Monday, April 28, 2008
The revolt of the cyber no-brainers
There was an article this week in the Sunday Times about the latest research being done by Professor Susan Greenfield, a front-edge thinker on the degeneration of the brain, as a result of ageing, disease, trauma and so on. She has produced a book on the subject: ID: the Quest for Identity in the 21st Century. Her work in this sphere has taken on a social dimension in that she avers that the young, by playing long hours on their screens could be irremediably affecting the plasticity of their brains. A consequence is that they may lose their sense of individuality. By submerging themselves in You Tube, Second Life, Face Book and all manner of social networking sites and avatar-based multi-user game programs, their sense of self may become increasingly diminished. As some readers will know, this has also been a preoccupation of many of these blogs. Greenfield also feels (the article could well have mashed her discursive thought into something unrecognisable, of course) that education’s historic importance in producing the brains needed to promote humanity’s future, is in decline. She cites the significance of learning facts, of recitation, of having to build personal structures of understanding from text and numeral in creating independence of thought. This new technological world will eradicate all this by addicting us to the quick fixes of the virtual world with its dopamine-releasing qualities. These neural changes may well result, she feels, in an increase in extremist behaviours such as dependency on cults and doctrines (gangs, terrorism, Waco, Jonestown etc) as the person loses his or her independence of being.
While many of these blogs have explored the effects upon identity of the virtual worlds within which some of us prefer to reside, I would not make any leap of connection to the thesis that the world is becoming increasingly extremist. Nor would I suggest that education was a positive experience of the kind she suggests. At the height of facts-based education, the 19th century was not exactly terror free! 9/11 is chilling for its symbolic power even more than its reality for it hardly compares in actual figures to deaths perpetrated by the regimes of Stalin, Hitler or Amin.
The problem, as I see it, is the reverse. The world of the classroom has become increasingly virtual in that it has become, over the decades, an alienating experience for the young. Lip service is paid to parenting, sex, drugs, crime and, latterly, the cyber experience. It was evident when I was responsible for primary research on computer games and videos in the early 1990s (Young Children, Videos and Computer Games: Issues for Teachers and Parents: 1997, Falmer Press) that the classroom and the bedroom were travelling in opposite directions. In a sense what has happened is that the cyber world has become today’s counter culture and one that does not just embrace intellectuals but people of all walks of life and propensities. The classroom has become seen as arid, over-structured and disconnected from the business of living, with its focus on league tables, examination results and a narrow interpretation of what it is to be educated. It is a factory that fails its products.
If the brains of the young are losing their vitality, as Professor Greenfield suggests, it is not the technology that is the root cause, it is a social system which refuses to become involved enough to educate the young as cyber as well as real citizens, in domains that really matter.
There was an article this week in the Sunday Times about the latest research being done by Professor Susan Greenfield, a front-edge thinker on the degeneration of the brain, as a result of ageing, disease, trauma and so on. She has produced a book on the subject: ID: the Quest for Identity in the 21st Century. Her work in this sphere has taken on a social dimension in that she avers that the young, by playing long hours on their screens could be irremediably affecting the plasticity of their brains. A consequence is that they may lose their sense of individuality. By submerging themselves in You Tube, Second Life, Face Book and all manner of social networking sites and avatar-based multi-user game programs, their sense of self may become increasingly diminished. As some readers will know, this has also been a preoccupation of many of these blogs. Greenfield also feels (the article could well have mashed her discursive thought into something unrecognisable, of course) that education’s historic importance in producing the brains needed to promote humanity’s future, is in decline. She cites the significance of learning facts, of recitation, of having to build personal structures of understanding from text and numeral in creating independence of thought. This new technological world will eradicate all this by addicting us to the quick fixes of the virtual world with its dopamine-releasing qualities. These neural changes may well result, she feels, in an increase in extremist behaviours such as dependency on cults and doctrines (gangs, terrorism, Waco, Jonestown etc) as the person loses his or her independence of being.
While many of these blogs have explored the effects upon identity of the virtual worlds within which some of us prefer to reside, I would not make any leap of connection to the thesis that the world is becoming increasingly extremist. Nor would I suggest that education was a positive experience of the kind she suggests. At the height of facts-based education, the 19th century was not exactly terror free! 9/11 is chilling for its symbolic power even more than its reality for it hardly compares in actual figures to deaths perpetrated by the regimes of Stalin, Hitler or Amin.
The problem, as I see it, is the reverse. The world of the classroom has become increasingly virtual in that it has become, over the decades, an alienating experience for the young. Lip service is paid to parenting, sex, drugs, crime and, latterly, the cyber experience. It was evident when I was responsible for primary research on computer games and videos in the early 1990s (Young Children, Videos and Computer Games: Issues for Teachers and Parents: 1997, Falmer Press) that the classroom and the bedroom were travelling in opposite directions. In a sense what has happened is that the cyber world has become today’s counter culture and one that does not just embrace intellectuals but people of all walks of life and propensities. The classroom has become seen as arid, over-structured and disconnected from the business of living, with its focus on league tables, examination results and a narrow interpretation of what it is to be educated. It is a factory that fails its products.
If the brains of the young are losing their vitality, as Professor Greenfield suggests, it is not the technology that is the root cause, it is a social system which refuses to become involved enough to educate the young as cyber as well as real citizens, in domains that really matter.
Labels: Susan Greenfield. Brain degeneration. Disaffected youth.
Thursday, April 24, 2008
A Tale of the Unexpected - Synchronicity
We don’t know the truth of the hypothesis, but Carl Jung’s notion of synchronicity is a gripping one. Jung suggests that extraordinary coincidences and inexplicable events may be the result of connection and communication which exist below the surface of consciousness. Telepathy, empathy, intuition, foreknowledge and so on are forms of mental transmission made possible because the unconscious of each of us belongs to a universal human pool, and we offer up our individual droplet to the vast unconscious whole and, in this way we are connected to every other droplet.
Here is a story, a case study, supporting Jung’s contention.
A woman friend in England, was feeling homesick and so decided to read a book, written a hundred years before and set in the city of her birth, Bordeaux. She had read several chapters of this story, concerning the love of a young man for an older woman, a tale of languishment and the hidden springs and poetry of love.
In the middle of reading it, she went off to work as usual, through the city that she could never call home. She called in, in that haphazard way we often do, at a charity shop. Her eyes scanned the lines of books. What was this? There, on the shelves of the good, the bad and the ugly of English literature, were two books in French. One was a translation of the Qu’ran and the other a slim volume of poetry by a minor French poet. Both were leather bound with gold edging to their leaves. They were both published in the middle of the 19th century. She bought them. When she got home she put them on her shelves for later reading.
Returning to her Bordeaux roman, she read a chapter or two over the next few days. Then she came across a passage in the story which described how the young man had found a poem by a contemporary author which summed up his desperate love. There, in the novel, was a complete quotation of the poem, the name of the author, the title of the limited edition and the page on which the poem sat. My friend looked up and above her head was the self-same collection! She opened to the page aforementioned in the story and found the poem, exactly as quoted.
This is as perfect an example as one might find of synchronicity.. The only reason I am not an atheist is not because of some weak longing for a God but because of the unexplained in daily life. These events seem to occur often enough to my friend. She will, I hope, write and publish them one day – in a more vivid and arresting detail than I have summoned up, here.
We don’t know the truth of the hypothesis, but Carl Jung’s notion of synchronicity is a gripping one. Jung suggests that extraordinary coincidences and inexplicable events may be the result of connection and communication which exist below the surface of consciousness. Telepathy, empathy, intuition, foreknowledge and so on are forms of mental transmission made possible because the unconscious of each of us belongs to a universal human pool, and we offer up our individual droplet to the vast unconscious whole and, in this way we are connected to every other droplet.
Here is a story, a case study, supporting Jung’s contention.
A woman friend in England, was feeling homesick and so decided to read a book, written a hundred years before and set in the city of her birth, Bordeaux. She had read several chapters of this story, concerning the love of a young man for an older woman, a tale of languishment and the hidden springs and poetry of love.
In the middle of reading it, she went off to work as usual, through the city that she could never call home. She called in, in that haphazard way we often do, at a charity shop. Her eyes scanned the lines of books. What was this? There, on the shelves of the good, the bad and the ugly of English literature, were two books in French. One was a translation of the Qu’ran and the other a slim volume of poetry by a minor French poet. Both were leather bound with gold edging to their leaves. They were both published in the middle of the 19th century. She bought them. When she got home she put them on her shelves for later reading.
Returning to her Bordeaux roman, she read a chapter or two over the next few days. Then she came across a passage in the story which described how the young man had found a poem by a contemporary author which summed up his desperate love. There, in the novel, was a complete quotation of the poem, the name of the author, the title of the limited edition and the page on which the poem sat. My friend looked up and above her head was the self-same collection! She opened to the page aforementioned in the story and found the poem, exactly as quoted.
This is as perfect an example as one might find of synchronicity.. The only reason I am not an atheist is not because of some weak longing for a God but because of the unexplained in daily life. These events seem to occur often enough to my friend. She will, I hope, write and publish them one day – in a more vivid and arresting detail than I have summoned up, here.
Thursday, April 17, 2008
April in Paris – Pigalle and the Picaresque
Probably April has never been the best month to visit Paris. It’s not too warm and the wind blows and there is a sense of a city coming out of hibernation. A few years on from my first visit, I approached the Museum of Erotica in the Pigalle, slaloming around the street girls in their leopard skin tights and mobile phones, the men adopting that bored but crafty-eyed observation of passing human traffic, the sex boutiques and the seamier arenas of below-the-belt entertainment.
The museum, itself, has not changed too much since my last visit but now includes more video and some early simple line-drawn animations. From the ground floor to the sixth there are displays of artefacts which encompass every possible take on sex. At the top is the latest in Manga-type extremism. At the bottom are the primitive, the ancient, the puzzling and the ambiguous. In effect, as one ascends, there is a gradual transmutation from non-pejorative, matter of fact depictions of genitalia and sexual practices, through Freudian uncertainty, fetishism and the commodification of sexual parts and related instruments of pleasure and pain, to a point where the human essence of the body is totally eradicated. And explicit representation is all. Unlike the Barbican Seduction exhibition, which I blogged earlier this year, there is a closeness, a tangible intimacy in the exhibition which can draw or repel. Here the body is loved and hated, lampooned and degraded, there it is transported to the divine and exalted. The lack of any aesthetic treatise in integrating the objects within some evolutionary (or revolutionary) theory of sexuality, is a plus. You make of it what you will.
At the end of the visit I felt curiously sober and contemplative. The museum would soon be including examples of the replicants discussed in the blog before this one. The historical sweep of the exhibits provides stark evidence that humanity could be slowly breaking its sensory bonds with the exhilarating joy of being sexually alive, as it loses touch with the primary sensuality of its skin, flesh and bone and consigns the body to the domination of market forces.
Monday, April 14, 2008
She's giving me good vibrations...
A new book has just arrived in a bookstore near you. It’s called Love and Sex with Robots and is written by David Levy, an expert in artificial intelligence. In the review of it that I read yesterday (the excellent Christopher Hart, Sunday Times), it appears as though we have already entered a world that science fiction has presaged, for decades, with gloom. We are long used to blow up life-size sex dolls and penis-substitute paraphernalia but Levy recounts that the rich are already ordering replicant females for their entertainment and gratification. Replicant? Well, if you’ve seen Blade Runner than you know what I mean. These are state of the art, electronically wired and programmed, flesh-simulating, indiscreet objects of desire (to parody Bunuel). They can be programmed to service whatever proclivities their owners have and, apparently, provide this perfect companionship for life – providing you keep the batteries charged.
There is no doubt that making and keeping relationships is an arduous, rewarding but sometimes ill-mannered process. We often find balance between ourselves and our partners difficult to attain and maintain. Our joint sexual needs can seem to have random harmonies and discords - which are all part of the messy business of being human. As we age we note the changes in our sexual appetites as if they have become the true markers of mortality, the first light-fingered touches of death.
So, what better than rid ourselves of this whole awkward business and, for less than the price of a luxury car, buy ourselves one half of perfect immortality, a partner who is compliant, designed to please, stays forever young and whose eyes mirror, not reality, but an egotistical Dorian Gray.
On many occasions in these blogs, I have pondered on the nature of identity as the technology we create, slides over us, wraps round us and infiltrates our pores, our cells, our neurons. Technology should, at best, remind us of the glories of transient human life - providing we learn to love ourselves with all our failings. If we hate what we are, then technology becomes our master or mistress and erases our very reason for being.
Labels: Inflatables, Mortality, Sexual gratification
Wednesday, April 09, 2008
Torching Tibet
Hearing an apparatchik, on yesterday's news, conjuring up disturbing realpolitik regarding the demonstrations against China’s conduct in Tibet, was just about as reprehensible as could be imagined. This Olympic Official said that the protesters were without political conviction and were just jumping on a new bandwagon to air their personal grievances and gain attention to themselves. This man ought to be subjected to Chinese justice.
The Olympics are no longer the clean dream of Baron de Coubertin. There is nothing innocent about them. They may be so for some drug-free athletes and a proportion of starry-eyed, blinkered spectators but they are also an arena for media wars, profiteering, cynical manipulation by Governments and a gravy train for their careerist representatives. The rings have become manacles.
It could be argued that choosing China for these games had a hidden agenda. The eyes of the world and all that guff - opening her up to international scrutiny. Making her more democratic. You just have to look at the eyes-of-the-world scenarios in Iraq, Darfur, Zimbabwe, Russia, Palestine and on, and on, to know that it’s economic realism and revolution that brings down regimes, not the eyes of a mainly self-interested world.
Whereas any campaign attracts agitators who have personal grievance, it will, if authentic and moral, gather momentum through international empathy fuelled by constant exposure. These days this is usually the result of the work of committed, honourable individuals, in direct action and using the internet. People can now talk openly to people – not sieved through the sanitised medium of the Official Spokesperson. News can no longer be glossed and standardised by endemic bias or direct intimidation. The result is that the path of the Olympic Torch illuminates, for all to see, China's monstrous behaviour in Tibet rather than being, as China hoped, an internationally hallowed symbol of its undertakings and it’s honoured place among nations.
What more hideous counterpoint is there than the images of peaceful Tibetan monks, following their gentle and loving paths and a torch which now symbolises the burning of their culture?
Labels: Tibet. China. The Olympic Torch
Tuesday, April 01, 2008
Self-administered brain growth
Well, I watched the BBC 2 programme last night on meditation, half-expecting the same result as when I, myself, meditate, falling asleep just when I think I am getting somewhere – or, actually, nowhere, that being the point of it! I’m glad I didn’t, not because Kathy Sykes, Professor of perspiring femininity and Doctor of divine dewy-lipped deportment (usually, jogging in tight vest and shorts) was at her most artfully wide-eyed, but because the last quarter of an hour raised something intriguing for this reader of popularised scientific research.
It was this. Meditation, in its various forms such as focus on breathing, focus on a small object, cognitive deep relaxation or transcendentalism, results in brain growth! Measurable. Significant. If we accept without demur all the strong, anecdotal evidence that it makes us more loving, compassionate and peaceable as well as curing physical ailments and move on – then, let us look at this one extraordinary fact. When a person meditates s/he changes the structure of her/his brain. The physical neural matter. Jugglers, for example, concentrating on learning how to fling their balls, beanbags and batons, show marked change after only three months.
Maybe, Reader, you are wondering at my effusive incredulity? Or you may be one step ahead!
This is my frisson, my philosophical flight of fancy: if, by meditating, I change my brain, is this ‘I’ who does this, part of my brain at the same time, bootstrapping itself to a higher order of neural processing? Is the brain a self-evolving entity that boots up to better things by deciding to adopt a state of deep quiescence? As we manage to contain and dissolve our atavistic, emotional chaos, bung full of anxiety, pain, jealousy and other forms of stress by shifting it all from right brain focus to left brain focus (another hypothesis in the programme) , who, exactly is the ‘we’, doing this? Is it something beyond the neuro-elastic brain, residing as a diffuse self throughout the molecules of our bodies? Is it a soul?
If the conundrum doesn’t bother you, fair enough. At least be practical and meditate for half an hour each day. Life will be rosier for you and people will love you for it. It’s not difficult. Sit comfortably. Look down your nose into the middle distance and concentrate on feeling and hearing your breath go in and out to the exclusion of all else.
See! Told you!
Well, I watched the BBC 2 programme last night on meditation, half-expecting the same result as when I, myself, meditate, falling asleep just when I think I am getting somewhere – or, actually, nowhere, that being the point of it! I’m glad I didn’t, not because Kathy Sykes, Professor of perspiring femininity and Doctor of divine dewy-lipped deportment (usually, jogging in tight vest and shorts) was at her most artfully wide-eyed, but because the last quarter of an hour raised something intriguing for this reader of popularised scientific research.
It was this. Meditation, in its various forms such as focus on breathing, focus on a small object, cognitive deep relaxation or transcendentalism, results in brain growth! Measurable. Significant. If we accept without demur all the strong, anecdotal evidence that it makes us more loving, compassionate and peaceable as well as curing physical ailments and move on – then, let us look at this one extraordinary fact. When a person meditates s/he changes the structure of her/his brain. The physical neural matter. Jugglers, for example, concentrating on learning how to fling their balls, beanbags and batons, show marked change after only three months.
Maybe, Reader, you are wondering at my effusive incredulity? Or you may be one step ahead!
This is my frisson, my philosophical flight of fancy: if, by meditating, I change my brain, is this ‘I’ who does this, part of my brain at the same time, bootstrapping itself to a higher order of neural processing? Is the brain a self-evolving entity that boots up to better things by deciding to adopt a state of deep quiescence? As we manage to contain and dissolve our atavistic, emotional chaos, bung full of anxiety, pain, jealousy and other forms of stress by shifting it all from right brain focus to left brain focus (another hypothesis in the programme) , who, exactly is the ‘we’, doing this? Is it something beyond the neuro-elastic brain, residing as a diffuse self throughout the molecules of our bodies? Is it a soul?
If the conundrum doesn’t bother you, fair enough. At least be practical and meditate for half an hour each day. Life will be rosier for you and people will love you for it. It’s not difficult. Sit comfortably. Look down your nose into the middle distance and concentrate on feeling and hearing your breath go in and out to the exclusion of all else.
See! Told you!