It's been over a month since I managed to write on this blog... you'd think I was a super-busy person! Well, I am, to an extent, but a lot of it is manufactured stuff that I require myself to do... working out five times a week, for example. It's good that I do that, but no one is actually making me do it other than myself.
Okay, so now that we know my excuse for not blogging is that I'm Getting Fit, where am I with my reading-the-books-in-my-house project? Well, it's going pretty well! I finished that ridiculous Alchemy and Academe book and recycled it, finished reading Joe Hill's Locke and Key: Welcome to Lovecraft (so great!), and finished reading my son's collection of Underland Chronicles books by Suzanne Collins (fun).
My most recent conquest has been yet another stripped book from my bookstore days, The Lost World by Michael Crichton. I finished it yesterday - the same day I decided to watch the famous "Love's Labor Lost" episode from the first season of ER, the now-defunct but still great television show... a show that was created by none other than Michael Crichton.
Crichton's fiction is always interesting to me, in that it's fun to read and fast-paced, but I always feel like I'm getting the same message: Beware Technology - It Could Destroy Us All! When I read Prey several years ago, I realized it was pretty much just Jurassic Park with nanotechnology instead of dinosaurs. The Lost World is pretty much just Jurassic Park with a few different characters. And I'm okay with that - because it was fun, fast-paced reading - but the underlying technophobia strikes me as a little much.
Consider this passage, where Ian Malcolm, chaos mathematician and survivor from the first book, opines about why he thinks "cyberspace means the end of our species."
"Because it means the end of innovation," Malcolm said. "This whole idea that the whole world is wired together is mass death. Every biologist knows that small groups in isolation evolve fastest. You put a thousand birds on an ocean island and they'll evolve very fast. You put ten thousand on a big continent, and their evolution slows down. Now, for our own species, evolution occurs mostly through our behavior. We innovate new behavior to adapt. And everybody on earth knows that innovation only occurs in small groups. Put three people on a committee and they may get something done. Ten people, and it gets harder. Thirty people, and nothing happens. Thirty million, it becomes impossible. That's the effect of mass media - it keeps anything from happening. Mass media swamps diversity. It makes every place the same. Bangkok of Tokyo or London there's a McDonald's on one corner, a Benetton on another, a Gap across the street. Regional differences vanish. All differences vanish. In a mass-media world, there's less of everything except the top ten books, records, movies, ideas. People worry about losing species diversity in the rain forest. But what about intellectual diversity - our most necessary resource? That's disappearing faster than trees. But we haven't figured that out, so now we're planning to put five billion people together in cyberspace. And it'll freeze the entire species. Everything will stop dead in its tracks. Everyone will think the same thing at the same time. Global uniformity."
While I actually (and weirdly) agree with some of that - it is annoying to imagine the Gap and Starbucks and McDonald's sitting in Tokyo and Moscow - and I also think it's really difficult to make millions of people change anything at all (see American politics in general), I think it's completely off the mark in a lot of ways. Put five billion people in cyberspace and it turns out that a lot of them will just continue to argue that their way is the right way forever and ever amen. This is true to the extent that there are entire news sources that deliberately slant their news one way or another. Even people who generally agree with each other that, say, that liberal viewpoints are "correct" will argue ad infinitum (see any ILX Politics thread at ilxor.com for further information, or if you feel like knocking your own head against a wall for a while).
The weird thing about all this is that, on the television series ER, medical technology was used constantly not as a threat but as a way to save lives. "Love's Labor Lost" shows heroic doctors spending a night trying to save a woman and her baby (admittedly this particular case showcased an extremely unlikely series of events and unfortunately scared a lot of pregnant women in early 1995 - but my point still stands). For a woman with pre-eclampsia or eclampsia (the first threatening diagnosis the character receives), it's critical to have access to intravenous medications and good fetal monitoring.
And yes, I realize Michael Crichton merely "created" ER, he didn't write it, and I acknowledge that there is a huge difference between a novel and a long-running television series. I just think it's odd to have the creator of both these worlds be so at odds with himself in his messages about technology.
Now I'm off to recycle The Lost World and leave it behind me, going on to another book from my shelves. I admit that I still like to read the paper ones and have them with me, but I don't think the new reading technologies (i.e. e-books, Kindles, iPads, etc.) are bad or destined to cause humanity to stop evolving and eventually die out. I think we have created a lot of problems that we need to solve, but I don't think cyberspace is one of them.
