Reality Bytes

 

My beautiful 19 month old daughter is an Angel. It is no idle hyperbole when I say that she teaches me something new every day. More often than not these lessons are reminders of things I already know but that I have either forgotten or ignored because of some trivial pointless distraction.

I wake up every day wanting to see her smiling face. When I am away from the house I look forward to getting back home to see her running around causing chaos and laughing all the while.

I acknowledge that it is exhausting and challenging and at times utterly terrifying but I look forward to my lessons like no other learning experience in my life previous.

And I suspect that most Dads feel this way about their children. Isn't it wonderful that we are made this way?

This story is really about one single lesson she has taught me. Hopefully that lesson will be obvious by the time you reach the end of this story;)

I take the train to work most mornings. Greystones is the last stop on the DART line and so more often than not I manage to get a seat. It allows me do things that I rarely get to do these days – read, write and observe.

One observation that I have been really taken by is how quiet train journeys have become. Outside of people answering mobile phones there seems to be far less conversations between people taking place. Particularly amongst young people.

More often than not young people are immersed in their 'smart devices' engaging in some connection with information or with another distant user somewhere else on the planet.

Its almost like we have put a greater importance on the distant connection rather than the nearby connection.

I worry about that.

There is a theory that says that the development of sophisticated language was the single most important evolutionary step for human beings. Our ability to communicate with one another is unprecedented in all of known life. The evidence is there to suggest that our language capability is far superior to all other species and has led to our ability to dominate and control our planet (not always in positive ways).

Life has evolved for over 3 billion years as far as we know. In that time the human brain (a truly remarkable evolutionary miracle;)) has developed some hard wired constructs linked to our physical capabilities that tell us a lot about how we evolved from a language perspective.

For example, the amount of brain power devoted to moving muscles in the face, that have no other purpose except to communicate and express emotion, is extraordinary. These brain to muscle connections are designed to augment all our other channels of communication when engaging in real communication (and by real, I mean people being physically present).

In short we are hard wired for face to face social interaction.

And the purpose of this need to socialise?

Sophisticated language techniques allowed us build relationships to work together and allowed us see the benefits of teamwork versus individual pursuits. It allowed us pick mates using more criteria than just physical traits. It allowed us build devices and shape our environment way beyond anything any individual could do. Crucially it is strongly linked to the emotional development and emotional intelligence that defines us as human beings.

If we ever do get an understanding of the greatest evolutionary mystery of them all, the emergence of conciousness, I contend that it will be related to the evolution of sophisticated language capability and our need to socialise.

Modern social network platforms reduce communication to stacatto like bursts of information (often completely disconnected from one another) without the rich augmentation provided by our brain in face to face communication. In fact if you were to compare how people communicate on modern social network sites to a rich, deep, extended conversation between two people it would be akin to comparing morse code communication to video conferencing with haptic feedback.

What are the consequences of this?

Essentially we get a lot of information shared with very little relationship building. Without relationships at stake people can pretty much behave in whatever way they want at a particular moment. There is a diminished sense of responsibility in communication and as a consequence debates and arguments can turn very nasty very quickly.

That would be fine if all this connectivity was just something else we were doing in terms of connecting to one another.

The danger is that this form of communication is actually replacing real interaction. It is a stated goal of big social network sites to make virtual connectivity as compelling as real communication. Its absolutely in their interests to keep users on their platforms for as long as possible. Patterns of behaviour can be tracked allowing for more and more targeted advertising. Users of these platforms think they are using a free service. They often don't realise that they are the product!

And all this is happening very quickly.

This is not good.

Over the last few years I have had to do quite a lot of travelling. I used to really love travelling when I was younger. These days I struggle with it. I honestly hate leaving my young family for extended periods of time.

A few months back I found myself in San Francisco trying to raise awareness about a new social networking platform that my company was building (more on this later). My daughter was just over 1 year old and so my wife and I tried her on Skype.

The first evening, when she heard my voice, she smiled and found the whole interaction very interesting.

Then the novelty began to wear off...

The second evening, she walked around the back of the tablet computer to see where I was and was confused to find that I was not there playing hide and go seek. She pleaded with her mum in baby-speak expressing her dissatisfaction at the situation.

The third night she picked up the tablet and threw it on the floor.

When I arrived back home 10 days later she grabbed me for a hug and would not leave my arms for about 30 minutes.

It really brought it home to me just how much children need real physical interaction. Instinctively they know the difference between whats real and what is an illusion in this case. Real connections matter  - it is essential for their sense of security and growth.

However the lesson did not stop there -  I had more to learn....

The seats nearest the door on the DART have a label saying that they are reserved for the elderly. I love this simple idea. Public transport in Ireland is free for people retired and long may that continue. The best seats should be for those that use and need the system most.

A couple of weeks ago I was standing (for once) on a busy train. It meant that I was in observation mode. The train was packed. At one stop, one of the reserved seats became available and a group of four teenagers got on and took the seat. They all clearly knew one another but as soon as they sat down (as two pairs facing one another) they pulled out their phones and started playing with them. There was no conversation - just lots of thumb movement and the occasional smile as some text received caused amusement. They were, to a person, completely immersed in whatever they were doing on those phones.

At the next stop an elderly woman got on the train. She was stooped and very frail and was carrying a shopping bag. Without saying a word she dutifully stood next to the teenagers in the reserved seat, held onto the support pole and waited for the train to depart.

The train began to move and the poor woman staggered and just about held her balance. Not a blink from the four teenagers immersed in their phones. At the next stop the woman struggled to hold herself up as the train came to a halt. Again not a blink from the teenagers.

As the train took off again, the woman’s shopping bag fell over. At this stage I felt compelled to point out to the next generation that the woman could do with some help.

To be absolutely fair to them, they recognised their mistake, profoundly apologised, helped the woman tidy up her shopping and gave her a seat.

I am not telling this story as a way of complaining about the youth of today;) - I was a youth leader long enough to know that this is not unusual. In fact, had I been in the same seat using my computer the same thing would have happened. Its more a metaphor for me about how modern communications has taken us away from the real world at the cost of important connections and responsibilities that we have to the people and surroundings around us.

The good news is that once you point out the obvious the essential goodness in human nature tends to prevail!

This note is an effort to point out the obvious;)

A couple of years ago I was priviledged to meet a remarkable young man called Stuart Mangan. Stuart had a terrible accident playing a rugby match and broke his neck very high up his spinal cord. The higher the break the less mobility you are left with. Stuart was left with very basic movement around his face and the ability to speak. He once described his situation to me as being in a block of cement with only his face above the surface. It was a terrible tragedy.

Over the course of a couple of months I worked with Stuart looking at technology solutions that could improve his quality of life. We had some great successes. We managed to get a computer to understand his distorted voice (he had to learn to speak again and he was on a ventilator that made a lot of noise). Computer voice recognition then allowed him surf the web and go on Skype calls. We linked his phone to his computer so he could send voice controlled texts to his friends. After 6 months he was voice dictating emails quicker than most people could type them, he was managing his finances online by himself and he was sending texts to friends in a way that kept him connected to the real world.

In this instance technology was a wonderful liberator for Stuart. He could pretty much do what any of us able bodied people can do on the internet. But Stuart had an extremely limited life in the real world. He needed 24 hour care. Outside of conversing with someone there were very few things he could do autonomously. In many ways he had no alternative but to use technology in the way that he did to improve his quality of life.

We have a choice. Spending vast amounts of time connected to the 'virtual opportunities' around us at the expense of real interaction is not good for us. We need a balance between the real and the virtual worlds. We can do amazing things connected to the internet but it should never compromise our real life engagements.

What really brought this home for me was the connection with Stuart. Although we were working together developing technologies to try and improve his quality of life it was actually the friendship that developed between us that mattered most.

He lived in London and I would arrive over for a day to spend it with him working on the technology. We would chat, joke, muse about life in a kind of intense way given the tragic circumstances. It was often raw, truthful exchanges pared back of ego and self promotion. It was about as real as it gets to be honest but in that connection bonds of friendship were forged. For me the real interaction that we shared together was far more important than all our technical achievements.

Stuart died in 2009. To this day I still wear my Stuart Mangan bracelet to remind me of those real interactions. Interactions that led to a wonderful, deep and tragically short friendship.

I am not againist technology. I think it has a profound and essential role to play in bringing humanity forward. I am also not against progress. I do however question progress when no consideration is given to where we are heading!

I think the social networking phenomena is an amazing and potentially wonderful way to share information and keep people connected who otherwise cannot meet. However, there is nothing 'social' about the phenomena. At best it can be described as 'isolation networking' – staying somewhat connected to the people you care about via technology.

If this 'social networking' replaces real communication we are shoring up huge problems for ourselves in the future, especially in the mental health domain. In the same way that our physical bodies need oxygen and air to survive, human beings need real interaction to sustain their mental health. Its that important and essential.

For the last couple of years I have struggled with this perspective. The potential of the modern communication tools are enormous - one only has to look at the recent presidential election in America and the Arab spring. However there are serious consequences if they compromise the essential ways humans need to interact. We may well be going or even being driven in the wrong direction.

I want to build a different type of social network. I want it to use all the power and amazing potential of our connected world to encourage more real connections. To enable conversations that should happen to happen, to connect people to opportunities that they were previously unaware of and crucially to forge real friendships between similar minded people that would not have happened without the technology. A more connected world should be a world full of stronger friendships, more vibrant communities and a more unified human race.

If you have read this far we are almost ready to release our fragile idea into the world....

My daughter is beginning to string sentences together. She knows I am 'Dada'. She knows how to make known her needs for interaction and play. She also knows that as a 19 month old baby girl, who is cuteness personified, Dada does what he is told.

In this short article I am bemoaning the fact that people are spending far too much time online at the expense of much more valuble real interactions. I am as guilty as everyone else.

And my daughter knows this..

Even as I was writing this story, sitting on my couch with the laptop, she wandered over to me with a look of determination that indicated a lesson was coming. In a moment of what I can only describe as pure genius, she pushed the lid of my computer down to shut it, picked the device up and placed it on the table next to me. She then waved to the computer and said 'bye bye'.

With that done she grabbed my hand and indicated that I had to sit down beside her. She pointed at the lego box, smiled and clapped. She did not have to say anything else.

'Make something real Dada'

GMcD 12/12/12

Check out this video;) for another angle on the above. WISPwell is available on the Apple and Google appstores.