This morning I had a very difficult time dodging an oblivious commuter who was staring into a SmartPhone. This occurred on the steps of a subway platform, at the height of rush hour, with a crowd of people streaming past each other.<\/p>\n
Objectively one would think that somebody wouldn’t attempt to text while walking up a flight of steps in such circumstances. But I realize that this person was really absent — somewhere else in all but the physical sense.<\/p>\n
This problem, which most of us run into pretty much every day, is at least partially the result of a technology still in transition. As SmartPhones get better\/faster\/cooler, they can draw your attention ever further away from the actual world — the world that contains your body.<\/p>\n
The technologist in me says “Hey, we can fix that!” If we can just invent a better technology, then everything will be ok.<\/p>\n
But there’s another part of me that says “Hey, wait a minute — isn’t technology part of the problem?” Maybe the solution to every problem isn’t a continual advancement of technology. Maybe there are ways of thinking of this that actually have nothing to do with inventing something cool.<\/p>\n
For all of our collective problem-solving inventiveness, maybe our view of how to “make things better” with technology is missing something essential.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This morning I had a very difficult time dodging an oblivious commuter who was staring into a SmartPhone. This occurred on the steps of a subway platform, at the height of rush hour, with a crowd of people streaming past each other. Objectively one would think that somebody wouldn’t attempt to text while walking up … Continue reading “Something essential”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14559"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14559"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14559\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14560,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14559\/revisions\/14560"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14559"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14559"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14559"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}