
Bathroom Monologue: He Has To Wonder At 130 - mcantor
http://johnwiswell.blogspot.com/2011/01/bathroom-monologue-he-has-to-wonder-at.html
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bradleyland
The story implies that the more accessible information is, the less you
"wonder". I've found it to be the opposite. As a child, my appetite for
information led me to read encyclopedias for leisure activity, but as the
internet came in to my life, my imagination was set ablaze. Words are paper
are great for recording history and conveying it back serially, but when you
want to make lateral jumps from bridges, to caissons, to the bends, to oxygen,
to chalcogens, to ...

You get the idea. The more accessible information is, the more you wonder.

~~~
JeanPierre
>> _The story implies that the more accessible information is, the less you
"wonder"._

This is a good story with multiple good interpretations. I myself read the
story as a warning against working all day and being available through
cellphones, intracells and whatnot:

 _Without intracell assistance, his natural hearing is so weak that he misses
all the grinding and screaming around him. He wonders what this feeling is
called._

People need silence and peace. We need to let our brain relax once in a while.

You could interpret it as a "back to nature"-story. You could also interpret
the story to tell us that we don't have to think as much as we did earlier: We
use the Internet and other means of communication to find the answers we are
looking for. When we don't have those tools available, we have to think. Your
interpretation is yet another good interpretation.

~~~
jonah
"When we don't have those tools available, we have to think."

1) And remember.

How many people's phone numbers do you have memorized? Far fewer than you did
before they were all programmed into your phone's address book.

2) I'll think.

I think I'll stop reading the NY Times on my phone for a while and instead
take those times to ponder.

~~~
kiba
We have limited capacity for memory. We use our memory for something else.

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ewjordan
What I find really interesting is that despite the fact that nothing in this
story indicates that things have gotten in any way worse for people - to the
contrary, it appears that at every step except the last, people are perfectly
happy with what technology is doing for them - almost every one of the
comments on that blog is about what a scary horrible vision of the future it
is, and _dear God!_ someone do something to make sure it doesn't happen.

It makes perfect sense for people to be frightened when a story is about how
we screwed up the future by arrogantly pushing the limits of technology,
Skynet and all that.

But there's no war here, no famine, there's not even a computer enslaving us
or keeping us as pets. Just chips in people's heads helping them do what they
want.

Oh, the horror...?

~~~
dools
It's a message about how technology increasingly disconnects us from the
natural world, and from our own nature as humans.

The key message I take away from this is that the longer we allow ourselves to
continue along a path this path of disconnection, the more jarring the
(inevitable) reconnection will be when it arrives.

Food for thought.

~~~
DanI-S
Technology also has the power to connect us with the natural world in ways
never thought possible. I can gaze into the innards of a cell from my desk, or
explore the deepest reaches of the night sky with the augmented view provided
by a mobile phone.

Arguably, all of the developments in his post were allowed by a _greater_
understanding of nature and our role in it.

We're becoming capable of connecting with nature on far deeper terms; as
participants rather than spectators. The desirability of that is a personal
issue; many of our fears of it probably stem from the idea that 'playing God'
is bad.

~~~
dools
NB: This is i reply to heed above as well.

Firstly to address the point about human action being "part of nature": of
course we are members of the natural world however I think the "disconnection"
here that I'm picking up on the in the story is the archetypal story of
disconnection told in Genesis. Getting kicked out of the garden of eden (a
state of perfect and ineffible natural harmony) for eating from the tree of
the "Knowledge of Good and Evil" (gaining sentience through our evolving
brains and become Directors rather than Actors).

Note I'm not actually a religious person but this is certainly an strong story
in the collective psyche of a large part of the human population alive today
so it's not to be ignored.

Secondly to DanI-S I would say that the "connection" you're referring to here
is the "cerebral" connection, or interconnection, illustrated by the
burgeoning information economy in the story, and not a physical or emotional
connection, illustrated by the "grass on the toes".

~~~
DanI-S
You're right, but at some level toes are just a high-bandwidth interface
between your brain and the world ;)

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lkrubner
This is offered:

"At 120: less than 3% of respondents under thirty do not have “at least some”
of their emotions digitally regulated."

I live in 2011, where more than a third of the population has been exposed to
chemical anti-depressants. I can think of arguments against chemical anti-
depressants, but I can not think of arguments against the overall goal of
helping people with depression. There is the larger goal, too, of helping
people manage with their lives, and all of the emotions, some quite painful,
they must face.

~~~
dools
To me this is a symptom of the totally unnatural effect of urbanisation. It'll
come good - once we all have high speed internet we'll move out to the country
and start growing our own food again :)

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prodigal_erik
Depends on what you're actually cutting yourself off from. Wondering about
ideas is creativity, but wondering about facts is merely ignorance.

