readers, but with linux and many types of applications.

The concept of RSS is great and I find it essential for the sporadic blog reading that I do.  I'd also be highly frustrated without the Bloglines feature that lets you publish a blogroll that updates automatically based on what blogs you subscribe to.  I search occasionally for a better RSS reader, but none of the newer and slicker ones seem to have that feature, which kind of baffles me.

On an administrative note:  This blog's feeds now all go through FeedBurner, which shouldn't make any difference to readers but is supposed to work better.  I also added a "subscribe by email" button for anyone who prefers that.  And thank you for subscribing -- I appreciate the support!

Citizendi-what?

There is much nattering on the internets about Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger's new initiative to create a better Wikipedia, one that recognizes expertise and is named, rather horribly, Citizendium.  Internet expert (and hard-core relativist, apparently) Clay Shirky (Many2Many) thinks it won't work because expertise is just a social construct.  Cory Doctorow (BoingBoing) agrees and thinks it'll just "devolve into interminable pissing matches over who was and was not qualified to be called an expert," which I thought sounded ridiculous (how do real encyclopedias ever get made?), but then I remembered: this is the internet, where everyone behaves like twelve year-olds.

Nicholas Carr has a good post about this.  He concludes that the flaw in Citizendium is not too much expertise, it's too little (still).  An excerpt:

I tend to agree with Shirky's belief that Sanger's concept of Citizendium is fatally flawed (though I wholeheartedly support Sanger's desire to counter the destructive force of anonymity). But Shirky's diagnosis of the flaw is all wrong. What "will kill Citizendium," he writes, is that, unlike Wikipedia, "it won't go far enough" in "its disrespect of experts." No, Citizendium's flaw does not lie in having too much faith in what Shirky dismissively calls "the rugged condition of expertise." Its flaw lies in not having enough faith in it. By creating a vague bureaucratic system in which experts gain their Citizendium credentials through community certification, Sanger is, in fact, reducing expertise to a social construct and thus rendering it meaningless, or at least turning it into a bone of endless and silly contention. He wants to have it both ways, and as a result will likely do no better than create another Wikipedia: a vast, labyrinthine garden of mediocrity.

Link: Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: What will kill Citizendium.

The Odds on Immortality

Marshall Brain, founder of HowStuffWorks.com, asks: Will my kids be immortal? (At the pro-human-enhancement Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technology's blog.)  He gives them a 50/50 chance.  I eagerly await the "How Immortality Works" article.