Back to my blog after some professional and personal interruptions. I thought I’d begin again by talking about the way many people so readily embrace the new technologies that stream out of software and hardware  companies and into their lives. Most dismiss objections about the changes in our lives, in our relationships—indeed in our brains— that those new technologies may trigger.  For better or worse, it’s inevitable, people say. Stopping the changes, or even the rate of change, is impossible now. Many pundits and members of the digerati enjoy not just defining the current trends but also predicting the future, whether it be the next new thing or a broad vision of social change over the upcoming twenty years or more.

But is it all inevitable? I recently came across another take on the issue of inevitability and the impossibility of stopping the relentless march of change over time. In Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, the narrator reflects on the consensus in his intellectual circle in Munich that as the 1930s unfolded, Germany was in for “hard and dark times
that would scoff at humanity, for an age of great wars and sweeping revolution, presumably leading far back beyond the Christian civilization of the Middle Ages and restoring instead the Dark Ages that preceded its birth and had followed the collapse of antiquity.”

Yet Mann’s narrator observes that no one objected to those conclusions. No one said this dark version of the future must be changed, must be avoided. No one said: ”We must somehow intervene and stop this from happening.” Instead they reveled in the cleverness of their insights, in their recognition of the facts and their inevitable results. They said: “’It’s coming. It’s coming, and once it’s here we will find ourselves at the crest of the moment. It is interesting, it is even good—simply because it is what is coming, and to recognize that fact is both achievement and enjoyment enough. It is not up to us to take measures against it as well.’”

It is a predicament well worth remembering, I believe, as we listen to our own technology enthusiasts. Our dark age ahead my not have death camps and atomic bombs but it has the possibility of being just as pernicious and inhumane. It could well be a time where in celebrating the wonders of technology we ignore what is the best essence of what it means to be human. We would do well to consider our choices while we still can.

“I am a multitasker,” my ten-year-old niece declared with a triumphant grin at a recent family get-together. I was horrified, frankly. After all the neuroscientists have been telling us lately about the limitations of our working memory—most people can only hold about seven items in  their working memory at any given moment—and about how switching back and forth between tasks actually makes people more inefficient, I was appalled to see a  member of our younger generation expressing multitasking as a positive achievement and a model for how to negotiate life.

If recent surveys and current trends are any indication, by the time my niece is 15, she will be checking her Facebook account, watching TV, texting several friends, and doing her homework in a rapid cycle of sequences for seven or eight or more hours per day. She will have acquired 365 friends on Facebook and sleep with her cell phone under her pillow. She will spend a great deal of her time tethered to her machines, alone, “communicating” with others through a truncated set of texting words, abbreviations, and acronyms. The closest she might come on some days to deep emotion will be expressed in a string of emoticons. Her time alone will resemble not solitude, where some contemplation of oneself and one’s life might occur. Rather it will be more of a muffled isolation within an electronic cocoon.

What draws people to the spell of multitasking? Why is this goal so valued as a continuous activity today? I think it began with a  set of metaphors that started making their way into our language, probably in the 1970s, possibly even earlier. I was first personally struck when I was having a conversation with a businessman  conversant with computer programming as he described how he “interfaced” with his client. When I asked him what he meant by “interface,” he told me he meant how people connected, just like the 8- or 12-pronged plugs that connected a
  computer terminal to a mainframe. By the 70s, we began to speak and think of some mechanical aspects of human thinking. By the eighties, the use of computer terminology to describe human thought became commonplace. We “processed” information. We “transferred” knowledge. We “crunched” the numbers. In short, we began to think of ourselves more as calculators than as people. Multiprocessing seemed a natural after that.

With the ubiquity of digital devices today, people have begun to emulate the microprocessors with which they share their lives. They have adopted the rhythm of the multitasking, breaking down large tasks into smaller steps and
processing multiple activities in a nearly simultaneous way. There are many problems with these analogies and the changes in our behavior they foster, but I’ll just mention two. One, we humans are not made to be multitaskers. We
basically can do only one relatively involved task at a time (most of us can walk and chew gum at the same time, but that’s different from activities that require real focus). The second problem involves the whole idea of equating
human activity with computers. It leaves out very large parts of what makes us human in the first place: creativity, self-awareness, morality, and our abilities to love, trust, empathize, grieve, and experience a whole range of
emotions that machines can never understand. All these experiences color our thoughts, one would hope, and make them more deeply human along the way.

“The world without spirit  is a wasteland. . . . What is the nature of a wasteland? It is a land where everybody is living an inauthentic life, doing as other people do, doing as you’re told, with no courage for your own life. “ Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth

Reality is broken, and video gaming may well provide a way for fixing it, according to Jane McGonigal, a game designer and author of Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World. The subtitle actually sums up the argument for the book. McGonigal argues that playing video games can help people find their core strengths. Essentially she believes that one can use video gaming as positive psychology therapy to learn how to become more optimistic, proactive, engaged, and creative in solving real-world problems. Not surprisingly the heroes in her book are the video game designers. She believes they can inspire people to give their lives more meaning and lead them to believe they are participating in epic actions, epic lives. She also suggests that people are likely to be more optimistic if they create alternate reality games in real life based on their favorite superhero mythology.

However, it is the subject of the main title, this  so-called“brokenness” of reality that provides a real clue to the mythology of  our time.  Reality (that is, real life) is disappointing, and in a series of bold statements, McGonigal tells us just how reality is failing us and why games are better. Here’s a sample:

 “Compared with games, reality is too easy. Games challenge us with the voluntary obstacles and help us put our personal strengths to better use.” Behind this statement is the sad and abiding idea that our real lives are boring, our real work an involuntary burden of unwanted tasks done at someone else’s bidding. “We are wasting our lives,” McGonigal explains.

And again:

“Compared with games, reality is unproductive. Games give us clearer missions and more satisfying, hands-on work.” Reality it seems  is  unstructured and offers few if any opportunities for satisfying work. Again, the work of our everyday lives is inherently tedious and the goals often ill-defined and hard to figure out.

One last sample:

“Compared with games, reality is disconnected. Games build strong social bonds and lead to more active social networks.” Real life is isolating, the author says. She cites the demise of extended communities in our everyday lives and refers to Robert Putnam’s landmark work Bowling Alone (2000) about the collapse of organizations and civic participation in the latter part of the twentieth century.

McGonigal argues that video gaming and alternate reality games can be powerful paths to help boost happiness, improve problem-solving and perseverance, and even provide sparks of a sense of community, all of which can
be applied to real-world experiences. To be sure, games of all sorts can be fun and give players a change of pace and respite from the responsibilities of life. But McGonigal goes way beyond the fun part. She is right in saying that we need to take games more seriously, that they are not just an evil force in society offering opportunities for people to waste their time or play incessantly and additively. But it is questionable whether she is also right in claiming that
video games are truly transformational and provide positive experiences that can influence the way people act and think in their real lives away from the video game screen. Her evidence is anecdotal and largely unconvincing.

In the end, it is McGonigal’s perspective is truly askew. Reality isn’t broken. It’s the relationship between people’s inner lives and their external reality that is out of whack. Life is complex, messy, full of demands, disappointments, inconveniences, and responsibilities. Virtual worlds and  gmes, on the other hand, offer more structure, clearer goals, and hence new ways to feel successful and to communicate. But this does not by any means lead to authentic living. In the mid-1980s, the renowned mythology expert Joseph Campbell observed that many people were leading inauthentic lives. He said that they weren’t connected to their own inner spirit. Nor did they have a sense of the fundamental mystery of life in general. Without a sense of who they really were and their place in the universe, it was not possible to be genuinely engaged with others. And all this basis for leading an authentic life, Campbell
wrote repeatedly, is what a living myth can provide.

Reality may seem broken for video gamers because the life on the screen is so vivid, so complete in its opportunity for vicarious heroism. It is  the land of superheros and super tasks, mythological in the sense that  characters and events are larger than life. But these things are not representative of a living mythology, which would inspire inward illumination and outer wonder through its symbols and narratives about modern life. “Myths inspire the realization of the possibility of your perfection, the fullness of your strength, and the bringing of solar light into the world. Slaying monsters [and here Joseph Campbell meant slaying the monsters within the individual] is slaying the dark things.” Campbell told Bill Moyers. “Myths grab you somewhere down inside.” Video games may excite, may amuse, may well elevate one’s mood, but they do not hit you down deep within your spirit. They do not change your life as Campbell defined it when he spoke of living myths.