I have some catching up to do with my reading recommendations. A lot of my time has been spent in marine diesel and electronics manuals the past week as I get ready to recommission my sloop for the summer season. If you want to know how to bleed the air from a diesel engine’s fuel system or replace an AC shore power circuit, I am your man. Rather than dig through every thing I’ve read over the past two weeks — and there have been some great long-form reads — I’ll devote this edition of the Lit’ry Life to:
Digital Behavior Modification
Stephen Marche’s piece in the Atlantic Monthly, Is Facebook Making Us Lonely? is a good companion to Sherry Turkle’s oped in the New York Times Sunday opinion section, The Flight From Conversation and Gary Wilson’s TedX talk on The Great Porn Experiment. Taken as a trifecta of content, it is a compelling and depressing sociological attack on the behavior modification the Age of Information Overload is having on our relatively slow-to-evolve brains.
Many other better informed critics have written at length on the alarming rise of a technically driven dystopia. The argument that social/communication technologies from Twitter to text messaging are making us more alienated from each other, not more connected is gaining empirical steam. Technology is blamed for everything from driving attention deficit disorder diagnoses through the roof to making men weird hairy-palmed porn addicts.
At my advanced age (soon to turn 54) I’m ready to plead guilty to technical senescence and invoke my AARP status as an aging luddite who just doesn’t get it anymore. Just as my parent’s generation was confused by blinking VCR clocks and the concept of “right click/left click” it may be my turn to lag the tech curve when it comes to location sharing, status updates, incessant liking, linking, curating and filming my skateboard disasters with a GoPro camera strapped to my hoodie. I may tag a food truck with my Google Glasses in a couple years, but ….if you haven’t noticed already, I’ve all but given up on Facebook as am astounded by my friends who post every beer, every Kony viral video view, every I’m-On-Vacation-And-You-Aren’t photo in the hope that someone will take notice and comment. I could care less about my Klout score. The only time I read Twitter is to check out some vile new comedian’s inappropriate 140-character quip. Going to LinkedIn is an exercise in who’s-viewed-my-profile narcissism.
The good news is I sense my own kids are indifferent to technically driven communications. One doesn’t have a Facebook profile and vows he never will. The other two dismiss Facebook as a 40-something loser haven. Only one has a Twitter account. They prefer text messages over phone calls and email. For the most part they look at technology as a platform for entertainment — be it a game or a song or a movie/tv show. So there is hope.
Read the depressing tales above then step away from the screens and get outdoors.
Yes, this sounds like the David Churbuck I know: “filming my skateboard disasters with a GoPro camera strapped to my hoodie.”