17 de outubro de 2011

I want to be connected. But why?

14:09 17 October 2011, New Scientist
Paul Marks, senior technology correspondent

Connected.jpgUnless you are supremely civilised and have allowed smartphones and online social media to pass you by (and if you have, I'd like to give you my email address so you can tell me how you do it, but of course you wouldn't know what to do with it) it's odds on that you've felt the odd compulsion to read tweets, emails, texts, RSS feeds and Facebook at times when its completely inappropriate. Glanced at texts at a wedding? Furtive peeks at Twitter in a meeting? I know I have. But why do we do this? 

It's a question Tiffany Shlain (founder of the internet Oscars, the Webby awards) attempts to tackle in her movie Connected.  Just what is it, she asks, that is so compelling about our ability to connect electronically? Why do so many of us hunch over our phones, scanning missives from people we don't know, that arrive faster than we can read them, leaving us oblivious to the slower-moving real world and people around us?
Connected2.jpg
In an opening monologue, Shlain confesses to caving in to her inner tweeter and ducking out of a lunch she was enjoying to go texting and emailing in the washroom. What, she wonders, made her abandon her lunch pal to do something so trivial? Why did her mobile gadget win that battle, for however short a time? 

We don't really find out. Connected  is a slick production with a commentary style that falls somewhere between that of David Byrne in True Stories and Sex and the City's narrator Carrie Bradshaw, all above a backdrop of  images and animations often akin to those in Koyaanisqatsi, a dialogue-free movie about how technology has kicked our lives out of balance. In short, Connectedis hugely watchable.  

But when it comes to finding answers, Connectedhas a disconnect - between the promise of its trailerand the film itself. While the trailer offers to throw some light on communications obsession, the film serves up something rather different. It's an homage to the theories of Shlain's neurosurgeon (and author) father, which are used to explain our tech-mediated communications obsession in terms of what seems to me to be the unproven assertion that the right hemisphere of the brain handles artistic and creative thought, while the left does our analytical work. And that too much left brain is bad for us.

The film's thesis, if I follow it right (it zips around a lot) is that the development of an early mass consumer communications technology - the printed word - and the literacy that followed in its wake moved our thinking towards the left brain hemisphere, taking us away from the right brain's lovey-dovey creativeness into the hard knock life of science and technology. As more and more ways to communicate have been invented (telegraph, telephone, radio, TV, cellphone, email, the world wide web, Twitter...) the cacophony of messages we swirl around in has led us to believe in our technology rather than nature, our pointless tweets and not our relationships. Or something.  

While some research does support a language/creativity face-off, the jury is still out on broader claims relating to left/right brain dichotomy and, as New Scientist has chronicled, arguments rage over its validity. 

So for truly hard-headed rationalists there's not a lot of meat here - but what we do have is a touching, funny tale of a woman's love for her dad and how his neuroscience theories explain part of what goes on in her world. Tiffany Shlain confirmed in a tweet to me that the movie's science is based on her dad's ideas - but she says it is all scientifically referenced in his books. Overall I'd say Connected is well worth seeing - just don't expect major league answers as to why we're obsessed with connecting. 
  
Anyway, I have to go tweet. I got a tweet from a movie director! OMG lol! 

Nenhum comentário:

Postar um comentário