Pit Schultz (by way of Pit Schultz <pit@is.in-berlin.de>) on Wed, 10 Jan 96 20:40 MET |
[Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]
Anxieties - Michael Heim |
gopher://jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU:70/00/pubs/pmc/pmc-talk/essays/heim.pt1 ANXIETIES 1. Some PHYSICAL HAZARDS of computers. 1.1. The invisible TOLL ON OUR EYES. The physical hazards of computing remain nearly invisible to the user. We usually look through the interface unawares. We can face the interface only by getting a certain distance from it. At the interface, things look differently. We peer through an electronic framework where our symbols -- words, calculations, simulations -- come under precise control, where things appear with startling clarity. So entrancing are these symbols that we forget ourselves, forget where we are. We become used by the interface. With our faces up against it, the interface is hardest to see. Because information technology fits our minds, it is the hardest of all to think about. Nothing is further from us. We can miss it as easily as we overlook a pair of eyeglasses on the bridge of the nose -- or a contact lens on the cornea. Phosphorescent symbols on the screen hold a hypnotic attraction. So intensely do they attract that human eyes blink less frequently when viewing computer screens. The cornea of the eye requires frequent fluid baths, and eyelids normally bathe and massage the eyeballs by blinking every five seconds. Interacting with a computer calls for concentration, and the sustained stress tends to fix vision in a stare. As blinking decreases, the eye muscles have difficulty focusing. Users also tend to hold their breath when trying to see the screen better. This decreases blood circulation and increases bodily tension. The resulting strain eventually leads to refractive error, most often chronic myopia. Computer use is the latest and most demanding of all the close-up work our life-style promotes. Lenses are symbols of modern civilization. The human eye evolved naturally to focus on distant objects. Looking into the distance, the internal eye muscles relax. Close-up work, on the contrary, causes the eye muscles to reshape the cornea. Protracted close work strains the eye muscles. If the eye strains sufficiently, the muscles undergo spasm, which then changes the actual shape of the eye. With frequent strain, the eye remains in a shape that impairs distant vision. The malady progresses. Once thrown out of shape, the cornea causes poor drainage of the internal eye fluids, which in turn increases the eye pressure and eventually elongates the posterior position of the eye. The result is further nearsightedness. Corrective lenses tend to increase myopia, especially for computer users. Because they bend the incoming light patterns, lenses reduce the visual field by at least six percent, and distort color waves by an even greater amount. Our technologically advanced society promotes a characteristically more nearsighted population. Even though the causes of myopia are partially genetic, the main reason for widespread myopia is the modern need to view things close-up and to fix things through symbols and simulations. The eyestrain at the interface begins with the modern ideal of vision. >From Descartes to Berkeley, the modern understanding of vision inculcates the fixed stare, as David Levin has shown in his study of modern vision. (THE OPENING OF VISION: NIHILISM AND THE POSTMODERN SITUATION, by David Michael Levin, (New York: Routledge, 1988). The classic study of the dynamics of vision and staring is Aldous Huxley's THE ART OF SEEING, (New York: Harper, 1942.) Modern theories of vision assume that the aim of seeing is to dominate, master, and control things. The thing in view is supposed to be a fixed object, an unmoving patch of qualities, a bundle of measurable light quanta. To capture a view, the eye casts an unyielding and unchanging gaze over it. The eye stares. It observes. Like a camera, the eye tries to hold things in a clear and precise focus while keeping them at a distance for observation. With a fixed focus, the eye petrifies the visual event. Contrary to the modern ideal, nothing ever remains absolutely immobile in the field of vision. Seeing requires the constant movement of the eye in tiny shifting motions. The movement is spontaneous, dynamic, and uncontrollable by the conscious will. When relaxed into its own dynamics, the eye continually shifts and enlivens the visual field. The movements of the eye are nearly imperceptible, tiny vibrations called saccades (from the French word for the flickering of a sail in the wind). These saccades last from two one-hundredths of a second to ten one- hundredths of a second. They travel from two minutes of a degree to twenty minutes of a degree (a minute being 1/21,600 of a circle). When your attention pauses on something, it may seem as if your eyes are stationary at that moment. The saccadic dance in fact continues around smaller points, bringing ever new perspectives into the central fovea where vision occurs. The eye continually plays with the light and shade of contrasting backgrounds. The tension of the stare freezes the thousands of tiny shifts and soon leads to distorted or impaired vision. The effort to dominate things visually fails, harming the eye in the process. 1.2. The visible TOLL ON OUR HANDS. The stress of digital writing breeds more than myopia. Because it is intensely interactive and yet nearly frictionless, computer work involves more prolonged strain than pencil or typewriter. You take fewer rest breaks. You have no paper file cabinets to visit, no corrections to make by hand, no variety of physical motions. Fingers just keep moving, repeating the same keystrokes. You hardly notice your unrelieved adaptation to the machine's specifications. The result is a workplace epidemic called Repetitive Motion Syndrome (RMS). The inflamed hand and arm tendons of RMS patients often require surgical operations, and doctors are finding permanent damage to bodily movement in many RMS patients. The word processor is not merely a glorified typewriter. The LA Times is finding RMS a serious problem among its employees. Even as you talk with a Times reporter over the telephone, you hear the constant clatter of her fingers taking notes as you talk. The computer is always running. Even when you ask about RMS, your questions become data, feeding the interface you are talking about. Reporting is becoming data entry. 1.3. I should mention some possible remedies here. COMPUTER EYE- STRESS by R. Anthony Hutchinson (New York: Evans, 1985) gives some useful exercises for alleviating focusing stress. But hardly anyone in America today has absorbed the discipline needed to apply such exercises to daily work where the emphasis is on productivity. Chinese Qi Gong exercises are wonderful for healing and preventing the RMS syndrome. But how many industries will actually move forward to protect their people by providing the time and the training for these exercises? I doubt that any corporations will take up this challenge. Companies tend to conceived productivity in the narrowest sense, seeking profit in the short-range rather than long-range sense of the term. 1.4. The TOLL ON OUR BODIES. The computer interface reinforces the sense many people have that the human body is becoming "obsolete." Maybe not obsolete in every sense, but obsolete as a major component in our daily awareness. The computer is drawing us into a total electronic interface with the world of experience. In the future of the home, a corner of the house" may soon be "dedicated to communication," with one gadget combining the powers of: tv, videodisk machine, vcr, computer, printer, phone, answering machine, fax, electronic protections gadgets, and others yet to be invented. This one omni-gadget will constitute a new kind of symbiosis between human and device. It will work more intimately, more internally than any previous machine. No one will find such a device easy to resist. We will soon become dependent on it, as we have become dependent on automobiles and airplanes and fossil fuels. The novelist EM Forster once wrote a short story called "The Machine Must Stop." The machine Forster described resembles Don Straus' omni-gadget. So helpful is that total interface gadget that human bone structures have atrophied beyond recognition. Humans have "evolved." Only one young person dares break the spell by seeking out the thrill of sheer physical existence. The teenager climbs out of the artificial environment and basks in the sun. It nearly kills him. But with his action begins the revolt against the wonderful communications technology we are now dreaming up. Full physical presence with personal depth may soon become a precous commodity, something we may first forget in order to remember again. We are only now beginning to examine how cultures teach us to treat our bodies and get us to assume different postures to inhabit our living space. 2. Some ECOLOGICAL HAZARDS of computers. 2.1. The visible TOLL ON OUR SURROUNDINGS. In an article "Why I Am Not going to Buy a Computer," the poet Wendell Berry explains another physical danger of computer use, this time not the danger to the individual person but the danger to the long-range ecology of the planet. Berry's article appeared in the Autumn 1987 issue of NER/BLQ, which was excerpted in HARPER'S MAGAZINE, September 1988, followed by a spirited exchange of letters in December (Letters) 1988. Wendell Berry opposes word processing in principle -- not because he thinks it has a negative impact on the quality of writing, nor because he has a personal phobia about technology. Berry opposes word processors because the computer is an unnecessary electrical appliance: the more appliances we use, the more electricity we consume; the more electricity we consume, the more we plunder the earth's limited energy supply. If you can accomplish a task equally well with a simpler technology, like paper and pencil, says Berry, you are morally obliged to do so. Berry's sees the personal computer as another aspect of American consumerism. Berry renunces computers because he is concerned about our dwindling energy resources. By energy he means fuel, specifically coal. Electrical appliances have caused the strip- mining of the Appalachian coal fields. Ruthless greed, Berry says, will plunder the environment and soon obliterate what remains of the wilderness. He considers most consumer appliances extravagant because they deplete the earth's finite natural resources. So Berry lives on a farm in the South, plows with horses instead of tractors, and writes during daylight hours so he can avoid using electric lights. Berry's wife types his manuscripts on a 1956 Royal typewriter. Mike Heim Cal State Long Beach Copyright (C) 1990 by Michael Heim, all rights reserved. ____________________________________________________________________ | | | Sound like criticisms for the sake of criticism? Call me | | Glitch, Devil's Advocate, Worry Wart. Maybe I'm a new | | computer virus, a WORM in the garden of Eden. Let me | | make a confession, though, before I fill your screen with | | more anxieties. | | | | I approach the computer as a humanist. I believe everyone | | here on <PC> probably does too. Humanists look for | | the human side of a technology. They hope to find the | | intra-human use and capability of machines. The people | | here rank CI ("collective intelligence" or "cotechnology") | | over AI ("artificial intelligence"). AI is good only if it | | promotes CI. We are determined to learn how to connect | | with one another rather than see how smart machines can | | get. | | | | As humanists, we have a tradition. Humanists have always | | sought to preserve the liveliest dimension of human | | communication. In the face of Scholasticism, logical | | dogmatism, and scientific narrow-mindedness, the | | humanists have always encouraged the flow of deeply felt | | expressive language. The main vehicle for humanistic | | language has been the printed book. | | | |___________________________________________________________________| ********************************** (coming next, section three begins "The HAZARDS FOR BOOKS AND WRITING) .