Reflecting on Technology in a Crisis
APRIL 14, 2020
As this period of social distancing wears on, many of us are beginning to settle into a new way of living. Solitude and the disruption of ordinary routines have fostered a mood of reflection -- on our goals, on our relationships, and on the tools we use. For most, this is not a period of Thoreauvian isolation, nor of the "digital minimalism" advocated by Cal Newport. In fact, we've become more reliant on technology than ever before. But we've all been forced, in Thoreau's formulation, to "live deliberately." This alone provokes a certain skepticism about the pace of modern life and the technologies that support it. Alan Lightman, writing in The Atlantic, captures the mood:
Some powerful force must strike to awaken us from our slumber. Now we have been struck. We have a chance to notice: We have been living too fast. We have sold our inner selves to the devil of speed, efficiency, money, hyper-connectivity, “progress."
Whether or not we share Lightman's conclusions, it's worth reflecting on this disenchantment before things return to a new normal. For most of us, most of the time, the physical and social contexts we inhabit shape the goals we pursue. This is not to say that we're blindly buffeted around by our environments. Rather, we save our precious cognitive resources for precisely those problems that the environment isn't already taking care of. When the environment is dependable enough, we begin to forget the problems it is solving.
Many managers are confronting this fact as they transition their teams to remote work. Physical co-location solves many problems of communication and coordination that are now being shifted to tools like Slack and Zoom. But technological solutions are, by their very nature, narrow. When we replace something as ancient as face-to-face communication with a digital tool, we are often not aware of the density of meaning being lost. To paraphrase Gabriel Duquette, it's like eating only nutritional supplements instead of food. We may not know precisely what's missing, but we'll gradually come to feel undernourished.
It is possible to take this critique even further and extend one's gripe with an unfulfilling Zoom call to modern technological society more generally. This critique is often framed as a critique of "progress," as in the Lightman quote above. But more often, it is really a critique of the narrow goals to which our technologies, social systems, and institutions have wedded us. As the philosopher John Gray, a famous progress skeptic, writes in his recent piece on the coronavirus:
In the view of the future to which progressive thinkers cling, the future is an embellished version of the recent past. No doubt this helps them preserve some semblance of sanity. It also undermines what is now our most vital attribute: the ability to adapt and fashion different ways of life.
We don't have to share Gray's nihilism about progress to recognize his point. It is all too easy to allow our technologies to trap us into a narrow metric of progress: emails read, followers amassed, information consumed. As these technologies become more pervasive and compelling, our capacity for reflection is diminished. The scope of our choice-making is limited to the menu of options presented on our interfaces. As the famous Churchill misquote goes, "we shape our tools and thereafter they shape us."
Crises like the coronavirus illustrate two points simultaneously. What Lightman calls "the devil of speed [and] efficiency" can surely cause us to be blindsided by unanticipated threats. But technology is indispensable in combatting those threats when they arise. One of the core questions for the psychology of technology is how we can retain a capacity for reflection as technology solves more and more complex problems for us. This means highlighting the way technologies blinker our vision, even as they open up new vistas. It also means remembering that thinking itself is a technology, and there is always room to innovate.