A barrista friend of mine complained
to me the other day that she had applied for a job as a park ranger of the
Indiana Dunes State Park, a park with large sand dunes along Lake Michigan east
of Chicago, and had been rejected as a result of an evaluation by a
computer. That’s right! A computer rejected her. What irony for a machine to be rejecting my
friend for a job where she would be working in nature! She filled out a series of questions, some
multiple choice, some yes or no. Each
multiple choice question listed a series of answers, each indicating a
different degree of knowledge or experience relating to a particular activity
that was involved in the job for which she was applying. The yes or no questions were up or down
inquiries as to whether she had done this or that in connection with the
job. She did send in a letter and a
resume, but these would only have been looked at if the machine had been unable
to select one of the applicants on the basis of the questions alone.
My
friend could understand the park administration wanting to get an idea of the
applicant’s knowledge and experience.
But preset discrete questions are simply unable to grasp the nuances of
each applicant’s knowledge and experience.
Nor can they pick up on the related knowledge and experience not covered
by the questions or unusual but relevant knowledge and experience. Certainly there is much to be learned about a
person’s character and perspective on a job by reading a cover letter. There is much to be learned not only about a
person’s work history, but also about his attitude towards work by reading his
resume.
My
friend was not perceived as a whole person with a coherent sense of self, but
instead was perceived as a series of discrete data which gave her the
equivalent of a pixilated sense of self.
She was judged by a machine in terms of her discrete functional capacity
to answer a bunch of isolated questions.
She was judged as a series of isolated mechanical functions rather than
in terms of her isolated functions fused together to form a flowing blendable
continual sense of self. The latter is
important, because the work of a park ranger involves tasks that are not always
predictable and routine. All kinds of
accidents and crises can occur in a state park, and a multiple choice and yes
and no test is not going to assess the nuances of the character of an
applicant, his intuition and resourcefulness, to deal with new situations. Also, a park ranger needs good social skills
in dealing with park visitors, and social skills come out in interviews, not in
computer evaluations.
This
use of machines to intervene in the life situations of human beings is not just
found in job evaluations. These
interventions are an essential part of the romantic matches made on different
dating websites. People are reduced to a
series of discrete skills, personality traits and interests and are matched
accordingly. People become pixilated presentations
of themselves. Which is why so few
enduring couples result from these computer matches. And anyway, if these websites were effective
in quickly matching people up, how could the ones that charge their clients
stay in business? The profits come from
people who continue to look for new romantic partners over a long period of
time.
But
still the fact that so many people use internet dating says a great deal about
the emotional state of people in today’s world.
People are modeling themselves after the complex behavioral entities –
the modern machines – that surround them.
Like the machines, they become a series of discrete processes, discrete
functions and discrete presentations.
This
modeling after machines has really been going on for many years. Students going on to college or going on to
graduate school have been evaluated by a series of standardized primarily
multiple choice tests. These tests again
reduce human beings to a series of discrete bits of knowledge. But in the U.S., increasingly, standardized
tests are occurring in elementary school to monitor how much students are
learning and indirectly to monitor the quality of education they are receiving
from their teachers. Classwork for the
students focuses on reading and math, two subjects that lend themselves more
easily to quantification. As a result, less
emphasis is placed on social studies and science and the arts. The student becomes a part of a competition
to see which school can produce the most functional academic machines. The process of robotization starts at an
early age in today’s schools.
Mediation
by technology is also obviously present in the use by stores of online websites
to sell their goods and services. As
customers become more and more used to doing their shopping from the comfort of
their homes, the direct interaction between customer and salesperson becomes
less and less present in purchase situations.
And online stores have many online means to find out what different
customers want. A customer is reduced to
a series of discrete tastes, discrete preferences, and discrete likes. He is often sold on goods and services based
on what he has bought in the past. In
effect, he becomes like a consumption machine.
Technology
facilitates many life processes, but only at the price of reducing our
perceptions of one another to discrete data and discrete images. The latter is particularly present in Skype
conversations. Yes, it becomes a means
of looking at someone who may be physically far away. The problem is that many companies now use
Skype as a way of saving the money of having their employees travel in order to
conduct business. There is no way that
deep bonds can be formed as easily through the discrete images of Skype. And deep bonds are a good foundation for
conducting effective ongoing business.
On
still another level, what does it do to each one of us to be constantly
presenting ourselves as discrete data and discrete images. As we negotiate our interactions with other
people on the Internet and directly and indirectly through different complex
modern machine programs as well as spend so much of our day doing so, we begin
to merge our pixilated self- presentation into a pixilated self-conception. We begin to believe what we present of
ourselves. This is a major danger of our
increasing involvement with modern technology.
By
the way, my barrista friend is determined to get at least a part time job in
nature. She recently applied to the
Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie, a tallgrass prairie reserve located southwest
of Chicago. She again got rejected, but
this time she received a letter from a human, telling her that, although she
was qualified, there were other applicants that were more qualified. What a pleasure it was to be rejected by a
human! Her dignity was restored. She is now applying again for another
position at the Indiana Dunes State Park.
Maybe to win over the machine that will be passing judgment on her
again, she can send it a ceramic apple, with a robot worm that pops out and
sings Stevie Wonder’s hit “You Are the Sunshine of My Life”.
© 2015 Laurence Mesirow
