The influence of technology on individual lives and culture in general is one of the pressing issues of our time, and one of the best voices on it is Christine Rosen. For five years, she has published articles in The New Atlantis and elsewhere on how digital technology, particularly in communications and entertainment, affects personal behaviors and social realities. Mixing historical contexts going back to the 19th century, recent neurobiological research, and her own cultural values, Rosen has taken on one technology advent, trend, tool, and myth after another, composing pointed and eloquent arguments and commentaries that form a nice counterpoint to the techno-enthusiasm so common in popular discussions. Here is a sample:
In this essay, entitled “Romance in the Information Age,” Rosen cites evidence on the decline of courtship rituals and determines, “Although not the root cause of our romantic malaise, our communication technologies are at least partly culpable, for they encourage the erosion of the boundaries that are necessary for the growth of successful relationships. Our technologies enable and often promote two detrimental forces in modern relationships: the demand for total transparency and a bias toward the over-sharing of personal information.”
In this essay, entitled “Our Cell Phones, Ourselves,” Rosen narrates the entry of cell phones into daily life and concludes, “Cocooned within our ‘Personal Area Networks’ and wirelessly transported to other spaces, we are becoming increasingly immune to the boundaries and realities of physical space. As one reporter for The Los Angeles Times said, in exasperation, ‘Go ahead, floss in the elevator. You’re busy; you can’t be expected to wait until you can find a bathroom…. [T]he world out there? It’s just a backdrop, as movable and transient as a fake skyline on a studio lot.’ No one is an outsider with a cell phone — that is why foreign cab drivers in places like New York and Washington are openly willing to ignore laws against driving and talking. Beyond the psychic benefits cell phone calls provide (cab driving is a lonely occupation), their use signals the cab driver’s membership in a community apart from the ever-changing society that frequents his taxi. Our cell phones become our talismans against being perceived as (or feeling ourselves to be) outsiders.”
In this essay, entitled “The Age of Egocasting,” Rosen goes back to the invention of the remote control and moves forward to TiVo and iPod to announce, “The creation and near-universal adoption of the remote control arguably marks the beginning of the era of the personalization of technology. The remote control shifted power to the individual, and the technologies that have embraced this principle in its wake — the Walkman, the Video Cassette Recorder, Digital Video Recorders such as TiVo, and portable music devices like the iPod — have created a world where the individual’s control over the content, style, and timing of what he consumes is nearly absolute. Retailers and purveyors of entertainment increasingly know our buying history and the vagaries of our unique tastes. As consumers, we expect our television, our music, our movies, and our books ‘on demand.’ We have created and embraced technologies that enable us to make a fetish of our preferences.”
In this essay, entitled “The Image Culture,” Rosen takes on Power Point: “Despite its widespread use, PowerPoint has spawned criticism almost from its inception, and has been called everything from a disaster to a virus. Some claim the program aids sophistry. As a chief scientist at Sun Microsystems put it: ‘It gives you a persuasive sheen of authenticity that can cover a complete lack of honesty.’ Others have argued that it deadens discussion and allows presenters with little to say to cover up their ignorance with constantly flashing images and bullet points. Frustration with PowerPoint has grown so widespread that in 2003, The New Yorker published a cartoon that illustrated a typical job interview in hell. In it, the devil asks his applicant: ‘I need someone well versed in the art of torture — do you know PowerPoint?’”
In this essay, entitled “Playgrounds of the Self,” Rosen takes on the identity games people play with new technologies: “Technology has allowed the ‘daily business’ of our occupations to intrude more often on our home life and on our leisure time, blurring the boundaries of formal and informal space. But we have adapted by creating places where playful, vindictive, inspiring, fantastic, or bizarre identities can temporarily frolic; places where we can borrow another person’s identity and, under its cloak, pursue activities we might never contemplate performing otherwise. We have created new worlds that allow us to change our names, our sex, our race, and even our humanity so that we might, at least for a while, experience what it’s like to be something or someone else. We have created video games, the new playgrounds of the self. And while we worry, with good reason, about having our identity stolen by others, we ignore the great irony of our own mass identity theft — our own high-tech ways of inventing and reinventing the protean self, where the line between reality and virtual reality ultimately erodes and disappears.”
In this essay, entitled “Virtual Friendship and the New Narcissism,” Rosen examines social networking in its beginning phases: “Today, our self-portraits are democratic and digital; they are crafted from pixels rather than paints. On social networking Web sites like MySpace and Facebook, our modern self-portraits feature background music, carefully manipulated photographs, stream-of-consciousness musings, and lists of our hobbies and friends. They are interactive, inviting viewers not merely to look at, but also to respond to, the life portrayed online. We create them to find friendship, love, and that ambiguous modern thing called connection. Like painters constantly retouching their work, we alter, update, and tweak our online self-portraits; but as digital objects they are far more ephemeral than oil on canvas. Vital statistics, glimpses of bare flesh, lists of favorite bands and favorite poems all clamor for our attention—and it is the timeless human desire for attention that emerges as the dominant theme of these vast virtual galleries.”
In this essay, entitled “The Myth of Multitasking,” Rosen surveys the latest research on the activity: “But more recently, challenges to the ethos of multitasking have begun to emerge. Numerous studies have shown the sometimes-fatal danger of using cell phones and other electronic devices while driving, for example, and several states have now made that particular form of multitasking illegal. In the business world, where concerns about time-management are perennial, warnings about workplace distractions spawned by a multitasking culture are on the rise. In 2005, the BBC reported on a research study, funded by Hewlett-Packard and conducted by the Institute of Psychiatry at the University of London, that found, ‘Workers distracted by e-mail and phone calls suffer a fall in IQ more than twice that found in marijuana smokers.’ The psychologist who led the study called this new ‘infomania’ a serious threat to workplace productivity. One of the Harvard Business Review’s ‘Breakthrough Ideas’ for 2007 was Linda Stone’s notion of ‘continuous partial attention,’ which might be understood as a subspecies of multitasking: using mobile computing power and the Internet, we are ‘constantly scanning for opportunities and staying on top of contacts, events, and activities in an effort to miss nothing.’”
Finally, in this essay, entitled “People of the Screen,” Rosen reviews claims about digital literacy: “We have already taken the first steps on our journey to a new form of literacy—‘digital literacy.’ The fact that we must now distinguish among different types of literacy hints at how far we have moved away from traditional notions of reading. The screen mediates everything from our most private communications to our enjoyment of writing, drama, and games. It is the busiest port of entry for popular culture and requires navigation skills different from those that helped us master print literacy. Enthusiasts and self-appointed experts assure us that this new digital literacy represents an advance for mankind; the book is evolving, progressing, improving, they argue, and every improvement demands an uneasy period of adjustment. Sophisticated forms of collaborative “information foraging” will replace solitary deep reading; the connected screen will replace the disconnected book. Perhaps, eons from now, our love affair with the printed word will be remembered as but a brief episode in our cultural maturation, and the book as a once-beloved technology we’ve outgrown.”
