

The lost world of physicality - jgrahamc
http://blog.jgc.org/2011/08/lost-world-of-physicality.html

======
thaumaturgy
Since nobody else has directly brought this up so far: our perceptions are
strongly distorted by our environment. If you tend to spend a lot of time at
the computer, you will tend to think that everyone else spends a lot of time
at the computer.

I live in a semi-rural area (Grass Valley, CA; local population approximately
25,000). Here, the neighborhood kids get together on my street and play
outside. On the weekends in the Summer, the local highways have boats on
trailers, headed out to the various local lakes for the day. The locals that
don't have a boat all congregate at one of the various local rivers during the
Summer, and hang out with their dogs off their leashes and chat with each-
other and jump off of cliffs into questionable landing areas.

I needed to get away for a bit last weekend, so some friends and I went hiking
deep in the mountains and bagged some 8,000-foot buttes while we were there.
Along the way, we met a bunch of other people out having fun too, including a
small, but full, campground of folks. Here, there are farmers' markets
somewhere almost every day, and big street events downtown. There seems to be
a kind of informal local contest to see who can put on the biggest events.
Last weekend, while I was out hiking, we had the brew fest (which is usually a
pretty big attraction), and the "Miner's Picnic", which also gets a good draw.

I have a couple of tickets to go and see a local production of "Rosencrantz
and Guildenstern Are Dead". I'm trying to improve my juggling skills, so I
hang out with some locals for a "circus jam" in one of the local parks every
Sunday afternoon. On Tuesdays and Fridays I get together with some older
friends and we play Go for a few hours at one of the various cafes. My
girlfriend goes out to various places throughout the week and sets up her
massage chair and offers $1/minute massage to interested people.

Yes, there are people here who spend a lot of time behind computers. I'm one
of them. There are kids who spend a lot of time playing video games. I've met
some of them. But, that's not the whole picture, and I know it's not, because
I go out and participate in and experience everything else that's going on
here.

I've also seen these dichotomies-of-community in lots of other places, too:
San Diego, the East Bay, Seattle.

If you feel like other people are spending too much time in the virtual world,
or that the virtual world is overtaking the physical one, or that experiences
are being cheapened somehow, or that there's too much fear among people ...
you need to get out more. :-)

~~~
TheSOB88
So you're saying that kids aren't outside less than they were a generation
ago? That people don't interact with the physical world less, opting instead
to interact with their phones?

Are you saying I'm blind?

~~~
thaumaturgy
No. I'm saying exactly what I said.

> _Yes, there are people here who spend a lot of time behind computers. I'm
> one of them. There are kids who spend a lot of time playing video games.
> I've met some of them. But, that's not the whole picture..._

------
glhaynes
Fisking mode on, devils-advocate-to-some-extent option engaged.

 _I think that the world of TV, computers, video games has caused us to lose
our connection with the physical world. Add on top of that fear: fear of
letting children play in the street, fear of chemistry sets, fear of
ultraviolet light. This combination means that people (and especially the
young) spend hours indoors away from the physical world immersed in virtual
worlds._

In my experience (and I'm only talking about my own experience), the fear is
driven by "predators". People aren't significantly more worried by actual dirt
than they used to be — kids in my neighborhood are filthy often. But there's a
perception that there are dirty perverts behind every corner ready to snatch
your kid from you — it's not so much of just a concern as much as a near-
certainty. This is driven by "news" shows that focus on the handful of
negative events out of the billions of positive ones - in other words, it
doesn't at all reflect the reality than one sees in statistics. But, many
people aren't statistically minded. Some kids are definitely losing out
because of this. All we can do is allow our own kids the reasonable freedom
that they're entitled to… I see many people doing so.

 _Books: as books move to electronic form they take on a different meaning.
The words of the book transcend and the physical presentation is lost. On the
Kindle every book is Twilight. In the real world the physical book has a
meaning of its own: it's the book your wife gave you as an anniversary
present, it's the book your late father got part way through and you dare not
remove the bookmark he left in place, it's the children's book read and read
until the pages are torn and worn. These physical remnants augment the book
with personal meaning._

Speak for your own ebook reader - mine isn't filled with Twilight. Are more
people buying Twilight than deep eternal classical philosophical works? No
doubt, but that's not at all necessarily related to medium.

 _Sex: what happens when pornography becomes the default means of getting
sexual pleasure. Does fantasy start to wither in the brain? If every fetish or
desire is available (for free) at the touch of a button what happens when we
are presented with a real other person to have sex with. And what's the cost
of reality not matching screen fantasy?_

Masturbation has always been the default means of getting sexual pleasure.
It's assisted more now and I agree that's something to be cognizant of. But I
remember wails a few years back of how rape was skyrocketing as corner
convenience stores started selling pornography. I don't have the numbers in
front of me, but my understanding is that rape, like most violent crime, is
decreasing and is (in developed countries) at pretty low levels historically.

While we're theorizing, we could speculate that many peoples' sex lives are
better now: as (widely-desired) taboos are normalized, more people get to
engage in them. How many married couples have gone through life both wanting
and desiring "more" (more pleasure, more intimacy, more "dirty", etc) but
neither getting it because they both considered it off-limits? I've known far
more couples whose sex lives have been improved by watching porn together than
the opposite.

 _Making: as a child I had Lego, Play-Doh, and other toys to occupy my hands.
Now imagine that these are all virtualized and I play with them on screen.
There's no difference felt in my hands between them. No texture, smell and
pliability of Play-Doh, no satisfying click of Lego, no hunt for the right
coloured piece. If an infinite amount of virtual stuff is available does my
imagination atrophy? If I can always find the right coloured, right sized Lego
piece is this an advantage or a loss because I'm no longer forced to invent?_

If you ever build a technological thing that makes kids not play with Lego and
Play-Doh, it'll be because it's _so_ immersive, fun, and imagination-
stimulating that they don't want Lego and Play-Doh anymore. Every kid I see is
surrounded by technology but still loves playing with these physical things
too.

 _Children: as an adult man I'm now viewed by many to be a threat children. I
can't be seated next to a child flying alone on a flight. I'm afraid to talk
to a child in the street, and we've seen schools instituting policies against
any sort of physical contact between children and teachers._

I agree: this is a huge problem. It doesn't seem, though, to be driven by
technology but by its offshoot, media. I don't know what the answer is here.
As above, I guess it's about making people statistically-driven rather than
anecdote-driven. Good luck with that. Horror is more exciting than mundane
news about the world being OK. As long as you have a free media, you're going
to have this problem. Only possible remedy I see is a heavy educational
emphasis on making statistically-based decisions.

~~~
heynk
Thanks for pointing out some of the more anecdotal evidence from this article.
I wish there was some data to compare things instead of it seeming like
'things were better in the good old days.'

One thing that is for certain is that obesity is a huge problem for younger
generations. Part of that may be from less physical activity, but it is also
no doubt due to recent food innovations that taste better, are cheaper, and
are way worse for you.

Yes, kids these days text more than they talk on the phone, which is more than
they probably talk in person. But if you look at it from the broader picture,
plenty of aspects of life are the same as they've always been. For high school
and college kids, the 'epitome of fun/social' is still going to parties. We
have better/more porn to watch, but the end goal will always be to have sex
with real girls. Sure, some kids grow up behind a computer and become very
socially awkward, but were there really no shy and awkward kids before
computers?

Action sports have taken off in the past twenty years, where 'physicality' is
the center of it all. And its due to no small part of technology, which
creates better equipment and increases exposure to actually make the sports
more physical than they ever were.

The kids are still alright. Look at what kids still value as 'cool.' Not the
video gamers, but the athletes. Being fat will never be 'cool.' Real social
activities are always regarded as more fun then online chatting.

~~~
epochwolf
> Yes, kids these days text more than they talk on the phone

OT: What age range is this?

I'm 24 and the only texts I get are from CloudKick (server warnings) and
Google Voice (voicemail transcripts).

~~~
true_religion
You're 24, in what way do you think your age group would be considered part of
"kids".

~~~
epochwolf
Because my grandparents and a number of people a generation younger than them
have included me in the "kids these days" group. :)

------
joshklein
The OP would do well to read "Walden" by Henry David Thoreau or, perhaps more
pointedly, read up on the teachings of Epicurus[1]. And, more generally, I
highly recommend "The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work" by Alain De Botton. And
then there's the defining entry from 1960's philosophy, "Zen and the Art of
Motorcycle Maintenance" by Persig, which is precisely about the intersection
between nature and technology.

These concerns with modernity go pretty far back in our history, and some very
smart people have come up with workable solutions you can adopt as an
individual without needing to go change society.

[1]<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epicurus>

~~~
sheeps
Another relevant one is E.M. Forster's "The Machine Stops":

<http://archive.ncsa.illinois.edu/prajlich/forster.html>

~~~
jgrahamc
Thank you both for these suggestions. I recall reading E. M. Forster's story
at school and my contribution to English class was that he was wrong about
there being a separate button for everything: in reality things would have
been multiplexed and the person would have used a keypad or similar :-)

I have not read Walden. Will put it on my Kindle.

~~~
keithpeter
"I have not read Walden. Will put it on my Kindle"

I think that sentence sort of encapsulates what you are saying in your
article. It certainly pulled me up sharp.

~~~
technomancy
The flip side of this is that without the Kindle, it would have been "I may go
pick up a copy from the public library, if I find myself visiting it soon and
remember this thread when I'm there."

He's a lot more likely to actually get around to reading it when it's
instantly and freely available. Hurrah for the public domain.

------
mixmax
Some six years ago I bought a boat that I now live on. This means that I'm in
daily contact with other people around the harbour that also live on boats.
These people are outside a lot, get a lot of exercise (if you've ever owned a
boat you'll know how much physical work must be endured to keep it ship-
shape), and generally don't sit much behind copmuterscreens.

I've noticed that there are quite a few people that live on boats that are 70+
years old. One of my neighbours, age 69, has just come back from a 2 year
solotrip from Denmark to the mediterranean and back. He sailed alone. These
people are much more fit than the average 30 year old, and they're having a
blast while most other people their age are sitting in a nursinghome.

Anecdotally it seems like a lot of this can be traced back to the hands-on
hard outdoor life that keeps you in shape all year round.

So I'd say that getting out is much more important than people think.
Especially if you're getting older.

~~~
giardini
But such anecdotal observations are often subject to "survivorship bias": you
see only those who have survived and not the 30-to-70 year olds who tried and
died:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias>

------
revorad
Some quick reactions:

To have a fair discussion, you would have to look at both the problems and
benefits of losing physicality. There is a danger of clinging on it to it
purely for nostalgia, which I think is largely the case with books.

My hunch is that kids' imagination will actually expand with virtual worlds.

Another advantage is they will be better educated. Like my wife says, "I wish
I had Google when I was a child. I wouldn't have to believe all the lies my
parents told me to shut me up."

I'm not even sure we will net lose physicality. We will probably just have new
types of physical objects.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Rationalization? Its very much a part of our physical development to interact
with the world. Also emotional formation like empathy depends upon
experiencing physically the results of your actions.

Things we lose by losing physicality:

Reading, hearing stories read to you.

Interacting with others over the media you view.

Spending time in a single environment stimulates imagination, sensory acuity

Respect for the physical world - it hurts to wreck your car, shoot a man,
insult someone face-to-face

The lies your parents told you (mine anyway) were designed to simplify the
world for a 5-year-old. This is necessary. They are moldable, easily confused
and frightened. Let the world occur to them in easy stages, not as a fire-hose
of internet weirdness.

Ultimately I fear a world of socially-inept fat autistic young adults.

The cure? Go fishing. Barefoot if possible.

------
lukev
The trend away from physicality began long before the internet. In fact, the
ability to spend mental energy and effort on non-physical things is quite
possibly one of the defining features of humanity itself.

Stories, religion, relationships, philosophy, basic societal concepts such as
"ownership" or "justice"... all of these are abstractions from physicality.
The invention of writing allowed us to make these abstractions even more
elaborate, as did the rise of the intellectual class and the invention of
printing.

Electronic media is merely the next step on this same journey - it allows us
to manipulate and record even more abstract ideas, and communicate them more
effectively.

In my humble opinion, although physicality and its accompanying physical
experiences are certainly pleasant and integral to the experience of being
alive, the ability to form, manipulate and care about non-physical
abstractions is one of humanity's most noble defining features, and nothing to
be afraid or ashamed of.

~~~
TheSOB88
We are physical beings, and our physical selves are wasting away the more we
neglect them in favor of the electronic world.

Sigh... We were not meant to sit around and play video games all day. Our
brains and bodies just don't respond effectively to it. It's not healthy.

~~~
lukev
We are physical beings, but we are not _just_ physical beings.

Playing video games may well be a waste of time, but it's not because they're
not physical. All the accomplishments which I admire most are informational or
abstract in nature, not physical.

------
boredguy8
This passage seems relevant as it points at the contours of what I take to be
the underlying 'problem' that the OP hints at with the litany of questions.
It's also an interesting background from which to approach the writings of
people like Kurzweil. There is, it seems, a deep desire to escape our bodies.
The drive is present in many religions and it is present in futurism of
diverse sorts. Lastly, the final sentence seems especially relevant at a time
when it seems that most 'misfortunes' get transformed into 'moral failings'.

From the essay "Really Bad Infinities", in the journal parallax, written 1999:

In ‘Body Fluids’, an essay as remarkable for its prescience as for its rigour,
Isabelle Stengers and Didier Gille ask in the context of what we have come to
know as safer sex discourse in the AIDS pandemic:

    
    
      What will we say to those who ignore advice and continue to make contacts
      known to be at risk? Will we treat them as irresponsible, to be lectured to,
      put under observation, and converted? In that case, our future scenario is
      assured: that of the child in the glass bubble, for whom the outside envi-
      ronment means death; that of the obsessional struggle against all unmonitored
      contact as potentially the source of death.‘
    

Much has happened in the fourteen years since Stengers’s and Gille’s essay
ﬁrst appeared. We have learned, for example, that the pandemic is
interminable, that we are, and will be, in what we call our being, of AIDS
(with the full force of the partitive: we belong to AIDS as its ownmost), and
that we can therefore no longer think of the future as the restoration of a
putatively uncontaminated past; we have learned, perhaps, that so-called safer
sex is not a state of being, and that latex is no guarantee of immortality;
we, some of us, have learned the hard way (there being no easy way) the
existential irrelevance of both hope and despair; we have learned that the
fact that we both are and possess bodies means that our bodies are our
unavoidable exposure to danger, that there never is, has been, nor can be a
place of safety; more, that the fact of our embodiment is the fact of our
utter nontranscendence, our ﬁnitude. And we have had to live the future
scenario of which Stengers and Gille warned us in 1985; absolutely nothing has
happened to deprive their question and their warning of their cogency, for we
have seen technical advice pertinent to our pleasures pressed into the service
of a thoroughly authoritarian, albeit thoroughly stupid, moralism. Indeed,
safer sex discourse, including not only verbal admonition but an entire range
of material and institutional practices, has become an essential part of an
entire scientific medical technology of social control such that all illness,
disability, and death itself have become essentially moral failings rather
than misfortunes.

~~~
patrocles
Perhaps; the medical industry follows our collective choices.

Say we eat more and grow obese, industry then works hard on maintaining
sclerotic, clogged arteries and other over-sizing-related sequelae. Or we
choose to have unsafe sex, so we get better at treating STDs.

Ultimately, medical industry expands to support an ever-increasing number of
human configurations. Financing this expansion aside, we are witnessing an
evolution of the human form.

Nature doesn't provide an unchanging measure by which we can gauge our overall
fitness. Luckily, the OP wishes to provide one for us.

------
rsaarelm
_On the Kindle every book is Twilight._

What does this even mean?

Text is already digital (made solely from a discrete alphabet), all about
setting up a completely artificial virtual reality of sorts, and not
fundamentally tied to any specific physical medium. Strangely, I nevertheless
don't see many of these types of essays condemning novels on the same breath
as social networking and video games.

~~~
pointyhat
I think it means that everything is mediocre crap.

(bar 1984 which goes missing).

~~~
bricestacey
I wonder if anyone making that claim actually owns a Kindle. After buying a
Kindle, I am reading a lot of older texts that are out of copyright and are
far superior to most of today's crap.

~~~
rsaarelm
I suppose the sort of person who always makes sure everyone can easily notice
they are presently reading _Gravity's Rainbow_ or _Infinite Jest_ won't quite
welcome the Kindle with open arms.

------
jsvaughan
Well, my 3 and 1 year old also have playdoh and lego, and love playing
outside. And can also play Angry Birds.

If the physical world is being 'lost' then an alternative cause (in the UK at
least) might be the amount of it available per person because of increased
densities of living.

Wolfram Alpha shows:
<http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=uk+population+density>

2011 - 663 people per square mile

1911 - 425 people per square mile

~~~
arethuza
One thing to note is that access to "wild" land in the UK is generally a lot
easier today than it would have been in 1911.

The high level population density in the UK is pretty misleading because quite
significant chunks of the country are fairly lightly populated - making us all
cram into what parts are left (e.g. the Central Belt of Scotland).

~~~
hessenwolf
Wouldn't that mean the population density is underestimated?

~~~
swombat
It does, but it means it's also a misleading statistic within the context of
this argument, because the high population density (600 people per square
mile) would indicate that you can't ever walk 50 meters in one direction
without bumping into someone. In fact, you can easily walk miles without
meeting anyone - if you go into the countryside. On the other hand, you won't
be able to walk anywhere near 50 metres without bumping into someone in a town
centre.

~~~
arethuza
I think my record, at least so far, is walking for four days in the Highlands
in winter without meeting anyone. Not bad for an island that people generally
consider as rather densely populated.

~~~
hessenwolf
Yes... a flat density statistic is fairly useless to describe somewhere like
Britain, although perhaps it is a weak proxy for relative density, because
most places will have density variations.

p.s. did you just walk around in a circle, though?

~~~
arethuza
It was a fairly devious route from Achnashellach to Ullapool stopping for a
few nights at the utterly gorgeous Lochan Fada so I could climb the
surrounding mountains then up to Ullapool.

It was early April, bitterly cold and very deep snow. Usually those mountains
are pretty busy - but I had the whole area to myself.

------
RyanMcGreal
> The virtual world is clean, colourful, free of danger and effortless.

Actually, the virtual world is highly dangerous: the life-long risks of
sedentary inactivity are well understood. From a risk management perspective,
I'll take the dangers of the real world any day.

------
usedtolurk
My parents were always worried that I "spent too much time on the computer",
but it was always balanced by weekend outdoor pursuits in mountains and
rivers. Both did me a lot of good.

I don't want my children to live in a "risk-free" society with all the
restrictions that it would imply.

We live in semi-wild country on the outskirts of a large flat city with lots
of manicured lawns and pavements. When children visit from the inner suburbs
they trip over a lot because they are not used to running on uneven ground. I
think it's a great pity.

------
icebraining
There was someone in a talk or podcast (damn, when can we get search engines
for our memories?) who discussed the idea of creating physical tokens as
representations of virtual objects or events. With the arrival of cheap 3D
printers, there is now the possibility of making personalized tokens.

As for offered books, I think hardcovers will become the tokens; for example,
for Cory Doctorow's _With a Little Help_ (which I've never read), the
hardcover edition comes with an SD card with the ebook and even a audiobook.

And the reality is that at least for me, only one in ten books or so actually
have any meaning besides the content; most are just books I bought for myself
for no special occasion, and I don't really benefit from the space they take.

------
corin_
jgc, some of your thoughts in this piece are worded badly, implying a
(possibly subconcious) bias which I don't think you intended to be in there -
though perhaps that was purposeful?

For example in paragraph three you have a list for virtual, and a list for
real - "pleasure" appears in one of the lists only, and as it would be clearly
incorrect to imply that virtual worlds cannot give pleasure, it was just left
off that list, which is a subtle suggestion that pleasure is only found in the
real world.

Books, I'm completely with you on that personally, I far prefer actual books
to reading on an iPad or a Kindle, and I'm generally quite sentimental in most
areas ("my dad's watch", etc.) But would losing that be a bad thing? It would
for me personally, because that's how I think now, but if I was brought up not
thinking of these things as sentimental for the object not just for the
content, would I be worse off? Not sure.

Sex: A big leap to suggest that porn will become the default blah blah. And
while I really have no idea what was in the heads of people 40, 100, 500 years
ago, surely we have always been able to imagine pretty much any sexual
scenario for pleasure anyway? And, porn is hardly new in the digital age
(though much more easily accessible, certainly), and we haven't got there yet.

Making: My 9 year old nephew loves playing with his DS, his Xbox, he's always
picked up technology (e.g. iphone use) fast, since he was young. But that
doesn't mean he doesn't enjoy being read to. Or reading himself. Or playing
with lego. Or playing on the swings at the park. Or playing with our train
set. Sure, some kids might never leave the computer screen, but some kids will
also spend _all_ their spare time reading, that doesn't prompt blogs about
books being bad.

Children: I saw your link somewhere here to the flying story, and while some
people may think like that, certainly not everyone.

And ultimately, sitting in front of a screen doesn't have to be bad.
Everything in moderation, etc. Playing video games with friends online is
(less so now, but still to an extent) considered geeky and lacking social
skills, but is it really different from playing football in the park?
(Ignoring the excercise aspect). Does playing with PHP help you improve your
thinking skills more or less than playing with lego? Etc.

------
jgrahamc
Just to add a note of thanks to all the people who have commented in this
thread. Wonderful to see the thoughtful reactions from the HN crowd. Much to
think about.

------
mootothemax
_Real worlds are filled with dirt, hazards, sensation, pleasure, effort and
more. The virtual world is clean, colourful, free of danger and effortless._

Heh, and then come along malware authors, spammers and scammers. I doubt
virtual worlds will be entire free of danger; just as it's possible to break a
leg through stupidity, I imagine it'll still be just as easy to delete
C:\Windows ;)

~~~
khill
You are correct in saying that the virtual world is not free from hazards.
However, the difference is in feedback and evolutionary development.

In the real world, you feel the snakebite or the hot stove burner. When
approached by a stranger or walking through an unknown neighborhood, thousands
of years of predator-prey evolution gives you the feeling that something is
wrong and you should flee.

We haven't evolved these levels of intuition for the virtual world. I can open
a harmless looking email and infect my home network with a virus and never
know it happened. I can't reliably tell if the person I'm chatting with is a
predator or a friend.

------
mnemonicsloth
When the internet was just beginning to show up on the collective radar (ca
1997, let's say), most people saw it as an isolating, anti-social influence.
You could order a pizza over the internet _without ever speaking to another
human being!_ (Except the driver, but that was a minor detail.) The internet
was obviously the thin end of a wedge. Today AOL says "you've got mail,"
tomorrow we're all living in one-person bunkers underground, getting all the
necessities of life from Amazon's delivery robots.

In 2001, I read a rebuttal by a former IT consultant in a contrarian magazine.
People had the same worries about the telephone, she explained. But the urge
to connect with other human beings had survived _somehow_ , eking out a meager
existence on the fringes of society. No amount of advanced technology would
ever be able to kill it off _completely_.

If our social instincts can survive suburbs and the telephone, we'll probably
find an excuse not to drift off into the ether.

------
BenSS
I have to balance my long sessions of hacking and screen time with something
physical. Gym, home projects, or something that's making my body work too. I
know others have experienced the same thing, with different solutions.

Loving the virtual and code isn't a problem, as long as there's an offline
component to balance things.

~~~
cmurdock
This struck a chord with me. I tend follow up long days at work with lifting
sessions in the gym. Helps me get a grip on the world outside the computer
sometimes.

------
Hyena
I have the opposite experience: freed from absolute reliance on physical
objects, my experience and enjoyment of them have multiplied. I find myself
carefully selecting the objects I share space with and I have more time to
wander public space because I'm not tethered to a single location.

~~~
shubble
So you've been doing the minimalist living thing? Do you find yourself
spending more or less time in the virtual world, having made the physical one
a little less comfortable? Also, as an aside, how do you deal with the
expectations of the opposite gender?

------
mahrain
I have considered the same thing, and it's true for me too. Take your office,
for instance: I don't use folders, everything is on the computer. Same for
photos and albums, I don't need to store those, or CDs, LPs and the like. I
have lots of shelf space and closet space to spare.

It took me some time to "back port" the concepts I know to the situation my
colleagues grew up in: they got memo's in in- and outboxes, they read, copied
and replied to stuff that went in folders on a shelf, and projects contained
physical snipplets from newspapers, photograps and typed files to review.
(Thank Mad Men for my insight here.) These went into filing cabinets
alfabetized.

I can hardly imagine the inefficiency!

------
mathattack
This isn't that new of a concept. Parents have been lamenting kids being lazy
(and too much time in front of the computer, though that's not really being
lazy!) since the start of time.

Relevant to this discussion is Silicon Valley Snake Oil by Cliff Stoll.
[http://www.amazon.com/Silicon-Snake-Oil-Thoughts-
Information...](http://www.amazon.com/Silicon-Snake-Oil-Thoughts-
Information/dp/0385419945)

In 1996 he predates a lot of these ideas by 15 years. And he's gone from
physicist-hacker to Klein Bottle (Mobius bottle?) Maker.
<http://www.kleinbottle.com/>

------
jgrahamc
Ah, I see this is getting some love from the HN crowd. Very interested to hear
people's opinions and very, very interested in original research that covers
any of the topics mentioned.

~~~
wladimir
You might also be interested in Nicholas Carr's blog, he writes about similar
things. I think it is worth following it, if only as a contrast to the tech-
utopianism of HN:

<http://www.roughtype.com/index.php>

~~~
revorad
To me, Carr mostly comes across as trolling.

~~~
wladimir
It's not just baseless ranting (well, not all the time), as he does provide
arguments. But he's very contrarian in this day and age. His views sometimes
border on Luddism :-)

But there is some truth in it. In a way, in our quest for efficiency, comfort
and safety, we are losing touch with nature, and even with the physical world.
I feel that as we become more dependent on technology we become more like
domesticated pets of "the machine".

~~~
revorad
I didn't want to call him a Luddite, as that seems rude, but I'd have to agree
with you.

Of course there is some truth in saying that technology has some unwanted
effects on our lives. But, the question is what alternatives or solutions does
he propose, if any?

You can improve the world by solving problems for a lot of people or you can
improve it by writing books about problems which new solutions may or may not
create. I think Carr has chosen the less useful option, if he is indeed trying
to improve the world and not just trolling.

~~~
_delirium
There is quite a bit of room for interesting middle ground, I think. A lot of
the public debate currently is framed more or less between the "very
optimistic" and "very pessimistic" poles represented, respectively, by Clay
Shirky's _Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age_ ,
and Nicholas Carr's _The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains_.
They make for a nice pair of dueling books, but I'd rather read something with
a bit more detailed analysis about the good and bad parts of a networked age,
and in particular what meaningful choices we can make that are more fine-
grained than "embrace technology" or "reject technology".

~~~
revorad
Agreed. The middle ground is where we have to deal with real data instead of
justifying our preconceived notions. I think that is what the OP is trying to
do with his post - a call for existing studies and data.

------
ctdonath
"On the Kindle every book is Twilight."

Struck me in church, standing there reading the Bible from an iPad, that the
value of sacred texts may fade or alter, being indistinguishable from any
other momentary array of pixels upon a slim universal reader. Being naturally
physcial-focused, my toddler children may come to not grasp the "specialness"
of some books - where I want them to learn value beyond bits and pixels.

~~~
lukev
But the specialness of any book is precisely related to its contents, not its
physical manifestation. The Bible is thousands of years old, and yet even the
oldest physical copies begin to crumble after a few hundred years.

Teaching a reverence for physical objects is in a very real sense
untruthful... the ideas they contain are what should (or ought) to matter.

~~~
ilkandi
I totally disagree. The immediate "specialness" of the hot coffeeshop barista
is not her "spiritual manifestation". Part of the uniqueness is presentation.
Size, shape, weight, age, smell...I'm talking about books... the roughness of
the pages etc. Bookreaders reduce this to a lowest common denominator that
limits sensory bandwidth and cheapens the experience.

Can a person have the same religious fervor with an ephemeral Bible/Koran etc
on a Kindle, as they would for a leather bound, gold-edged King James Version
with the red tassel bookmark? And the cutout pages that let you thumb to the
right chapter? These things should only be tools because in the end we're all
animals. And, trying to virtualize everything limits us to half of our
birthright.

~~~
lukev
I don't disagree that a physical experience is nice, and I'm not even going to
touch the "hot girl" point, since sex _is_ one of the few things that is
almost entirely physical.

But the physical experience of a book is completely orthogonal to the _true_
nature of the book: that is, its content. I actually prefer physical books to
e-texts, I like the experience better. But I don't delude myself that that's
somehow more "true." I also like reading outdoors on a cool autumn day with
the scent of woodsmoke in the air, but that's no more essential to a book than
its physical medium.

The essence of a book is the thoughts contained therein, everything else is
peripheral.

------
scrrr
Not sure what the paragraph about talking to children has to do with the rest.
But I've been seated next to children that traveled alone before so perhaps
it's just your perception? Often if we feel uncomfortable with something, we
make others uncomfortable, too.

~~~
jgrahamc
No, I was referring to this:
[http://www.economist.com/blogs/gulliver/2010/06/british_airw...](http://www.economist.com/blogs/gulliver/2010/06/british_airways_seating_policy)
(see also:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airline_sex_discrimination_poli...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airline_sex_discrimination_policy_controversy))

The point of the children paragraph is that many things are leading people to
keep children indoors (fear of men, fear of the Sun) and this combined with a
virtual world means that they are more and more cut off. At least, that's the
hypothesis. Looking for data.

~~~
narag
It sounds a lot like Asimov's novels. In _Caves of Steel_ humanity lives under
domes and feels unconfortable outside them. In _Naked Sun_ humans inhabiting
another planet have become totally reclusive and never contact others in
person, but using holographic teleconference.

------
kylek
I'm guessing this article is great as the site has been down a while
(congrats! I think?). However, I'd like to read it :), cached version
anywhere?

------
VladRussian
>Sex: what happens when pornography becomes the default means of getting
sexual pleasure.

i stopped reading that rubbish here. If he can't distinguish between sex and
pornography ....

------
Hisoka
A side effect of losing touch with the physical world is that it wrecks your
brain. You begin to feel isolated from the rest of the world. What doesn't
help is the growth of cities, and overpopulation. We start to view other
people as competitors and enemies. Have you ever gone through some days when
you encounter many people, whether it's in a commute, or whatever and ask why
people are so useless in your life? What does he/she matter in your life? Life
has become so impersonal, and it's not our fault. But I think we have to do
something about it, as individuals (not as collective).

In the past, we had tribes. Small communities where everyone felt a sense of
belonging. Why? Because everyone was important to the success of the whole.
You could save the world, because the world was not 1 million people. Everyone
mattered to each other, and everyone had stake in each other's lives.

The world has become something like this:

We RUSH and STRESS to go to places for 40 hours we hate, to work on stuff we
don't like, with people we don't care about.

~~~
masterzora
_Have you ever gone through some days when you encounter many people, whether
it's in a commute, or whatever and ask why people are so useless in your
life?_

No, never. They all fascinate me, instead.

Try this: next time you're in a rush somewhere stop for a minute and look at
the people around you. Try to figure out their stories: who are their families
or friends, why are they out right now and where are they going, what do they
do for a living or in their spare time? You'll rarely, if ever, guess
correctly, but it really helps to remind you of the human factor of everyone
around you.

 _We RUSH and STRESS to go to places for 40 hours we hate, to work on stuff we
don't like, with people we don't care about._

This seems to be the case with far too many people, but it doesn't have to be.

~~~
Hisoka
I've actually tried that. It's not sustainable for me, personally to have that
attitude. There's just way way too many people in this world. I just don't
care about 99% of the people in this world.

------
ristretto
Actually the difference is not that big. It's all in our brain anyway, and
most virtual experiences evoke similar brain responses as real ones (theater,
TV, cinema, mirror neurons etc). What virtual items lose is fine properties
like touch, smell, permanence etc.

I think the bigger problem is both city planning and immobile technology: most
of us are forced to live packed away from the nature in cities planned for the
long-gone industrial era, and until recently we were forced to sit in front of
our heavy information devices. I believe the mobile revolution is going to
bring back a lot of those "physical" elements that we are missing now.

It's not the first time societies face transfomations. We already eat virtual
food, i certainly don't remember slaughtering that many chicken, pigs and cows
lately, and i 've only milked a goat once or twice in my life.

~~~
suprasanna
You bring up some good points with the parallels in the brain however I think
more is lost in the exposure to different experiences that you simply can't
replicate online.

For most, it'll be difficult to differentiate between things (physical books,
library visits, spending time outdoors, etc) that we don't want to leave
behind for nostalgic reasons and things that we shouldn't leave behind because
they help us with maturity, growth, etc.

I'm wondering what people's thoughts are on this. Technological change is a
part of society, yes, but is it always best for the individual?

------
wnight
Sheesh, what do people have against ebooks? And where do they all get the same
fetish for fondling paper?

You can't grep dead trees. Books just aren't as effective. You also can't
store tens of thousands of paper books on a tiny USB stick.

~~~
colanderman
You also can't build redstone computers out of Lego bricks. Capability wasn't
the author's point.

~~~
wnight
But capability is the point of books. If you want a work of art buy a
sculpture/etc.

There's a huge undercurrent of people who romanticize books, I was asking
where/why they came from.

~~~
colanderman
The author answers your question in the article:

"In the real world the physical book has a meaning of its own: it's the book
your wife gave you as an anniversary present, it's the book your late father
got part way through and you dare not remove the bookmark he left in place,
it's the children's book read and read until the pages are torn and worn.
These physical remnants augment the book with personal meaning."

~~~
wnight
Sure. You'd likely have as many sentimental books as you'd have sentimental
tie-clips, rings, photos, favorite songs, etc. But why do some people
romanticize nearly all books?

