Techno-Transmission

I had a conversation with a friend last week in which he mentioned that his new job required him to learn how to drive a stick shift, and this somehow  sparked in me a tirade about the dangerous side effects of technology as a mechanism by which we insulate ourselves from reality.

Stick with me.

I'm not a car nut, ranking behind both brothers and my father in the zeal, knowledge, and skill of automechanics.  I do know how to work a manual transmission, though all 5 cars I've owned have been automatic (and full disclosure - my next car will doubtless be automatic as well).

But here's the argument.  

A Manual Transmission is a mechanized aparatus that makes the shifting of gears possible by a human operator, but not without removing cognizance and control of that operator from the process.  As a result, reality - the consequence of the driver's actions - is transmitted through a connected linear process from the wheels on the pavement and the combustion in the pistons to the pedals, feet, knee and brain of the driver.  While the driver may not necessarily understand the exact construction and operation of every link in the chain, the process is not outside his/her comprehension.  Sure, driving stick gets to be 'automatic' in that we stop thinking about it, but no more so than we stop thinking about our fingers when we type - we are still aware of our indivisible control.

Compare this to the automatic, where by pressing one pedal with no concern for other factors the car "goes" - as if by magic.  We could easily replace the pedal on the floor with a button on the dash - the Go Button - or for those of my generation and after, the "a/x" button on most video game controls.

The car moves forward.  It changes its own gears through the undecipherable process of bearings, transmission fluid, and hydraulics.  This causes a schism between the act of driving and the reality of the car's movement (we could even joke that, technically, we lose our sense of auto-mobility).  

My point is that there develops a gap between how a thing works, and how we perceive it as working.  And this I think might actually be a problem.

Without getting too broad, consider other examples.

How does democracy work?  What about the Internet?  We know what both of these things are, and we can certainly describe the results they produce, but how do they work?

These institutions and technologies have become "black boxes," a term developed in the field of Scient and Technology Studies (STS) by people like Bruno Latour and Michel Callon.  We don't recognize how these technologies work; we put in command/item A, and we get result/item b.

When you put a tomato in a shredder, this isn't really a problem.

When you put a tomato in a microwave, the results might surprise you.  

Go ahead and try.  

I'll wait.

I'm not sticking too close to Latour's argument, because this isn't about all technologies, just those that I deem create or exacerbate a rift between reality and cognition.

It is interesting to me that most instances of engineering technology fall into this category.  Again, hydraulics, steam power, even simple devices like gears and pulleys to some degree separate us from reality in that they alter/mitigate the amount of work required to achieve a certain effect.  Yet a pulley is not beyond my ability to recognize and understand as an instantaneous cognition.

On the other hand, the Automatic transmission, which I've been able to operate (legally) for 11 years now, is a complete mystery to me despite opening one up, and then later having the distinction of paying to replace it.

What does it mean to have our actions/control divorced from the reality of their effect?  While I'm sure it's done a lot to make driving easier, it hasn't actually made cars any safer or appreciably more fuel efficient, has it?  It's now possible for us to eat a Big Mac or put on our mascera while we drive.  It's finally possible to get up to an unsafe speed while drunk.  Progress?

The incredible jump in the use of unmanned aerial drones by the US military, originally for surveillance, but now increasingly for offensive strike missions also comes to mind.  We now have 19 year old "pilots" sitting at their desks in Arizona controlling expensive military hardware on the other side of the globe and killing people - hostile or civilian doesn't really matter for this argument.  

We've all been horrified about the "finger on the button" of US-USSR nuclear arsenals - that one man could effect the death of millions from an isolated bunker without directly doing anything.  The scale of nuclear winter is obviously dramatic, but the isolation from the reality of the act it implies I find disturbing, and progressively more available not just in our military, but also in social aspects.

Medicine technology, until very recently, has not followed this trend of anti-reality.  Dissection, EKGs, fiberoptic cameras.  These technologies all seek to either bring the doctor into closer direct contact with what I'm calling 'reality,' or to create a more accurate representation of that reality.  This representation is frought with its own complications (re: 'Virtual Reality'), but for now, I'm just stressing that the point in this technological process is to bring the operator closer to reality, rather than further away.  New prospects in computer-controlled lasers represent one divergence from this trend.

So what's the point?  Clearly I don't think technology is a bad thing (I'm blogging) - in fact I'm quite the technophile.  I think the 21st century is an astounding time to be alive.

But I wonder if maybe we're accepting our drift away from reality just a little too complacently. Maybe it's not a bad thing in and of itself, but have we stopped to consider the consequences, the side effects?  Perhaps there aren't any, then again...

We aren't sacrificing virigns to the Blue Screen of Death (yet - wait, would that work?), but the more we allow ourselves at an individual and social level to become dependent on instruments and institutions that we don't ourselves understand (functionally or historically, to bring it back to Bruno), the closer we come to a civilization of mystics and soothesayers.  

If we accept that just rebooting our computer one more time is going to (magically) make that error message go away, how much better are we than the alchemists of yore?

So learn to drive a standard.  Make your kids learn.  Because when the apocalypse hits, it'll be the MacGuyvers, not the Neos, that keep the experiment of humanity ticking along.