Dr. Jim Taylor’s blog

Has computer and communication technology allowed us to connect more deeply with life? Or, as we become more connected with this technology, are we becoming more disconnected from life?

As someone who has made his life?s work the study of human behavior and who is fascinated by the nexus of humanity and computer and communication technology, my interest lies in how the lives of ordinary people (defined as those not involved in these technology industries) are impacted by this technology.

When teenagers tell me that they have friends all over the world whom they?ve ?met? on the Internet, I pause. When NBC?s David Gregory has to tweet that he?s having a bagel before he goes on the air, I wonder. When I see people walking down the street with headphones on, I question. When research has shown that young people spend nearly six hours a day in front of a screen outside of school, I worry. I ask myself, is that life they?re engaging in? I guess it depends on how you define ?life.?

I see life as connecting with the world directly rather than through a conduit of computer and communication technology. Life is moving something other than my fingers, and experiencing the world with all of my senses, not just with my eyes and ears. It is about connecting with others in a substantial way. Life is about caring deeply about things that directly impact my world. What makes life life for me is its inherent imperfection and untidiness, its intermittent chaos and uncertainty, its occasional blood, sweat, and tears. Can we find that with this kind of technology? I?m not so sure.

Computer and communication technology just feels too safe, too clean to me. Whether the anonymity of blog comments, the false intimacy of online relationships, or the ease of hitting Delete or Exit at will, we?re able to hold life (as I define it) at arm?s length with this technology. There?s little messiness, little disorder (except when I get disconnected!), only the linear perfection (well, maybe not perfection) of circuitry, wiring, and radio waves.

Don?t get me wrong, computer and communication technology has been a boon to the work world, increasing productivity and efficiency dramatically. I certainly couldn?t do what I do without this technology. The Web and email have enabled me to reach an audience that wouldn?t have been possible 20 years ago. I spend hours each day on my computer writing, communicating with colleagues and clients, and maintaining my practice. I was even the lead editor on the publication of a textbook with a colleague whom I have never met nor even spoken with by telephone; the entire book was written and edited on line.

I also use this technology for entertainment. I follow the news, read movie reviews, and follow my favorite sports on line. I email friends, send photos to family, and use Skype to connect my daughters with one of their grandfathers who lives on the East Coast. And, yes, I?m on Facebook.

Yet when I?m immersed in computer and communication technology, I feel somehow disconnected from life. I feel like I?m in a purgatory, not outside of life, but not living life fully either. I?m being productive and I?m being entertained, but not fully wrapped in the fabric of life. When I check my email or surf the Web, I feel like I?m cheating on life. I really should be with my family or exercising or doing chores around the house or doing something?substantial.

Maybe that?s the problem. Computer and communication technology functions two dimensionally while life is three dimensional. Yet because of the splendid technology, there is the appearance of three dimensions. I like to use the expression, ?getting hip deep in life.? Well, as an end user, I can?t get that mucky with this technology because, though it has length and width, it lacks depth.

My concern is that too many people, particularly young people who haven?t known life without mobile phones, the Internet, or iPods, equate computer and communication technology with life. They spend hours listening to music, watching YouTube, texting, tweeting, and playing games on line. This technology certainly gives us an easy distraction from the pressures or just plain mundaneity of daily life. That?s not inherently bad; we all need a break from life periodically. Who am I to judge whether playing World of Warcraft or hanging out on some technology Web site is worse than reading, running, or meditating. But when ordinary people are spending much of their leisure time absorbed in this technology, then it may not be just a respite from life, it may become an escape from life. Yes, life is messy and difficult and painful sometimes, but without such untidiness, there can also not be inspiration, joy, and contentment. Better that than the antiseptic numbness of a virtual life, in my view.

Even worse than escaping from life, computer and communication technology may, in the process, become life itself. Computer and communication technology gives us ?virtual? reality which means ?almost like or very similar to, but not quite the same as.? This technology can give us something like life, but not exactly life (e.g., virtual relationships). It is missing those essential ingredients that I described above that I define as life. I guess more than anything, what is missing is engagement in something of personal meaning and value, and a deep connection with others.

But, hey, I guess I?m old school (I grew up in a time when we had three black-and-white television channels and eight-track tapes were the future of audio recordings). Maybe I need to get with the times. Perhaps life needs to be redefined to include computer and communication technology. I don?t have a problem with that. With every advance of civilization, humanity has had to adjust to fit the new world order. And we will certainly make that paradigm shift as well.

Computer and communication technology does and will continue to play a powerful and mostly positive role in our lives. The key for me is that it should provide brief diversions from life and, most importantly, be a tool to enhance our lives, but it should not be the most important part of life or, dare I say, become life itself. Because, for all that this amazing technology has to offer us, it will never, in my view, be a substitute for the life that I remember as a child, however old school and quaint that may seem.

Disclaimer: I am an AT&T customer with a data plan. I?ll do my best not to let this ?conflict of interest? interfere with my opinions expressed below.

You have to hand it to AT&T; they?ve got chutzpah! That, by the way, is not a formal psychiatric term. I could have said that AT&T is delusional, grandiose, or narcissistic, but everyone understands chutzpah.

In any event, a few days ago, The Boy Genius Report reported an internal email (later confirmed in an article by Information Week) indicating that AT&T will require data plans for all smartphone purchases beginning in September. This new development seems to be just another nail in the coffin of the already-tarnished reputations of mobile-technology carriers in the U.S. Recent stories have highlighted criticism of the industry for high pricing, excessive profits, exclusivity, poor coverage, and reduced capital investment. The federal government is concerned enough to begin investigations by Congress and the FCC. My fellow ComputerWorld writer Mike Elgan went off on the wireless industry a few weeks ago with his well-informed rant on the ?10 things I hate about you.?

But I digress. This post is about AT&T?s internal email of this change, which is as fine a piece of malarkey as I have seen in a while, filled with illogic, circular reasoning, and just plain dishonesty. So let?s parse their memo:

To read the rest of my post, please visit my blog here.

Have you ever thought about how far we’ve come in our ability to connect with others and how far we’ll go? I’ve been thinking a lot about connectivity recently and have always found that looking back to where we came from can help us better understand where we are today and, more importantly, where we may be going in the future.

Consider the evolution of connectivity. We officially became homo sapiens approximately 200,000 years ago. With the emergence of sophisticated language, we were able to communicate with each other face to face in a way that allowed for the emergence of civilization as we now know it. Of course, this connection was limited to, well, shouting distance, but it was a start.

About 4000 years ago, humans developed their first means of non-face-to-face communication with the discovery of smoke signals and then, about 2500 years ago, drums. For the first time, people were able to connect without being in physical proximity to each other. Amazingly, not much changed in communication technology for the next 2300 years or so.

Then, around 1835, Samuel Morse invented the telegraph, setting the stage for the greatest period of technological development in history that, in a relatively short time, has transformed our lives so dramatically. Think about it. The telegraph was a clear precursor to the Internet and the telegram was an early iteration of email.

Alexander Graham Bell’s patent of the telephone in 1876 (many have laid claim to having invented it) enabled humans to converse directly over great distances as if they were in the same room.

The facsimile followed closely in the wake of the telephone, paving ?the way for the immediate transmission of something other than voice. For the first time, documents could be shared at a rate far faster than through the mail (what we now quaintly refer to as ?snail mail’).

Mobile phone technology emerged for commercial use with the car phone around 1979 and progressively evolved to the present where mobile phones are now considered an indispensible part of our lives.

In 1994, the Internet was introduced to the public (it had actually been around since the 1960s) and it has likely been the single greatest leap forward in communication technology, enabling the instantaneous transmission of data, documents, still and moving images, and voice. It has created a veritable torrent of technology that has given us the Web, email, text messaging, and an array of applications, for example, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, and Skype, that have dramatically altered the way we connect.

This brief and, admittedly, incomplete history is obviously not news to most of you, but I wanted to provide a little perspective on how we arrived at the present.

What did all of these communication technologies have in common? They have incrementally enabled us to connect with other people and access more information in more rapid, easy, and less costly ways. And each advancement changed our lives in ways manifest and subtle, direct and indirect, predictable and unexpected. Connectivity may be the most powerful tool in our lives today, with informational, economic, social, cultural, and political impact.

What then of the future of connectivity? What new technologies will be developed that will further change our lives? Perhaps we need look no further than science fiction to see what might become science fact in the not-too-distant future. Will we receive visual and auditory tweets through eyeglasses and ear pieces, respectively? Perhaps 3-D holographic telephone conversations? In the distant future, instead of voice recognition, how about thought recognition?

My concern is not in the technology itself; we cannot and should not try to slow or halt the inexorable march of progress. My interest is in our relationship with that technology and my concern is in how technology will affect us. Will we be passive recipients – dare I say victims? – of technology who allow it to change our lives for better or worse without consideration? Or can we be masters of our technology and deliberately harness its tremendous value while minimizing its risks?

The answer to these questions will depend not only on the technology itself that is developed, but also on our exploration of how new technology will influence our lives. Could anyone have predicted how the latest communication technology would change our lives? Maybe not, but I think it would be worth a try. Good questions to ask include:

1. What are our goals for this technology?
2. How will it influence how we interact with others?
3. How will it affect how we use our time?
4. What benefit will it bring to us?
5. What costs might arise from its use?
6. How can developers prepare us to best use this technology?

Yes, let us continue to nurture emerging technology to further connectivity. But the journey of progress shouldn’t be guided by developers and engineers alone. Such a trip leaves behind other important aspects of connectivity, namely, our relationship with the technology itself, where the risk is that the technology will lead us a down a road of unintended consequences rather than our leading the technology down a road of our choosing.

Let’s not forget that technology is not an end in itself, but rather a means to an end. What is that end? Enhancing the quality of our lives. Yet can we can say unequivocally that the latest technology has done that? I’m not so sure. With that purpose in mind, bringing technologists together with those who reside at the nexus of technology and humanity, for example, experts from psychology, philosophy, and sociology, would be invaluable in answering these questions. Though computer and communication companies use neuroscientists in the “micro” development of technology (e.g., GUIs) and there is some academic study of these issues, I haven’t found anything to indicate that technologists are exploring the “macro” side of technology (please correct me if I’m wrong).

Such a collaboration would serve two essential purposes. First, by fully understanding the relationship between technology and people, developers will actually create technology that will better serve our needs. Second, such a collaboration will increase the chances that we will understand the ramifications of new technology and ensure that it will provide the utmost benefit to humanity with only a minimum of costs.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock lately, you’ve heard that Twitter was the victim of a cyberattack causing the popular social media to shut down for two hours last week. Well, if you live in the Land of Twitter you would have thought that it was 9/11 all over again. CNN.com quoted one Twitter user as saying, “I was pretty upset, actually. It feels like a lifeline for me.” ” It’s like my heart was gone” and “I felt so empty inside,” came from several other Tweeters. “Naked” and “jittery” were also used to describe how Tweeters felt during the blackout.

To read the rest of my post, please visit my blog here.

Talk about hitting a man when he’s down, literally and figuratively. Did you read the New York Times article on Friday about the surge in attacks on the homeless, many by so-called thrill offenders? There’s even a genre of on line entertainment called “bum fight” videos that get posted on the Internet. In other words, young men beat up and set fire to these helpless victims for fun and profit. If I weren’t such a civilized person, I would suggest a public flogging for all those convicted and their being forced to wear a t-shirt that reads: “I’m mean and I’m stupid.”

The article reminded me of an appearance I made on Fox News a few years ago where I was asked to comment on a case in which two teenage boys videotaped themselves getting their five-year-old nephew high on marijuana while the child’s mother was sleeping in the next room. Like the homeless assaults, such a profound and wanton of irresponsibility, callousness, and stupidity made me really wonder what how civilized our society actually is.

During my Fox News appearance, I emphasized that the perpetrators should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. At the same time, I suggested that such thoughtless acts do not occur in a vacuum. Somehow, these young men-and they are almost always young men-got the message that it is not only okay, but downright fun to take prey on people who are helpless to fight back. I added that our society holds some responsibility for these action as well. The legal pundit on the show immediately challenged me, asking who or what in our society told those two boys to get their young nephew high. But she was seeing the trees, but missing the forest. Of course, our society didn’t teach these young men those specific behaviors, but it does send powerful messages, through parents, peers, and the media, about what is acceptable and what is not. These boys, and those who beat the homeless, somehow “missed the class” in which they subject was responsibility, compassion, empathy, and decision making.

There are likely a variety of contributors to such antisocial behavior. Poor education, economic hopeless, lack of an intact family, and a sense of disenfranchisement among young men can all “prime the pump” from which this senseless violence pours. Add in a popular culture that worships violence and plenty of unhealthy role models to turn to in film, music, and video games, and you have a boiling cauldron of frustration and anger with no healthy outlet.

So the question is: how do we get these and other young men to get the message? Yes, appropriate punishment is required for those who act so stupidly and cruelly. But deterrent has not proved to be effective. We need to understand the causes of this behavior and develop interventions that attack the root causes. But before that can happen we need to get the same message that we want these young men to get, that we as a society are partly culpable for their actions. Once we can accept that responsibility, we then have the power to institute change. We must look at ourselves as a society in the mirror, honestly assess what kind of culture we have created, and ask ourselves whether this is the culture in which we want to live and raise our children.

Am I optimistic about changing our culture for the better? At a macro level, sadly, no. There are just too many forces out there that are too powerful, mainly a popular culture that cares nothing about people and only about making money. Yet I retain hope at the micro level, with families, schools, and houses of worship. My greatest hope is that enough people will “think globally, but act locally” until the tide turns toward a society in which such obvious values as responsibility and compassion are the assumption, not the exception.

Dear Bill,

I know you’ve been retired from Microsoft’s day-to-day operations for about a year now and Steve B. is running the show, but you are still Chairman of the Board and the public identity of Microsoft. That’s why I’m writing you, Bill, because Microsoft is still your company and it needs you. Think modified Pottery Barn rule: you own it, you broke it, you fix it.

To read the rest of my letter to Bill Gates, please visit my blog here.

A hundred years ago, Sigmund Freud developed the notion of the projective test, like the Rorschach, as a means of indirectly assessing people’s psyches and identifying their deepest needs and emotions. Though the value of projective tests has been questioned, I would suggest that such formal tests aren’t necessary anymore. We need look no further than television (let alone celebrity magazines, the Internet, and spectator sports) to find out what’s on the minds of Americans these days. So, in the name of increasing our understanding of what makes America tick, I thought it would be interesting to put the television-viewing habits of America on the couch and see what we can learn.

The hot trends in American television these days fall into five general categories: procedural crime shows, shows related to supernatural occurrences and abilities, and reality TV. The popularity of these types of shows opens a window into the current American psyche that is both fascinating and troubling.

The nature of procedural crime shows, for example, the Law & Order and CSI franchises,? is that there are bad guys on the loose-murderers, kidnappers, rapists-and a crack (and very attractive) team of good guys, led by a man or woman of principle and wisdom (is it any wonder that the leaders of several of these teams have names such as Gideon, Jordan, and Horatio?) who persevere against immense odds to solve the mystery and catch the bad guys, all in a neat and tidy 60 minutes.

The fact that these shows dominate the Neilson ratings says something more about America than just that these shows are entertaining. Whether from the threat of terrorist attacks, catastrophic natural disasters, or economic uncertainty, many Americans feel great doubt and fear for their immediate safety and future well-being. It seems as if every time we turn on the television, open a newspaper, or go on line, the bad guys are winning. Whether it’s the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan or the economy, it’s easy to feel unsafe and hopeless in the face of such bad news. More than ever, in this unpredictable and dangerous world, many Americans need clarity and comfort in fantasy where it doesn’t exist in reality. Procedural crime shows offer us this certainty and predictability; viewers know what will happen every episode-the good guys always win!-and isn’t that a relief and reason for hope?

The latest genre of television shows that has gained popularity are those in which the good guys not only win every time, but, to remove any doubt at all of the outcome, they are endowed with special powers that guarantee their triumph over the evil doers, for example, Smallville, Medium, and Ghost Whisperer. And did you ever notice that few of the bad guys have superpowers too? Why not? If the good guys do, why don’t the baddies? That’s not fair. But we need that imbalance for two reasons. If only the heroes have superpowers, then we are guaranteed that they will always win, thus providing even more certainty about the world to viewers than the regular procedural crime shows. Also, in such a scary world where many Americans feel powerless to change it and many have lost faith in others to protect us, the notion that there are superhumans out there-even if only on television-makes us feel safer and more secure. Children have always enjoyed this sort of fantasy in superhero comic books, but now it’s the adults who need that comfort.

Last, but far from least, reality TV (e.g., American Idol, Survivor) presents an entirely different projective test with which to diagnose America. Reality TV isn’t reality at all, but rather offers viewers an alternative universe vastly different than the reality in which Americans live. In the real world, many people are old, unattractive and overweight, but on reality TV most everyone is young, attractive, and slim. In the real world, success takes time and comes from talent, hard work, and perseverance, but on reality TV, people become rich and famous quickly and with little ability or effort. In the real world, life can be routine and boring, but on reality TV, life is a whirlwind of excitement and drama. In the real world, love develops infrequently and in fits and starts, but on reality TV, love occurs often, easily, and between perfect strangers in a matter of days. In the real world, it isn’t acceptable to be dishonest and mean to people, but on reality TV, deception and cruelty is not only encouraged, but admired.

Reality TV transports viewers to a place where life is interesting and exhilarating, and anything and everything goes. Reality TV, with its preoccupation with humiliation and schadenfreude, also makes viewers feel just a little bit better about their own lot in life because their lives-however mundane they may be at times-sure are better than being one of those pathetic losers they see on reality TV every week. In sum, reality TV presents a guilty-pleasure fantasy world where all of the winners (which the viewers would be, of course) are young, attractive, sexy, talented, rich, and famous (and the losers are those other people), where we are all happy, and where we can treat others any way we want; as Freud might put it, reality TV is our Id unleashed.

All three of these popular genres of television shows are a projection of anxiety and discontent that many in America experience from feeling insecure, insignificant, unsatisfied, and powerless in their lives. No wonder tens of millions of Americans have such a strong desire to escape to a world in which we are both safe and powerful, and where we can live exciting, noteworthy, and hopeful lives.