Colin Ellard - You Are Here

A trickle of oil

The news outlets are slightly atwitter today with a report that suggests that there's about a 50% rise in the consumer cost of gasoline in the short-term offing.  The part of me that can blithely ignore the short-term pain, poverty, hunger, discomfort and suffering that something like this would cause says "bring it on".  I'm not a huge fan of doomsday scenario-mongers who make us feel as though we're all beyond hope now and about to be smitten back into the Stone Age, but there's no question that fossil fuels will eventually be depleted and much rides on how they're depleted.  If we suddenly ride off of a cliff edge into a world with oil priced beyond the reach of all but a tiny few, then I can see much of society unraveling quickly and catastrophically.  If we receive a series of substantial jolts over a series of years then maybe this will be the tonic we need to look into, and figure out, a future without such excessive fear and panic that we can't think straight. 

I'm no economist, but $1.50/litre seems like a sharp needle in the ribs but not a catastrophe. It might be enough to help apply some braking force to our tendency to live beyond our geographic footprint.  The expense of long commutes to work will begin to encourage people to think of ways to populate space differently.  The cost of importing goods from afar, whether they be oranges from California or  plastic toys from Guangzhou might take a little nip out of our tendency to luxuriate in a life beyond our spatial means.  Many of us will discover that we have feet attached to the ends of our legs and we'll remember what they're for.  Many of us will eventually rediscover the simple joy of measuring space one quiet, soulful step at a time.  We'll all be pretty stressed--we'll need that calm comfort to help us think through all of the brilliant ways that we'll eventually re-connect with the real dimensions of the planet.  For all of the consequences of our oversized brains, both ridiculous and wondrous, I for one still think we're a species worth preserving.

What is a real human?

Just before the new year, Stephen Strauss wrote an interesting piece for the  CBC website on the subject of virtual crime.  The issue is not a new one, but it is one that I predict will continue to heat up in the coming year.  How do we apply human laws in virtual realms?  How do we deal with everything from property theft to slander, assault, and rape?  I don't spend much time in Second Life anymore (too busy writing at the moment) but I've hung around there long enough, especially late at night, to experience some of its seamy underside.  I've never been battered with a virtual penis, but I have been chased mercilessly by a small cube emitting a loud and obnoxious sound file.  I've seen people trapped in cages, and I'm pretty sure I came close to being shut in one myself at one time (I teleported away before things got too ugly).

In the end, Strauss takes the common sense line that when it comes to defining virtual crime, if there is property theft then virtual property is as real as bricks and mortar, provided that there is real money at stake somewhere.  But other kinds of crimes--crimes against the person--seem to him much less clear cut.  He says that you have to let thoughts be free "if there are no real humans involved."

And for me, there's the rub.  I'm far from alone in wondering whether a real human needs a real body.  I've written here before about Stelarc, the Australian performance artist whose mission is to extend our range of thought and imagination about what it means to be embodied.  If I'm attached to wires, or bluetoothed to some device that I can control with my mind, do those wires and devices constitute a part of my body?  If not, then can I use the connection to punch someone in the jaw with a robotic arm?  Surely not, even by Strauss' standard, but then what of a virtual jaw?  What if it hurts, or even just stresses me out a bit?  Neuroscientists have found clever ways to convince people that a rubber hand that they can see in front of them is actually a part of their own body.  Having induced this kind of otherworldly feeling of possession, not only do we flinch when we see the rubber hand hit with a hammer, but we feel significant (and measurable) physiological stress.

Many years ago, the brilliant sociologist Edward Hall defined a new field of study that he called proxemics.  We all know something of the laws of proxemics because they deal with things like territory and personal distance.  It's common intuition that we carry bubbles of personal space around with us whose size and shape can vary depending on the context.  We have one size of bubble for close friends and lovers, another for strangers and bosses.  One range of distances works well between two women and another operates between two men.  Now here's the modern virtual twist.  Research out of Jeremy Bailenson's lab at Stanford University suggests that those same laws of proxemics apply in virtual worlds like Second Life.  So I may know that my avatar is not a "real" body, but I still invest enough reality in it that I know where to stand and how to (or not to) make eye contact with other avatars.  This suggests that I'm embodying my avatar with some part of myself.  Enough so that if I'm jumped by someone in a dark virtual alley then the assault is a real world crime?

The problems involved in working out the psychological, sociological and legal issues are not to be underestimated.  Virtual technologies are incredibly freeing, filled with real promise, and potentially life-affirming, but the kind of life they affirm will not look too familiar to those with too strong attachments to the sacredness of the handful of cells we call our bodies.

Wireless umbilicals

The geo-everything trend continues to make inroads in our lives.  A few different types of technology have been around for some time now whose purpose is to help us to keep track of our children.  Everything from embedded GPS chips in mobile telephones to subcutaneous RFID chips (this latter makes me more than a little queasy) might be used by parents to keep a distant eye on our children's movements or even to set up geo-fences in which alarms ring and lights flash when our offspring stray beyond prescribed coordinates.  Now the latest entry in this market is trendy GPS-embedded sportswear -- the BladeRunner Jacket. 

I'm not completely opposed to these kinds of uses for geo-coding technology, but I'm not sure they necessarily help us in the way that we might expect them to.  First, any child older than 4 who wants to 'slip the lead' is going to do so in a hurry (except for those embedded chips -- ouch!).  In fact, I'm sure there's a human rights argument to be made that if they can't do so, we shouldn't be strapping them into the things in the first place.  Second, I think that the perceived risks of simply letting our children wander outside are inflated, and the real risks are far outweighed by the benefits of giving our kids unencumbered access to the big wide world from as young an age as can be managed.  If this technology moves the perceived risks downward so that they're more in synch with the real ones, then this makes me happy.  It gets kids out the front door and into real space.

What interests me is the idea that what matters most is where my child's body is located.  This is all that we can track with GPS.  But my children's minds, while they surf the Internet, thumb text messages to their friends, talk on the telephone, or even watch television, are so completely detached from the locations of their bodies that being able to read out the latitude and longitude of their actual brain tissue can't tell me much about what kind of trouble they might be in.  At the same time our technology helps us to vacate real space by moving minds and messages at light speed, we find ourselves trying to use it to strap ourselves back to the planet.  Are we just being old-fashioned, or is something else going on?

Where words

News reports today describe the ruminations of Stephen Harper's government regarding a plan to adopt The North Star as a kind of rhetorical reference in policy statements, general speechifying, and so on.  I can't help but be pleased that our national government is thinking about encouraging us to adopt an explicitly navigational reference for our national identity!

At the same time, there are reasons to be careful how such references are used.  Our language is rife with spatial references that can mean all manner of different things ('underhanded', 'overbearing', 'backpedaling', 'moving forward', not to mention 'left wing').  Psychologists have shown that the spatial references used in language can interact in all kinds of interesting ways with meaning and understanding. 

There's a really interesting example of this in a recently reported experiment in the journal Language and Cognitive Processes.  Mia eti  and Draen Domijan presented participants with words on a screen and then they asked them about their meanings.  They found some fascinating interactions between the locations of words on the screen and the speed with which they were identified.  For example, words for flying animals were identified more quickly if they were presented near the top of the screen, and reaction times were slower if the bird words were presented near the bottom of the screen.  The experimenters found much the same pattern of effects for non-animal words as well. 

What this tells us is that our minds are so imbued with space that even our mental dictionaries are hung on a kind of spatial framework (though, if it is like much of the rest of our behaviour, it may not be a very orderly framework).  I'm not sure what it means to the government, though.  Perhaps when Members of Parliament speak of the North Star, they should always be sure to stand on tiptoe.  Or perhaps they just need to ensure that stories about their policies always appear above the fold.

Ideology and the human brain

We're on the eve of an election in the province of Ontario.  My fingers have hovered over the keyboard for a few days now, wondering whether this was an appropriate venue for my political opinions and ultimately deciding, wisely I think, that it isn't. 

But I can't help making at least a passing reference to an interesting recent investigation of the differences between liberal and conservative brains.  In a study published in October in Nature Neuroscience, it was reported that those people who describe themselves as 'liberal' do better than those who describe themselves as 'conservative' on a simple kind of response inhibition task called a "Go -NoGo task".  In this task, participants are presented with a simple display (in this case it was a letter on a computer monitor) and they are required to press a button very quickly whenever they see the letter (GO!).  The catch is that on a few trials, a fairly small proportion of trials, they are presented with a different letter and the instruction to not respond (NO-GO!).  Though this sounds like a simple task, 500 trials of it, especially when being needled to go as quickly as possible, is enough to cause anyone to make some errors.  What's interesting is that self-identified conservatives are not quite as good at reining in their responses on the NO-GO trials, and they don't show the same patterns of brain activity that are seen in self-identified liberals (an area of the brain called the 'anterior cingulate cortex' appears to play a special role in generating inhibitory responses in this task).  Interestingly, some older research suggests that these kinds of differences may even be heritable.

So what does all of this mean?  I suppose one interpretation would be to say that conservative minds work well when we expect what has always worked to continue to work.  Liberal minds, in contrast, might shine when our habitual responses are no longer working and something new is needed.  So where are we right now in Ontario?  Canada?  The world?  That's for each of us to answer for ourselves -- and not just on our election days, but every day. 

Space and time

There's much in the news this week about speed.  Transport Canada has unveiled a pilot program to encourage drivers to adhere to posted speed limits.  The idea is that a small computer containing a GPS device will compare actual speed with recommended speed and drivers who do the right thing will be rewarded with points that can be cashed in for some kind of swag (as yet to be determined).  Apparently, previous attempts to achieve the same end by 'punishing' speeders using chiming alarms or by forcibly throttling down the accelerator failed.  As both a psychologist and a parent, this doesn't surprise me at all. 

Future plans, which interest me a lot, include the idea of embedding intelligence into our roadways so that the point system can be geared to prevailing conditions -- weather, traffic, and so on.  This idea of ubiquitous or ambient technology, in which our lives are made more comfortable and easier by gizmos that adapt to both our own internal workings and the greater environment, holds promise.  A curmudgeon might complain that we're giving up some freedom, but I think the more enlightened view is that our minds, especially our limited capacity for focal attention -- the mental bottleneck of most of what we can do in a day -- are being freed to focus on what matters.  Who wants to calculate a safe driving speed when they could be planning an efficient route or even just enjoying the views?

Other findings released this week suggest that our evolutionary forebears were trudgers.  Lacking an Achilles tendon, early hominids would have been slow and inefficient runners.  This would have made it difficult for them to hunt live animals for food.  The slow evolution of the biomechanics required for fleetness of foot was a key development for our species, but little is known about how this came about.

Two stories, one rooted in our ancient history and the other looking forward into a hyper-technological future, but both of them about how the marriage of space and time to make speeds both fast and slow influence the episodes of our everyday life.  Slow me down and space expands.  I may see and notice more, but perhaps my opportunities are limited.  Speed me up and space contracts.  Put a telephone or a Blackberry into my hands and space, in a way, disappears.  How do our minds accommodate to the waxing and waning of life's velocities, and what effect does this have on the shapes of our lived spaces?

The anniversary

We all know where we were six years ago.  I remember walking through the history department at the University of Waterloo, on my way to meet my first class of the semester, wondering why every room I passed seemed to contain a television tuned to CNN.  It was only hours later that I completely understood the magnitude of the thing, and we're still coming to terms with how the world has changed since 9/11.

Who flies an airliner filled with ordinary travelers into a gigantic building filled with ordinary office workers?  What kind of anger precipitates that kind of action? The answers are complex, to say the least.

Mohamed Atta, one of the masterminds of the attacks, was trained as an architect and an urban planner.  In an interview with the Australian Broadcast Corporation, Dittmar Machule, Atta's thesis supervisor for his Master's degree, offers some insights.

One of Atta's greatest passions as a student of the built environment was the manner in which he perceived modern Western forms of building to have invaded ancient Muslim designs.  Muslim streetscapes and buildings are designed to help reinforce cultural norms -- family hierarchies, gender segregation, privacy.

In the interview with Liz Jackson, Machule described Atta's concerns: "It's a problem with destroying our little narrow courtyards. It's a problem that somebody builds high rise towers in our neighbourhood so that the people can look at our courtyard and that was what he was dealing in and what he was interested in."

It might seem an overstatement to suggest that Atta was driven to jihad by the evolving shapes of the streets of Damascus, but it would also be a mistake to underestimate the power of space's shape to move us, make us feel, and motivate us to act.

Getting to the 'ask'

In an article today in the online publication Grist, Michael Tidwell argues that there's a possible downside to encouraging people to undertake small, local actions to combat climate change.  The heart of the argument is that those "10 Things You Can Do to Combat Climate Change" lists published in well-meaning magazine articles could either have the effect of minimizing the scope of the problem ("If my changing a few lightbulbs will right our course, then the problem must be a small one so I needn't worry") or causing us to despair ("If all I can do personally to fix this is to pay a few dollars for carbon offsets when I fly, then we're doomed").  Tidwell argues that personal action needs to be augmented by sweeping, dramatic, legislative reform of "Churchillian" magnitude. 

I think parts of this argument are correct.  There is a real risk that  grassroots campaigns to fix the environment will be derailed by despair.  In fact, I bet that Tidwell's motivations in writing this article were driven to some extent by despair.  People aren't changing their ways voluntarily, so perhaps it's time for the jackboots and the truncheons.  I understand the feeling.  I stand at a busy streetcorner every morning, waiting for my turn to cross a road crowded with cars filled with single occupants commuting to city jobs from McMansions in the suburbs.  I watch parents sitting in cars waiting for their children to come out of school, engines idling to keep the A/C running.  Waiting for their children.   I see people clamouring to find $5 t-shirts at discount stores, either oblivious to the human costs of getting those shirts on the shelves, or feeling helpless economically to do otherwise.

When election time comes, what would those people do to the politicians who proposed legislation that forced us to live in an environmentally responsible manner?  People are basically good, thoughtful, well-meaning.  We care about what happens to our children, and their children. But we're not making the connections between our own actions and what is happening to the planet.  Psychologically, we're not 'wired' to make those connections easily.   Ironically, many of the technologies that we've been able to develop with cheap carbon-intensive energy sources (rapid transit, instant telecommunication) have conspired to disconnect us further still from our spatial relationship with the rest of the planet.

It's been said so many times before, but I'll muster the breath to say it again.  In a democracy, people get the government that they ask for.  Governments will only enact tough laws to curb carbon outputs if we ask them to do so in very large numbers.  It's getting to the 'ask' that matters, and that's where those local actions count.    Getting to the 'ask' means understanding how we're connected to the planet and its problems, and this is a psychological problem, not a technological or political one.