John Zabroski wrote:
I personally do not believe technology actually improves lives. Usually, it
is the opposite. Technology creates instant gratification and addiction to
it thereof, and the primary reason we are so addicted to technology is
because we have become so empty inside.
Related to your point, but from a different direction, here are two books on
the theory of where things went so wrong in our society, by two different
authors who say essentially the same thing but don't cite each other. :-)
"The Pleasure Trap: Mastering the Hidden Force That Undermines Health &
Happiness"
http://www.amazon.com/Pleasure-Trap-Mastering-Undermines-Happiness/dp/1570671508
http://www.healthpromoting.com/Articles/articles/PleasureTrap.htm
"Supernormal Stimuli: How Primal Urges Overran Their Evolutionary Purpose"
http://www.amazon.com/Supernormal-Stimuli-Overran-Evolutionary-Purpose/dp/039306848X
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernormal_Stimuli
The basic idea is that humans seek various things that kept us healthy and
yet were rare in the past. However, because our technology has made some
things abundant now (like concentrated calories with few phytonutrients
http://www.drfuhrman.com or getting novelty that we want without going
outside http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml or like novelty or
strong emotion in media) we become desensitized to normal healthy stimuli
and begin to crave the supernormal stimuli as the new normal. But,
ironically, that seeking of supernormal stimuli is to no lasting net
increase in happiness (since we return to a baseline of enjoyment), and
meanwhile the supernormal stimulus often causes health problems (example,
too much salt, too much fat, too much raw sugar or too much media violence
etc.).
Those ideas were developed first about food and then about media, but it
makes me wonder how those ideas could be applied to healthy computing in
general?
One obvious example to me is the proliferation of eye candy and pointless
moving graphics in computer interfaces that ultimately just distracts from
usability, but is really novel and intriguing for a brief time. The plainer
interfaces may then get ignored by people used to the new flashy ones, even
if the flashy ones may be less usable over the long term.
I wonder if one could say the same about programming languages, like the
plain Smalltalk syntax against the whiz bang kitchen-sink Java syntax that
seems fancier at first?
Or, as many people enjoy coding as a logical challenge that keeps us in a
sense of flow or provides us with various other rewards, could we be
drowning ourselves in too much code? :-) I've long thought that 99%+ of
software out there is not only unnecessary, but just makes excessive work
for everyone to deal with the incompatabilities. :-) Also related on how so
much of our socio-industrial base is about unnecessary "make work":
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
There are obviously a host of other reasons why things get complicated and
complex; I'm just suggesting this as one reason that is not yet discussed
that much.
Anyway, in that sense, could FONC be seen as trying from a computing
perspective to address "The Pleasure Trap" of technology leading us,
counter-productively, to ultimately be drowning in endless make-work code
and tons of fancy but unneeded widgets? And where the end result of that
pleasure trap of all the eye candy or syntactic sugar is that we are
ultimately worse off than if we stuck with simpler systems, like, say, an
extensible Forth command line? :-)
--Paul Fernhout
http://www.pdfernhout.net/
http://www.beyondajoblessrecovery.org/
====
The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of
abundance in the hands of those thinking in terms of scarcity.
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