Touched in the head

I recently had to edit something that included a Q&A between two very successful French-trained chefs and the denizens of a certain technology company - not naming any names, but you definitely use this tech company's wares.

During the Q&A, a couple of these technorati asked about why can't these two chefs, who had recently published a book, come up with something that would just let people create recipes or dishes based on the ingredients they already have at home. Another went into more detail, asking why the chefs weren't writing a book about teaching people what foods and tastes go together.

The second person to ask a question even whined about why there wasn't a technology where you can just use a tablet, because "using a cookbook is hard."

He actually said that.

My initial contempt for the two questions was simple: these two questions basically illustrate the importance of something like a culinary school, of learning a craft and really understanding it, not just something you can fetch from the internet, use, dump, and then repeat the next time you need the knowledge. While I do think that there are some things that you can learn from using only books and the internet, there is also something to be said, at times, for the value in experiential learning and in-person instruction. Culinary school, for one, is an example of that.

One of the chefs, though, in his response to this techie, was that while this tech company might be on the high tech side, he considered his side of the pairing - the cooking side - to be "high touch."

High touch. While the oomph of that phrase may be lacking, the sentiment is spot-on: an evolved explosion of sensory information. The importance of touching, and not just touching, but for getting a feel for something - both literally and cerebrally. To feel is to start to get to know something, and allow that something more deeply embedded to who you are. We crave to be close to things we like, that intrigue us. Sexually, geographically, historically - it doesn't matter. To touch is to truly know.

Meanwhile, to hear these tech cranks opine, you get the sense that they hope our primary somatic sensory cortex will hopefully go the way of the vestigial tail and the appendix.

These tech dweebs desire to repudiate any need for touch because, really, why touch something? What do you think the point of Google Glass is? It's directly engineered so that people will never have to touch anything every again. You literally get to wear a Google search engine on your face so you never have to ask another question of someone else, never get lost, never do anything, really, except exist in a wholly sterile world. I hope that at next year's big gala, they'll announce Google Bubble: the nano-animated personal now-time EXPERIENCE ORB that lets you roll your blobby life around without ever having to experience anything tangible ever again. Just roll around in your front yard! We'll make it just like you were spear-fishing in the Amazon!

If it's not going to become a part of you in some way, you can just keep your distance as much as you like. And by not touching something, by not really dwelling on a thought or subject for any prolonged amount of time, you free yourself up to go do the next Google search or click on the next link, and find something else.

I don't want my brain to simply become a card catalog of websites to defer to when I don't know something. Fuck that. What an embarrassing, wasteful use of not just a brain, but of humanity.

Listening to these future Bubble early adapters talk about why cookbooks are so hard, it occurs to me that maybe the entire generation that seems to be diagnosed with ADHD isn't actually to do with attention, and instead, everything to do with retention and experience. We just never move any information out of our active, nee short-term, memory to our long-term, persistent memory. Why should we? We can just Google it if we forget it.

We just don't learn anymore. We read, but we don't absorb. We might search, and we might discover things, but less and less, people don't feel as obligated to grasp what it is they've found. We don't even write, we just type and - actually, I was going to say push a pen, but I doubt that's going to be around much longer (it was good knowing you, cursive script).

I might be able to Street View most of the world, the pits of the ocean, and even the surface of the moon, and that's all amazing, because I wouldn't get a chance to see any of that kind of stuff so up-close without that technology. But it's as meaningful to touch and learning for me as cotton candy is vital to my body as a source of iron and vitamins.

This goofy technology is fun. But at the same time, though, it doesn't supplant the need for experience and memory and learning. It doesn't efface the need for still touching something.

I'm lucky that I was born at such a time that permitted me to now stand in the division between old world learning (I don't know what else to call it) and this new world surface-learning. I like that I at least got to grow up with an appreciation for touch, for actually retaining the things I learn, and not rendering myself as an intellectual halfwit crutched up by the ever-dependable Google.

However, I also feel lucky that I will die before nobody touches anything anymore. I don't live in a world I'm not touching beyond what my stupid fucking wearable technology tells me it feels like outside.