The
human sense of touch seems to be under ongoing attack by modern technological
innovation. In some cases, the
experience of touching stimuli is reduced as in swiping one’s fingers over or
typing on smartphones to perform all kinds of tasks and searches that used to
be handled in direct contact with the external world and with books and with
magazines. This use of the smartphone supposedly
reduces the exertion of physical and mental effort. In other cases, touch is eliminated
entirely. Lights turn on when we walk
into rooms, particularly public bathrooms, and turn off when we leave them. This has the purpose of reducing the amount
of energy used by making sure that lights are only on when rooms are occupied
by people. Faucets in bathrooms turn on
and off as hands approach and then retreat from them. Here water is saved as a result of preventing
people from accidentally leaving faucets turned on. Finally, toilets flush by themselves. Ostensively, this is to prevent toilets from
continuing to hold waste products left from the people who use the
toilets. In the case of all the devices
in the bathroom – lights, faucets and toilets – not having to touch things can
be considered to be more sanitary. And
again there is the reduction in the exertion of physical effort.
Nevertheless,
this use of smartphones and sensor technology represents the breaking down of
tactile connection with the external world.
More and more, people are being put into a tactile vacuum which becomes
an integral part of the total experiential vacuum in which they are immersed
while living in modern technological society.
And this of course contributes to the behavior distortion that has been
talked about in this column. There is
the conative acceleration, the speeding up of the will, where people try to
bust out of a sense of numbness through relentless work, hard fun (kicks) and
violence. This speeded up activity
creates increased friction which helps a person to feel alive. Then there is conative anesthesia where a
person tries to withdraw into himself and create his own world of numbness that
he can control and manipulate to reduce the harmful effects of a more global
numbness from the external world. Here
you have everything from marijuana to meditation to Eastern religion – Western
style.
Both
of these behavioral postures can be used (sometimes by the same person) in
response to the increasing numbness we feel, as modern technology increasingly
separates us from our tactile field of experience. In an article Gizmag, “Microsoft Research
anticipates the future with pre-sensing touchscreen prototype”, we learn that
Microsoft has created a technology where the way you hover over a screen with
your fingers determines the creation of menus on your screen as well as options
for interaction in order to control and manipulate your screen content. The same can be said for the way you grip a
smartphone and with one or both hands. Once you bring up menus or options, you
can touch your fingers to the screen as you would normally do to type on or
swipe the screen.
This
new hovering aspect of smartphone usage is extremely concerning, because it
represents one more level where one’s tactile connection to the external world
is mediated by technology. We have
progressed from carving out messages on rock to writing first on papyrus and
then on paper, to typing on paper, to typing on a computer, to typing on and
swiping a smartphone, to organizing data on a smartphone without touching any
physical object.
And
using the way we grip a device to bring up menus means that we are using gross
motor actions rather than the fine motor actions of writing or typing or swiping
with fingers to control written material.
Gripping can’t possibly provide the same fine-tuned control that these
fine motor activities can. But it
obviously seems smooth and comfortable to Microsoft and reduces physical
activity with the fingers. Heaven only
knows we mustn’t strain our fingers with too much physical activity.
We
come again to a major overarching purpose of modern technological innovation:
get rid of friction. Breaking down the
reasons for this purpose, it can be said that friction creates frustration
which threatens one’s sense of empowerment.
Except that, in reality, some friction helps a person feel alive, and a
person can’t feel empowered in his life if he feels numb. Furthermore, unless a person has some
obstacles as demonstrated by the friction, he can’t put into practice his sense
of empowerment and thus feel for himself, know for himself that he is
empowered.
Also
friction creates a sense of general discomfort.
Particularly as a person becomes accustomed to the numbing effects of
modern technology, it takes less and less friction to make a person feel
uncomfortable. Except that it is
precisely this discomfort from relatively small sources of friction that should
act as a danger sign that people are losing an important aspect of their humanity
– the ability to engage the external world, and transform it; the ability to
make and preserve imprints and feel fully alive in the process, and the ability
to prepare for death through the surrogate immortality of these preserved
imprints.
Connected
with this sense of general discomfort is a sense that somehow friction, in and
of itself, creates a sense of disorder, both within one’s mind and in the
external world. It is true that in the
process of trying to transform the world both in ways small and large,
breakdowns and disorders occur in our field of experience. But in changing the world, in recreating the
world, there has to be a certain amount of messy creative destruction. As they say, it goes with the territory.
For
many of us who increasingly can’t tolerate friction, we just sink deeper and
deeper into conative anesthesia. In our
numbness, we become intolerant within ourselves of anything that does not
represent the most mediated of life narratives – a life narrative mediated by
technology.
It
may seem farfetched to impute such a significant influence on human behavior to
the technological device that is the subject of this article: the pre-sensing
touchscreen. But the pre-sensing
touchscreen is just one of many modern technological devices that are
contributing or will contribute to increasing layers of mediation in our field
of experience and to the increasing numbness that accompanies this
mediation. All these increasing layers
of mediation are making it more and more difficult to get the organic
stimulation that humans need to feel alive as fully actualized human beings so
that they don’t sink into the living death of robots. We are becoming what we use.
(c) 2016 Laurence Mesirow
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