Should 'analog' human beings conform themselves to a digital society?

We are analog beings – flexible, tolerant and compliant - living in a digital – rigid, fixed and intolerant - world that we created. This is the main argument from an excerpt from Don Norman’s book The Invisible Computer that can be found at http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/being_analog.html. Norman explains in depth how adaptable and flexible humans are, and how that does not work well in an inflexible computerized society that values efficiency and accuracy.

While Norman comes to some great conclusions and thought provoking points, I found the core of his reasoning flawed and it was very distracting from trying to glean the points he was making.

Norman goes into great depth to illustrate how humans are flexible, tolerant and intuitive and have evolved that way. Perhaps his greatest flaw is in trying to sum up human beings in a nutshell to serve his point of view. He either has forgotten or doesn’t realize that when you break down a human to its smallest parts all the way down to DNA you have something that is almost mathematical and so precise that the smallest error could cause a person to have a beak or a tail. This doesn’t happen very often. We are basically incredibly complex machines that have the ability to function beyond the mechanical and adapt and evolve. The ability to adapt and evolve is something that is necessary in our survival of the fittest world.

Norman’s main summary and points are still very interesting though. It was painstaking trying to still be open to that with his flawed reasoning, but in the end he does point out the intriguing dilemma our society faces in either adapting computers to think more like humans or trying to adapt people to behave more like computers. I don’t think we should push human beings toward behaving more like computers: We should use computers and tools to enhance ourselves and our greatest natural abilities.

Tags: Analog+beings, Don+Norman, a+digital+society