Will You Try an Experiment With Me?

Tech enables us to do great things—break new ground, transcend limits that seemed fixed, and turn imagination into reality.?

Think about the first humans (or whatever? Have you been following all the recent finds?) who first harnessed fire, learned to shape wood and stone, figured out the wheel, developed writing, paper, printing...and on and on till the current peak of human achievement: Meta, X, and TikTok.

KNEE JERK ALERT—just kidding on those…

Honestly, my loyal readers know I write about this a lot and am passionate about separating Tech as a powerful tool from the DIGIBABBALE narrative that is still sadly prevalent today of:?

• Tech as a Harry Potter-like wand or spell
• Tech as magic that replaces all else
• Tech which erases all that went before

Versus…

• Tech that, as I started, enables us to do and accomplish ever greater things.?

The verb “enable” has several senses, most of which are a variant of allowing someone or something, such as tech, to do something.

“Enable,” in this sense and linked to Tech, is way more powerful and ultimately more productive in terms of actual positive outcomes than DIGIBABBLE.

However, not all the variants of “enable” have positive connotations in our era. In fact, one, in particular, is not only negative but has serious ongoing implications that are redolent with destructive behavior.

ENABLER: encourage or enable negative or self-destructive behavior.

See the progression??

Enable via tech and the future is limitless.

Be an Enabler, using tech, and possibly damage the world.?

As always, my ramble was inspired by the events of the day. In this case, I read an actual printed newspaper after I had finished my morning digital read on my iPhone of the same source.

Try it!!! Please. My choice was The New York Times.?

KNEE JERK ALERT! No comments, please; it’s one of my many daily reads.?

I grew up reading the NYT daily from 7th grade onwards for a $.25US/week student rate. (Our teacher scared the S**T out of me, saying we’d never be successful if we didn’t read it every day.) I never missed a day. My wife saved me what I missed when I traveled in the days before the Internet.?

From the day the “paper” went online, so did I. I still start every morning with the paper, but now I read it on my phone—no matter where I am in the world.

Yet, reading a large format paper is way more than being up on the news, reading commentary, getting a view on a new show, movie, or book, or seeing an ad for something I didn’t know I needed.?

As I have written before, there was a tactile engagement factor—immersive and engaging as you picked it up and folded it in special ways (commuting with it was an art) or spread it out on a table (my favorite).?

Yes, it’s heresy to suggest that something so primitive could be immersive and engaging. But let’s be clear no matter how much I love the digital experience (and I do); it’s not even close. But that’s not my point.?

Like many, we still get the printed edition of the weekend NYTs delivered to our home. My wife prefers it and I enjoy the book review section and the Arts and Entertainment.?

Honestly, it has been years since I opened the main news section—until this morning. I did so after having gone through my ritual of online reading.

Dear readers, I felt like a bolt of lightning had hit me. I was transported back to a print-only world. It wasn’t nostalgia I was feeling but a serious and real loss of intellectual input.

A major part of the experience was how we were taught to consume the content (Yes, there was content back then). You read the whole first page (above and below the fold), which was some XX articles that began there and continued (in a non-linear fashion) to other pages elsewhere in the paper that might have different stories as well—some self-contained beginning and ending right there. There were also ads, of course, none of which impeded your progression.?

You held all those stories in your hand, and as you went, page by page, you finished them and read other stories along the way as well. Soon, you could make connections and synapses, leaping between concepts, ideas, views, opinions, and even ads. It was mind-expanding and intellectually empowering. Energizing.

I had read many of the stories the day before (the digital advantage), but you read them one at a time as you scroll down. The editors (AI or otherwise) try to replicate the print experience by allowing you to follow stories or concepts they feel are related, which takes you off the page and maybe never back, but it’s not the same thing.?

It stopped me in my tracks.?

I felt a loss. Those who never experienced reading the print edition have lost out and are locked into a linear experience of being served and led one story at a time with click-bait enticements, all along the way, that benefits the publisher with revenue and clog our minds with useless and non-related fluff.

Frankly, I’m worried. A generation has lost the ability to hold, mesh, combine, and synapse leap and are instead following the Pied Piper.

Okay, rant over, back to words and definitions.

This is where the power that has enabled us to achieve greatness has become an enabler of dumbing us down. It is robbing us of the opportunity for independent thinking, for making connections that are purely human and serendipitous, and possibly inhibiting the next generation of true Tech advancement to benefit us all.?

ENABLER: encourage or enable negative or self-destructive behavior.

Try it yourself. See if you agree. You may not. But be open to the experience, and (KNEE JERK ALERT) it doesn’t have to be The New York Times.

Meanwhile, the Enablers are out there.?

—shortening our attention times

—limiting what we see

—choosing what they want us to engage with

—a.k.a., dumbing us down.?

I want to be enabled, but I don’t want Enablers limiting me.

As mental health professionals always say: Stopping enabling is a critical step toward personal growth.?

Allow me to paraphrase: Stopping enabling is a critical step toward personal intellectual growth and the future of human innovation.?

Like I said...try it. It’s not digital vs. analog, new vs. old, or the future vs. the past.?

It’s about not letting Enablers, in this case, DIGIBABBLE FOMO promoters and social media (you get the picture), control you.

What do you think??