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.

Yes, RFE (and R.E.M.) Are Still Around

It's Official.

Kygryzstan - Summer 2009.

Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty Internship

May 25 - Depart for London

May 28 - Depart for Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan

                *MAGIC*

July 27 - Return to NYC via London

Future travel-related blogs will be diverted to weberonthelamb.blogspot.com

Weber

::lame (Texpatriot)

The Elephant in the Room

Given the extreme sharpness of the wit involved, and the tremendous wealth of unusual experience from which it sprung, I'm more than a little hesistant to begin a blog entry by quoting from the immensly quotable Mark Twain.  I will instead simply quote from the considerably less daunting Samuel Clemens, who said, "Of all the things I've lost in life, I miss my mind the most."

It's practically become an American proverb, showing up in a variety of pop culture mediums from bumper stickers to Techno-Hacker movies.  Oddly, I've yet to see the twisted post-modern use of the term in a dark schyzophrenic animated muppets-from-hell scenario, but I'm sure Jason Segel is working on it.

Point is, there's something irrestibily, even childishly, attractive about the absurd.  As far as humor goes, the Absurd has always been one of my favorites, ranking alongside if not above dry satire or bitter sarcasm, and certainly in competition with tried-and-true slapstick.

Why we enjoy the absurd, either as imagined in stand-up comedy routines, or as witnessed in those rare sublime moments of reality, is well beyond my ability to answer.

But we do - I certainly do - and if you put up with this blog, Absurd must be something you get too.

So I must admit, I was a bit disappointed when I went to watch the Elephants march into NYC.  It just sounds so... ridiculous.  Sure, NY has TONS of parades, occasionally involving livestock, and always with more pomp than necessary.  But the Elephants aren't (in theory) a public event - taking place on a Monday night starting at Midnight.  The event - now annual - marks the beginning of the residence of the Ringling Bros./ Barnum & Baily circus at Madison Square Gardens in the heart of midtown Manhattan.  And while MSG is located right on top of Penn Station, a major railway hub, apparently none of the circus' regular freight cars can fit through its tunnels.  

What is a gigantic circus corporation to do when their elephants can't get shipped to the venue?  They go for a walk.  The pachyderms get off-loaded at a railhead in Queens, and then they march the elephants through the midtown tunnel (presumably the bridges would scare them?), and then across the island of Manhattan on the major thoroughfare of 34th street (like the Miracle) from 1st to 7th avenue (actually terminating at Macy's - sadly, months after the last elf has departed). 

It's become quite the event - apparently last year saw the first widespread protest by PETA members - "Circuses Abuse Animals" ; "Free the Elephants" ; "Kids Don't Want Elephanticide"; etc.

But when I got down there, along with a small crew of swing dance acquaintances, all seemed in order and frankly a bit too well orchestrated for my taste.  The elephants emerged from the tunnel right on cue at 12:30, did a long press conference/ photo op with flood lights, clowns, local news people, and local newsclowns before starting the cross-island trek.

It was cold out - just above freezing - with a very slight dewyness. Not ideal, and it's hard to imagine the elephants being any more comfortable than the rest of us.  And so they started walking at standard elephant pace, just faster than a walking stide, and the small crowds of people lined up along both sides of 34th, gripping their starbucks for warmth, cheered and whistled.

Then, finally, something interesting happened.

We're not talking about a lot of elephants - maybe a dozen all told, with a small group of ponies in tow and a variety of plainclothed handlers at the front and rear.  The result is that it takes about 45 seconds for the entire "parade" to pass by the average on-looker.

Once this happened, taking into account the temperature, the time (now after 1 am), their jobs the next day, etc.  many people turned and went home.

But not all.

For every 10 or 20 people that the elephants passed, 5-7 of them, for reasons I doubt any of us understand, would peel off from the street and start darting up the sidewalk until they reached the front of the parade again.  For the first block, this was barely noticeable, but each block there were more people along the street, with more people peeling off, and adding to those who, having made the efforts since block 1, weren't about the stop now.

It was a snowball of 'Elephant Chasers', giddy with the adrenaline of an absurd purpose and sharing, knowingly, in an experience that was both immediate, communal, and intrinsically worthless.  Once you've seen 1 elephant, suffice to say you've pretty well seen them all.  Once you've seen the same 12 elephants, seeing them time and time and time again does not make the experience any more informative. 

But the idea of chasing them, with scores of other serious, insulated, high-fashion, no-BS New Yorkers was surreal, and that's not just an observation.

One of my closest fellow chasers said, with no small touch of surprise, "I'm high on Elephant."

Indeed.

So here's to a spectacle which was invented of practical necessity, grew into a mundane-but-glittery spectacle, and somehow catalyzed the absurdity of innocent, even adolescent, joy in the cold, dark heart of Gotham at 2 am on a Monday morning.

Weber

::(lame) Texpatriot

P.S. in digging up Twain quotes, I found one more, perhaps familiar to you already, but which given our current economic whatever seems apropo: "Buy Land.  They've stopped making it."

clever bastard.

Mercy Killing: Aim for their Recaps

This blog was founded on the ideal of finding interesting concepts in everyday life.

you might notice there haven't been many posts recently...

Funnily enough, that's not due to any lack of things happening in the world, or even my awareness of them, big or small, but rather to the wealth of such experiences and the violent collision of said events with my sudden dearth of creativity.

I think it's fair to say at this point that those of you reading this blog for enlightenment, or even disembodied entertainment, are long-since disappointed, and if you have yet to desert, let me encourage you to do so now.

Family and Friends, here's a quick recap of what the hell I'm up to these days as my way of both apologizing (weakly) for not being in better communication, and to put your fears to rest that I am either working myself too hard, or morphing into a grad school recluse.

Hobby check:

Swing Dancing -  back to 2+ times a week, and starting a 3rd weekly gig soon

Comedy Writing - obsessed (unhealthily) with Daily Show / Colbert.  No other progress except (crowning achievement) "A Treatise on Pissing in Public" from Summer '08.

Knitting - 1 scarf finished, 1 hat in progress.

Drums - no comment, no progress, not much hope.

Racquetball - getting rusty.

Webradioblog - 23 episodes, no Fat Lady yet.  When it turns 30 it'll start to feel old. 

(actual) Jazz radio - Got the skillz, won't pay the billz, still addicted to it like... non-OTC pillz?

School Update:

Midterms - done

Term Papers (4) - getting started.

Thesis - ... check back in a few (more) months.

Expected Graduation - still May 2010 (watch out World, I'm getting back on the payroll... somewhere)

Professional Development:

Radio Station Manager - terminated, still in withdrawl.

Xerox/Scan Monkey - terminated with no remorse.

Book Publisher - 1 book (This is Ragtime) almost to print; 1 book (Early Ellington) in the works.

Webmanager - minimal, but continuing.

Internship with Radio Free Europe in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan - pending; Summer 2009.

Personal:

Family - 1 brother married (London), 1 brother bought a house (OKC).  Otherwise, obsessed with collecting stray black cats.

Friends - growing cult of buddies in NYC, too many cool peeps to see everytime I go back to TX, Seattle, or OK.

"Domestic Partner" - I still miss having just a "girlfriend," but she is well despite being hundreds of miles away, and occasionally threatened with violence.

Week in Review:

Monday - Goodbye Beloved Shelley

Tuesday -  Hello Becky-Face

Wednesday - Watchmen movie screening in Times Square

Thuesday - Colbert Report taping (again)

Friday - Battlestar Galactica Finale 'Frak' Party at downtown NYC bar.

That's my life.

Don't let anyone ever tell you that you're too special to get summed up in 452 words.

Weber

::(lame) Texpatriot

There's No I in B_ble Study

WARNING:: This is an especially long, and not entirely entertaining, post pertaining to a subject of some sensativity, and woefully inadequate nuance.  For those few who do bother to read it, even in part, please take it as it is intended - an expression of personal understanding, in no way intended to suggest the propagation of these ideas, but simply the sharing of one particular perspective.

This evening I was approached by a kind looking young man as I headed out of Columbia's campus after a *thrilling* day at the CU library.

He made eye contact, which in NYC signifies either desperation or dimentia, and smiled as he stepped directly into my walking path.

"Hey, how are doing?"

Unsure if I knew this random person from one of my classes (I mostly just pay attention to the prof,  leaving in doubt whether or not I actually "know" other students), I tried to play it off and kick the warning alarms back to neutral.

"Just fine, you?" I parlayed as I kept walking, now a little to the left of my previous vector.

"I'm great, can I interest you in joining us for a Bible study this evening?"

Great, one of Those.

"Thanks for asking, I'm going to pass, but you enjoy."

"Aw, come on, why not?"  This is key.  These people know you aren't just going to say yes, they are not out here (with some regularity) to actually get people into their bible study, they're here to engage in conversation, ostensibly to eventually make people realize they do not, indeed, have any good reason not to be in Bible study.  I cut to the quick.

"Because every time I've tried to study the Bible, it's only made my faith weaker, and I really don't have that much left to spare."

I'm sure he had some trite response at the ready, but I was done with the conversation, and continued on my way, bundled up against an unusual March snowstorm.  The short walk home, and slightly longer wait for my take-out Chinese food, gave me the opportunity to reflect on what had just happened, how I had reacted, and what my relationship to faith is, made all the more relevant by my recently-intensified academic study of a less-familiar faith, Islam, and the cultural and political activities of its adherents.

I've no desire to make this blog strech beyond the limits of even the infinite scroll bar, so let me be ridiculously brief, and correspondingly blunt.

I was raised in a "christian" household, by which I mean that I was taught all the normal moral values, attended church services, sunday schools, bible studies, and youth groups, all with the purpose of strengthening my knowledge of the (Methodist) Christian religion, and presumably my faith in its dogma.

My entire extended family was part of the church, and it formed a nexus of my social/familial upbringing.  I was baptised, went through confirmation, and even earned a Boy Scout religious award.   On at least one occasion, I delivered a sermon to the congregation (as I recall, it was, ironically, lambasting the hypocritical "Easter Christians" who only showed up at church on holidays).  

Point is, I was inundated in the river of religiousity, but I was (pardon the pun) damnably curious, and persistenly rational.  In a course of events which I'm sure will be very familiar to a great slice of my "generation," I found myself drifting away from Christianity despite, or perhaps even because of, my efforts to understand and embrace it.  I believed that God called us to question our religion, so as to strengthen our faith.  But I never found satisfactory answers, and my faith withered (on the vine - to keep up the punnery).

This was no fault of my instructors, pastors or parents, nor a sign of any particular 'independence' inherent in myself.   Rather, it was a lack on my part - a complete, or at least deficient, capacity to have faith in the religion I was presented with.  

I want to be clear - I have never seen rationalism or "intelligence" as being in any way contrary or hostile to religion / faith.  I greatly respect people who have faith, and while I could only maintain my religion through enforced ignorance, I do not assume the same problem confronts other "religious" people, who I do not take to be ignorant by default.  I just cannot balance the world as I came to know it with that presented in the Bible.

Now, I'm only human; God's reason need not be apparent to me, sure.  I know.  Or at least, I recognize the logic of that argument, but it's the same as heliocentrism.  I could be told that the Sun is the center of the universe, and I don't honestly know enough about astronomy to counter that.  But when I hear a different argument, supported by other facts I can't directly prove or disprove, if it sounds more reasonable, then I believe that.  I'm critical, I'm rational, but mixed up in all of that is a degree of "faith" which is not religious.  My point is that I can have faith in many things I don't see, but apparently not God.

So it's not that I'm committed to Neitzsche, but more that the "death of god" argument, or more accurately, the social construction of religion, remains for me more plausible, a stronger argument, than any of the other alternatives based on the social / historical factors that I'm willing to accept on faith.

I do find it laughable that people think Science is killing religion.  If anything, all Science tries to do is display the mechanisms by which an Intelligent Design is at work.  That Design is called Evolution, and the sooner religious factions accept this one minor point, they will realize that the real trouble isn't the study of the natural world, but the various social sciences, which present the real threat.

I was never swayed by whether or not a Leviathan was in fact a dinosaur or not, or the exact age of the planet.  On the other hand, that the majority of our planet doesn't believe in "the One True God," or more accurately, that in even recently centuries, billions of people believed in a different "God(s)" was world-shaking.  That all of Christianity, itself an obvious conglomeration from various pre-christian sources, represents only a small fraction of the intellectual development of mankind means that belief in Christianity, even in its most general terms, is a minority.

That's fine and good if you're devout - willing to cling to your beliefs in the minority because you are so confident of their rectitude, but what if your faith was based on a greater assumption of pre-existing wisdom and tradition?  What if you accepted Christ as your savior because you assumed that the world you were brought up in was representative of the culmination of human knowledge?  Surrounded by christians, good, loving people for the most part, your faith was reinforced by this buffer, but only so long as you stayed within the buffer.

Not to pick on minorities, but it resonates with the extreme Mormon enclaves.  I wasn't raised on a rural compound, but I did grow up in a world where the most "diverse" person I was intimately familiar with was my (reform) Jewish best friend, who did much to broaded my perspective, but ultimately reinforced much of what I assumed, being himself a religious minority subsumed within (my) christian majority, and also being in large agreement about much of the pre-christian scriptures.

What happened?  Was it just learning that defeated my religion?  Learning about the world, history, great civilizations of art, morals and culture that existed before, after, and generally without the Good Word?  Was it Catholic high school, in which dogma was so forcibly shoved down my throat that my only option was to reject, or at least question it?

In its vaguest terms, I still think Christianity has much to recommend it, both as a set of social instructions / morals and a method of social control.  Further, I recognize that the intense indoctrination and familiarity I have with the scripture and the intellectual constructions it creates are not something I would be able to divorce myself from, even with vigorous effort.

The funniest dilemma for me is the rare occasion when someone actually asks me if I'm a Christian.  It really stumps me.

Do I believe that there was a fully-divine/fully-human, 200% being named Jesus Christ who was the son of God the Creator, born of the virgin Mary, who came to earth some 1,988 years ago, walked around one of the smallest countries on earth for a few years, was arrested and killed by one of the ten largest empires in recorded history, and ascended in physical form to join his father and sit at the Right hand accompanied by the even less-defined Holy Spirit, and from thence to sit in judgement, while simultaneously being a guide and personal advocate via silent prayer and ritual worship?

No. By this litmus test I am 0% Christian.

But as an identity, a cultural stamp; as a white, "Heartland American," I cannot deny that my self-image is that of a "Christian" as I understand it from observing others who take this same title.  A liberal, progressive, one to be sure, but closer in most ways to an "Okie from Muskokie" than a "Sheik of Araby" (thanks, slightly-offensive pop songs).

It's rapidly becoming cliche'd to be an Atheist, and the more New-Age definitions of being "spiritual" or eternally Agnostic, I find equally distasteful.  Truth be told, it is the same rational faculties and curiousity which told me I'm not a Christian that definitively rule me out of any of these vaguely-demarcated camps.  This does not make me special or unique, as I believe a great many, perhaps even the majority, of my peers are in the same boat, but it does confound me when asked to identify myself as "Christian" or not.

or when someone courtesously invites me to Bible Study.

And shouldn't it be pronounced "Bibble" anyway?

Sorry for the novel.

Ayn Rand can eat her cold Atheist heart out.

Weber

::(lame) Texpatriot