Positive computing, satisfaction and the lack of it
Shortly after writing my entry on the joys of engineering and the banality of products, I found that Rafael A. Calvo and Dorian Peters had addressed much the same issue in the Winter 2013 issue of IEEE Technology and Society (pp. 19-21). In fact, they say they're soon to publish a whole book on the subject, to be called Positive Computing. I've added it to my reading list.
In the mean time, the book's title comes from a 2011 position paper written by Tomas Sander, who looks at the role of information technology in pursuing the "positive psychology" proposed by Martin Seligman. The basic idea is to create computer applications that promote what psychologists and economists call "subjective well-being", rather than applications that merely allow us to do things faster. Tibor Scitovsky might have had exactly this in mind if he were writing The Joyless Economy today.
I'm sure that plenty of applications already exist that promote well-being in one way or another. Calvo and Peters specifically mention SuperBetter, bLife and the Mindfulness App, which seem to implement ideas from the positive psychology school. The promises made by these applications might be a little saccharine for my tastes, and I have certain misgivings about aspects of Seligman's ideas, but I think there's reason to believe that great games, for example, can provide meaningful and satisfying challenges.
On the other hand, I'm sure that there is plenty of software out there that promises meaningful and satisfying experiences, but ultimately provides only superficial simulacra of such experiences. The development and use of such software might be driven, in part, by a wish for fast and easy access to desirable experiences.
Whatever the motives of producers in creating the products that they do, Scitovsky calls for consumers to become more sophisticated in their choice and use of products. In a computing context, for example, word processing software may make it fast and easy to edit and format documents, but it's still up to writers to strive for meaningful words, and up to designers to strive for attractive pages. If they don't, word processors are just a fast and easy way to produce unsatisfying junk. I've previously made similar comments about communication technology that I can now interpret as a need to be more sophisticated about the communication tools that we use.
Seeing that Scitovsky and others were writing about these notions back in the 1970s, I wonder why we still appear to be prioritising fast and easy over meaningful and satisfying. I suppose that Scitovsky's critics might argue that history has shown him wrong, and that the majority of people really do value fast and easy products over what a few elitists think are more worthy pursuits, Maslow's hierarchy of needs be damned. But when I see the degree to which Australians appear to have convinced themselves that we're "doing it tough" despite enjoying one of the highest levels of material wealth that has ever existed in the world, I suspect that the critics and their followers might just have chosen to pursue the fast and easy path because it is itself the fast and easy choice.
On the value of second-hand experiences
Amanda Parks recently wrote for The Social Interface about the expectation that we share our experiences via social media, and wondered if becoming pre-occupied with our media activities sometimes gets in the way of the experience we're supposedly enjoying. A few days after reading Parks' article, I happened to be seated on a train carriage behind a couple busily photographing and filming a good part of a trip from New South Wales' Southern Highlands to Campbelltown.
Prior to owning a digital camera, I rarely took photographs at all because I found that the photographs rarely reproduced much of the experience that had inspired me to take them. This may say something about my ability as a photographer. Since purchasing a digital camera, I've been more inclined to take photographs while hiking or travelling alone, and I find that looking back over them does frequently evoke the memory or being in that place even if the photographs aren't going to win any awards.
I still almost never take photographs while socialising. Sometimes I think it might be nice to be able to look back over a record of a good time, and I do occasionally glance over photographs taken by friends. But while I'm actually engaged in the socialising, it seems awkward and artificial to dig out a camera. Watching the couple filming their train ride, I thought: why don't you stop fiddling with those awkward-looking tablet things and just enjoy the experience? And whatever happened to that advice to never look like a tourist?
Presumably Sydney's intercity rail network is less mundane to that couple than it is to me. And obviously plenty of people feel that they can pull out a camera with a lot more aplomb than me. But how much does anyone actually care about the results? Well before anyone coined the term "social media", I remember comedians getting plenty of laughs out of travellers boring their friends with post-holiday slide shows. Parks similarly concludes her article with an anecdote illustrating the disappointing result of sharing photographs that seem wondrous to the person who experienced the event, but are only cheap second-hand experiences for everyone else.
Perhaps being better photographers would improve our friends' experiences. After all, talented photographers, film-makers and writers can make a living out of travel books and documentaries. But, to go by my own experience of writing publishable papers, I doubt that even those talented folks publish everything they record. However the act of recording might affect the experience itself, perhaps we need to remember that frequent communication is not the same as good communication.
The joy of engineering and the banality of products
I recently happened upon an article from Today's Engineer in which Doug Lamm contrasts the views espoused in Tibor Scitovsky's The Joyless Economy (1976) and those espoused in Samuel C. Florman's The Existential Pleasures of Engineering (1976). Scitovsky worries that populating our world (or, at least, the United States) with labour-saving and comfort-providing devices might leave devices' users with no challenges to meet, leading to boredom. Florman writes of the pleasures that engineers experience in the act of engineering, which provides exactly the challenges that Scitovsky worries we might engineer out of life.
Scitovsky and Florman's views are not mutually exclusive: engineers may very well have a wonderful time developing products that leave their users bored and lazy. This prospect might seem fairly depressing for a profession that takes pride in its ability to produce artefacts that improve people's lives.
Of course another way of looking at it is that the pleasure experienced in doing engineering is as valid and good a pleasure as any, so what further justification do engineers need? I don't feel any need to justify a Sunday hike, say, with any benefit to society beyond my own pleasure, so what other motivation should I need to write software? Is whatever pleasure I might experience in developing software diminished if the end result isn't particularly useful to anyone?
Yet I have to write software that pleases users if I expect the users to pay me for it. Perhaps the knowledge that I need to earn money from software development prevents me from taking quite so care-free an attitude to software as I do to hiking. Things might be different if I could afford to undertake software development purely as a hobby. Yet, even then, having adoring users surely increases an engineer's pride in his or her work, even if the users don't pay a cent for the product.
Engineers are perhaps fortunate that there is so much demand for what they do: engineers can make a living by performing work that they find challenging and satisfying. If the world appetite for roads, machines and computers ever diminishes, engineers might find themselves in a position similar to those of present-day artists who want to devote their lives to their art, but must make ends meet by doing odd jobs in which they can't make use of their skills.
Lamm concludes that technological innovation is, in and of itself, neither good nor bad, and that it is "the development of wisdom regarding the satisfying use of technology" that matters. He alludes to the example of rock-climbing: there may well be easier ways of getting up mountains than climbing the rock, but people nonetheless buy rock-climbing equipment because they enjoy the challenge of doing it this way. For the engineer and his or her sponsors, the trick is to realise when to build rock-climbing equipment, and when to build an elevator.
Social experience machines
While expanding my thoughts on synthetic worlds for The Social Interface, I made a connection between Edward Castronova's concept of migration to synthetic worlds, and Robert Nozick's experience machine. Nozick postulates a machine able to give its user any experience he or she desired, but argues that no one would actually want to live in such a machine. Therefore, he argues, people do not subscribe to the utilitarian notion that we care only about the pain and pleasure we experience.
It's important for Nozick's argument that potential users of the experience machine are aware that it simulates experiences, since he argues that potential users would find this simulation dissatisfying irrespective of how good the experiences were. Castronova's synthetic worlds satisfy this criterion since their users are aware of entering and leaving their worlds, and this would be the case even if virtual reality technology advanced to the point that it could provide perfectly realistic experiences.
Assuming that Nozick is correct about a fully-informed person wanting to live in an experience machine, the question remains as to what might happen were someone to enter an experience machine without knowing it. Fully-functioning experience machines don't exist, but I think an argument can be made that certain aspects of them do. Would a person tricked into entering one feel cheated?
During the discussion that led to my dangerous idea last week, one of my colleagues observed that it felt rewarding to accept connection requests, and rude to decline them. I countered that this was exactly why I'd deleted my LinkedIn profile: it seemed superficially rewarding to accept connection requests, and at first I thought they might lead to something, but this quickly turned to disappointment when I realised that I wasn't actually connected to these people in any meaningful way, and it never led to anything.
For me, LinkedIn was a primitive experience machine that (momentarily) provided the experience of being connected. As Nozick predicted, I got myself out of it once I'd decided that the experience was, in fact, simulated. As Sherry Turkle puts it, it promised friendship but delivered only a performance — and a particularly crude one at that.
I suppose that people who use LinkedIn and other networks might contend that that was my particular experience, that they have built genuine connections with it, and that maybe I wasn't using the tool correctly in order to benefit from it. Or maybe it's just not my thing, in the same way that stamp-collecting and dog ownership aren't my thing.
This all sounds plausible enough, and I can neither prove nor disprove it. When pressed, I guess I find the "not my thing" explanation most convincing. Going back to experience machines, though, I only felt cheated once I'd compared the LinkedIn experience with my physical world experience. If I were still in LinkedIn's experience machine, and ignorant of the physical world, might I not be as happy as everyone else in that machine?
There's still only one world that counts
I've just finished reading Edward Castronova's Synthetic Worlds (2006), which is something I probably ought to have done some time ago. Reading it seven years after its publication, however, reminded me that synthetic worlds — notably Second Life — seemed like big news in the computer community at around the time that Castronova was writing. I remember being told that major companies were opening stores in Second Life, luminaries were holding press conferences there, entrepeneurs were making money there, and that anyone who was anyone would shortly be living, at least in part, in a synthetic world. Yet I don't hear much about Second Life or any similar world anymore.
The worlds themselves are still there and, presumably, making a living for the companies that develop them. But neither the media nor the conversations in which I'm involved have much to do with them. Was I, in 2006, hanging around a bunch of starry-eyed gamers unaware that not everyone was interested in their hobby? Is the media still not taking computer games seriously, as Castronova suggests in his introduction to Part II? Has everyone disappeared into a synthetic world, leaving me wandering alone on the outside?
In both the mainstream media and in conversations of which I'm a part, the giants of the computer industry aren't synthetic worlds of the kind that Castronova wrote about, but web-based tools like Facebook, Twitter and Google. And, to go by the numbers, rightly so: according to Statistic Brain, Facebook has over 1100 million accounts, Twitter has over 550 million accounts, and Google responds to over 5000 million searches per day. The largest synthetic world, World of Warcraft, had a comparatively measly 12 million subscribers at its height.
If there are synthetic worlds to which humanity is migrating, as Castronova puts it, they're surely Facebook and Twitter. The home pages of Second Life and World of Warcraft themselves sport those ubiquitous offers to "like" them on Facebook and follow them on Twitter.
I can think of several possible explanations. Firstly, Facebook and Twitter are free, where the synthetic worlds studied by Castronova ask for subscriptions. Secondly, the user base of game-like synthetic worlds is fragmented into numerous followers of different worlds, while Facebook and Twitter completely dominate their markets.
Lastly, though, I wonder if synthetic worlds have themselves met the fate of virtual reality identified in the appendix to Castronova's book. As Castronova has it, the researchers behind virtual reality originally supposed that virtual worlds would be created by completely immersing the users' senses in computer-generated stimuli. But it turns out that relatively crude representations of characters and landscapes on an ordinary computer are good enough to keep users' minds in a synthetic world. But maybe most of us don't even need those crude representations, at least not most of the time: our needs are adequately met by augmenting the real world with web profiles and instant messaging. After all, it's the one world from which we cannot migrate.
