Technological Nature: Adaptation and the Future of Human Life

Abstract

319 Children, Youth and Environments Vol. 22 No. 1 (Spring 2012) ISSN: 1546-2250 Technological Nature: Adaptation and the Future of Human Life Kahn, Peter H. (2011). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; 240 pages. $24.95. ISBN 0262113228. Having grown up in the heart of Manhattan, I can't say that I feel terribly expert in how people relate to nature. Indeed, during my childhood, trips to Central Park were about as far as I got from a human-engineered environment—and of course, as urban historians could attest, Central Park is itself a rather energetically "engineered" space, with carefully placed playgrounds, meadows, and ponds. For me, a typical bird is a pigeon; a typical mammal, a gray squirrel; and the insect kingdom is represented by the common cockroach. In this sense, I am a victim of "environmental generational amnesia," a condition named by Peter Kahn in his provocative bookTechnological Nature. Environmental generational amnesia, in Kahn's view, is not so much an individual as a cultural disorder, in which successive generations of human beings progressively lose more and more of their sense of the natural world; for each generation, their own experience of nature becomes the (increasingly impoverished) benchmark against which that of the still-more-diminished next generation is measured. Kahn's book is a thoughtful attempt to map out the shifting territory of how technology impacts humanity's relationship with the natural world. At the same time, it is in many important ways frustratingly incomplete. While I would strongly recommend the book to readers interested in the impact and meaning of technology—this should be a large audience—I would also stop short of blurb-level (“triumph,” “masterpiece”) language. The book raises more questions than it can possibly answer, and it left this reader, at least, with a nagging feeling that in fact not all the right questions were asked. Most of Technological Nature focuses on a series of empirical studies by Kahn and his colleagues, comparing various forms of 320 technological experience with their natural counterparts. For instance, two early chapters in the book describe experiments in which a "technological nature window" is placed in an office setting: the nature window is a large computer screen displaying, in real time, a natural (or at least pleasant outdoor) setting. In comparison to a true window looking onto the outside world, the nature window turns out to be only a pale, though not entirely valueless, substitute. While people in the presence of a real window show various physiological measures of stress relief (a finding that Kahn notes is reinforced by previous studies of windows in hospital settings), the technological nature window is no more effective at relieving stress than a blank wall. Still, for people who are ordinarily stuck in stifling indoor offices, having a nature window in their workspace for a protracted time did bring some satisfaction: at least several study participants noted that they would look at the nature window to take a mental break ("I can now find some peace in the room that wasn't there before," said one), and missed its presence after the study was over and the screen was removed. Kahn summarizes this sort of result by saying that "technological nature is better than no nature but not as good as actual nature" (137). In a similar vein, he recounts several studies in which children interact with the Sony AIBO robotic dog; in one study, preschool children's responses to AIBO are compared to their responses to a stuffed dog; in another, the responses of somewhat older children are compared to interactions with a real (biological) dog. There are many fascinating observations in the book regarding these experiments, but the bottom line is that the preschool children clearly treat AIBO with more interest and "lifelike" care than a stuffed dog, while the older children are much more affectionate and tactile with the biological dog than with AIBO. Again, the robot dog is in a space between inanimate and animate— in Kahn's phrasing, better than no nature but not as good as actual nature. Interestingly, in yet another chapter, Kahn describes encouraging results in which autistic children have far more social responses...