Looking Without Seeing

I've been enjoying Vernorn Vinge's Rainbows End during the last few days.  It is a SciFi novel, set in the not-so-distant future as an old man, newly recovering from Alzheimer's and any number of other illnesses, tries to adjust to life where technology and everything else are virtually inseparable.  Poor Robert Gu is a 75 year old poet who finds himself torn between his former stubborn refusal to adapt to technology and a new and confusing fascination with how this newfangled stuff works. 

During the first twelve chapters, Robert refuses to adjust his life to the new technology around him.  In Vinge's world, this means that Robert refuses to "wear."  "Wearing" is basically using high-tech clothes and contact lenses that constantly maintain the wearer connected to online information of all sorts and even place layers  of information over what the wearer sees, in a sort of Iron-man kind of fashion.  Robert's granddaughter Miri exclaims that people who do not "wear" cannot see the world like regular people.  It is like looking through a keyhole, she says.  Effectively, Robert can look at the world around him without seeing anything that most people in that time would consider worth knowing. 

There is a definite theme of sight and vision in this novel.  When Robert Gu is healed of his Alzheimer's, he is also healed of many other ailments, including blindness.  Robert remarks that trying to do things for himself before recovering his sight was like fumbling around in the dark when you can't turn on the light.  Interestingly, after Robert regains his sight, he is still blind to the world around him.  Because he does not "wear," Robert fumbles and is not able to see and interact with all things around him.  It is like a severe myopia that impedes him from getting more than a gist of the information that should be available to his eyes.  Robert looks without seeing, but this time, his blindness is by choice.

This makes me think of what types of technology we use to enhance our vision of life.  Although we don't have contact lenses that can project information to the back of our eyeballs, there are certainly tools that most people use which they would feel blind to their world without.  Facebook, Twitter, text messaging, even some apps on our phones and other devices all give us views of the world we otherwise wouldn't have.  In this rapidly evolving technological world, we can choose to be blind to some things that technology offers.  This does, unfortunately, leave us in the minority as life experience is ever increasingly experienced through these mediums.  We have to be careful not to become like Robert Gu and some of his elderly peers who have refused to adapt to a changing world and then become frustrated when they are left behind at light-speed.

On the other hand, we can see in Vinge's book that an un-enhanced view of life can also be beneficial.  Living exclusively in the virtual realm can have drawbacks.  Some things in life are better enjoyed in their purity.  Juan Orozco provides us a contrast with Robert Gu's situation.  Juan layers new, enhanced, vision on almost everything he sees.  He rarely experiences life in a direct non-augmented way.  However, when he hears Robert's poem, even though it is far from his best work, it touches Juan and causes him to experience the beauty that can be found in the world, but which is often covered by the stream of information and enhancements offered while you are "wearing."  Juan looks at his world, but often doesn't see what is really there.  He too is often rendered blind by his choice to always interpret his world through the rose-colored lenses of new technology.  I think that we can all learn from the experiences of both Juan and Robert and try to find a healthy balance in our consumption of social technology.

What technologies do you use that change the way you experience the world around you?  Do you feel blind without them?