Meaningful Technology

A fellow PhD student and I recently shared some thoughts about the grad student life.  There are so many distractions available to us that it is difficult to get focused.  There is so much compelling content on the Internet that I have to wonder how many millions of hours of time has been wasted in meaningless activities.  For example, I once spent the better half of a weekday afternoon watching zombie movie clips. Film has a way of sucking you in completely. The experience of film and especially a story is that you escape from your present world and dive into make-believe. Over and over, I saw the typical zombie scenes: protagonists desperately fighting off zombies, hapless victims getting torn apart, zombies chewing on human flesh, etc ad nauseam.

Once in a while, my attention fell out of the movie and I realized I are only looking at a person (not a zombie), chewing on something which you are to believe is a human leg.  When I had run out of clips, I felt disgusted at myself and went for a walk just to clear my mind. Outside in the real world, there were no flesh-eating zombies and not a every-man-for-himself, apocalyptic world.  

And then I thought to myself, “Why?” Upon reflection, I had just spent the past few hours engaging with an artificial world I had constructed with the help of computer.  What was the point of it all? As life begins to imitate art, it seems we have so much time on our hands to indulge in pointless fiction. 

At this point, my classmate’s critique of the Meaningful Technology project comes in: Aren’t we free to choose what we do with our time and our lives? Apart from cases of clear addiction (is it actually clear or is there a spectrum), we make choices as best we can in any moment and we face the consequences, whether regret or fulfillment.  “What are you proposing?” he asked, “That we eliminate film, music, and fiction? Who decides what is meaningful and what is not?”

While we do make choices, at the same time we might not be fully aware of our making choices.  Many of these choices seem innocuous or they seem like a good idea at the time.  Or we simply choose to take up a technology that seems neat and cool but later becomes addictive and absorbing (without our noticing).  Assuming that people have free will and they are the best arbiters of their fate, if technology increasingly shapes how we live our lives and what we make of it, can we sit up and reflect and truly decide whether what we do is meaningful? Can people reflect on the purpose of the current moment and do so within the greater context of their lives?

This is an important question for both users and designers. Designers ought to understand the implications of creating a loyal user base that is engrossed in their designed experiences. Is the experience they are trying to create meaningful to the user, even assuming that their free choice is not a sufficient validation? Consider the situation when they have created something so compelling, the user does not pause and think about the role the technology plays in the context of their lives. Perhaps it is just shiny or an obvious enhancement over the current state. When advertising is a major revenue stream for any particular technology, users should be keen to understand that it does not matter what they do so long as they stay engaged with that website or system.

I have heard sentiments that the Meaningful Technology project is paternalism. However, we cannot dictate what meaningful technology is.  Even if we claimed to know what was best, no one is obligated to listen to us. What we can do is empower end-users to seek meaningfulness in their adoption of technology.  We want is for people to snap out of the interactions they are engrossed, see it within the context of their lives, and ask “What is the point of it all?”  We want technology designers to ask the same question.