When I first read Blue Ocean Strategy, I felt like I had been given the keys to business success.
When I first read Innovator’s Dilemma, I felt a new world opening before me of how business empires rise and fall.
But as I read Alone Again, I feel like I am reading garbage.
Despite hours since Nintendo Direct, I not only have the book but am reading it. I am reading it so you don’t have to. Do not waste your money buying this book.
Turkle’s book is not an objective look at computer technology and Human behavior. It is written entirely through the lens of a premise. It is the premise that computers change Human behavior and social norms. Her ‘data’ consists of talking to people in pizza parties about how they ‘feel’ and ‘behave’ with technology. Reviewers at Amazon say the book is ‘impartial’, but it is not. As evidence, at the beginning she remarks how the great majority of people, such as her MIT comrades, wrote off her concerns that computers are just ‘tools’. She mocks the idea of ‘just tools’. She only writes from the premise that computer technology shapes Human beings. Anything that says computers are tools where Humans are the shapers and not the shaped is ignored.
Let me pause here to tell you a little about myself in two ways of why I not just disagree with Turkle’s premise but despise it.
My formal training is Con Law. When you study things like Con Law, you ask yourself questions such as “This thing called ‘free speech’ that is protected by the First Amendment… why does it need constitutional protection? Why would anyone restrict speech? That would be barbaric!” The obvious answers the question. Political enemies would want to restrict speech. But there had to be more. There are many nations today that do not have free speech. It is more than just shutting down political opposition. Why would anyone want to shut down the free flow of ideas and conversation?
I found my answer in French philosophy. There is a French philosopher (forgot the name) who believes media is the shaper of people. The person does not read the newspaper column, it is that the newspaper column writes the person. And if speech can shape people (not influence or persuade them, but shape in the context of a potter shaping his clay), then only the ‘wise’ and ‘correct’ people should have the power of speech.
It is a monstrous idea, but it is the fruit of much of French philosophy (which America wisely never adopted). The Old World philosophy, as it may be called, is the notion that a ruler (be it a legislator, a prince, a king) was the ‘body and soul’ of the nation. The reason why they called a king this was because the relationship of the king and the people was that the king was the shaper and the people the clay. The ruler was supposed to instill the people with virtue (apparently people wouldn’t go to virtue by themselves). The ruler had to give the people morals, customs, and their identities (because people were seen as having no self-engine). If the peasants were such sad shape, how could the king shape them if the king was as Human as the peasants? “It is because,” the Old World said, “the king has royal blood flowing through him.” Much of French philosophy revolves around Rousseau’s idea of society, of Human beings, being clay that is configured by someone… never the people themselves. Locke had a huge impact on America but Rousseau never did. There is a reason why.
Listen to how Turkle frames her book’s context:
I had just spent several years in Paris studying how psychoanalytic ideas had spread into everyday life in France—how people were picking up and trying on this new language for thinking about the self. I had come to MIT because I sensed that something similar was happening with the language of computers. Computational metaphors, such as “debugging” and “programming,” were starting to be used to think about politics, education, social life, and—most central to the analogy with psychoanalysis—about the self. While my computer science colleagues were immersed in getting computers to do ingenious things, I had other concerns. How were computers changing us as people?
She does not say she ‘studied’ in France. She is saying that she studied a French context, in France, and is applying it to Human-computer interaction in the United States. What I am pointing out is that she is telling us the entire book’s context will be through that French philosophy lens.
And what is that French philosophy lens?
It is the idea that something shapes, molds, the person other than the person. She asks the question, “How are computers changing the people?” as if people have no souls, no free will, no self-determination, as if people were just raw clay that computers ‘rewired’.
It sounds like much of that Marshall McLuhan crap.
But read what she writes immediately after:
While my computer science colleagues were immersed in getting computers to do ingenious things, I had other concerns. How were computers changing us as people?
Her ideas met resistance from colleagues. Do you know why? It is because they were not subject to French philosophy in Paris. It’s not very objective when she only uses people’s opinions that fit her template, her premise. She needs to disprove that computers aren’t just ‘tools’ but are changing Homo-Sapiens as we know it before she focuses on the HOW.
What I see with Turkle is that her formative years were in French philosophy and she only sees the world through the prism. I demand the author prove her premise correct that computers “change us” before she volleys off into a parade of ‘examples’.
Another part of the premise, in order to be true, is that Turkle must demonstrate why other technology (the stuff that came before computers) is supposed to be ‘normal’ and/or didn’t change us. She is acting like computers are some great variable, some great shaper.
Have you wondered why no one wrote a book of technology changing us with technology like the automobile or telephone? It is because it would be laughed out of time. Automobiles replaced horses and telephones replaced actually having to go to the location to talk to someone.
Turkle is contrary to the spirit of Christensen’s disruption. Disruption’s ‘crappy products for crappy customers’ worked not because ‘technology changed people’ but because the natural Human behavior forced the products to reshape itself to fit. Disruption would be impossible if Humanity was fluid and shifted, changed due to ‘technology’.
The second thing you need to know about myself is that my grandfather could not read or write. The reason why is because he worked on farms. Part of my family line is descended from poor farmers who had no education (which wasn’t needed as that education wouldn’t plow the fields. Philosophy doesn’t milk the cows).
“What is the point of that?” demands the reader.
The point is the children from that uneducated ‘hick’ farmer all became prominent engineers with one becoming a nuclear physicist. When we look at nations like South Korea or India, where they were very poor, and wonder how these engineers sprung up from them, I know the answer. Poor people do not have the luxury of fantasy and common distractions (they can’t afford them anyway). They take extremely great pride in reality and in understanding reality. Reality is what makes the crops grow. Those that become engineers from these parents have a sort of romantic quality with reality which is why they tend to go into engineering or the sciences.
While I am a generation away from that poverty, I am trying to learn that sense of reality they were forced to grow up in. It wasn’t until I got older that I realized what had happened and how astonishing it was. For example, when my brother got married, two astronauts were in attendance. Another person, a friend of my parents who we gave presents under the Christmas tree, was the guy (or one of them) at NASA who designed the astronaut suit. I am not talking about someone from recent days but during the NASA golden days of the sixties and seventies. I remember as a kid, stuck at the dinner table with guests where kids don’t want to be, hearing his stories of the astronauts and what went on and not paying any attention to it. Today, those stories are literally gold and stuff the public may not know. I wish I listened better. Engineers and scientists tend to hang out and befriend other engineers and scientists.
My entire point is that my lineage went through a sort of ‘technology shock’ not unlike what happened recently with South Korea (this is occurring to much of the rural areas of the United States and are the seeds of the future economic hotspots). I can go back only a few generations to find out how life was like before the Industrial Revolution while many people have to go back much further. But for some reason, the generation following immediately recognized the potential of computers and seized it. I remember computers and other electronics being brought home constantly (often secretly) back before the Apple II came out (these were not PCs).
So my viewpoint is that technology is a tool and can be nothing but a tool. But a tool can be used in many ways. Fire can be used for arson as well as cooking dinner. The idea of a computer changing people is ridiculous to me. The people who began and propelled the computer revolution (as well as launch shuttles into space) were not altered or reformed by the technology. (Maybe the wealth it brought them…) They were using the same reality principles to create and utilize better tools.
Just because they used computer language into general language doesn’t mean anything. It is no different than the farmer’s language permeating everything else in his life (since most of his life is in his work). The English language is full of words and phrases from various trades. The Industrial Revolution is full of them.
When Turkle talks about computer role playing games, I wonder why she is wasting her breath. Role playing games didn’t start with computers. They started with pen and paper games such as Dungeons and Dragons (well, that was the most popular one). All the computer did was do the calculations and eventually give a graphical visualization of that role playing experience. However, this clear link and evolution doesn’t fit Turkle’s premise that that computers are ‘changing’ the Human being so it is not mentioned.
I’ve just begun this book so expect more posts to come on it. This is just the tip of the iceberg.
Going on the Wii U philosophy (and hopefully since Nintendo is reading), I would like to present Mr. Iwata with this picture:
This picture shows a breakfast with a couple reading the newspaper. If we replace the newspapers with iPads or Kindles, is there anything truly different?
The above image was seen as the ‘normal’ and ‘happy’ breakfast. But if the newspapers turn into electronic tablets, why is it suddenly bad? Nothing has changed.
Take a look at this image. The family is in the living room watching TV. This scene is considered iconic in life in this time period. What the family is not doing is talking to each other. Look at them! They are ignoring each other to watch the TV! Can you believe it, Mr. Iwata? The entire family is in the same room, and they ignore one another to watch a television set.
But if everyone in that image had their own electronic screen, they would resemble the picture of everyone looking at their own thing. Why is the above image good but the one Iwata showed bad?
Oh no! It is another family that is ignoring each other to watch the television set! This image is, I believe, from the 1950s. It is considered good, wholesome, and part of that time period. If they had electronic screens, I am sure they too would look like the family image that Iwata condemned.
As we move backward to the radio era, we find the family sitting in the room together, ignoring each other, not listening to each other, just to hear the radio. This iconic image is also condemned underneath the Wii U philosophy.
Conclusion:
It is good that Nintendo wishes to make products to solve a problem. But it would be better if Nintendo made sure the problem actually existed in the first place.
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