May 20th, 2011
On the Importance of Staying Fresh – the Sea Change is Past
A little over two weeks ago at the invitation of Duke Professor Cathy Davidson I attended the Milken Institute 2011 Conference at the Beverly Hills Hilton. Putting aside the easy potshots I could take at the audience made up predominantly of white men over the age of 55 and that the $5,000.00 a head ticket price that excluded nearly all people of interest – I was stunned by what I felt was the tenor of negativity on Professor Davidson’s panel.
The panel provocatively titled “The Attention Deficit Society: What Technology Is Doing to Our Brains” had brought together the right crowd, Nick Carr author of ‘The Shallows’, MIT Professor Sherry Turkle, and Clifford Nass of Stanford, to mull over and chew on what our hyper-connected world hat wrought, but it was stunningly one note, “It’s all bad.” (The entirety of their conversation can be viewed here ) Now, mind you I freely admit to being highly distracted, I even joked about it by tweeting from the panel that I was on my iPad. While I’ve been writing this I have been IM’ing with my friend Noah Brier in New York and odds are I’ll get an email and read it before I’m done with this post, but what stunned me about this panel, even accounting for everybody’s need to flog their POV to sell their book and then go to the next event, was the desire to go back in time to a seemingly more nuanced and deep-thinking era when we all talked to each other in person or on the phone.
It’s not that I don’t value the face-to-face or am equally fermished when I get a text vs. a phone call if I felt like connecting with somebody or making plans, but what Cathy’s fellow panelists kept insisting was that texting, IM’ing, or even Face-Time, Skype or iChat were all of lesser value or somehow had a deleterious effect on person to person communication. And moreover that by engaging in this form of communication people were forgetting what it meant to communicate, but that held true only if the only ‘true’ way of communicating is to meet in person. Forget for the moment that this may or may not be true, it just struck me that the collective position of her fellow panelists was the age-old if-I-stick-my-head-in-the-sand it isn’t happening. It was as if they were behaving much like the record industry did when Napster hit, as if you could turn back the tide, or that turning back the tide of connectivity is the answer.
To me, there’s two specific problems with this line of thinking, and it’s less the desire to go back in time but the way it was presented. One, you can’t stop change. The train has left the station. The cat’s out of the bag. The genie’s escaped the bottle. We are in the midst of a total sea change that fundamentally alters how we go about our daily lives and to swim against the tide is not only pointless but potentially hazardous. It is very much if you can’t beat them, join them. The other is assuming that which has come before is better, preferred the only way to be.
But what struck me most of all was Cathy’s willingness to partake in the developments of the Internet vs. a kind of Chicken Little ‘the Sky is Falling’ mentality illustrated for me the necessity of remaining open, of staying fresh to the possibilities of this world vs. clamming up, drying up and aging towards dinosaur status prematurely. I had the pleasure of meeting Norman Lear earlier this year and the twinkle in that man’s eye, he is 89 years old!, is amazing. He is to my mind younger than me for he has that rarest gift of being curious, of being engaged. It’s what Cathy Davidson has, it’s what I hope to have more of, it’s what we all need.
Sure. Fight the Power. But just be sure what Power you’re fighting.
Global Connectivity #FTW.
Here is a brief post-panel interview with Cathy’s own characterization of that morning’s discussion. Unsurprisingly we are on the same side of this one.
The Internet is Terrible from Todd Krieger on Vimeo.
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