The notion of two people bonded together, joined at the hip, nowadays extends more and more to two additional realms: dogs and phones. While to argue the value of an interlocutor’s prize pooch proves as fruitless as questioning the belovedness of another’s child, the reality of the digital realm’s tactile interface with the essence of our being is contested terrain.
The American Psychological Association’s recent admission, or was it a diagnosis, that internet addiction is a growing concern comes with a defining statement: digital addiction involves “an inability to control use of the technology”. While many of us have been seen to become rosy-faced maniacs at the prospect of having lost our phone presumably most of us don’t reduce ourselves to becoming carpet-surfing meth addicts frantically combing through filthy floors in search of a few crumbs of jib. There’s a spectrum to tech addiction, as there is elsewhere through the mental health field; yet, the underlying reality of tech addiction may fall more in the purview of philosophy. At its root, many or most of us use technology, the internet most notably, to basically make us smarter. Or at least make us feel smarter.
Algorithms seem to provide easy access to the wisdom-laced entrails of the intellectual realm such that we tend to assume that to Google an answer is to yield a certainty. Yet, just as the rhythm method is, at best, a dubious form of birth control, trust in an algorithm’s bespectacled dweeb worldview can let us in for a world of issues. Consider, then, if you will, Flowers for Algernon. It’s the classic middle school language arts novel—read and studied by multiple generations of schoolchildren, ranging from the earnest to the disinterested.
In Flowers for Algernon the protagonist, Charlie, presents as a low IQ individual and, thanks to brain surgery on a lab rat that drastically increases the rodent’s intellectual precocity, scientists decide to try the experiment on a human specimen. As with Elon Musk’s human trials for his brain implants, Charlie (a baker by trade) soon becomes wiser and more erudite and learns to knead bread dough in ways hitherto unknown. A few summary phrases illustrated the neophyte wiseacre’s new sense of reality:
“I don’t know what’s worse: to not know what you are and be happy, or to become what you’ve always wanted to be, and feel alone.”
“I am afraid. Not of life, or death, or nothingness, but of wasting it as if I had never been.”
“Now I understand that one of the important reasons for going to college and getting an education is to learn that the things you’ve believed in all your life aren’t true, and that nothing is what it appears to be.”
“Only a short time ago, I learned that people laughed at me. Now I can see that unknowingly I joined them in laughing at myself. That hurts the most.”
“How strange it is that people of honest feelings and sensibility, who would not take advantage of a man born without arms or legs or eyes—how such people think nothing of abusing a man with low intelligence.”
This final one perhaps reveals something crucial about the nature of internet learning via access to the seeming erudition of the World Wide Web. We each of us, arguably, seek to better ourselves while not risking falling behind the knowledge level of our peers. The comparative concern, aptly described by Ben Ze’ev’s textbook The Subtlety of Emotions in the AU course ‘The Business of Emotions’ here finds illustration. Yet, in the end, the satiety provided by possession of a life’s purpose to us worth living is as far as ever removed from the reality of acquiring information. The question of what the purpose of education and facts are for the attainment of wisdom goes at least back to Socrates in Ancient Greece.
In the halcyon early decades of the internet the hope was that somehow the Internet would up the ante on the rational human mind and lead to a better world. Twenty years ago Jacques Derrida during an interview made a few points on how, if anything, our being glued to computerized screens has actually diminished our efficacy as purpose-finding individuals. “The computer installs a new place; there one is more easily projected toward the exterior, toward the spectacle, and toward the aspect of writing, via a trajectory of making alien. Inversely, because of the plastic fluidity of the forms, their continual flux, and their quasi-immateriality, one is also increasingly sheltered in a protective heaven.” While comfort may be easy it also can induce intellectual paralysis – witness the dull gazes of a living room full of online gamers on a sunny day. As we lose ourselves in the flow of surfing the web, and its infinite regress of other people chattering their inanities, we also perhaps lose our sense of self-reflection over what matters most to us in the here and now. Derrida continues: “In this new experience of specular reflection, there is more outside and there is no more outside” (27) As we come to adopt digital avatars that refine and characterize our selves, we may also psychologically merge with the facsimile of identity that the spectacle of social media induces. Who we are and what we want lurks into the murk of increasingly tangential thoughts and feelings; what, after all, does it say about us when we judge and are judged by the mere click or flick of our index finger on a screen or mouse? Have we become the mouse, the lab rat, in a maze of distraction where following rules rather than thinking outside the box is the surest way to achieve a reward? No certain rejoinders are possible to such queries, a fact that no long list of search engine results can quite gather.
Just as new mansions of joy abound if we put away our technological fixations for awhile, at least long enough to read our paper textbooks (where applicable) and avoid an addict diagnosis, so too may we find a mournful acceptance that the idealistic youth of our lives and culture is now behind us. Hardly anyone would claim that the internet has led to a better world, or even a more honest, objective, and critically aware populace. It remains only for us to, with Charlie (whose artificially increased intelligence faded away in the pawsteps of the test rat Algernon’s declining abilities and, finally, death) remember to implore our progenitors to lay flowers at the grave of the idea of technological utopia. In the post-script to the book, author Daniel Keyes gives the last will and testament of Charlie, that low IQ baker who briefly attained heights of brilliance only to realize that the view from aloft merely showed the dissolution and decay below:
“And P.S. please tell Dr Nemur not to be such a grouch when pepul laff at him and he would have more frends. Its easy to make frends if you let pepul laff at you. Im going to have lots of frends where I go. P.P.S. Please if you get a chanse put some flowrs on Algernons grave in the bak yard”.
In the end, no matter our learning and growing and use of spellcheck, the fact is that all too often in any given moment we must choose whether to run with the pack, allowing them to belittle our yokel ways or our lack of knowledge of the proper pop culture opinions or vial trends. We are evermore faced with a choice: do we embrace the drive to be accepted by others or do we focus on the individualized nature of our life’s journey? At its best an AU education can further us on a path to a better assessment of where we are and who we are.
References
Keyes, D. (1966). Flowers for Algernon. New York: Harvest Books. Quotes retrieved from https://agelessinvesting.com/flowers-for-algernon-quotes/ and https://raio.org/FlowersForAlgernon.pdf
Sherer, D. (2024). Technology, Digital, and Gaming Addictions’. Retrieved from https://www.psychiatry.org/Patients-Families/Technology-Addictions-Social-Media-and-more#section_1
Zeev, B. (2000). The Subtlety of Emotions. Retrieved from https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/2393/The-Subtlety-of-Emotions
