Reflections: “The Capacity of Abstraction” – Dungen

“Mijmeringen” is a weekly column by Dongener Rinus Krijnen

The ability to abstract
Our world is becoming more and more abstract. The most important tools of modern man could not have been recognized in this way by someone who lived 100 years ago. I'm talking about things like the Internet, TV, smartphone, laptop, and navigation system. Aside from the internet in the virtual world, all of the devices mentioned are visually meaningless if you look at them objectively, they are usually rectangular devices with a glass top, with only the laptop somewhat revealing what it can be used for as it is from the keyboard. In fact, the keyboard is also an abstract tool, because if you didn't grow up with typewriters, it doesn't mean much.

Even if we go back 50 years, the world was not so abstract. When I was a teenager, the popular series Catweazle was on TV. This English series made a huge impression on me and was very funny. It was about a wizard who was transported 900 years later to the late 1960s by a magical error. The magician has encountered the modern era. He thought everything was magic. Such a confrontation with, for example, the “speech bone” (telephone) was sealed with the spell “Salmay Dalmay Adonay”. During the series, he became more accepting of using modern things such as electric light and the telephone, but it remained magic. But it's nice that a medieval man was dealing with the modern era, and so the devices weren't nearly as abstract.

The success of modern abstract tools is the multifunctionality of these objects. If you look at devices dating back approximately 100 years or more, they are fairly unambiguous in what they were used for. With a hammer, you could do little more than hit, and even the first electrical household appliances were derived directly from their non-electrical predecessors. Take lighting or iron. Operating the devices was quite straightforward: the button had only one function. The light was turned on using the light switch and the iron got hotter using the heat button. The more complex the device, the more buttons there are to operate it.

Even then, it was already on some people's minds: all those buttons. In practice, buttons were only used for the most common functions. Stay away from the rest, otherwise things will get worse. Fortunately, the behavior of the trigger buttons is usually easy to learn, and you will continue to do so if you do it often. Not much error occurred as long as the correct buttons were used in the correct order. My mother was not a champion of cardigans. At one point she had two TV remotes: one to turn on the TV and one to change channels. If you press or change another button by mistake, the TV will not turn on or you will not be able to select a channel. Then I can get on and off from Dongen to Oosterhout in a two-second process. At some point, I got so tired of it that my mom and I started looking for a new TV with shared controls. The problem has been resolved.

What if my mother has to turn on a laptop or smartphone? This won't really work. They survived it. Otherwise I would have to move every day. At the same time, the world is becoming more and more digital, and we hide functions behind glass screens instead of operating them with clear buttons. This is usually not a problem, especially for younger generations. They have encountered tablets and smartphones almost since the cradle, and using touch screens has become as natural as the buttons used by seniors.

However, there is a difference. Once you get used to working with screens, using them will become more complicated as well. In most cases, hardware doesn't define what you want or what you can do with the device, but rather software and applications as we call them now. You can install or purchase this software personally, which turns your tablet or smartphone into something personal. Depending on your ability to adopt the technology, the device becomes indispensable, but it remains abstract. When someone else picks up their smartphone or tablet, you see a world that is often very different. Fine, to each their own. But suddenly you have a stroke or your memory is gradually erased due to age-related diseases. Suddenly you see your smartphone or tablet as a metal box with a glass panel again and the function you used the device for is gone. And it comes up a little further: What's the password again?

The industry is roaring along. Abstraction of screen hardware makes it possible to adapt more complex systems without technical interventions. This makes the manufacturing process cheaper and also limits the number of parts. With the new update, you are up to date again and the manufacturer can keep up with or stay ahead of the competition. This way, your electric car won't need to go to the garage and your communications will be remotely protected against hackers. It's very abstract, because you see nothing and no one and with a notification the device tells you that you are “in”. Device but you? No idea what the device did. With confidence you assume that everything is fine. Moreover, it is difficult for almost anyone to understand what is happening behind the scenes.

But if you no longer understand how to use it, you become increasingly dependent on third parties. Interchanging existing digital services with legacy, manual, human-driven processes is often impossible or unaffordable, and therefore not accessible to everyone. At some point, almost all of us find ourselves in a situation where we can no longer keep track of everything well. This can be a very annoying final chord.