Tech Overload

Yesterday I attended a conference called "Shaping the Industrial Internet." The "industrial internet"--aka: the internet of things, the cloud of things, the smart planet, and a few others--is the networking of everything. Sensors in the road, in your car, and in everyone else's car to ensure a safe trip. Refrigerators that know when the milk has expired and order a replacement bottle. Home thermostats controlled by your smart phone. WiFi cameras that post your snapshots to Facebook automatically. And tens of thousands of other industrial, business, and personal applications.

We talked a lot about privacy that in the European Union is considered a fundamental human right and in China is considered something of a problem. Technical, ethical, political, and policy problems abound, but don't expect any of that to stop it. Mountains of data already exist about you including that you're reading this blog and, if you're reading on a smart phone or tablet, where you're located while your reading. It's astounding.

More than once during the conference, I peeked at my email on the iPhone. Others did the same thing. In fact, the fellow sitting next to me, a journalist, had two phones going and a number of participants were blogging.

That's when the tech overload set in. I am deeply grateful for my devices. Facetime with distant grandchildren is the greatest invention ever. And yet, well, I'll just admit it: I miss card catalogues. I know that library collections on computer are faster and more efficient, but flipping through cards, I found out all sorts of things I never even heard of. And flipping cards was and is much more pleasant than typing. I still like books and if I wasn't frankly a bit lazy about it, I'd still write letters in script with a fountain pen.

I don't think I'm becoming an old fogie Luddite. It's just that there's something very human about books and pens and paper and card catalogues that digital media simply don't share. There's an acknowledgment of our embodiment. We can't be everywhere all at once even if that's the promise of the wired world. We can only be here, now, with our hands on one thing--even if that one thing pretends to be everything.

Calvin College Professor Quentin Schultz wrote in his book Habits of the High-Tech Heart:

We love to presume that our newest contraptions will equip us to engineer a better world. We thereby display an enormous capacity for collective self delusion, because the same machines that appear to give us a greater command of life are harder and harder for us to control. [Vaclav] Havel writes that "as soon as man began considering himself the source of the highest meaning in the world and the measure of everything, the world began to lose its human dimension, and man began to lose control of it."

Quentin Schultz argues that in order to live, as he says, "virtuously in the Information Age," we need to carefully assess the technologies around us to use them wisely without losing our humanness in the process.