Sunday’s New York Times Magazine (!!!) featured an article by Peggy Orenstein on the virtues of Freedom. She writes:
Not long ago, I started an experiment in self-binding: intentionally creating an obstacle to behavior I was helpless to control, much the way Ulysses lashed himself to his ship’s mast to avoid succumbing to the Sirens’ song.
And that is why I need the mast. It came in the form of an app called Freedom, which blocks your Internet access for up to eight hours at a stretch. The only way to get back online is to reboot your computer, which — though not as foolproof as, say, removing the modem entirely and overnighting it to yourself (another strategy I’ve contemplated) — is cumbersome and humiliating enough to be an effective deterrent. The program was developed by Fred Stutzman, a graduate student in information and library science, whose own failsafe self-binding technique — writing at a cafe without Internet access — came undone when the place went wireless. “We’re moving toward this era where we’ll never be able to escape from the cloud,” he told me. “I realized the only way to fight back was at an individual, personal level.”
Orenstein goes on to write:
It could be that sometimes our greatest freedom may be to choose freedom from freedom. I am still surprised by the relief that floods me whenever I bind myself from going online, when I have no option but to ignore the incessant tweets and e-mail messages and videos and news links and even the legitimate research.
I’m not wishing the Internet away. It has become so integral to my work — to my life — that I honestly can’t recall what I did without it. But it has allowed us to reflexively indulge every passing interest, to expect answers to every fleeting question, to believe that if we search long enough, surf a little further, we can hit the dry land of knowing “everything that happens” and that such knowledge is both possible and desirable. In the end, though, there is just more sea, and as alluring as we can find the perpetual pursuit of little thoughts, the net result may only be to prevent us from forming the big ones.
First things first, it is a tremendous honor (an a little surreal) to be featured prominently in the New York Times Magazine. My goal in designing software is to solve complex problems through simple design, and it is heartening to know that I’ve helped people become more productive and accomplish their goals.
The point Orenstein makes is that our inundation with little-k knowledge – extensively afforded by the Internet – stands in the way of production big-K knowledge – our books, dissertations, and large-scale projects. By stepping away and freeing one’s self from the stream – by finding freedom in Freedom – we are able to focus anew on Knowledge.
The privileging of Knowledge over knowledge is essentially a value-enforcing process (see Foucault’s lecture Truth and Power or the long-form Archaeology of Knowledge), one that is troubling as we privilege certain forms of literacy and marginalize others (e.g. Wikipedia, digital literacies, etc). But there remains a simple fact that many of us have got to “get stuff done” – and many a longer-form project has been distracted and derailed by YouTube, Facebook, and other smaller knowledges.
The article draws on one of my theories regarding productivity and machines of work. The history of machines is dominated by unitary, task-focused devices (see Cohen’s Social History of American Technology for a review of discourses surrounding early technologies). Even though industrial devices were technically collaborative, the focus of use was primarily individual and task-focused. Fast forwarding to the creation of knowledge industries, we see a long lineage of restriction and task-focusing (i.e. working on computer systems with limited programs, no access to the internet).
Following Latour’s interpretation of Machines in Science in Action, the meaning we attribute to devices is socially constructed and situated. The problem we face with “computers” is their many “constructions” and “situations.” Our computers exist as boundaries between work and personal culture, hot and cold media, work and enjoyment, social and contractual obligation. Our expectation that the computer remain a device of work is a discursive construction, and our perspective that it is a failing to be distracted by computers is a statement of values.
So why does Freedom work? At a very practical level, yes, it removes the distraction of others, YouTube, Facebook, and so on. But it also reshapes the device, reconfiguring our expectations of the device. Is a computer running Freedom still a computer? And that, I believe, is the power. When the expectations are reconfigured and the device is reappropriated, we can approach it on new terms.
Fred Stutzman is a doctoral student, researcher and teaching fellow at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's School of Information and Library Science. He studies how people use social media.
