It
seems that no area of modern life can escape being technologized. Take sports, for example. A company called DribbleUp has already
invented and marketed a smart basketball, and is in the process of marketing a
smart soccer ball. The basketball is
tracked by an app on a smartphone that uses the smartphone’s camera and pulls
together thousands of data points to analyze a player’s techniques and guide
him to improve his dribbling technique.
The player learns from watching a virtual trainer on his phone go
through drills and then imitating him.
The ball is tracked by algorithms that lock onto the ball and follow
it. There evidently are other balls
manufactured by other companies that actually have sensors inside of the balls. It would seem that such sensors as well as
batteries add unnecessary weight to the ball.
DribbleUp is the only company that has created a system for tracking a
ball that doesn’t have internal sensors or batteries.
So
you too can become a master dribbler in basketball or a master kicker in soccer
by taking the DribbleUp path. But there
is a price that is going to be paid for the acquisition of these skills using
all this smart technology. Sports, in a
certain way, traditionally have had elements of an art in them. Technique was a matter of developing certain
flowing blendable continual movements that were appropriate for achieving the
ends of a particular sport. This was
true both for sports that had a projectile in them as well as racing sports and
sports that involved martial arts.
Developing technique in a sport involved modifying the way an athlete
experienced himself. It involved briefly
lifting himself out of the flow of his life through guidance and practice
drills in order to then reinsert himself as a practicing athlete with
reconfigured methods in the flow of his athletic play. But the corrections were never meant to be of
such a nature as to potentially disturb the coherence of his sense of self, the
coherence of his flow of movement. And
this is because each sport was an art, and a good player had to remain coherent
in order to maximize the quantity and quality of the organic imprints that he
made in playing his game. To be a good
player requires not only that he be able to make the right moves but that he
has the coherence of self to be able to make the judgements as to which right
move to apply in which situation, and also that he be able to blend these moves
or string them together in order to be able to make effective complete plays.
In
DribbleUp, a player learns an aspect of a sport not so much through a flowing
blendable continual experience of movement, but on the basis of thousands of
data points, thousands of micro-events that not only pixilate his movements,
fragment his movements, in order to put them back together in a perfect
expression, but also pixilate or fragment his sense of self. An advanced complex behavioral entity that
lacks coherence has lost one of the essential components that could be used to
define him as a human being. Such a
person is sliding into behaving like and becoming a robot.
The
app on the phone models for a player a particular kind of athletic movement
with a robotic precision. And yet
without sound judgement, without the contribution of a coherent sense of self,
how does a player experience that he is making and preserving meaningful
organic imprints? To just be trained to
make good mechanical responses, how does a person’s play contribute to him
experiencing it as part of a rich vibrant life?
How does the flow of his play, a flow that has been broken down into
small parts and pixilated, contribute to his interacting organically with his
teammates and bonding with them?
And
then the larger question is whether or not we are moving to a time when our
whole life narrative will be broken down into pixilated microevents so we can
learn to perform our life processes just right.
All of our life processes, both mental and physical, will be taught to
us as if they could be thought of as being subject to the rules of mechanical
engineering and computer programming.
Perfecting “our right actions” as if there were seldom or even never creative
alternatives.
The
two brothers who have created the DribbleUp apps thought they were doing
something truly noble, helping young players who can’t afford a personal
trainer to perfect their technique on their own. But the best way to learn how to improve in a
sport is by modeling oneself after a living flesh-and-blood human being in
external world reality. That is the way
a person improves his play and stays whole and coherent at the same time. Is it worth improving one’s play at the price
of unconsciously becoming a pixilated avatar or a mechanized robot? That is the real question. Perhaps it is similar to the question of
whether it is worth ruining one’s health by taking steroids in order to become
a super athlete. In all sports, there
have been many stars who started their lives in poverty and somehow found a way
to rise above it and excel in their respective sports without using DribbleUp
or anything analogous to it in order to develop their technique
And
returning to the discussion of applying DribbleUp techniques to our whole life
narratives, it would be like putting our whole coherent lives on steroids, so
we can become super livers of life, people who perform mainstream life processes
in a new and different and superior way.
So
here’s another pathway to follow in order to lose one’s human side. With enough
pixilating technique developers in different areas of our lives, we can become
our own avatar as well as a super cyborg that performs perfectly in all
circumstances. Of course, life would
become flavorless, boring and meaningless.
But that would be a small price to pay in order to have a perfect
seamless existence.
(c) 2017 Laurence Mesirow
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