Transparent and opaque experience
Continuing the adventure of train timetables from my previous entry, I recently asked a similar group of friends if anyone could give me a lift to the nearest railway station. I was astonished to find that none of them appeared to know the location of the railway station, even though all of them drove right past it on their way home.
I suppose that my own perspective is biased by my preference to travel by foot and public transport: my car-driving friends might be similarly astonished that I can't comprehend the desire to live in or visit XXXX Heights that has never seen a bus or train, and which I think might as well be on the moon.
Nonetheless, I've long felt that car-dependent people have a somewhat less intimate understanding of geography than those of us who take the time to walk through it. I get a similar feeling after travelling by underground train in cities like London and Tokyo, where I'm effectively teleported from one part of the city to another without any experience of what lies between.
More generally, it seems that technology-dependent people have a less intimate understanding of the world around them -- at least in the sense that they don't experience it directly, even if people with modern educations have a better theoretical understanding of physics, biology, etc. than their Stone Age forebears.
This seems like a bad thing, but it is surely inevitable: no one person could experience everything we know about physics, chemistry, biology, psychology and all the rest. My mode of travel aside, I don't farm my own food, prepare my own medicines, or even build my own computers.
An early chapter of Sherry Turkle's Life on the Screen talks about people with "transparent" and "opaque" views of computers. People with transparent views are interested in how computers work, while those with an opaque view are only interested in what they can do. Before reading Life on the Screen, I sometimes characterised non-technical people as having a "magic box view" of computers.
I found Turkle's discussion refreshing in that she doesn't make one view superior to other, where computer nerds might consider the opaque view stupid and ignorant while woollier minds might disparage engineers as boring and inhuman. I've since come to think of good engineering and design, at least in part, as using the transparent view to enable the opaque view (or to enable the "magic" in my former terminology).
Perhaps the transparent view of technology (and geography) provides a more direct and complete experience of the world, and the person who took an opaque view of everything would surely be a supremely ignorant and uninquisitive one. But it clearly isn't practical to take a transparent view of everything all the time, and the opaque view is a very practical one.
