I was listening to a podcast with Sherry Turkle who just wrote a book called “Alone Together”. It was super inspiring, and also touched upon many feelings I have had living and working on the Internet.
Growing up latchkey kids in the eighties we got to see the computer evolve from it’s humblest beginnings.
Playing Pole Position on the Atari, Card Games on the Intellivision, using a speech program to say swear words on a Texas Instruments, or using Cubase to record my first band on a Macintosh. We were exposed to the computers evolution and learned how the machine worked from the inside out.
While I am no programmer and couldn’t write a line of code to save my life, I still understand the fundamentals of computing and saw how we got to where we are today.
Computing and society in general has become so front facing that you have to wonder if this next generation of kids will understand what’s behind the curtain or even care to. From making a blog, building an app, to recording music; a computer today makes it so you don’t have to know anything to accomplish amazing feats. Heck you don’t even have to talk directly to anyone anymore either, but thats a whole other rant.
Here’s where the old guy starts to ramble about the days of yesteryear, but I feel as we have designed for simplicity we have lost a little bit of wonder and sense of exploration. How can I say this when the web is a vast never ending stream of information and stuff waiting to be discovered?
Therein lies the problem I think. As our performance driven always on culture loses its autonomy we also are losing the capacity to be alone within ourselves.
I was having a conversation with a friend this week about music and how It took a lifetime of reading, learning, and discovering to have the vast and discerning musical tastes we have acquired. You would spend hours in record stores, reading liner notes, and listening to new bands alone in the dark dreaming to discover a gem. It was a very personal and inward experience.
Today you can hook up a terabyte hard drive to your music friends computer and download a lifetime of music discoveries that on the surface make you knowledgeable about music, but without the context it is all very front facing. You can read a blog from the greatest tastemakers around, watch videos of Nina Simone on Youtube, but it all still feels very cheap, cold, and throw away. The journey to finding the things that inspire us is really what moves us forward as people.
I wonder if all this knowledge we are acquiring is just the cliff notes versions of deeper thinking and understanding. Will we have the tools going forward to solve complicated things? Stuff that takes a lifetime of exploration and searching. That requires the mental fortitude and dedication to making a breakthrough.
Are all of our ideas now just rehashes of other thoughts constantly bouncing around an echo chamber of nothingness? Is our need for validation and the sharing our feelings the only way we are going to have any feelings? Will the children just move on to the next thing at the slightest sign of conflict and trouble?
As we move with technology at breakneck speed towards whatever it is we are trying to achieve will we take the time to break away and dream?
I hope so…
