On Technology and Happiness

In the study report “Around the Web in 80 Ways”, the author comes to the fairly prosaic conclusion that what motivates politically interested internet users is different than what motivates users with less political inclination (p 319). This would seem pretty obvious, and now it’s been proven by a survey. Another conclusion, that it is very difficult to predict what usage patterns occur with different users judging on their previous usage patterns, is again predictable. In fact, the Internet is in this way akin to driving through an area of town that is festering with billboards. Your eye will wander, and it’s not especially meaningful.

So why was the study done? I can’t help but think that this article indulges in a little of the dot-com era hand wringing in it’s attempts to understand “what is the internet?” Well, this study might not differ much if it focused on newspapers or radio. People are drawn to a given medium for what they seek – uses and gratifications theory. I really failed to see anything profound about the fact that the medium, or rather channel, is the internet, except that the internet does offer orders of magnitude more choice.

It is interesting and sensible that there is apparently a renewed interest in Uses and Gratification theory, as the author states on p304 in the introduction, at a time when people are offered more choices for interactive and self-directed media consumption than ever before. This would seem to offer a goldmine of data to anyone trying to parse the implications of Uses and Gratifications theory, and of a quality that would have been impossible before the internet. But the author’s intended goal of determining whether motivations (specifically political motivations) act as an intervening variable in the uses/gratifications equation would appear somewhat light – the answer seems self evident. Anyway, it’s done and documented.

The most interesting part of the article for me was the section in which they drew certain conclusions about who uses the internet for political purposes, or really for any of the studied uses. There’s some interest data to ponder there. That accessing bulletin boards or lists so totally outranks music download and game playing actually surprised me – there must be a lot of “virtual community” oriented nerds out there. This is an especially interesting and compelling piece of information for many online game developers. It’s an assumed axiom that supporting community development (clans, chat, friends lists) within a specific game will powerfully reinforce loyalty to that game. That said, I think a more interesting dimension would emerge if the study were not cross sectional, dated Oct/Nov 2004, but a longitudinal study spanning many years, as practical. The trends that might emerge would be very telling about the internet’s effects.

If I seem mildly like an eye-rolling luddite here, I can at least take comfort in the message of the excellent speech Neil Postman gave to the German Informatics Society in 1990, another of our readings for this week. His point that computer technology comes at as high or higher of a cost to society as it’s benefit really resonates. I hadn’t considered it, but the truth is that within the last ten years, as he points out, I have noticed that I do feel more tracked and controlled, more buried by spam and junk mail, and more easily reduced to a number or password. His point that sophisticated information technology doesn’t really help us cope with any of the real problems in society, such as war, hunger, homelessness or disease, seems especially poignant to me as I reflect how easy it is to abstractify and reduce the reality of the poorer, non-western world down to CNN news bytes. Information overload means less ultimately hits home.

I find this little excerpt of an article in the London Financial Times germane, where it quotes Jean Giono’s “The Weight of Heaven” :

“Joy is not the product of technology or society. It is the individual product that an individual being, rich in natural treasures, is better qualified than anyone else to attain and to keep, so long as his physical being inhabits the space and time of a man. Mankind lives among unbounded splendours."*

And, similarly, a quote from William Blake’s “Songs of Innocence”:

"I have no name/ I am but two days old - / What shall I call thee?/ I happy am/ Joy is my name - / Sweet joy befall thee!"

Clearly a variation of the old platitude “ignorance is bliss”, these nuggets nicely embody the wisdom of Postman’s speech. There’s some irony in the fact that, through supervening necessity, the technology to access these gems has matured into not only the internet, but the extremely powerful proquest database where such information is literally at my fingertips, and it is through these means that I’m finding such pertinent quotes to illustrate my point. Ultimately, of course, I wouldn’t give up that search capability for anything. I am just delighted and thankful to have read Mr. Postman's counterpoint.

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Article: “In search of sweet and untainted joy: society and technology often obscure this elusive emotion, but it can be recaptured through nature”.

Abstract: With quotes from prose and poetry, the author opines on the subject of technology vs. joy, and makes the point that they are antithetical.