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