Technology & Wholeness

May 21, 2020

What problems are solved by face-to-face communication? Or, put differently, why are Zoom calls so comparatively unsatisfying? We've each been given all too much time to reflect on this question in recent weeks. Obvious shortcomings like lag or low resolution aside, it seems clear that even a perfect Zoom call is far less nourishing than a conversation in the flesh. Face-to-face interaction has evolved over millennia of biological and cultural evolution, accruing complex and densely interconnected meanings that are difficult to explicitly express. It is at once a mundane practical tool and sacred form of communion. Its technological replacement, though vitally useful in these times, can only be a pale shadow.

As the writer Sarah Perry points out, evolved and ancestral solutions to problems tend to come tightly bundled: a ritual like the hunt or face-to-face communication solves problems at every level of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Technology, by contrast, tends to unbundle these solutions:

"Almost every technological advance is a de-condensation: it abstracts a particular function away from an object, a person, or an institution, and allows it to grow separately from all the things it used to be connected to."

The Zoom call is a prime example: it abstracts away the function of communication from physical proximity, drastically expanding its scope. But with this de-condensation comes a loss of the higher-level, ineffable functions that traditional conversation serves. Many of the discontents of so-called "evolutionary mismatch" can be chalked up to this kind of de-condensation. Perry writes:

"Simple abundance of food is not the cause of obesity, but rather the loss of carefully evolved ancestral diets. Our ancestors found it easy to get to sleep because they were tired from intense physical activity; we often find it a challenge to get to sleep because modern solutions to material problems do not include physical activity. We are lonely and bored not because of material abundance simpliciter, but because the specific cultural patterns that have reproduced themselves to produce material abundance have whittled away the social and psychological solutions that were built into old solutions to material problems."

Of course, few of us would be willing to give up the benefits of modern technological society for the hardships of the ancestral savannah. But if we accept Perry's critique, it's worth asking how we might change technological design to better meet these deeper needs. A simple distinction between evolved and designed solutions will not do, because technology also evolves, albeit mediated by human minds. The trouble comes when we are forced to make explicit and rational the purposes for which our technology is designed. The limitations of our explicit understanding then get reflected in our technology.

The anthropologist James C. Scott illuminates this problem by reference to two forms of knowledge distinguished in Ancient Greece: mētis and techne. Techne, an etymological ancestor of technology, refers to knowledge that is universal, abstract, and analytically precise. Its universality, Scott writes, "arises from the fact that it is organized analytically into small, explicit, logical steps and is both decomposable and verifiable." This kind of knowledge characterizes top-down design, as opposed to bottom-up emergent order. Mētis, by contrast, is the kind of contextual know-how born of intimate experience in a domain. Because it is tailored to context, it is hard to make explicit, but can nevertheless be felt. Thus we say a skilled person has a certain "feel" for a domain. Even before we know the rules of grammar, a misformed sentence "feels wrong." 

It is precisely this kind of feeling, or the lack of it, that alerts us to the insufficiency of a Zoom call. If technological design is going to adapt to our deepest needs, we'll need to find ways to integrate these feelings into the design process. The architect and design theorist Christopher Alexander has made it his life's work to bring this understanding to architecture and urban design. Among the techniques he has deployed are empirical experiments asking participants how "whole" they feel in a space. For Alexander, these feelings are as much a perceptual faculty as sight, sound, or intellect. Indeed, they are the only way to direct our design efforts toward the kind of dense interdependence that characterizes ancestral solutions. Alexander writes:

"What I call feeling is the mode of perception and awareness which arises when a person pays attention to the whole … It is an intelligent and practical way forward...This is not an emotional move away from precision. It is, rather, a move towards precision."

For now, we'll continue to make do with available tools. It is hard to imagine weathering this pandemic without them. But if our dependence on technology is only going to increase, we should learn to make it serve us -- in all of our richness and complexity.