Why is digital technology so exciting? Why is all this fast change that technology brings always so inevitable and wonderful? There’s an eerily similar narrative that so many books follow these days as they recount the breakthroughs in technology and how they are changing our culture. Written by highly credentialed and respected scholars and technology writers, they all seem to begin by announcing a revolution that is taking place, a level of change that will dramatically (and of course rapidly) affect how we live, how we think, how we interact, or sometimes all of the above. The books present many studies and discuss their ramifications to support their theses, all of which are pretty rational and often good food for thought. 

So far, so good. The problem with these books really appears toward the end of the works. There the authors somehow feel compelled to extensively predict how some particular aspect of digital technology will inevitably transform various aspects of our lives in drastic ways, some of which may enhance our lives and some of which may simply make things more complex, or more artificial, or more alienated than they already are. In most instances,
one is left thinking that writing the book got the authors so enmeshed in their own material that they literally ventured over the edge and into some great unknown by the end of the work. Maybe all these authors/editors need to do is just lop off the last 40 pages.

To show the typical trajectory of such books, let’s take a look at Infinite Reality: Avatars, Eternal Life, New Worlds, and the Dawn of the Virtual Revolution by Jeremy Bailenson, founding director of Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab, and Jim Blascovish, Distinguished Professor of Psychology at UC Santa Barbara.

First there’s the revolutionary thesis:
“We sit on the cusp of a new world fraught with astonishing possibility, potential, and peril as people shift from
 face-to-face to virtual interaction. If by 'virtual' one means 'online,' then nearly a third of the world’s population is doing so already.”

Then they announce the intent of the book:
 “In this book, we provide an account of how virtual reality is changing human nature, societies, and cultures as we know them. Our goal is to familiarize readers with the pros and cons of the brave new world in which we live. We explore notions of consciousness, perception, neuroscience, media technology, social interaction, and culture writ large, as they pertain to virtual reality—and vice versa.”

Blascovich and Bailenson are genuinely excited because they see a new frontier of opportunity for the behavioral sciences based on all the data that is becoming available through online social interactions. While the environment may be virtual, the behavior of the individuals is “real.” And virtual interactions can change individual behavior in the real world as well as people’s sense of themselves. Virtual experiences change how people make important decisions and how they react viscerally to real-life situations. Examples of studies and analyses of various data sets take up the majority of the volume and are meant to convince the reader that there is indeed a revolution underway. 

Some of their narratives and analyses are quite interesting and could have some meaningful implications for understanding how and why humans behave in the ways that they do and how therapists can use virtual reality
software of various sorts, including explicitly targeted exercises and games, to help people change negative behavior patterns or improve their abilities or performance in some areas. 

It’s in the final portion of the book, however, that the real problem arises. And it occurs in an area where so many technology writers get into hot water: Predicting the future. The authors paint a series of semi-plausible scenarios for various activities from market research to legal trial evidence to surgical training as well as physical therapy, airplane-pilot training, even virtual vacations. Some of these things are well on the way to becoming part of our lives (although I myself will probably resist virtual tourism to my dying day). 

Then Bailenson and Blascovich take another small leap into the more distant future that really puts them over the edge. First they discuss the “promise” of avatars, which they say will become “perceptually indistinguishable” from their real counterparts. People will be able to automatically interact with their avatars without the need for hardware or even voice commands so that they may be unaware that they are actually incorporating an avatar into their body. It will be an experience akin to wearing contact lenses. The authors also posit that avatars will “walk among us” so that we might not even realize that the figure approaching us is actually an avatar. This kind of speculation seems to seduce the authors into a discussion of how avatars will change close relationships (which inevitably in such works always seems to devolve into a discussion of virtual sex). 

Equally predictable and mundane are the applications of virtual reality to the domains of religion and education. A couple of examples are enough to illustrate how silly the claims about future can get:

On religion, the authors write that having a virtual reality experience of Moses parting of the Red Sea, including the ability to smell the flopping fishes would deepen our understanding of the miracle. Frankly I prefer the Charlton Heston version myself. (And in any event, the land is dry when the Israelites walk through the path, according to the Bible.)

On education, things are even worse when you consider that one of the authors is a psychologist: The authors envision a “virtual tutoring system that will combine virtual reality, nanotech, and artificial intelligence"
capabilities and provide the most complete educational experience anyone could hope for. The salient feature of this transition from “physical to digital” learning environments seems to be the elimination of the notably dull textbook with options such as movies and virtual reality programs. This means the children wouldn’t have to read anything at all—a great improvement, as any psychologist will tell you, for the development of the brain and for the
learning process itself.

With improvements such as these one can only hope that the virtual revolution is just that—virtual, that is, not for real.

Take your pick: Do you like the continual sounds from your smartphone announcing yet-another text message or phone call, or would you rather opt for an hour or so of listening to Mahler or watching whirling dervishes from Istanbul? 

There appears to be a wave of spirituality gaining force in the classical music world. And it is in part in reaction to our heavily technologized modern lifestyle. As Lincoln Center’s Artistic Director Jane Moss sees it,  the ubiquitous cacophony of cellphones, smartphones, and other digital gadgets is not only enormously seductive, but it is also  a
barrier to having a full interior life: “People are looking for larger experiences in a cyberworld” that has become more and more “like eating candy.” She has organized an annual White Light Festival in New York as a way to give
audiences a chance to experience “transcendence.” Moss stressed that the  festival is not about sacred music but about transcendence.  This year’s festival offers seventeen offerings from various international individual  performers and groups from a French Baroque ensemble to Indian Sufi mystics to contemporary American composers, along with many classics from the Western tradition. 

Other organizations are joining in: The annual Salzburg Festival, now the summer home of the Vienna Philharmonic, this year added a 10-day Spiritual Overture to its program while the Lucerne Festival in Switzerland has created a summer festival simply called “Faith.” A “Credo”series in that program  explores religions of seven different spiritual visions from the perspective that every religion is legitimate and each is only an approximation of what ultimately remains unexpressed. And the Pittsburgh Symphony is expanding its offering of a program it calls Music of the Spirit, an annual set of performances that is designed to show the symphony’s “deep commitment to
promoting and spreading a spiritual and universal message.”

Joseph Campbell, writing from the 1950s through the 1980s in the field of comparative mythology, could not possibly have foreseen how technology would permeate our lives as it does today, yet he did observe even
then that people had generally lost the ability to think and feel in metaphorical terms: “Our thinking is largely discursive, verbal, linear,” he told Bill Moyers in the conversations that were eventually aired on PBS and
published as  The Power of Myth. “One of the problems today is that we are not well acquainted with the literature of the spirit. We’re interested in the news of the day and the problems of the hour.” Were Campbell alive today, he might in addition have observed that we are so tethered to our digital machines and gadgets that we have no time for an inner life at all and may well be losing the capacity to ever develop one.

Campbell did not believe that contemporary society had a living functioning mythology.  And it is myths, as he points out, that provide “clues to the spiritual potentialities of human life.” The deep vitality of a culture’s mythology comes from the power of “its symbols as metaphors, delivering not simply the idea, but a sense of the actual participation in such a realization of transcendence,” he wrote late in his life in The Inner Reaches of Outer Space. If we were to have a new mythology in the future, he believed it would be up to the artists to create it, and he also believed that it would have to be a global mythology, taking into account and trying to express the rapture and the wonder of what it is like to be alive as human beings on this planet Earth within our solar system and “the cluster of twenty galaxies of which our galaxy is a member, which local cluster, in turn, is represented as but one of thousands of such local clusters of galaxies, themselves gathered in superclusters in a universe whose limits are not yet known.” Although Campbell focused primarily on the art of literature and story-telling, I think he would see good signs in how various musical organizations in the US and Europe are starting to offer programs that combine
Western and Eastern spiritual traditions, offering transcendence and the richness of a strong inner spiritual life through art in their own medium.

Yesterday I attended a conference on social networking at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and was once again struck with how absolutely overwhelmed and engulfed our modern lives are with digital machines and  technology. They are omnipresent. We carry them with us wherever we go. We  transact business through them. We communicate with friends and family and even  with that larger amorphous network of acquaintances and distant mutual friends  and their mutual acquaintances. And if we are honest, most of us will admit that  we even take those devices into our bedrooms with us when we retire for the  night. It is now so easy for our lives, our minute-to-minute experience of life,  to become permeated and mediated by our technologies. 

The conference, “Are Social Networks Really Social? was sponsored jointly by the museum and the Boston Institute for Psychotherapy so I would guess therapists of various sorts were in the overwhelming majority. But  there were more ordinary folk like myself who came out of curiosity to hear  three speakers on the topic of social media: (1) a psychologist and author who specializes in technology, Sherry Turkle, (2)  a  novelist, Helen Schulman, who has written about the nature and consequences of all things digital on the lives of ordinary families, and (3) an artist, Rachel Perry Welty, who has explored media like Facebook and Twitter as performance spaces. Over a long and rich afternoon those speakers and the audience pondered how social media—everything from email to smartphones to  Facebook—affects both our relationships with others and our own psyches. There  was a general consternation, even fear, and some sadness too, about how distracted, unfocused, and isolated individuals are becoming in our society. 

Many ramifications of such behavior came up: People are less productive, and they’re less capable of sustained and complex thinking. Some observed that there’s an intolerance, perhaps even an inability to actually cultivate
solitude. Not unrelated is a strong tendency to avoid, even again to fear, having direct conversations with others. And this of course leads to a lack of intimacy as well as empathy. Sherry Turkle worries that many people are actually substituting “connections” for “conversations.”

I’m thinking it may even be worse than that because when people post some thoughts on Facebook, send out a Tweet, or text someone, they are often not “connecting” so much as they are “performing.” My own experience with
Facebook and its current invitation to participate: “What on your mind?”is that it is a site for self-promotion, or as Norman Mailer once humbly (or maybe wryly) called a collection of his short works: “Advertisements for Myself.”
(Mailer was very good at the self-promotion thing, well before 2.0.)

The Yale computer scientist David Gelernter recently wrote a diatribe in The Wall Street Journal primarily against the careless disposable nature of “digital words,” and how sloppy and lazy (and idiotic) texting and smiley faces
really are. Yes, I agree that it’s all regrettable and one can only hope that everyone will come to their senses eventually. But what is even more interesting is Gelernter’s observation that “Generation-i is stuck in then“now,” neither pondering the past nor planning for the future. It’s the permeation and flow of the continuously new. “Merely glance at any digital gadget and you learn immediately what all your friends are doing, seeing, hearing, 
.  .  .  and (if you care) what’s going on now any place on earth. The whole world is screaming at you. Under the circumstances, young people abandon themselves to the present. Group narcissism takes over, as Generation–i falls in love with its own image reflected on the surface of the
cybersphere.”

Group narcissism. It seems we have far more of this phenomenon than we do of wise crowds and smart mobs. But it’s not clinical narcissism, which is a serious personality disorder characterized by dramatic emotional
behavior, a deep need for admiration, an inflated sense of self-importance, and an underlying fragile esteem for oneself. No this narcissism refers to the simpler classical myth of the beautiful Narcissus, who fell deeply in love with his own image in a pool of water as he drank from it. But he could never embrace or possess the image so rather than relinquish it he lay down by the side of the pool and was gradually consumed by the flame of his own
self-passion.