Last week I tackled the question of whether or not I’d melt like a belieber clutching the Biebs when meeting my own teenage crush, Cyborg the Teen Titan (given that, of course, Cyborg could crush just about anything).
While the jury is still out on this hefty hypothetical, I thought it would be nice to continue this week on the theme and overarching question of last. That is, can machines and technology teach us anything about the human condition, whether it be neurological, biological, philosophical or psychological?
Examining how paraplegics learn to control and adapt to computer interfaces, intermediaries between firing neurons and mechanical limb movement and how beating hearts are not necessary conditions of normal life last week, today I’d like to walk a psychological track. More specifically, I’d like to highlight the work of Barry Schwartz, professor of psychology at Swarthmore College.
Professor Schwartz may be best known for his book and TED talk, both entitled “The Paradox of Choice.” The crux of his argument is this: Too many types of jeans exist and he wishes someone else would do his shopping. Joking aside, this is essentially the problem we all face (save those hipsters who wear corduroy all the time) living in a society that equates freedom with maximizing everyone’s total number of options. Our theory reads that a choice of ten things grants more liberty than a choice of two.
Before Professor Schwartz debunks this westernized myth, I want to bring technology into the mix, as I promised I would at the outset. Perhaps nothing in the world maximizes our total number of possibilities more than the internet; we sift through myriad articles full of useful and useless information, feel bombarded by scads of multimedia and could buy nearly anything on Amazon (jeans galore, pet tarantulas, the chef-d’œuvre Unicorns Are Jerks: a coloring book exposing the cold, hard, sparkly truth).
On first glance this doesn’t sound like such a bad thing, and according to technologists like Kevin Kelly, the founding executive editor of Wired magazine, it has counterintuitively allowed us to minimize; the amount of technology in our lives diminishes as the technology we do have becomes more capable of fulfilling our wants. We have iPhones instead of GPSs, flashlights, calculators, cameras, etc.
This doesn’t really extend to the internet, however, because of limited censorship, the sheer quantity of information and the multitudes of avenues, a surprising number of which lead me to cat videos. The only limiting factors are creativity and desire. This is a good thing, but it may, according to Barry Schwartz, have unintended consequences.
One such potential consequence is a dissatisfaction with whatever one has chosen to do on the interwebs. For example, since options are virtually limitless, think of all the educational, thought-provoking or hilarious uploads one misses by logging into Facebook -- by logging into anything, really. Missing out is an inescapable result of having everything.
Back to the jean analogy. When Schwartz was given a wide array of pairs to choose from he found a great fit, but at what cost? He didn’t find the best fit, and the more freedom there was in his selection the more this was seemingly attainable. Watered down, the essence looks like this: options make us perfectionists. Freedom comes with the caveat that it might engender a lust for perfection and that you will not attain it.
Even so, I think I’d rather lust for the chimera of the ideal than be without connection to the information the internet holds. I assume that Google raises my quality of life, but is this necessarily the case? Could technology be leading us in emotional and psychological circles?
