The tragedy of hi-tech consumerism

In response of my post two days ago, Mari wrote a thoughtful comment which contained the following:

“All these gadgets making us as human beings actually dumber (!?)… and less sensitive as communicators? I was just looking at some music pedagogical things they are doing here and thought, “but we’ve been making music just fine for 100s of years without these…”. All is geared towards ‘easier’ way of being creative human beings…like conductor for dummies, violin players for dummies so you don’t have to listen, train and practice like the old days. Clearly that’s where the $ support (toy companies etc) comes from.”

Coincidentally, last week I was having pretty much the same discussion, mostly because of my recent experience putting together the MakerBot. Assembling that was hard. Many steps required me to push my personal envelope, and to learn technical skills that were new to me. And for that reason it was incredibly fun.

I’d had pretty much the same ecstatic feeling while I was learning to play classical and flamenco guitar — a process that took a lot of hard work over many months. When I think back to my peak life experiences, all of them required me to push beyond what I had thought myself capable of. And while I very much enjoyed those “relax and do nothing” vacations — lying on a nice beach and looking at the sunset — not one of them was a powerful peak pleasure experience for me.

If the goal of your business is to provide experiences for people that maximize their quality of life, then you’ll want to give them opportunities for meaningful challenges. Generally speaking, people feel most alive when they are actively engaged in something that they working for, and that holds some significant meaning for them. The political candidate you worked to get elected, that day you hiked all the way up a mountain, the Shakespeare play you worked on all summer, the time you cooked all day to create an amazing meal for someone you love — these are experiences that make us feel we’ve really lived.

But if the goal of your business is to maximize profitability, it is far easier to ask your customers to do as little work as possible. An experience that substitutes the illusion of mastery of skills is a far easier sell than one that requires the customer to achieve true mastery. For example, there is money to be made in giving guitar lessons, but there is vastly more money to be made in selling Guitar Hero and its equivalents.

I worry that the combination of new technologies might be conspiring to create a perfect storm — an entire generation is coming of age expecting the illusion of truly rewarding effortful experience, since selling such illusions can scale up far more easily than selling the real thing.

Certainly the commoditization of illusory skill building is not new. The Craft Master “Paint by Number” kits first sold in 1950 by Max Klein and Dan Robbins were a huge and immediate success. In a sense, they were the Guitar Hero of their era. But now such commercial plays are the rule, rather than the exception. The concept of putting in hours of effort to create a truly rewarding personal experience — once the norm, and in fact a defining trait of the American “can do” ethos — may be gradually fading from our culture, as it is supplanted by an illusory Potemkin version of itself.

But maybe not. There is definitely some hi-tech consumer software out there that encourages — and richly rewards — effort and originality. PhotoShop, GarageBand, and GameMaker come to mind, and there are plenty of others. There is also a growing youth subculture that puts enormous effort and talent into creating some of the most intriguing videos on YouTube. This movement of video creation as individual craft is arguably a successor to the youth-led — and substantially home grown — popular music revolution of the twentieth century.

So maybe there’s hope. 🙂

One thought on “The tragedy of hi-tech consumerism”

  1. Yes let’s hope that human beings will not forget to be “happy” always finding engaging ways in spite of our tech advancements. I’m not complaining about our abilities traveling faster on TGV instead of on horses, but more about our sensitivities diminishing or being lost because of it. Maybe the next thing is to regain that–how can we smell the change of air and light, feel the time past, feel the change of different vegetation along the way over time, without actually spending time? Or is that considered lost and unnecessary? Maybe it is.

    My daughter tremendously enjoys Google Sketchup program (3D designing) but she wasn’t really impressed at all visiting Guedelon (medieval castle being hand made http://www.guedelon.fr/ ) But maybe she will come up with totally new ways of challenging herself. In fact I have no doubt 🙂 So yes, thank you for being hopeful!

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