Andro passed on this article from John Naughton to me today, which is about how my generation uses technology to isolate itself from the real world. It’s something I’ve been thinking about lately, this tendency to create what I’d like to call virtual ecologies: a mentally unified representation of the world, or an internalized version of external reality.

The iPod is interesting in this respect only because it’s so portable. It allows its users to create a personal auditory space no matter where they are, whether it’s on the train or in the art museum (or fighting vampires, if you’re that hot chick in Blade:Trinity). But for sheer pervasiveness, nothing yet has beat the television, which was so effective at showing huge numbers of people a particular reality – a set of personalities, a set of material possessions, a whole mode of living – that local culture practically vanished overnight. People knew more about Lucy and Desi than they knew about their neighbors, more about the latest Ford than about what was happening in their own towns, and that was the end of the neighborhood.

If people use technology to isolate themselves from external reality, it’s probably only because the human brain is exquistely tuned for the creation of virtual ecologies. Sensory information is useless in and of itself; the brain’s job is to turn a miasma of sensation into a coherent reality full of things that can be manipulated and goals that can be reached. An experienced hiker learns to see the shape of the terrain; an experienced hunter learns to detect the movements of prey; a musician eventually learns to treat an instrument like the extension of her body. All of these things exist in the mind, and they are percieved by the mind as a part of external reality because reality itself is an internal representation, a virtual ecology.

What is remarkable is that, unlike any other animal, at any moment we humans have the ability to choose what virtual ecology we belong to. An animal’s internal ecology is a function of the physical ecology it belongs to. Its genes and brain are adapted to perceive the things it needs to perceive, and nothing else. A human can look at the same field a thousand times and see a thousand different things (a potential farm, a potential shopping mall, a place to lie in the shade with your love, or even a thing of pure beauty).

There are those who would see in this fact an argument for what is essentially the “transhumanist” position: that because there is no authoritative notion of external reality, we can alter ourselves as we see fit, using technology to augment our perceptions or our genes. To my thinking, though, this is precisely the wrong direction to take. Technology gives us access to new ecologies, but it doesn’t teach us how to choose between them. If anything, it makes those choices for us: we’ve become dependent on cars and cheap electronics, and our dependence has forced us to choose the shopping mall and highway over the field. (One wonders how many otherwise environmentally-conscious urban hipsters realize how much their cheap iPods depend on a vast infrastructure of shipping and big-box retail stores.)

The alternative is not necessarily Luddism, or rather, not the categorical rejection of technology that goes by the name of Luddism (Ludd’s violence against factories was not a reaction to technology per se, but to the havoc industrialism was wreaking on centuries-old lifestyles in England). Nor is it necessarily yoga, meditation, or some particular form of mental discipline. Though there is undoubtedly some value in learning to quiet the mind, a quiet mind is just another virtual ecology. One of the most inconsiderate people I’ve met was a yoga instructor.

What we need to learn is how to be here. The world is beautiful, filled by creatures of infinite value. The true purpose of the mind is not to indicate or describe. Systems have their use, but the universe is not a system. Pull back the veil of ideas, until we can see other people: not with our eyes but by suffering with them.