Virtual reality, virtual republic

The technical side of virtual reality is catching up with a small but powerful culture of humans that has long been disconnected from the world. The word "grounded" has lost meaning. 

It is hard to demonize people you do not know, hard to steal from your neighbors, hard to poison a well we all share, because, at heart, it is hard to be unkind. It's hard-wired in our DNA.

For many of us, the last conscious remnants of our connection to the earth, to our natural cycles, is found where we worship. Religions, for the most part, are tied to the cycles of seasons and sun. The ancient stories remind us we eat, we breathe, we age, we die. Dust to dust.

The ancient stories only work if you remember we are tied to the earth,the air, and the water, and that everything alive is tied to each other.

Words make sense only when words retain their meaning. Words retain their meaning when we retain our senses. We need to feel the warmth of the sun and our clan, taste and smell the foods made by grandma's hands, shared it with the youngest, hear the music of our voices, see the light in each other's eyes.

Connecting to the world bring us joy--just watch a young child plain a May puddle. Words without a connection to this world literally make no sense.

And yet here we are, worshiping false idols who spew words with no meaning, playing to deep, unfounded fears, promising to return us to a world that never existed.

Take a good look (and sniff) around--get grounded again.
Continue the joyful (and hard) work of being human.

AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti, via SiliconBeat

Virtual reality is child abuse

Filed under "rant."

On the windowsills in B361, plants continue to grow using little more than the collective breath of the lambs in my room and a bit of water, knit together using the energy from the afternoon sunlight streaming through.

Grown from a wheat berry by a child.

Not sure putting a seed in a clump of peat moss and vermiculite counts as maker space, but the back corner of the room is dedicated to just that. Seeds, trays, a few light banks, and a container or two of dead honeybees (for pollination) dominate one corner of the room.

Through the lives (and deaths) of their plants, children learn a bit about life, but not a whole lot about the colleges and corporations that, according to l'idée du jour, must be printed on this generation's collective mind, at least those stragglers in public schools who we feed with our myths.

And now we have this:

via Hindustan TImes

School districts are starting to use tools made by humans, for a human world, limited by human imagination, pushed by human profits. Our children can no longer see the stars, and are taught to fear strangers, fear others, fear living.

Authority figures are giving children a tool to "broaden" their experiences, yet keep them tethered to assigned desks in assigned rooms with assigned teachers herding them.

This is not education; this is institutional child abuse. It would be cheaper to let the little ones lick tabs of acid--at least the expanded "world" they experience would be their own, not the limited visions of code monkeys paid to make virtual worlds when they themselves have not yet learned how to live.

We have collectively lost our minds.....

Fear of flying

Dell has a disturbing new ad out, and even more disturbing has been its response--"[t]he Dell ad makes its technology feel human."

I just spent a wonderful week as a Siemens STEM Institute fellow,where at Discovery Education  Hall Davidson and others showed us how to manipulate images just like this girl did. Most of my kids will love this, for a few moments, anyway, then on to something else. (Dopamine's half-life is about two minutes.)

But it's not science. Beyond knowing a few keystrokes and where to find the software, it's not learning.*

***

During this same week, we got to spend some time behind the scenes at the Smithsonian Institute, where we saw passion and joy as scientists described what they do. Turns out real live scientists like to hold things--skulls, nuggets of gold, dead fish, apples. Their passion was palpable, but even more notable was their joy!

Here's an exercise we picked up, one worth doing as a department.

Take an apple or two, real ones, pretend you've never encountered one before, and describe it. List as many of its qualities as you can in a few minutes. You will likely scribble down dozens.

Now observe an apple model--you can use one of the plastic ones, which wholesale around 35 cents a piece. Scratch off all the qualities you listed about the real apple that can't be found of the fake one. The list gets dramatically smaller.

Northern spyes, my choice for hard cider, via Village Voice.

Now do the same thing with a photograph of an apple. You're down to a few words, maybe red, oblong, with a stem attached.

And finally, this:

Apple

To most of us, the word conjures up vivid memories of what we know of "appleness"--but the word itself means nothing to someone who has never seen an apple.

***

What is the purpose of public schooling?

If it is to produce "career and college ready" corporatizens, then mastering manipulation of the digital world becomes the goal. Virtual flying becomes meaningful, and an apple's visual appeal matters more than its taste--how else explain the dominance of the ironically named Red Delicious over the plain looking Roxbury Russet?**

If it is to produce joyful citizens in a community, with all its human warts, well, then, Bloomfield and thousands of towns like us are trying to hang in there with our gardens and plays, our cooking and sewing classes, our wood shop and photography classes, our bands and choirs, our art shows, our sense of community.

Our motto is generations old, and can be found on the floor of the foyer as you walk in:

Learn to live

If you want to fly, you need to build something that will let you do just that. You need to risk failure, ridicule, broken bones and even death--Orville Wright himself was involved in the first fatal airplane crash (which he barely survived--Lt. Thomas Selfridge did not).

The girl who jumped off the roof with an umbrella in the Dell ad will not be satisfied with a green screen fantasy--she likely will lead a happy and productive life despite the casts and sutures she'll accumulate along the way. Not all dreams need be so risky--but dreams should not be avoided because of the risks.

Green screen lives are safer in some ways--hard to fracture a femur playing Angry Birds--but, it turns out, are far more dangerous in the long run.

Our sedentary screen lives are literally killing us--when we require children to sit still, when we ask them to watch a screen, we are shortening their lives.

From Advanced ICU Care newsletter, Spring, 2009

Beyond that, deferring life to virtual reality kills living long before a heart stops beating. Technology can keep that same heart beating a little longer, in a small cubicle surrounded with screens whose job it is to keep that heart going--a heart that stopped working long, long ago.

 *It's a great tool for story-telling, and story-telling belongs in science class--Hall Davidson is a master story-teller and gets this. Dell, at least in the ad, does not.
**Yes, I know, hardiness and ability to survive shipping also matter. If you're going to make cider, though, I strongly recommend Northern spies.

The burning tears of St. Lawrence

The stock market tumbled a bit today.

If I were paying attention, I might release some more stress hormones worrying about retirement. But the plants in my garden grew just the same.

The Federal Reserve is buying more Treasury's, and the sky may be falling.

No matter--tonight the sky is falling, as it has each August, as it will--the Perseids peak. Get outside, look up, and watch pieces of a comet fry as they hit our atmosphere.





Oh, you can look at the purty pictures by National Geographic, and you can blather on about radiants and ZHRs and all kinds of nonsense, but none of that will take you back a few thousand generations as a brilliant bolide breaking across a sky we rarely even notice anymore.

You can feel the oxytocin wash over you as the night's cool air reminds you that we are, after all, part of this world, the real one, the one that will exist long after the words "Dow Jones" fall from our vocabulary.

The Perseid photo is from National Geographic here.

This life more 'tweet....

Now, my co-mates and brothers in exile,
Hath not old custom made this life more sweet
Than that of painted pomp?....
And this our life, exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything.

Duke Senior, As You Like It
Shakespeare, natch

***

Tweet:

I'm diddling away my mortal coil here instead of staring at stars. Which reminds me--I need to go stare at some stars....

And then I hung around for another 15 minutes before I got out.

I'm glad I got out--a golden meteor streaked across the sky as though painted with glitter, sparks flying off the tail, a tail that extended more than half the sky. It shook me up.

I have never regretted a single moment spent outside. I've regretted plenty inside. If I believed in signs, I'd toss this machine off the kayak....

***

In the past couple of days I've heard two croakers complain as I wrestled hooks out of their jaws, squinched a few dozen cabbage worms, burned my feet on a hot jetty, cooled those same feet in the bay, picked tomatoes and beans, sliced open my finger, dared a harlequin stink bug to stink, stared at Vega and Venus, sank ankle deep into sand at the sea's edge, and watched tiny fish break the surface in an explosion of red light reflected from the setting sun.

***

My fledgling story:

I went into the garage just after supper yesterday to fetch the paddles. Some critter was flapping around noisily, but I was too busy running away to see it. (Yes, I'm a coward....)

A few minutes later, Leslie (much braver than me) found it--a fledgling robin, now exhausted, its beak gaping open, its chest billowing. The fledgling found a window--it could see the outside world, and it kept beating against the glass, its wings sprawled open against the pane.

Just a few feet away, the open garage door beckoned, but the bird was too frightened to see anything but its view from the window. It would die waiting for the pane to dissolve.


With the help of a crab net, I managed to get the bird out onto a juniper bush by the garage. I feared it would collapse from exhaustion. I cooed (ridiculous, I know) and slowly brought a hose to its mouth.

The robin drank. Then it drank some more.

In a few minutes it was gone.

***

As one who has trouble believing anything, not sure now's a good time to start putting trust in "signs"--but I do know this much. This computer screen is my garage window. I keep staring into it, looking at a world through glass, glass that cannot be broken, glass that will not magically dissolve.

No matter how much I tweet like the desperate fledgling.

Photos are ours, and we gave ourselves permission to use them.

Down the rabbit hole....

Beautiful July morning--I picked some purple beans with hues so deep and warm I wandered back to childhood. My fingers slipped through the vines knew what to do. There is unspeakable pleasure when we do what we are designed to do.

The first tomatoes are ripe now--tumescent with life. Four months ago they were tiny tufts of seeds I tucked into peat moss. My fingers knew what to do.


On mornings like this, one should avoid finiteness. The world holds wonderful and infinite complexity.

Alas, I'm an idiot, and logged into the internet.

***

I've given up Twitter before, and may give it up a few dozen times before I get it right. I follow teachie/techie type folks, and learn a lot. Today, perhaps, I learned my most important lesson. This was not it:

To folks who scream they don’t want private lives online:
Maybe you should just try to be a better person.

I am pretty much the same online as off. My Twitter account is "M_K_Doyle," not exactly a pseudonym. I stimulate annoy folks pretty much wherever my words take me. And I scream a lot. About just that....

I immediately let all 7 folks who follow me that I found that tweet scary. I tracked it down to Bud the Teacher, a marvelous edublogger. He clarifies his position a tad, but he's still scary.

And I think my public persona,
person I am at work and in the world,
be it the store, or church, or at the park or anywhere else, should be the same public persona online.

Bud Hunt, "On modeling," Bud the Teacher

Here’s the problem, and where modeling matters. We have multiple levels of intimacy/behavior in different settings.

What I say to a colleague in an elevator may be different than what I say to her in a pew, both public spaces by Hunt's example. The database searching capabilities have smashed our online personae into an extremely public figure–one with a megaphone screaming at anyone who cares to listen.

Part of becoming an adult is learning situational awareness. Lumping our online persona into some common public space sounds great, but there is no single layer of “public” in our real lives. (It’s like “global awareness,” another impossible task that sounds so cool.)

***

Today I saw this: "10 Reasons to Stop Apologizing for Your Online Life" on the Harvard Business Review blog, by Alexandra Samuel, a social media expert:

In our online lives we shake off the limitations of our physical selves, perhaps even our names and consciences, too. What remains are the fundamentals: human beings, human conversations, human communities. To say that "reality" includes only offline beings, offline conversations and offline communities is to say that face-to-face matters more than human-to-human.

I keep hoping to see "America's finest news source, The Onion" at the bottom, maybe the Harvard Lampoon.

My conscience, my name, my physical self is all human. The slight resistance feel as I pull a ripe tomato off the vine, its sensuousness as it rests alive in my palm, is part of who I am.

Face to face evoke all kinds of humanness, not all visual. My neighbor's aromas just beneath our consciousness, his growly gut, the preliminary hug or handshake--all involve a complexity and richness online cannot capture.

There is more complexity in a spoonful of the soil around my tomato plant that can be found on the whole of internet. We kid ourselves when we float on the web, amusing ourselves like bored kids throwing rocks at windows, passing time until we die.

Because we all die. Even if our web personae live on and on....