Digital Inferno E-Book

Paul Levy

• Herausgeber: Clairview Books
• Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

How many times do you check something on the internet but find you are drifting aimlessly from one link to another? If you can't not answer the phone when it rings, and you spend hours a week on social media, and you read your texts instead of kissing your loved one goodnight, and you don't give your kids proper attention because you just have to prioritize new responses to your tweet... then this book is for you. The digital world is spreading like an inferno – a swirling, hot storm of change, possibility, addiction, passion, manipulation, creativity and abuse. It demands our attention and encourages us to be always on, with its constant updates and feedback. It is exciting, but it can also be overwhelming. And it's developing faster than our ability to deal with it. To adherents of digital living and working, any criticism is uncool, a sign of being out of touch. Refreshingly, Digital Inferno is neither simple indictment nor unqualified endorsement. Rather, it's about holding your own in the digital realm – adapting in a healthy way to the new reality. It offers a conscious path that allows you to derive the benefits you need but also to manage the dangers. Packed with a wealth of practical advice, Digital Inferno describes numerous methods to enable you to step back from constant digital activity and virtual living, and to pay more attention to the real world. You'll find exercises to overcome tiredness from digital contact and to develop skills to enable you to remain awake and aware. Crucially, you will be master of the digital realm: to abstain from contact when you need to, but also freely to immerse yourself when you choose to. We don't need to shun new technology, but we do need to be armed with an understanding of its challenges, problems and limitations. This book provides the tools you will need to meet the future consciously.

Leseprobe

PAUL LEVY is a writer, facilitator and founder of digital publication FringeReview. He is a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Research in Innovation Management (CENTRIM) at the University of Brighton in the UK, and co-author of several books on innovation, technology and change, including E:Quality and Technosophy. Paul was Head of Interaction at the Digital Workplace Group and has worked with the digital realm for over thirty years, using technology in the fields of business training and organizational theatre. He lives with his family in Brighton, England.

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR THE DIGITAL INFERNO:

‘This book is visionary and practical and both are needed at this time as the digital inferno spreads, setting fire to more and more elements of daily life.’ – Tom Bourner, Emeritus Professor of Personal and Professional Development, University of Brighton, co-author of Workshops That Work

‘An exciting book, full of hope for the future. By applying the concept of mindfulness to digital interactions, Paul Levy shows how we can get the most out of technology without losing touch with our essential humanity. Great stuff – thoughtful, insightful and very timely.’ – Sue Palmer, author of Toxic Childhood

‘An insightful guide for those seeking to consciously navigate the noise and confusion of the digital age.’ – Daniel T. Jones, author of The Machine That Changed The World and founder of the Lean Enterprise Academy

‘A fascinating and thought-provoking survey of our digital times.’ –Cliff McNish, author of The Doomspell Trilogy

‘Our generation is gradually noticing the subtle effects of digital media in our lives. There are no clear answers as the effects are generative and emergent but it is useful to be mindful of the path we are creating. Paul Levy's book is an eye opener. It is written with precision and full of insights on this ongoing interplay between people and technology. It is a great book for anyone keen to regain control of their relationship with gadgets and digital media in general’ – Professor John Baptista, Associate Professor of Information Systems, University of Warwick

A fascinating, moving and practical dance of content exploring what awfully is and what awe fully might be as human civilization embraces digital virtuality. Brilliantly conceived and written.’ – Angus Jenkinson, author of From Stress to Serenity, Chief Organising Officer of the Civil Society Forum

DIGITAL INFERNO

USING TECHNOLOGY CONSCIOUSLY IN YOUR LIFE AND WORK

101 WAYS TO SURVIVE AND THRIVE IN A HYPERCONNECTED WORLD

PAUL LEVY

CLAIRVIEW

Published in Great Britain in 2014 by: Clairview Books, Russet, Sandy Lane, West Hoathly, W. Sussex RH18 5ES

E-mail: [email protected]

www.clairviewbooks.com

© Paul Levy 2014

All rights reserved. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, electrical, chemical, mechanical, optical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner. Inquiries should be addressed to the Publishers

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Print book ISBN 978 1 905570 74 4 Ebook ISBN 978 1 905570 65 2

Cover by Morgan Creative featuring an image © Sergey Nivens

To Sylvia, Cyril, Didi, Roo, Catty and Honey

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

PART ONE

1 The Problem and the Challenge

PART TWO

2 ‘Placement’ – the Key to Freedom in the Digital Inferno

3 Staying Awake, Keeping Conscious at the Computer Table

4 Gaining Mastery over the Mobile Phone

5 Speaking on the Phone

6 Digital Dancing in Short Sentences and Sound-bites

7 Following Through in the Digital Inferno: The Case of Facebook Non-commitment

8 Losing the Thread

9 Looking at Pixelated Images: A Deal with a Devil?

10 Talking to Yourself

11 The Attack on Memory – Dancing Back into Sacred Remembering

12 Digital Gesturing and the Smiley

13 Staying Safe and Secure in the Digital Inferno

14 Reclaiming the Whole Narrative

15 Parenting the Digital Inferno

16 Welcome to the Internet of Things – the Future

17 Going Back Consciously into the Digital Realm – Enjoying the Dance

Bibliography

Glossary

Acknowledgements

I’d like to express thanks to Sevak Gulbekian and Peter Stephenson for their priceless guidance and editorial genius in helping this book to emerge out of the digital realm, into the form of a manuscript and finally a book. Thanks to the creative souls at Pavilion Gardens Café, to David Knowles, Tom Bourner, Michael Parker and Ian Powell for their listening, and their willingness not to collude. Thanks to Graham Precey for breakfasts without purpose. Thanks to Demelza Craze and Sylvia Levy for having the patience to read and re-read. And thanks to Ian Postre, an inspirer of this journey.

Introduction

It would be easy to write a book warning of the dangers of mobile technology. It would condemn the negative effects on the well-being and health of people and communities. There is, in fact, a case for condemning the addictive nature of the internet and there are hundreds of studies of the negative effects of the digital realm. If I were on a mission to have it all switched off, then I would present a one-sided case. I am not going to do that. The digital world is here. Its waves are running through your living room and through your head. It is in your pocket, it's everywhere. However, I believe we are here to meet it and my starting point is that we should meet it with self-awareness, hold our own in the face of it and not give ourselves over to it. This is what I mean by staying awake in the digital realm, which is what this book is mostly about.

I’m 47 years old, and here are my digital credentials. I was Head of Interaction at the Digital Workplace Group and the Intranet Benchmarking Forum for six years. I’ve been a senior researcher at the Centre for Research in Innovation Management at the University of Brighton for over 20 years. I have a leading edge smartphone, three tablets and four laptop computers. I also have a paper notebook in my bag and a nice pen. I’m a trained social scientist and my interests include communication, spirituality, theatre, creativity and personal development. I am an open-minded sceptic. I have over 10,000 Twitter followers, 900 friends on Facebook, and over 1000 contacts on LinkedIn. My blog was visited over 30,000 times last year and my various websites garnered over 150,000 unique visitors. I’ve made films, worked with animators and developed new ways of holding virtual conference meetings. This book is a harvest of some of that experience.

The short history of the digital realm has been one of constant flux and powerful forces blowing in from who knows where. It brings with it a shift in consciousness and new possibilities, as all new frontiers do. Is it a stepping stone towards creating heaven on earth? Is it a realm in which dreams will soon become reality? That is up to us. One thing is certain, it is flaring upwards and outwards like an inferno. I’m excited and inspired by it, and scared and fascinated by it. Whatever we think or feel about it, we must meet it if we are to shape it to our ends. To only demonize it, as some do, would be to ignore its already firm embrace.

This book will be more or less meaningful depending on how you want to relate to the digital realm. If we were all together in a room, each person might show his or her attitude to it by standing somewhere along a line. One end of this line would represent having nothing to do with the digital realm; a person standing there will think that it is anti-human and that it seduces people into fake experience and addiction. The other end of the line would represent diving blindly into digital experience. Between those extremes is the more complex position of welcoming a new technology while being armed with an understanding of its challenges and limitations.

That middle position seems the hardest to sustain because the digital realm, given the way it is designed and marketed, offers a better experience if you are always on. Constant system updates and feedback, automated as well as human, demand that you do something to stay in touch and on top of it. I’ve not met that many people in the last 20 years who are able to sustain the middle position. A person at the middle often slides towards becoming hooked. He, or she, might begin a digital session intending to have just a couple of shots only to stagger out, stupefied, after spending hours having just one more for the road, aimlessly following one more link. I call this digital drift. It is going to become a widely known phenomenon in the future.

Some warn of the dangers of the digital inferno and, equally, it has its strong defenders.

Our privacy is under threat! – No, that's a myth; we have more control than ever.

The batteries and the electricity required to run laptops and underground servers leave a big carbon footprint. – No, this is a new way to communicate without the even heavier carbon footprint of flying and driving to see each other.

Computer games are de-sensitizing our children to violence. – No, there's no evidence to support that; rather, tablet computers running collaborative software for four-year-olds are nurturing values of community and cooperation.

Our children are becoming lazy, forgetting how to add and multiply. –No! The web is a place for active exploration and problem solving. It develops our thinking.

Our bodies are becoming sick through lack of exercise and healthy movement. – But we’ll soon be cyborgs, with enhanced capability and robots will serve our every need. Anyway, buy a decent chair!

We are isolated from each other by it. – No, we are more connected than ever.

To adherents of digital living and working, any criticism is ‘uncool’, a spoiling tactic, a sign of being out of touch. It is the greatest invention, the most awesome, planet-changing phenomenon humanity has ever produced, so why knock it?

The arguments and statistics for and against are bamboozling and contradictory. And our relation to the digital realm is contradictory. We celebrate the arrival of a new smartphone (‘got it free on the same tariff!’) while bemoaning our loss of privacy and ritually loving to hate Facebook. But it remains true that, whatever charges we bring, these gadgets help to create an unprecedented single planet family. It is exciting and it is also frightening. Both together. There will be neither simple indictment nor unqualified endorsement. The message here is about how we find in ourselves the right relation to an inferno – a swirling, hot storm of change, confusion, addiction, passion, possibility, lockdown, manipulation, creativity, cliché, fakery and brutal honesty. It's all in there. It is developing faster than our ability to understand it. Behind it stand powerful and often unseen forces of commercial interest and change. Some technical visionaries see the digital world becoming a kind of ‘hive mind’ and we, the masses, will be the drones, lost in it and ruled by it. Being really in it can redefine people and determine many hours of their lives. Just to enter it is to become subject to its underlying ‘rules’ and to adopt some of its behavioural patterns. It can become the focus of your attention and disconnect you from the physical world. It offers contentment at a price.

This book contains stories, advice and practical ways to adapt in a healthy way to a giant development in our lifetime which has reached into every corner of life in an incredibly short space of time – and has become part of our social body before we have digested it. I will often present a dark view of the digital realm and point to its potential to do harm but – and this is the point – we will meet this challenge better if we do so while being as wide awake as possible.

Even while working on this book I felt myself drifting towards doing other things rather than completing it. This is because of a tiredness that began to creep over me the moment I began to use my first mobile phone. Actually, it must have been earlier, when I was couch-surfing daytime television at ten in the morning when the sun was shining outside. The tiredness is only forgotten when I spend time away from my various devices or if I use them but in a very specific way. I hope to describe this way in this book. It is a way of stepping back from constant digital activity, getting some distance from it and paying more attention to the live version of the real world.

Perhaps this comes across as being down on the digital realm. That is not the intention. This book is not an attack on the digital realm. For over 20 years I have dived into it as a blogger, a member of chat rooms, a barefoot poet in Second Life, an online conference facilitator, a host of an internet radio show and as a speaker at virtual meetings. I’ve observed, reflected and connected with leading thinkers and practitioners in the field. I’ve met some who are immersed in it to the extent of being passive and addicted. They spend hours in there which to them feel wasted and lost forever. Some are worried for themselves, or for their kids.

I’ve met others who engage with it in disciplined ways and are under no illusions about its darker side. These are members of a growing community of people who seek to avoid losing themselves in it and becoming pawns of its underlying commercial game plans. What they seek is a more conscious way through it in order to derive the benefits and manage the dangers.

It is quite possible to go right in, and seem to become cleverer while definitely becoming colder. This is what I found when I became fully immersed in it as a researcher who was trying to understand it. This book will expose this cold realm of quantity, and assert that quality, nuance and subtlety are vital for human beings. However complex quantity becomes, the vitality of quality will elude it. However complex the binary world of ‘either-or’ becomes, our human ability to grasp a paradox, an ‘either-and’, will elude it. We are human when we embrace the messiness of life and its infinite gradations. We can take our human messy quality into a realm built of numbers and try to hold our own. This book is about the challenges in doing so, and some of the problems that arise when we fail to hold our own. Upsets and new social norms have always accompanied new technologies. We all join together in determining what form these will take through how we think about and respond to them. One quality to which quantity is utterly irrelevant is the quality of you, which you determine when you act with conscious freedom amidst the bewildering new possibilities of technological change.

I wish to offer some advice, which has been gathered from others and developed through my own reflections, on how to go safely with freedom in the digital realm. If this realm proves to be a truly great gift to humanity, then here are skills which you may still need in order to remain awake and aware in it. If it turns out to be a hell, here's some practical advice on how to prevent getting too burned. This book is about holding your own in the digital realm while its changes swirl around you. Some say it is a losing battle. That is not helpful. Surely, we are here to meet whatever comes towards us with all the consciousness we can muster.

As you can see, this book celebrates what it criticizes. Inside it you’ll find exercises to help you use digital means for your ends, to overcome the tiredness and fly above the digital sea like an eagle when you choose to, or dive into it with mastery like a dolphin. The exercises begin with ‘Try this’. You can just read those exercises. There are many points of entry and exit. Read it from cover to cover, surf it, use bits of it, re-order it. Use what works for you.

An invitation to hurl this book away

If you have no problem with the effects of digital technologies and social media platforms, if you do not feel the negative ‘drag’ and have no fears of losing a part of yourself in them, then read no further. Put the book down, give it away or recycle it somehow. If you happen to be a champion of total surrender to the miracle of digital technology, then this book will irritate you and make no apology for having done so. This isn’t a book to convert you.

If you can’t not answer the phone when it rings and you spend 40 hours a week on social media and you read your texts instead of kissing your partner goodnight and you don’t give your kids real attention because you just have to prioritize new responses to your tweet, then you are in the first level of hell, the place of Wretched Contentment. If you want to regain something which you feel you’ve lost to the digital realm, then this book is for you. It deliberately repeats itself from different points of view. It is in two parts. Part One is an overview of the digital realm's territory and of some of its challenges. Part Two develops themes set out in Part One and dives in more deeply.

PART ONE

1

The Problem and the Challenge

The digital realm has existed since human beings began to use numbers for understanding and representing real things, such as natural objects and the processes between them. Since its advent in the form of electronic media it has transformed the world in the blink of an eye.

The pioneers of digital computing, working in research establishments and laboratories, wanted to connect and share their knowledge in ways that didn’t need physical journeys and face-to-face meetings. They also wanted to avoid the inefficiencies of paper-based information. The first version of the internet was conceived, as far back as the 1940s and 1950s, as a medium through which academics and scientists could collaborate. That technical capability exploded all over a post-war world fairly itching for newness and choice when Sir Tim Berners-Lee, a computer scientist and professor at MIT, had the notion of bringing it to the rest of us, in the form of the World Wide Web.

Before the web made connectivity between widely separated computers possible, some of us were zapping aliens on the first personal computers. As a 15-year-old, I spent hours on my Acorn Electron computer, playing adventure games and tenpin bowling with red square dots. Many of the popular early computer games soon offered more – alternative worlds in which aliens were real and where we could govern our own country. I remember being addicted to a game called 1984 in which I was the prime minister.

The first computer game is often credited as being Spacewar, from Steve Russell at MIT. We were offered simple shoot-’em-ups and text-based adventures: ‘You make your third wish and take off, gliding into the sky.’ They offered interactive stories in which we were the hero, able to choose actions and to experience the outcomes which were programmed into the game. When we had done something right, the feedback gave us a high. ‘You put the gold in your knapsack and gain 10 points.’ Years before the emergence of the internet and social media, these were the first ‘likes’. We played in order to progress. We had the thrill of a little victory via a quicker and easier route than becoming proficient at a real sport or meeting some fascinating person at a real party.

Text games soon became two-dimensional, graphics-based, and then went into three dimensions. A few years later our game character was rendered in cartoon-like or lifelike graphics. A couple of decades after that we began to inhabit a virtual reality (a kind of reality in effect, but not in fact). We could create simulated models of all kinds of things, such as flying a jet plane or running the government. A dual experience of physical and virtual worlds was emerging. Objects, landscapes and rules in the virtual world were versions of physical reality – an interesting mix of both the fantastic and mundane. Some years later, virtual worlds such as Second Life and Minecraft led to literally millions of children and adults ‘zoning out’ of physical life for hours each day. Many children cut their teeth on digital worlds such as The Sims.

Chips constantly became smaller and processing faster and cheaper. Newer gadgets offered ever more colourful, flexible and exciting versions of mundane reality. This realm was not constrained by the limitations of scale of the real world. We could not only create a new world but there were no limits to how fast we could travel in it, how big it could get and how the laws of nature applied. We could transform ourselves into a fox. We may not fly like an eagle in our physical bodies but in a virtual realm we would soon be able to fly as freely as we wished. People flocked to the new worlds. When Second Life was first developed, it had so many users and financial activity (buying and selling land, products and services, real as well as digital) that Reuters sent in a full-time reporter to report news of it back to the real world and vice versa. His name was Adam Reuters.

These visions of the future fuelled the flames of the digital inferno. Behind all of that was a technology which used an artificial language for writing programs; these represent sequences of minute electrical switches set in silicon. The programs were brought to electronic life for us through interfaces and screens of all kinds. Each tiny switch is, like any switch, either on or off, and the great challenge was to create for the end-user an experience of infinite and flowing possibilities from sequences of current changes from on to off and from off to on. It has obviously been a runaway technological success.

For some, the next plan is to realize something which science fiction imagined a century ago – to port our consciousness into a virtual and better world and truly ‘fly’. In this scenario, technology solves the problem of human frailty by enhancing it or even by rendering our physical form superfluous by a transfer of human consciousness into immortal digital reality. Perhaps feeding that dream is another one, of solving our material problems by creating a virtual reality with unlimited resources – we have only to find a way to minimize our bodily function and transpose ourselves into another realm of computer-realized imagination.

Many programmers found an artificial world into which they could escape, and many of us followed them. We indulged ourselves in the realms of fantasy and first-person role play games. The image of the computer genius behind these games, as captured in popular films such as War Games and Independence Day, was that of an introvert seeking escape from an unfriendly world into an anonymous virtual world. The lone geek lacks the hero's looks and emotional literacy, probably due to a lack of time spent in real social interaction, but he gets to play the greatest game of all, that of saving the world. Sure, not all programmers fulfilled that stereotype but many were deeply attracted to a virtual world and the possibility of leaving the rest behind. Not surprisingly, many ‘techies’ with a profound wish to escape were drawn to science fantasy. The fantasy virtual worlds of Larry Niven, Isaac Asimov, Tolkien and Robert Heinlein already offered magical or technological Utopias and dystopias. The ‘holodeck’, the lived dream world and other parallel universes were going to take us to places that were richer in colour and broader in possibility. Losing oneself in these worlds was soon a widespread pursuit, and it still is for vast numbers of us.

The roots of the digital realm which we experience are within the minds of the original programmers and designers. Many of them were loners who found a home in the world of computing and in working environments that were one-on-one with a computer — informal, with no need for office uniform and supplied with unlimited sweets and cola. Departments of information technology and computer engineering became the ivory towers of social avoidance. I’ve met many examples of this type over the years. I have, of course, met computer engineers who are socially literate and emotionally warm but there is a real core of avoiders who have shaped the digital realm for the purpose of doing without the complication of actually meeting. Almost the whole of the digital realm is still based on that foundation: when we are virtual we no longer need to meet face to face.

Email was a virtual version of the physical memo, fax and letter. People often printed out all of their emails at work, just in case. That still goes on but, for the rest of us, keeping all of our letters in a place that doesn’t require bulky physical storage is a dream come true. Email was a perfect way to communicate, without eye contact and the other hazards of physical presence. It was only one step from linear emailing – from one computer to certain other ones – to chat rooms in which we could converse with many other people without needing to be physically present. We added video and then avatars, or digital version of ourselves. This presented the possibility of renaming ourselves and becoming another version of ourselves. We could not merely escape from others; we could escape from ourselves as well. The online self could experiment with being more confident and socially extroverted. When online, shy quiet Kevin would become his avatar, bold Thor352, a roaring warrior with powerful fists.

We were offered another mode of existence, a virtual life rooted in fantasies. For those seeking escape from the pressure and the immediacy of staring eyes the digital realm was too good to resist. It offered simplicity. We could get the treasure without any physical risk at all. We could get new lives in which to replay our failures with different outcomes. We could explore new behaviours without the complications. We could flirt and threaten without consequence. We could ‘have’ other lives in which we could stretch the boundaries of behaviour. We could kill people and be rewarded with 50 bonus points.