Opinion | This Conversation Changed the Way I Interact With Technology – The New York Times

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Im Ezra Klein, and this is The Ezra Klein Show.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

So before we get into it today, were going to be doing an ask me anything episode of the show. If youve got a question youd like to hear me answer, email it to ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com. Again, ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Todays show is about technology. And I want to be upfront about this. I would be useless without technology. I mean, Im for the first part, functionally blind without glasses. I cant see anything. Im a writer, but I have this terrible, unreadable handwriting that makes it difficult for me to communicate using a pen both you cant read it, but also I cant think clearly while doing it. Im so distracted by the way it turns out.

I got rejected for my college newspaper. And so the path I took into journalism it was completely built on a narrow technological moment. I happened to have a lot of free time because I was in college at the exact moment blogging became a thing. And that is how I got into journalism. And so I think of myself fundamentally as a techno- optimist. I mean, I believe that technology can make our lives better, richer, more fulfilling.

A lot of the things I care about politically, ranging from climate change to animal suffering to the dignity people have at work, it seems to me we are going to need big technological advances to make the politics of those things easy enough to overcome. But partly because Im so taken by the power of what technology can do for us, I think we underestimate and actually worse, we ignore what technologies to actually do to us.

We do not just use these tools. We become them. We are reshaped by them. This was a big theme in 20th century media criticism. And if you read Marshall McLuhan or Neil Postman, it is all over their work. And it is still true. One of the critics carrying these ideas into the modern era, into our modern technologies, is Michael Sacasas, or as his pen name is, L.M. Sacasas. I know his work because I follow his excellent newsletter, The Convivial Society, which I highly recommend. What he does in that newsletter is interesting. He brings theorists of the past into conversation with the technologies of the present. And he does so to look at todays technologies outside of their current narratives and business contexts, to treat their evolution not as inevitability, but a series of choices we made, all of which should revolve around the human character and experience. And certainly, the way we evaluate whether or not these tools are serving us should revolve around the human character and experience

Sacasas recently did a piece in which he posed 41 questions 41 we should ask of the technologies we use. And technologys defined here broadly. Its computers and artificial intelligence and Zoom, but its also tables and alarm clocks and ovens. And what I loved about these questions is theyre ways of not just thinking about technologies, but about ourselves, and how we act, and what we want. And what, in the end, we truly value. As always, my email ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.

Michael Sacasas, welcome to the show.

Thank you. Pleasure to be here.

So I want to begin with a technological experience many of us have had over the past year. Why is talking to someone on Zoom so much more exhausting than talking to them in person or even talking to them on the phone?

Yeah, so the way I began to think about this early in the pandemic last year is that were abstracting the body from the act of communication. And not entirely in fact, Zoom in some respects provides more of a view of the body than, say, a telephone call does. But the body is really essential to the work of meaning making in communication settings. Right, so we pick up on all sorts of cues from one another to register whether someones paying attention or theyre losing interest, or whether theyre tracking with what were having to say.

There are ways in which we use our body to generate meaning. We might point or gesture. Body language, again, conveys a lot of the sense of the interaction. And so when were on Zoom, there are a number of things that sort of distract us from that. For one thing, if we havent hidden self view, we have a tendency just to look at ourselves in these settings. We see ourselves there and we want to make sure that we dont look too foolish in our presentation. And our eye glances at that.

Theres no need to get personal.

[LAUGHS] Im thinking just in my own experience. The camera is positioned in such a way that if I try to give you eye contact, I cant see your eyes and vice versa. And so we lose that ability to look into one anothers eyes. And again, I think were laboring. Our mind is sort of laboring when its used to using these tacit cues from the bodily experience, and it loses track of those or has a really hard time focusing on them. I think its just really laboring to just make sense of the kind of things were trying to talk about. And for that reason, I think it becomes exhausting. At least thats, I think, a big part of the picture.

One thing I loved about the piece is, you gave me language for something I was feeling, and then gave me courage to stop Zooming with people early in the pandemic, which there was this period when everything tried to move there. But something I reflected on a lot after it is, well, then why do I find it easier to be on the phone?

And I do think it comes back to this idea of the body. You talk about the body being there and not there on Zoom. You cant see it. You cant move it. Its micro-delayed, given what you would expect on the other end of the connection.

But youre also stilled. So on the phone, I cant see your body right now. You cant see mind. Weve turned off the cameras for all these reasons. But it means I can move around.

My body can be like a body, at least on my end, as opposed to a still body, because Im worried about your end. And just that point that what is happening in our bodies affects profoundly what is happening in our interactions with technologies and each other its pretty big, and its laced through your work. So I was wondering if you could talk a bit about it.

So Ive picked up bits and pieces from a variety of philosophers and theorists to kind of help me make sense of what were doing when were using technology. And at some point early on, it became clear to me that the body is a really essential part of this picture. I sometimes think of the body and the world in our minds kind of creating a circuit.

And so then, we introduce a tool into that circuit, and its going to shape how we perceive the world, and its going to shape how we interpret the world. And so the body is at the nexus of our experience of reality, and technology enters into that loop of perception in ways that can be benign, in ways that can be beneficial, in ways that can be detrimental. But it certainly changes it.

And so thats one important lesson that Ive taken from people like Don Ihde, who is a philosopher of technology, who I think is one of the ones that has kind of made this a central concern in his little branch of philosophy of technology. And I think its always useful to ask that question: how is this tool that Im bringing to my body, into my interactions with the world, shaping the way that I perceive the world, in often very subtle ways?

Were about to ask a lot of good questions like this about technology, but let me ask you about one place Ive seen you bring this, which youve made me attentive to, which is technologies that make you forget your body is there. Can you talk a bit about that?

Yeah, so many of us whose work focuses around the computer or around the workspace where we sit down to do knowledge work, I feel like we get very absorbed in that. Theres a tendency to just become absorbed in what were doing and to forget the needs of the body, right? Im thinking, for example, of this idea of email apnea, which was coined by Linda Stone, a researcher with Microsoft many years ago.

You know, you essentially kind of catch your breath when youre focusing on what youre reading online. Its one way in which it kind of upsets the ordinary rhythms of our bodily existence. Theres a lot of effort made to make our tools ergonomic, friendly to the body.

But more often than not, we find ourselves in postures that are not really great for us. And so we have to be reminded. We have an app that reminds us to get up every so often, so we dont stay in that position. So thats one way, I think, in which a very, very common work experience for individuals and an experience that frankly is not just limited to work can make us forgetful of the needs of the body.

So this begins to get at something you do a lot in your work, which is reverse the way we usually think of the ethics of technology. And you use it in this essay that will frame a lot of our conversation about 41 questions one should ask of technology. You begin with the example of a hammer. Now, a hammer can be used, you say, to build a home. It can be used to bash in a skull.

So one way of looking at a technology like a hammer is the ethics of it are simply what we do with it. It is just our ethics, transferred to the hammer. But you suggest a different question, which is, how does having the hammer in my hand encourage me to perceive the world around me? What feelings does it arouse in me? So tell me a little bit about that move, from us directing the technology, to the technology changing our experience, or the nature of ourselves.

A lot of thinking about ethics or technology traditionally a little less so now often involved the question of, what am I going to do with this tool? So hence, the example of the hammer. In this view, the tool is ostensibly neutral.

And I think thats the idea that I find myself pushing back against a good bit. So in one sense, it makes a certain amount of sense that, yeah, I can do good things with this tool, this hammer. I can use it to build a house or repair something, or I can use it to hit somebody. And in that sense, what matters is my intention and the use to which I put it.

So I want to push back on not the fact that thats untrue, but that its inadequate as a way of thinking about how technology impinges on the moral life or what we think of as ethics. And so the example that I give there with the hammer has to do with perception. So one of the key ways in which I think technologies fail to be neutral is that they shape how we perceive the world, and they dispose us in a certain way towards the world.

So the hammers a trite example. People often have heard the expression: to the person with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And this reflects the way in which, when that hammer comes into that circuit of mind, body, and world, it transforms how the world appears to us or what it makes us see the world as.

And so that is one example. A camera is another example. And by cameras, I simply mean the smartphone so many of us carry with us all the time, and how it kind of reframes aspects of experience as memories to be recorded, for example.

So we might have felt differently about experiences, seen it differently, without the camera in hand. But now that its there, even if we choose not to take the picture, for a moment, it has changed how we interpret what is happening or what is going on.

The camera is such a good example of this. I think sometimes about how much the smartphone camera has changed my experience of parenting. Because constantly, when my son does something cute, my instinct is that I need to whip out my phone to record the cute thing, so it can be shared with my family or memorialized for the future.

And seven times out of 10, when I do that, I stop the thing that was happening. He sees the phone, he gets interested in that, he sees me doing something, he just gets interested in whatever change had happened to me, and I break the circuit of the experience. Im not even saying its all bad. Im happy to have many of the photos and videos I have of him. And then, sometimes I now try to not have my phone when Im with him. I leave it at home. But then, hell do something cute, and Ill be, in a part of my head, frustrated that I just have to sit there and experience it, and I cant let anybody else know this wonderful thing has happened. And its a really different experience, even though I just didnt have access to a smartphone camera at all.

Yeah, I mean, thats a great example. I have two little girls, so I can very much relate to this. And I want to echo the point that you made. A lot of this is not about saying its good or bad. And I think very often, people just want to know, is this a good thing? Is this is a bad thing?

And I think part of the point that I often try to make is that something can be morally significant without necessarily being good or bad by itself. So thats a point that we can come back to at some point. But yeah, definitely, the experience of wanting to document reality. You know, one thing Ive found I dont know if this is true for you as a parent is that somewhere, theres this sense that you want to kind of arrest the growth of your kids, you know.

Theyre growing up so fast, and you want to document where theyve been along the way. Paradoxically, in my experience anyway, I think Ive almost found that having this very pervasive record, visual record of their growth, has made that actually a more pronounced experience, a greater sense of things slipping by, slipping away.

And I often wonder, how would the experience of being a parent in relation to a child in this way have been different, as it was the majority of human history. People just didnt have a photographic record of the sort. All they had was their memory to work with. And so to me, thats an interesting question. Its a moral question that involves a very profound human relationship and how we experience it.

So let me take that as a bridge to the 41 questions. And Im simply going to pose these to you. Youre the one who wrote them. I appreciate you making my job so easy.

And I will maybe sometimes offer a prompt of the technology we can talk about, but of course, you should feel free to take it wherever you want. And so the first question you implore us to ask of a technology is, what sort of person will the use of this technology make of me? And I would say, lets use Twitter as the example.

Yeah, and thats the most general of those questions, I think, and it comes out of my sense that we become what we habitually do. So Ill say that the way I think of the moral life and moral formation is really influenced by virtue ethic theory, which places a lot of emphasis on habit, disposition, and inclinations.

And so Im on Twitter a lot. So this is the one social media platform that I am on with some regularity. And I find that when Im on Twitter, I tend to feel a little anxious, a little scatterbrained. I do feel like my focus is sort of distracted in ways that arent entirely good for me.

So I use it as a way of building relationships, garnering information, kind of keeping an eye on the way the world in that little Twitter sphere is reacting to current events. But I do feel it taxes me mentally. It frames the way I think about what I say.

So Im very aware of the audience on Twitter and how they might respond to what I may want to tweet. And so theres this little editing voice in my head that takes the Twitter audience for granted. And I think eventually, that sort of spills out, that may spill out into other spheres of life.

And then, theres of course the tendency to take the experience of Twitter and normalize it, or to say that this is a one-to-one map of reality. And we have to, I think, guard against that tendency. So there are ways in which it kind of plays with our emotional, cognitive lives the way it frames the self.

Its a kind of performance that were undergoing for the audience on Twitter. Those are some of the ways that I think come to mind, in terms of how thats beginning to shape me as a person, the way that I think about myself and what I do.

I want to hold on that idea of the self as a performance. Because thats one of the things I noticed. People who listen to the show know I have a lot of thoughts on Twitter, and I stay off of it a lot of the time, and then I tend to jump on it when I have something to promote.

But particularly when Im using it more, one of the things that is striking to me about it is it makes me somebody who thinks a much wider expanse of my thoughts are things other people should also hear. You know, I was a writer before there was really Twitter.

And as a writer, the things I thought people should hear were of a certain variety. They had a certain weight to them. A certain amount of effort went into them. They were about a certain set of topics, for the most part. And on Twitter, its literally what I thought of the Loki season finale. I mean, its anything.

And it makes me more audience- and approval-hungry, and possibly more backlash-aversive or something. I do think it is both believing more of what I think should be shared, and also shaping that more to social approval, than I do in other mediums. But over time, that actually does change how I think, and if I let it, what kind of person I am, but also what kind of person I present myself as to the world.

Yeah, no, absolutely. An example of this resonates what you just described. I found myself reading a book a couple of days ago, and underlining some passages of note. And immediately, my first thought was, Ive got to put this on Twitter.

And I had to resist the urge, and I consciously thought of, how would I have done this if I didnt have Twitter? How would my experience of reading have been a little bit different? And why do I feel compelled to share this? Do I feel compelled to share this because I think, oh, this will play really well within my networks?

And I think that sense of approval, of its sometimes described as a kind of dopamine hit that you get and then, we begin to crave that, and then that bending of the self to the perceptions of the audience, that feedback loop, I think, can become really powerful.

Lets go to the next question. What habits will the use of this technology instill? And lets talk about electric lighting.

I recently wrote a little bit about the loss of the night sky, so this is what comes immediately to mind. Famous anecdote I think it was in LA. There was a massive power outage.

And there were a number of calls to 911 about this striking, glowing thing in the sky, which turns out to be the Milky Way, which numerous people hadnt seen. And so one thing that comes to mind with electric lighting this maybe isnt quite a habit, but theres a sense of where I look. What can I see? How do I experience darkness?

And there are long social trends here, going back to the beginning of electrification and even gas lighting in European cities. But it changes the character of daily life, in terms of my habits even of experiencing sleep and rest. And so its mundane technology, but its one thats been profoundly formative of just the experience of the day, how we order and structure our day.

It opened up the night, in many respects, for activities that wouldnt have been possible elsewhere. But I think also, and again, going back to the question of the body, remembering were embodied creatures. Maybe its kind of messing with the rest our body needs. We have the habit of staying up later than perhaps we ought. Were timing ourselves to rhythms that are not necessarily conducive to our well-being.

And so theres a way of experiencing the night, both at a macro level with regards to what we see, and the loss of connection with the naturally dark sky, to social life, impact on social life, and then impact on personal life. So at those three scales, different habits will be generated by the fact that we can flip a switch and carry on with our activities when the sun goes down.

Your next question, I really love. How will the use of this technology affect my experience of time? And Ill let you choose the example here.

Oh, the clock. I love thinking about technologies that we take for granted, that we dont think of anymore as technologies. And so the clock is a fascinating piece of technology, the mechanical clock. It was originally used to help monks keep their daily rhythm of prayer, and then it comes to structure so much of modern life.

Lewis Mumford in the 1930s, in his book Technics and Civilization, makes a great deal of this. He says that its the clock that is the centerpiece of the modern world, in that it divides time. It segments time into discrete measurable units. To think that without the mechanical clock, it really doesnt make sense to say, Ill meet you at 12:10.

But that just wasnt the way that human beings experienced the passage of time. It gives us a sense of time as something to be lost or wasted, measured. It generates a kind of anxiety about that. So time, I think, is one of the fundamental moral dimensions of human experience.

And so we tend to think, well, time is just time. Everybody experiences it similarly, and we relate to it similarly. But in fact, its one of the realities that has been, I think, most profoundly shaped by the technologies that we use to measure time. And then, of course, when we were able to put that measurement device on our wrists, it made that ubiquitous.

We all know where we are in this finely calibrated ordering of time, and that allows us to relate to it in different ways, to think of punctuality differently. It changes our sense of the politeness of arrival and departure. And I think there are still certain cultures in which you can see that there is a profound difference with the way, certainly, that Westerners tend to think about what it means to abide by time.

Speaking of always knowing where you are, the next question, which I really like, is how will the use of technology affect my experience of place? And I want to use here a technology that arose in my lifetime, which is ubiquitous GPS maps.

Thats another great example. I actually thought of it on the way to the studio here. I dont have a smartphone, so I dont have GPS on me all the time, and I have an old car.

So I made note. I did use Google Maps to find the location of the place, relative to where I was, and then just made a mental note of it, and I made my way here. And I thought, well, itd be really bad if I got lost and wasnt on time, so I made a point of taking down the number.

And one thing Ive observed in other contexts is that sometimes these technologies that make things very easy very efficient, in some respects they eliminate certain things. So what would I have done if I had gotten lost? I would have stopped for directions. It would have required a kind of human interaction.

And so that changes. But then, also, I think the way we tend to use when I have used GPS the way we tend to use GPS is that it directs our attention not so much to the place itself, but to the directions were receiving. So if were just listening to the voice thats going to tell us, turn in 100 yards or whatever the case may be, our attention is focused on that, rather than, if I were told, you need to watch out for the corner of this intersection, then Im more actively engaged in figuring out where I am.

And so its not that we have to do that all the time, that we need to necessarily that using GPS is bad. But it does, I think, change the relationship that we have to the place, our ability to know that place well. And you may or may not put a moral value on that. But if you do, yeah, definitely, I think that ubiquitous GPS use has an effect of creating a certain distance from place, of abstracting us from place, making us less attentive to it in ways that might be beneficial.

How will the use of this technology affect how I relate to other people? And the example Id like to use here is search engines.

Thats a good example, in that it pushes it a little bit. Because if we rely on the search engine, for example, to form our picture of the world, our idea of what others are like, when we try to understand those that are not immediately in our network of friends or colleagues, then it filters a picture of the world of others to us.

How are those search results being determined? What is being included? What is being excluded? How is the algorithm calibrating the kind of information Im going to receive?

And I think that does tend to impact the shape of our perception of others, not necessarily those closest to us, but those others that we know in this more mediated fashion. It changes our understanding of who they are, and eclipses, I think, important aspects of the fullness of their personality, or the complexity of their view of the world. I think that would be perhaps a risk with the search engine as the mediator of our relationship to others.

You know, theres somewhere else I thought you might go, but this is in truth just where I went when I saw the question, which is, it made me think about how many conversations with other people I do not have because of search engines.

Yes.

How many times when my map of knowledge to fill something in would simply require, and did require when I was younger, just asking. Do you know? What do you think? Where should I go to dinner? Do you know this persons phone number? Have you heard of? Do you remember that president? Do you know when this happened?

And on the one hand, the information I got from those conversations was probably much less precise. And on the other hand, there was a lot of other information, and there was relationship building that happened in those conversations. And so I dont think I would tend to think about search engines as a social technology or a technology with a heavy social effect.

Theyre not social media, famously. Theyre the thing that came before it. But they actually really changed the social world and took a whole expanse of interaction out of it and into a sort of bilateral between me and the computer.

Yeah, and thats a great example. I think thats a wonderful thing about these questions, you know. Whatever might come to my mind is not going to be what comes to somebody elses mind. But thats, I think, a terrific example of the way that it enters into that loop of social relations, yeah.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Im going to jump forward a little bit here. What practices will the use of this technology displace? What do you think of when you hear that?

I think of something like the example of the GPS. So the practice of finding my way on a map or getting directions from someone, and so that social connection that gets set aside because I can just look this up on my phone and find my way there. I can think even of something more mundane, the way we organize our dinners or our meals together.

Theres a philosopher of technology, Albert Borgmann, who famously made a big deal about this. And we think about what was involved for a family, and again, one has to recognize that not all families are structured similarly. But if we think about the way that all members of a family might have been involved in putting a meal on the table and gathering around it. So then we think of the alternative, which initially, maybe in the 1980s when Borgmann was writing, was just, pop something into the microwave, and everybodys served.

More recently, you might think of the app, delivery app, that just brings you the food. It has displaced certain rituals or roles within a family, certain interactions within a family or within a network of friends, even, who might gather for a meal. That might be a felt loss.

Again, not necessarily morally wrong or morally right, but consequential with regards to what is binding that family or that network of friends together. There was a kind of labor involved in putting that meal together, and that labor itself had an important role to play in the dynamics of the relationship that are outsourced when we change the practice by finding technological shortcuts around it to get to the same end, but through different means.

I really like this couplet of questions: what will the use of this technology encourage me to notice? And the technology that came to mind there was the ubiquity of social media or just social profiles for people that when I meet somebody or even often before I meet them, I can look them up on a profile that is going to encourage me to notice other things than I would have if I had just called them up or heard about them from a friend.

Yeah, each of us are such complex realities, such a tangle of desires, emotions, insecurities, capacities and capabilities, and histories and narratives. And any attempt to kind of capture that, certainly in an online profile, is necessarily going to leave some important dimensions of the person out.

And if we come to know a person chiefly, initially, through a profile by looking them up, well bring those preconceptions to the table when we meet them, and it will have the tendency, I would say, to reduce our understanding. But of course, that can change over time. The dynamics of the relationship might be such that we get to see these other aspects of one another.

Well, if there is a relationship, it might. But what that made me think of: there was a very funny but also telling article in New York Magazine, probably a month ago now. And it talked about how on dating apps in New York, Tinder and, I guess, Hinge I dont know what everybodys dating on in New York. But it talked about the amount of very far-left signaling on a lot of the apps.

So eat the rich, or Im going to burn civilization down and light my joint in the fires, or just a lot of very hardcore socialist signaling. But then, people meet each other, and of course theyre not that hardcore, and theyre not really revolutionaries, and theyre not really trying to upend society. And theres a very, very funny anecdote in there of a woman who ended up on a date with a guy whose profile was all about how much he hated the rich, about how much he wanted to abolish billionaires, and so on.

And then, when they met, after a couple times and he just kept ranting about how he hated the rich hed be like, listen, Im actually rich. And she was like, oh, well, I still like you. [LAUGHTER] Lets keep dating.

I think a lot of the way we display who we are in flattened profiles is wrong about who we are, what tradeoffs we really make. But what it does is, it creates a kind of filtering of, is this person like me or not?

I wonder how much of that has to do with the scale at which were operating. So you know, like you said, if we build a relationship, we might correct our perception. But were not going to build that kind of relationship with the vast number of people that we interact with online, even if its not directly with them online.

And there is a need to find some quick way of sorting, of categorizing. And so theres this built-in temptation, I think, to use these categories to drop people into or if we think that thats what theyre going to expect of us, to try to fill that role or to live up to that role.

See the original post:

Opinion | This Conversation Changed the Way I Interact With Technology - The New York Times