Digital Technology and the Next Stage of Human Evolution
Are people with autism giving us a glimpse into our future human condition?
Could
we be driving our own evolution with our technology and, in fact,
be witnessing the beginning of the next stage of human evolution?
The thesis at the center of this book is that since we have delegated the ability to read context to contextual technologies such as social media, location, and sensors, we have become context blind.
Since context blindness--or caetextia in Latin--is one of the most dominant symptoms of autistic behavior at the highest levels of the spectrum, people with autism may indeed be giving us a peek into our human condition soon.
We could be witnessing the beginning of the next stage of human
evolution--Homo caetextus. With increasingly frequent floods and fires and
unbearably hot summers, the human footprint on our planet should be evident
to all, but it is not because we are context blind. We can now see and feel
global warming. We are witnessing evolution in real-time and birthing our
successor species. Our great-grandchildren may be a species very distinct
from us.
This book is a must for all communication and media studies courses dealing with digital technology, media, culture, and society. And a general reading public concerned with the polarized public sphere, difficulties in sustaining democratic governance, rampant conspiracies, and phenomena such as cancel culture and the need for trigger warnings and safe spaces, will find it enlightening.
https://www.amazon.com/Context-Blindness-Technology-Evolution-Understanding/dp/1433186136
“There is evidence that we have slipped into an unprecedented reality,” Berger said. “Digital technology has made us context blind.”
In this case, Berger’s definition of context is centered around a set of conditions that help people predict others’ behavior. While discussing context related to current technological tools, Berger provided insight on what the pandemic lifestyle of Zoom calls and looking at faceless black squares on a screen all day has done to people, especially students.
“(Context) helps us concentrate on what’s relevant and when we’re context blind, we can’t do this.” Berger said, “There’s an artificial silence that takes getting used to. It’s a new context that reveals how contextually insensitive we are.”
After defining context blindness, Berger discussed the phenomenon’s relation to the digitization of important life events. Often, noteworthy or exciting aspects of an event are seen mostly as an opportunity to post something on social media. Berger said “promposals” are a good example becuase they’re meant to be expressions of affection but often devolve into a spectacle for social media.
Beyond causing people to miss out on important life events, Berger said technology may also be putting people at risk of falling under its control later in their lives.
“Self driving cars, GPS and AI know everything about us,” Berger said. “They take control of our life experiences and we ignore what’s right in front of us.”
Berger concluded the event by discussing the symptoms of context blindness that also happen to be present in people that have been diagnosed with autism. She mentioned symptoms like fragility, hypersensitivity, high conflict personality and delusions.
“People with autism may be giving us a peek into our impending human condition,” Berger said.
Shorter Reviews
"In this provocative and highly accessible book, Eva Berger identifies caetexia as a major malady of today's times, one that bears a wide array of personal, social and political symptoms. Her abundant examples and theoretical connections allow readers to see key patterns across many different changes occurring throughout the contemporary world. In identifying context blindness as an unanticipated evolutionary consequence of digital media, Berger makes our fragmented, disconnected, and perplexing world more intelligible and more understandable. Tom Wolfe famously asked of Marshall McLuhan's work, 'What if he is right?' I could not help but think along the same lines regarding Berger's bold and sobering work here: 'What if she is right?'" --Corey Anton, Vice-President of the Institute of General Semantics, Professor of Communication Studies, Grand Valley State University
"This is an urgent, stirring, and relevant book. It revives media theory that has been unjustly pushed aside in the digital age and focuses on some of the most interesting challenges we face." --Siva Vaidhyanathan, Author, Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy
"At once a penetrating social analysis and an eloquent lament for where we are now and where we may be headed, this book is required reading for anyone who wants to understand the source of our failings and delusions. Dr. Berger presents a clear, cogent, and concise diagnosis of the ills of present-day culture, one that is essential if we are to begin to seek healing by reclaiming our real, human contexts once more."--Douglas Rushkoff, Author, Present Shock and Team Human
"In Context Blindness, Dr. Eva Berger presents a persuasive case that human beings, shaped by the media environments we have created, are evolving to a species that will not or cannot attend to the contexts we inhabit. Our ever-present connection to the internet that first intruded upon our sacred spaces (family dinner, classrooms, and churches) has now simply erased our understanding of how behaviors and spaces might differ. This erasure has replaced questions about what subjects and actions are appropriate in a specific context with arguments about trigger warnings and safe spaces--ultimately making no space safe. The algorithms that rule our lives are encouraging cancel culture and blinding us to the very idea of perspective. With an artful and passionate prose, Berger has issued a warning that the toxic human behaviors we are observing may be a natural selection provoked by our own inventions."--Missy Alexander, Provost, Western Connecticut State University
Wikipedia Definition - Caetextia - chronic disorder that manifests as a context blindness in people on the autism spectrum. The inability to see how one variable influences another, particularly at the higher end of the spectrum, than the label of 'Asperger's syndrome'".
People with caetextia often experience elevated levels of frustration, anger, and anxiety when faced with a situation that requires giving attention to more than one interacting variable or factor at a time. This can be attributed to the inability to unconsciously draw upon the contextual information presented in a given situation as well as evaluate the significance of change with regards to the surrounding environment.
Caetextia can also exist in a temporary form prompted by stress, anxiety, or depression.
In order for someone to be considered contextually aware, they must be able to attach attention to and detach it from the interacting variables in a given situation. This implies active integration of sensory information gathered from the situation. It has been found that patients differ in their ability to perform these functions based on the dominant hemisphere of their brain.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caetextia
Book Excerpt; feedbooks.com
Introduction
Every era in human history has a defining disease, and the language used around every disease defines the response of both patients and society to that disease. The illness itself then becomes a metaphor to describe unrelated social processes and cultural phenomena that resemble the symptoms—or the stigma—of the disease: cancer must be “fought” or “defeated,” and hatred is “like a cancer.”
Due to the physical disfigurement that accompanies leprosy, the sick suffered humiliation and segregation, and the word “leper” became synonymous with an outcast or a pariah. As Susan Sontag (2001) explains, tuberculosis was initially viewed as a disease of the artist afflicting a person of sensitive and sad temperament, and later as a product of urban decay and sexual excess. Similarly, AIDS became a symbol for social disorder and moral decadence. Neil Postman (1992) compares information glut—the overload of information that leads to the breakdown of a coherent cultural narrative—to AIDS. The dangers of information on the loose, he explains, are like those of an impaired immune system that cannot manage cellular growth and destroy unwanted cells.
Disease is the metaphorical source for psychological states as well. We can be “lovesick,” we buy things we don’t need because “nobody is immune to advertising,” and unexceptional events are “like the common cold.” We talk about behaviors as contagious, like laughter or riots. We draw parallels between the spreading of germs and the spreading of ideas.
The term “contagion” is used to explain phenomena in economics (financial contagion), psychology (social contagion), and anthropology (cultural contagion); we use it to describe the spread of ideas within social networks in the real world and online as well (Mitchell, 2012). We also speak about “viral” memes, Facebook posts, and advertising campaigns. The source of this metaphor has become more physically tangible, of course, since the COVID-19 pandemic. One may wonder whether its application to computers and social media has stripped it of its malign associations, making it difficult for us to see viruses as the potentially lethal, biological phenomena that they are. As Susan Sontag (2001) suggests, metaphors of illness obstruct the rational awareness necessary to contain disease. Our impaired ability to think of the coronavirus as literal may partly explain the arguments over masks and social distancing that facilitated its spread, although we never politicized anti-virus software or claimed it infringed on our liberties.
Every generation, it seems, has a defining physical or psychological illness. When the condition’s characteristics are made public by popular science, we all begin to use them as explanations for our own or others’ behavior. The rise in popularity of reality television, and with it the quest for instant celebrity, made “narcissistic personality disorder” the diagnosis of the moment. Then came “OCD,” “ADD,” “bipolar,” and “borderline,” and today “autistic” and “Asperger’s” are the most commonly quoted and loosely used terms by laypersons to describe (often in a demeaning manner) the socially awkward friend or ex-spouse, the friendless child, or the abusive boss (Wallace, 2012).
This use of the term autism is, of course, unfair to those indeed afflicted by the condition because when it becomes a slur, it leads to stereotyping and to the misunderstanding of the challenges and needs autistic people must face. In this book, it is meant neither as an actual medical diagnosis nor as an insult, of course. Autism seems to be the most useful metaphor to describe the human condition at the start of the third decade of the twenty-first century.
One of the most dominant manifestations of autistic behavior at the highest levels of the autistic spectrum is context blindness, or caetextia in Latin (Caetextia, 2009). People with autism assign meaning in an absolute way and not in a context-specific way. This affects abilities such as face perception, recognition of emotions, understanding language and communication, and problem-solving.
As it turns out, not only people with autism have difficulty reading facial expressions and recognizing emotions. A study conducted by UCLA (Morin, 2014) found that digital media decreased children’s ability to read other people’s feelings. Social skills require practice, and we had been low on this practice for a while when the pandemic struck. We were looking at our phones an average of ←2 | 3→96 times daily in 2019 (Asurion Research, 2019) but most of our conversations in 2020 took place behind a screen, and chances are that our ability to socialize in-person has been even further compromised. With muted screens on Zoom, we have become used to an unnatural silence and absence of conversation fillers (such as “uh” and “um”). Some are finding face-to-face conversations awkward and less fluid and their online behavior leaking into their real lives.
In addition, the social distancing and wearing of face masks imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic may turn out to have negative implications for babies and their bonding, early attachment, and connections with others (Green et al., 2020). It is much harder to read people’s emotions behind masks, and if we can’t read other people’s emotions, empathy deteriorates too.
When people with autism find it hard to empathize, it is because their brain lacks contextual sensitivity. They are affected by context blindness. It is important to emphasize, however, as Strate (2006) points out, that autistics’ lack of empathy does not imply antipathy, nor does autistic alienation necessarily lead to immoral conduct. As Frith (in Strate, 2006) explains:
Some of the perceived abnormalities of autistic social behavior can be seen not so much as impairments, but as unusually positive qualities. These qualities can be captured by terms such as innocence, honesty, and guilelessness. Autistic people are not adept at deceiving others, nor at impressing others. They are not manipulative or gossipy…they are not envious and can give to others gladly…. Autistic people may not empathize in the common sense of the word, but neither do they gloat over other people’s misfortune. Indeed, they can be profoundly upset by the suffering they see, and they can show righteous indignation. (p. 120)
The eroded contextual sensitivity that seems to be afflicting us all explains at least some of the lack of empathy we have seen around us over the past few years. Context blindness explains former U.S. President Donald Trump’s lack of empathy. It explains how this unorthodox demagogue who challenged all the conventions of modern-day politics, a brash celebrity-turned-politician who used unfiltered talk and defied all norms of public civility, won the U.S. presidential election. When we are blind to context, we cannot be civil, as we don’t have the context (cultural or social) to serve as a guide for what is acceptable and what is not when we play a certain role in a given situation. For the context-blind, civil norms are rendered meaningless or transparent. The concept of common sense ethics disappears, as there is no common sense—no basic shared, self-evident moral principles to guide us.
Context blindness also explains Jair Bolsonaro, current president of Brazil. Upon his return to Brazil from a visit to Israel in 2019, at a meeting with evangelical pastors in Rio de Janeiro, he said that the crimes of the Holocaust are ←3 | 4→forgivable. In a clarification posted later, he blamed “those who want to push him away from his Jewish friends” for taking his speech out of context. He added that forgiveness is something personal, and his speech was never meant to be used in a historical context. What other context is there when talking about the Holocaust? Well, when there is no understanding of context, you can talk about the Holocaust in whatever context you want—including a personal, Hallmark-card kind of context—and in that context, “good friends always forgive.”
Another good example of context blindness is the ultra-orthodox weekly in Israel that blurred the faces of women featured in a famous picture from the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The photograph, featuring a Jewish boy holding his hands up in submission, depicts the surrender of Jews after the Uprising. Most of the Jews in the picture were sent to extermination camps. But for the publication, the context of the photograph is invisible, and female Holocaust casualties and survivors are sexual objects, so their faces were blurred, and the little girl walking next to her mother was cropped out completely (Tessler, 2013).
Fake news can also be explained by our inability to understand context. Culture watchers and worriers—everyone who is concerned about the disregard for facts and the rule of emotion over reason—have been trying to understand fake news and the multiple explanations that have been provided for them.
Masha Gessen (2016), for example, explains that fake news and alternative facts are told for the same reason that Vladimir Putin lies: “to assert power over truth itself.” Another explanation is that with trusted news establishments in decline, fake news is disseminated faster and wider than ever before through social media such as Twitter or Facebook. Clearly, technology has changed the way that lies, or fake news are communicated. On the Internet, they are clickbait meant to lure us into reading more and to expose us to advertisers’ messages. In addition, most traffic to news websites is driven by social networks, and the algorithms of those social networks give us news stories that are trending rather than those that are important or accurate. The algorithms that create news feeds don’t care much about journalistic norms. There, user-driven metrics are used, and the “wisdom of the crowd” blurs the lines between fact and opinion (Keen, 2011).
I have attended carefully to these various explanations, and I do not claim that they are wrong or that my explanation is the only one possible, but the lies that come so easily to despots today have always come easily to despots. Totalitarian-leaning leaders always present alternative facts, weakening our ability to make moral judgments. As Hannah Arendt (1973) wrote long before the Internet, “the ideal subject of totalitarian rule…are people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist” (p. 474).
There is strong evidence all around us that we have now slipped into an unprecedented reality in most areas of life, and not only in the realm of facts and truth. The insurgence at the U.S. Capitol, the rise of QAnon, and the election of figures like Marjorie Taylor Greene to Congress are not “more of the same,” but rather signs of a profound transformation.
My argument here presumes a more all-encompassing grasp of our current human condition, and the value of the argument resides in its media ecological perspective. This perspective has its origins in the observations of authors such as Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman. Media ecology is the study of media as environments, of environments as media, of the structure of situations or contexts, and it provides the definition of “context” in the context of this book.
Context is a set of conditions involving space, time, objects, symbols, and transactions between people, culture, and reality. The conditions are functions of one another and of the media through which they are conducted, and they allow us to label the situations we find ourselves in. The conditions also enable us to predict how others will behave and their expectations of us. These situations or contexts assign us roles. They tell us who we are. Context helps us concentrate on what is relevant and ignore what is irrelevant. It helps us make sense of the world.
Media ecology is context analysis; thus, it explains our context blindness. Media ecology focuses on the implications of technology and postulates that technological development leads to the creation of new human abilities and the weakening or even disappearance of older abilities. When skills are delegated to technology, unused skills and capacities tend to atrophy.
The advent of automated airplane operation weakened pilots’ abilities to respond creatively in emergencies. Pilots these days spend more time learning automated systems than practicing hands-on flying, and they often have trouble manually flying the plane: “They become a systems operator rather than a stick-and-rudder pilot” (Nicas & Wichter, 2019).
Doctors who rely entirely on technology are increasingly losing their ability to make diagnoses based on observation. With their attention focused on the massive amounts of data generated by lab and imaging tests rather than on the patient, they find themselves spending more time at their desks and at their computers than at patients’ bedsides. The physical exam is almost a lost art. The skills that legendary physician William Osler called “inspection, palpation, percussion and auscultation” (Zaman, 2018) are barely used. As Abraham Verghese half-jokingly said: “If you come to our hospital missing a finger, no one will believe you until we get a CT scan, an MRI and an orthopedic consult” (Knox, 2010).
As Nicholas Carr (2010) explains:
When a ditch digger trades his shovel for a backhoe, his arm muscles weaken even as his efficiency increases. A similar trade-off may well take place as we automate the work of the mind…our technologies at once strengthen and sap us. (n.p.)
The animated film Wall-E was also about how technology shapes us, about what skills weaken or completely atrophy, about the impact that fully automated systems for food, drink, entertainment, and transportation on an intergalactic spacecraft are having on our lives. The hovering chairs that move humans about in the junkyard that Planet Earth has become lead to atrophy, to loss of agency and skills, to flab. Losing bone density and becoming amorphous blobs are, of course, visible results of atrophy due to the delegation of abilities to work and transportation technologies. The loss of intellectual, cognitive, and social skills as a result of their transfer to media of communication are harder to identify and take longer to notice. In Carr’s words again:
When the power loom was invented, weavers could manufacture far more cloth during the course of a workday than they’d been able to make by hand, but they sacrificed some of their manual dexterity, not to mention some of their “feel” for fabric. Their fingers, in McLuhan’s terms, became numb. Farmers, similarly, lost some of their feel for the soil when they began using mechanical harrows and plows...The toll can be particularly high with our intellectual technologies. The tools of the mind amplify and in turn numb the most intimate, the most human, of our natural capacities—those for reason, perception, memory, emotion. (n.p.)
Why perform the basic arithmetic required for splitting a check or calculating the tip for a waiter at a restaurant if we can use the calculator on our phones? Why tell time by the hands of an analog watch if we can quickly look at our phones? Why remember birthdays when our calendars and social media accounts remember them for us? They even provide no-effort templates to say “Happy Birthday” quickly and move on. So, what if we gave up the pleasant feeling that once came with being congratulated by someone who remembered, or at least took the time to write it down to be reminded? Why retain the ability to give instructions if we can tell someone what to type into Waze instead? Why write cursive, or write at all, if one can type? Or talk? We don’t need any special skills to take good photographs either. Just add a filter on Instagram and…voila!
Human skills have been delegated to technology throughout history. The invention of writing weakened our biological memory; rational thought was impaired with the advent of television, and contextual technologies of the digital age have made us context-blind.
When GPS decides what route is best and iTunes decides what song to play, humans forget how to contextualize. When we completely outsource all our skills to mobile technology, location services, sensors, social media, and AI, we stop understanding the most basic situations. To relinquish control over our decisions to contextual technology is to give up our awareness of context.
When we live so much of our social lives on social media, we forget how to behave in the real world. We have become really good at distinguishing nuances of emotion between a smiling emoji, a grinning face, a beaming face with smiling eyes, a face with tears of joy or rolling-on-the-floor-laughing. In the physical world, our sensitivities have coarsened. Walking on the street, it has become one’s job to evade those walking with their eyes on their phones, not experiencing life, too busy documenting and uploading it to Instagram and walking into elevators before letting others out.
Sitting with a friend at a coffee shop or with our family over dinner, we text and swipe and look at our phones instead of at them. We no longer feel insulted when the people we are conversing with take their eyes off ours, “leaving us” or “putting us on hold.”
We are “tethered and marked absent” (Turkle, 2017). In other words, we may be physically present in a situation, but tethered to our mobile devices, we are mentally and emotionally elsewhere. Before the Internet, a “place” was made up of physical space and the people within it. Today, the places we physically inhabit have become invisible to us. They have ceased to provide context for our interactions because we are all physically present but have fixed our attention on the absent and the remote.
Since we are only partially present, lack of eye contact has become the norm in real life. Online we are apparently uncomfortable, so in its new iOS 13 update to FaceTime, Apple is experimenting with faking eye contact (or our “attention,” in Apple’s own jargon) and altering our faces so it looks like we are looking directly at the other person (Wilson, 2019).
If we can’t see context, manners disappear, and ethical behavior deteriorates. The ease with which we can connect with people through social media, including strangers, has impaired our ability to communicate “IRL.” The fact that there is an abbreviation like this one (“In Real Life”) is, of course, itself very telling. IRL was the only place where we lived, once upon a time.
Location technologies, mobile and contextual sensors know everything about us: where we are, what the weather is like, where we are going, what we are looking for, and whom we are with. They can even anticipate what we are likely to do next. Thus, they take control of our life experiences, and we stop noticing what is right before us. We may occasionally look up from the screen, but this is because we were encouraged to do so by a stream of slot machine notifications, usually to find a place that knows we are there and wants our money. This, according to Foursquare, is like a friend that taps us on the shoulder when there is something he or she deems relevant to the moment, but contextual mobile services are not our friends. We know nothing about them, and they know everything about us.
Of course, I share the concerns of many regarding our loss of privacy or the financial motives of businesses when technology knows everything, from our geographic location to our purchasing habits, and even our stress levels. However, I worry about something even more disturbing. My point in this book is that the danger is not that the technology knows what we want, but that it knows what we may not even realize that we want for lack of context to recognize it. We love technology because it is our guide dog or cane, but it is our reliance on it that is making us blind.
Context blindness is the disease of our time. I do not claim that context blindness for all humans is the same as the medically diagnosed context blindness of children with Asperger’s or autism. These issues stem from very different sources. Scientists have found genetics, certain pesticides, and other environmental factors to be suspected culprits in the proliferation of autism. According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC, 2020), statistics show that the number of people with autism is on the rise—one in every 59 American children in 2019—and not solely as a result of an increase in diagnoses. These statistics raise some questions: are people with autism giving us a glimpse into the human condition in the near future? Some characteristics of caetextia as described by experts in autism do resemble those of the average technology-using human. Is it possible that technology-driven context blindness is itself partially responsible for the explosion of autism spectrum disorder diagnoses? Could this be a case of humans driving our own evolution with our technology?
COVID-19 has made these questions even more pressing. Despite Zoom fatigue and the fact that for some people on the autism spectrum, video chatting can be a struggle (as it can intensify sensory triggers such as loud noise and bright lights), the sudden shift to video calls has mostly had advantages for people who have neurological difficulties with face-to-face interactions or with people all talking at the same time. Remote meetings with frequent lags between speakers have been a godsend for people with autism, reducing the stress and anxiety that stems from their difficulty recognizing when it’s their turn to speak in real-life conversations (Sklar, 2020).
The signs that people with autism may display early indications of the human condition in the future were there long before the pandemic. The descriptions of autistic behaviors very often speak of a child sitting expressionless, constantly spinning the wheel of a toy car, his eyes fixed. He pays no attention when his name is called, oblivious to the situation around him. It seems to me that if we replace the toy truck with a smartphone, this is quite an accurate description of a high percentage of the world population today. As Juan Enriquez argues, “autism isn’t so much a vestige of the past as a glimpse of what’s to come: the next evolutionary step in an increasingly data-choked world.”
This book is an inquiry into and a lamentation about our context blindness. Contextual technology has put us on the doorstep of a new reality, a moment of a completely different class from other moments—a sea change. The transformation we are undergoing is so fundamental that it may be the beginning of a new stage of human evolution—I call it Homo caetextus.
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Book Introduction Excerpt from here
https://www.feedbooks.com/item/4514347/context-blindness
