Trapped in a Fortune-Cookie Factory with no Stories to Tell

Abstract

Drawing on a distinction between 'primary' and 'secondary' experience derived from J. J. Gibson's ecological psychology, Edward S. Reed argues that our 'psychosocial ills' result from rampant 'degradation of opportunities for primary experience.' That Reed slides easily from 'experience' to 'information' is less due to Gibson's psychology than to the spirit of the time in which he writes: it is a truism that we live in an age of information, where every experience is an act of communication. But, as Reed notes, progress in information technology has been matched by regress in communication. We spend billions on a 'superhighway' that carries every kind of information except the ecological information 'that allows us to experience things for ourselves.' In a pattern familiar from cities shaped by automobiles, the line of this highway traces a virtually impermeable wall. While (sometimes) increasing access to 'processed' information, it (almost always) decreases access to 'ecological' information. This is a 'pedagogical' as well as a 'perceptual' problem; my intent in this paper is to pose the problem clearly as a first step toward addressing it adequately.