Authors Hervé Fischer and Jason Logan promoted their books on technology at Hart House last Thursday, as part of the University of Toronto Bookstores’ reading series.
Multimedia artist and philosopher Fischer talked about Digital Shock: Confronting the New Reality, which examines the relationship between human beings and digital technology.
Fischer introduced himself as two times an immigrant: once to Canada and once to the cyber world. He compared the digital era to another significant period in human history, the “age of fire,” and stressed the need for a new way of thinking. Fischer believes that humankind, confronted by an ever-increasing world, needs to switch from “linear thinking” to “arabesque thinking.”
Whereas linear thinking follows the principle of causality, arabesque thinking would be modelled after hyperlinks and would involve conceptual leaps and dancing.
“There is the temptation to jump like a kangaroo, back, forth, everywhere,”
Fischer stressed that “Technology is not an enemy for humanity or humanism…Technology is not good or bad in itself-humans make it good or bad, usually both.” Despite this declaration, however, he seemed worried about the future of humankind. Fischer compared the progress of humanity’s wisdom with our technological progress, and found we came up short in the first category. Fischer added that people use digital technology to escape reality and experience euphoria without resistance, citing iPods as an example.
“Inventions are increasing exponentially with the digital age,” he said. “It’s getting out of control, faster than our consciousness, faster than our wisdom. We are heading into catastrophe if we don’t have a mutation of brain.”
In contrast to the structured discourse of the grey-haired Fischer, illustrator Jason Logan’s presentation of iGeneration took a lighter and more anecdotal approach. Logan explained that he wanted to examine “people who always knew and expected instantaneous communication,” and read from his book of what-if lists, illustrations and musings.
Consulting notes written on an envelope, Logan then guided the audience through his process of “dumb research.” Logan said he hovers around people that seem the right age to him in the subway or coffee shops and notes how they talk about the digital world. Instead of ignoring spam mail, Logan reads it and visits the suggested sites. He also explores weblogs and websites, following hyperlinks to see where they lead.
Logan stumbled onto Statistically Improbable Phrases on Amazon.com, where computers comb scanned texts to identify combinations of words that are statistically unlikely to occur.
“I found it an interesting and actually kind of poetic way of looking up information, to look at some book that you liked, find out what its statistically improbable phrases [were], how [those phrases] link to other books, which makes completely unrelated books somehow have a word connection.”
