The Medium is the Matrix

welcome

to the future

[Music]

my name is jerry copchick i’m professor

of psychology

at the university of toronto scarborough

since 1974

and i just can’t seem to graduate

vision clarity and imagination

together we’re dealing with issues of

retirement we’re dealing with people

early in their lives

planning a career so let’s begin with a

crisis

where are we now how do we deal with

ourselves in the age of technology

now german sociologist harvard rosa

is very concerned about this and he

talks about the issue

of technological acceleration and social

acceleration

come up right

with the two of them we’re always one

step behind

we’re never quite catching up where will

we be in our lives how we plan ahead

as a result of always trying to catch up

and always being a step behind

he feels that in the 20th century life

and 21st century life

we suffer a kind of alienation and his

solution

is resonance his solution

is feeling each other’s presence and

feeling our own

you have a harare is probably very

public public

and precious collection of papers and

books

specifically concerning with how

experiences contribute to the exchange

of information

he wants us to address being part of a

bigger system bigger than ourselves

and he equates human experience with

data patterns

and here we have the issue of ourselves

and the outside world

where the system can become the source

of meaning for us

and that’s the heart of my talk

balancing ourselves

against the world of information

now the humanists and i’ll talk about

them say listen to your feelings be

aware of your feelings be aware of who

you are

but the dataists listen to the

algorithms

they know us better than we know

ourselves and that’s our problem

because we’re always giving out the

information as a consequence

in the world where information is

dominant human experiences are not

intrinsically valuable

and we sort of recede into the

background of life

now what do we want what’s the price we

pay

how does it affect our lives the

boundary between the self and big data

becomes more porous

i’m concerned about the outline of our

being are we aware of the issue of

public and private

are we aware of our presence are we

aware of what we give away

because the tracks we leave behind can

come back to haunt us we’ve all sent

messages that we can’t retrieve

we’ve all had to apologize but when it

goes to

the large database the problem is the

self can become too diffuse

because we’re spreading ourselves too

thin we’re giving out so much

information about our life

the self then can potentially be more

manipulated

because that database knows too much

about us

and can begin to control us now

let me give a bit of a change of pace

our minds have changed over forty

thousand years

let’s talk about a bit of pre-history

we’ve always left marks okay

we’ve always had to survive going back

40 000 years

because our instrumental mind has had to

solve problems we’ve had to adjust

we’ve had to deal with our environments

we’ve used tools to survive from the

sinai desert 200

000 years old when you hold it you feel

your cousins in advance coming out of

mother africa

you feel the presence of the person with

the little notches

who use this perhaps to clean a screen

but we have the other side of ourselves

the instrumental side has the expressive

side

and what does the expressive side do it

has created paintings on the walls

of the chauvin caves 40 000 years ago

where imagine the artist sitting alone

in the dim light of the flickering oil

lamp that had just been created in that

era

seeing the man in the moon but on the

walls of the cave as if a movie

and taking out the skin and preserving

what they have in their mind

they put it out on the wall to share as

a kind of record of culture

now i want to do a comparison between

the analog mind of old

and the digital mind of new you see we

feel our actions

when you do art when you do music as we

just heard

we feel our presence we hear ourselves

we sense ourselves

it’s holistic it’s organic our body is

moving

see we are part of ourselves and as a

consequence

as we grow toward retirement from the

early ages of uncertainty into childhood

layers of experience collect and these

aren’t just layers of experience

they’re layers of meaning that we must

address

and we try to understand

what’s changed over 40 000 years what’s

the difference

well we’ve had the cognitive revolution

and what is this cognitive revolution

the old brain of taste and touch and

smell

gives way to this new logical brain this

problem-solving brain

the analog mind turned into this digital

mind

and that’s the world we’re living in

today

now tell me tell you about this digital

mind you see

the digital mind is not constrained by

personal history

you just have your keyboard you can

reach out

in any direction without respect for

hierarchy your teachers your parents

religious authorities don’t necessarily

follow you you can go and you can search

you can seek meaning

but the problem is in our world

of acceleration social uncertainty

they can become more concerned with

outcome than meaning and process

because they can measure us all of us

now i’m going to do a little bit of

historical run

psychology professor that’s my job the

german romantics

early eighteen hundreds wolfgang gurta

founder of morphology and biology and

understood how plants grow

they also understood how we grow because

they were concerned

in this early existential era in western

europe

a first world society they were

concerned about how

we are aware of ourselves because we’re

in the post-feudal period

we’re in the early stages of the

industrial revolution

so we have an intuition of becoming who

am i where am i going we all struggle

with this i struggle with this

so they assumed that uncertainty and

tension are essential

in the struggle toward a unified self

and so it’s important for us to also

resonate to the experiences that we have

and others in meaningful situations

now we move forward into the later 1800s

and the poet baudelaire talks about the

age of discontinuity

because this acceleration of society is

happening

he favored this spectacle of modern life

in paris

with all the new machines and all the

fascinations of modern technology

but you see what happens we have a cult

of images

because we can preserve it he

romanticized this fragmentation of

modern society

he said to the painters capture the

fleeting moment

preserve the fleeting moment and that’s

what the impressionist painters did

now thorson valen an american

sociologist has talked about conspicuous

consumption because in this modern world

you can show yourself off the

achievements that you have

and you can show conspicuous leisure

this is my leisurely life

and we can sense how this can affect us

now

cool sociologists put an important card

on the table he says we have a looking

glass self

because we try to imagine how we’re seen

by others

because that way that they see us shapes

our identity

but the individual and society are

inseparable by moving

toward the digital era

in 1935 and who could imagine a

television existed then

rudolph arnheim the important

psychologist of art

talked about cultural transportation and

he said with television the wide

world is entering our room is entering

our life

but you see the individual can become a

lonesome

consumer of spectacles because you have

this screen

that seems so real that is so salient it

is so powerful

and there’s a problem because illusion

that perceiving is equal to

understanding

just because it looks real on the screen

it must be true do we not suffer that

today

after world war ii adorno is talking

about the cultural

industry where mechanical reproduction

enables

mass distribution and consumption this

outside world can feed us information

and get us to want to buy things hidden

messages can begin to control us

make us more conforming and the problem

arises again

and again we become less critical about

our world

and in this incredible remember there’s

no internet now

everything we’re concerned about at the

outset of my talk they don’t even

imagine it we didn’t imagine it in the

60s

the boar says in the spectacle of the

society

commodities complete the colonization of

social life

you should have this you should own this

can take us over

being turns into having and having turns

into merely

appearing so what happens

how do we achieve this authentic life it

gets

replaced with its representation

people need to be self-conscious of

their situations

as an antidote to this problem where we

present ourselves as a spectacle we show

this side of our life for that side of

our life

in the lonely crowd american sociologist

david riesman

talks about the transition in the 50s

and 60s where the bureaucratic society

takes over from the entrepreneurial

and we need people to fit in we need

them to be the grease

of the modern institution so what

happens we got to fit in

so we identify with people

we believe in what they consume we want

to be loved

rather than esteemed autonomy and

self-knowledge in that circumstance are

compromised

with each of these technological

advances we face a crisis

because we can be consumed with

illusions we can be consumed with the

need to display our life we can be

consumed with products

are we being critical are we being

conscious of our worlds

and marshall mcluhan the distinguished

professor of literature at the

university of toronto a very dear man

with no ego i have friends who made him

pilgrimage just to meet him

he talked about media and remember

there’s no internet and he’s writing in

the 60s he’s writing in the 70s

new media have important personal and

social consequences

the message in this medium is the

message

is the change of scale or pace

or pattern that a new medium brings us

and we can sense the arrival of the

internet

and that’s what happens he uses the word

electricity electricity makes

everything instant time

and space collapse

and now a professor would never put this

in a speech

in the 1960s or 70s or 80s quoting

playboy magazine

but what did he say in an interview

the central purpose of all my work is to

convey this message

that by understanding media as they

extend us

we gained a measure of control over them

so my little tool

that someone a hundred thousand years

ago held in their hand

it’s not unlike the button we push to

give access to television

or the most that we play with to give us

action to the internet

and in all those cases we must be aware

to have control

so one can say from the medium is the

message

one can say the medium becomes the

matrix like the movie

that we were all fascinated with because

big brother from 1984 by

orwell has arrived we face

the crisis that i spoke of at the outset

the matrix is a repository of all we

have said or written

of things we know we do of things we

have done

inadvertently we all know we’ve pressed

on an ad somewhere

and that little object keeps coming back

again and again

when we go to different sites algorithms

track our conscious and unconscious

actions

we may not be aware and that’s part of

the purpose of my talk

raising our consciousness making us

aware of our worlds

making us aware of institutions

cultural media that can manipulate us

now what are we looking for in social

media what are we looking for

we’re looking for connection we’re

reaching out to find meaningful new

relations

that’s logical and we may be looking for

vicarious fulfillment

because when i go to facebook and i see

your life i live through

your life that can become problematic

may be searching for validation i’d be

searching for approval

as reisman has spoken of with the other

directed individual

i want to be accepted what i do has to

be okay

but on the other hand we may be creating

illusions we may be searching for

compensation

we may be presenting ourselves in ways

that are our fantasies

that we wish we were just like

conspicuous consumption

we have conspicuous display

okay now what do we do how do we save

the self

how does the cognitive digital mind that

reaches out in this instrumental

structure problem-solving way

reconnect with the embodied and a

logical mind

how do we retrieve our primitive self

and that’s part of my point

we want the vision 2020 but division

2020

goes back in time for the layer itself

the essential self

all of our childhood experiences all of

the experiences of our people

whatever society we come from how do we

avoid becoming dopamine addicts

because they’ve shown that when we get

that little jolt of a message

on email in whatever social media

you favor we get a joke for dopamine we

get a reward

and we want more of it cigarettes are

not the only addiction

now we need to take ownership of our

technological lives

okay we want to be aware of the facts

and the situations of our private lives

we need to find ourselves we need to

address the skin of our life

and address the porousness where we give

so much away

without necessarily knowing the social

and technological world

surrounding us we need to be

understanding of these institutions how

do they work

are they trying to manipulate us what’s

going on in the midst of our daily life

that is accelerating so rapidly and

turning we need to unify ourselves

in the face of big data

thinking of rosa where i started my

story

we need to slow down

we need to feel the moments of our life

and we need to feel the presence of

others not remotely

on screens but presence with us in

face-to-face interaction

for the taste and touch and smell regain

importance

we need to explore the layers of our

personal history

what’s your life about how did you

construct your identity

how did you survive where did you get

your resilience

and not just that the resilience of your

family

the resilience of your people

we need to explore these situations

around us to take the risk

to be out there in the world to find out

what the world is like with first

hand knowledge not vicariously through

others

and we need to value our experiences

because when we slow down

we become mindful of the moment

we can feel the moment we can reflect

on the moment and not just that

on the issue of retirement for whatever

age we are

we need to imagine ourselves 10 years in

the future

how will i get there how will i take

my layers of experience and arrive at

that state

i see a fine line separates us from the

machine

world but we have to remember

even though machines can give us the

music we want and they know what we want

they can take care of what we want and

what we need

but they are not organic

they have no blood or feelings they have

no emotional history

they can correct themselves but they

don’t feel the pain of those early

mistakes from which

they can learn they just store

information

see and remember

they can control us

but they’re not conscious so in the end

my story is a story of recovering

ourselves recovering our personal

histories

recovering the histories of our people

taking the risks learning from the risks

and being

aware of ourselves in the end

thank you very much for listening

you