Chapter Fifteen: Navigating Virtual World Conflicts: How Electronic Devices Shape Us
Part One: Personal Conflicts with Technology
Don’t use the telephone.
People are never ready to answer it.
Use poetry.
Jack Kerouac 1970 (Scattered Poems)
Readings:
Taylor, J. (2011). Technology: Virtual vs. Real Life: You Choose. Do you lead a mediated life. Psychology Today.
Key Dilemma of Part One:
How can we personally enjoy the benefits of the virtual technological world, without aggravating our connection to the natural world?
Review of List of Navigation Strategies for Seemingly Intractable Conflicts, Differences, and Dilemmas:
Example to help us work through these dilemmas:
My experience with electronic devices is probably similar to yours. They’re great to use to create, communicate, and access resources. They seem to be indispensable in navigating the post-modern world around us. I imagine that those people who cannot afford electronic devices and/or they do not have the patience, or inclination, to operate them effectively, or find solutions to problems that inevitably occur while using them. I fear that their isolation from the cyber-world is going to be a hardship on many levels. It will likely stagnate or lower their income, undermine their careers, and limit their access to vital resources. These limitations will, in turn, negatively impact their health, family and social relationships, as well as longevity. They will be newly victimized and oppressed by this technology, as it increasingly shapes our “civilized” world.
In my direct experience with electronic technology, I believe it has helped my income, career, social and family life in some ways, and harmed these things in other ways. Technology has cost me a lot of money to keep my various electronic devices functioning. This expense has not been fully compensated by my income. It has helped me stay employed, but it has also pulled me away from social connections with colleagues, friends, and family, undermined my feeling more alienated, than successful, in those arenas.
More specifically, when my computer systems go haywire, I feel incalculably powerless, frustrated, and angry. Even though I have been working on computers since the beginning of the personal computer age, which was at full speed in the 1980s, I have not become a computer technician, nor hobbyist, so I easily get lost in the non-intuitive techniques needed to fix problems. I must rely on tech-support people, who are often reading scripts, which often come to an end after hours of waiting for someone to pick up my call and then run through their scripts.
Personally, I have conflicts with my computers quite often. Just lately, I have had the displeasure of ordering a new multifunction printer that would not communicate with my computer. After spending an hour and a half with the tech-support script reader, I was told to send back the printer, and it would be replaced with a “refurbished” printer. When the replacement printer arrived, I discovered that it too would not communicate with my computer, and when I tried to use it as a copier, it jammed repeatedly, never functioning at all. After returning both printers, I received an email saying that one of them was not received, even though I used the label that they sent me. They threatened to charge me for the “missing” replacement printer. I checked with the Better Business Bureau to find that this company has a horrible rating. So, not only am I mad at the company, I’m mad at myself for not going to the Better Business Bureau ratings in the first place (creating a new inner conflict). I can contact my credit card company and challenge the fee, but my experience has been that the credit card company sides with other companies, not consumers.
I have had updates that don’t properly update; technical support that does not properly support. I have had old programs that stop getting updated. I have experienced tech companies that slowly begin to force me to only their programs and hardware that they make. The conflict is similar to human/human conflicts, where one person has vastly more power than the other.
Computers, the companies that make them, and the technical support workers that “help” you, have absolute power over me. I can give the product or company a bad review, but there are programs that can populate review sites with massive numbers of positive reviews. Simply, I feel powerless in these conflicts, like have a conflict with the President of the United States. Powerlessness creates resentment that begins to infect other relationships, spawning more conflicts.
In these kinds of conflicts, there is no current way to find a process to collaboratively work toward transformative communication and restorative justice. I am left with my sad appeals to distant technocrats for their fairness and kindness. Unfortunately, they do not seem to be bothered by getting negative reviews; so what compels them to be sympathetic to me? If their business model is to “first get the consumer’s money; then second, find ways to not give it back,” what recourse do I have? I could try to spend, who knows how much, time trying to locate a consumer advocate, to apply institutional pressure, and threaten the company with a news release. Or I could hire a consumer-affairs lawyer, but that would be cost-prohibitive.
Again, the feelings of powerlessness, rage, and incompetency flood into my otherwise semi- serene mood. In the context of a global economy, consumer advocacy and consumer laws also need to have a global reach. Ideally, there would be globally-accessible, collaborative, processes available to all consumers, where some kind of parity between multinational companies and consumers could begin to be achieved.
Other Voices:
“In the globalized world we have transactions dealing from different parts of the world. They can be protected by only laws which are totally democratically formed; and if they fail to do so, then the people may question their relevancy, and also the government forming such rules.” (Abhinav R. Pisharody, Symbiosis Law School, Hyderabad, The World Journal of Juristic Polity, 2017)
Questions:
1. Are electronic devices more than tools, communication, and resources?
Electronic devices have become embedded into our daily lives. They started out as tools, communication devices and resources. Now they are part of the human community—like a new appendage that has become part of our bodies; they have become necessities for our survival. Even homeless people need cell phones as an important means for their survival. It is no surprise that humans have developed chronic conflicts with their electronic devices. If it was possible to hack into our cell phones, tablets, and computers, and observe the kind of virtual/real world conflicts occurring regularly, we might be shocked at how frequent this phenomenon has become. Cognitive dissonance used to only be within our minds; now we have an additional cognitive dissonance between ourselves and our new computer-appendage. Who do we default too? How do we resolve these conflicts?
2. Can computers think, or are they unthinking slaves at the command of people?
The computers that exist today are simply machines that store and transmit data at the command of human designed programs, and deliver data to humans at their command. This is not thinking because there today’s computers do not have a way to understand the data that it manipulates. Computers only know “meaning” as a data set, not as we understand “meaning” to be our ability to place data into the context of our lives, environments, cultures, and history. “Meaning” means “knowing something in a human context.” Computers only have an unthinking mechanical context, which they cannot know as more than a set of data. Context will never be reducible to a set of data.
In terms of conflict, if I have a conflict with a computer, I am not having a conflict with the machine, as a conscious being, I am having a conflict with its function and data set, which was programed by specific human beings. Therefore, I am having an indirect conflict with inaccessible people. This mirrors the kinds of conflicts that I might have with a multinational corporation. The people who make decisions about how that corporation will interact with my life are inaccessible to me, just as computer programmers are inaccessible to me.
3. How are electronic devices addictions and distractions?
Furthermore, computers can easily become addictions and distractions, undermining family, friend, and work communities. Our culture is already plagued with social dislocation, as people move from school to school, neighborhood to neighborhood, town to town, state to state, country to country, job to job, and continent to continent—maybe even earth to moon, if for some reason, it is economically or scientifically profitable to have a lunar outpost. This dislocation weakens our ties to family, former friends, former coworkers, and former neighbors. In turn, our sense of community and security erodes.
In the face of computer driven news updates, our anxiety increases. Escape from anxiety can easily lead to addictions and distractions. We get addicted to the many interesting features of our electronic devices because it makes us feel good to be distracted from our daily anxieties. The key questions are: First, how do these addictions and distractions get in the way of normal brain functioning (If there is a “normal.”), community membership, physical vitality, productivity, and happiness? Second, if these addictions and distractions have become dysfunctional, what can be done to cure the malady?
4. How is computer technology hyper-logical, abstract, and context-denying?
Computer technology is hyper-logical because everything in this virtual space is a linear progression of cause-and-effect functionality. It is abstracted and mapped, so that the virtual world is divided into infinite categories and resource streams. Idiosyncratic contexts are lost, or glossed-over, when virtual realities reduce the irreducible features of our world to reducible, digital data, and pixels. A photograph or video is not the object photographed or videoed; it is a representation of that object. Neither is an object, an oral story, or live music captured in descriptive words the same as the actual object, story, or music. Computer technology does not treat individual computer users as unique people, nor does it link directly with the natural world. People and nature become data for computer technology to manipulate.
When I have a problem or conflict with computer technology, computer technology does not have a conflict with me, rather computer technology has a conflict with the data that represents me and my problem. This creates an asymmetrical conflict, where the user is up against an inhuman machine and the people who program and maintain it—and the computer support people, who follow scripts to fix problems, and where I am, again, reduced to data and time management.
