Alternative intimacies in the nature network
If you are looking for me these days, I have probably gone running. The conundrums I face on the page send me rushing outside and on to the trail, running in the hills and half-turns behind my home. Am I running towards something or away? All I know is that I am out of breath and it’s time to slow down.
AI - Artificial Intelligence - is grabbing us by the head and shoulders and rummaging about in our imagination. Life is abuzz with AI right now, and it’s leaving us all standing on the precipice of a harsh in-between, commanding us to rush, to catch up, to keep speed, to quicken our pace.
In her book Alone Together, Sherry Turkle writes about the way the pace of technology “proposes itself as the architect of our intimacies.” It seduces us, she says, in a way “that puts the real on the run”. Turkle is worried about computers and people and what this combination is doing to our sense of being human, what it is doing to our relationships, what it is doing to our ability to have a conversation, to be intimate.1
Perhaps then, AI also stands for alternative intimacies.
My thinking-as-writing requires a wandering pace. It meanders, shuffles, takes detours to where its heart desires. I am a slow-world writer in a place where technology is fast-slicing through the grammar of our lives.
I came across the words of Amy Dobson, an Australian media lecturer and expert in gender politics, youth, and social media, this week while searching for better ways to explain my research into women’s online testimonies of sexual assault. Dobson urges researchers, stakeholders and activists to “slow down” when considering the implications of young women’s media practices.2 Philosopher Michelle Boulous Walker is on the same page; she encourages “slow reading”, that is, “to read carefully, to reread and return to what one reads”. Conditions of time stress, says Boulous Walker, make it harder to think along new paths, “to innovate, to question, to challenge”.3 She points to Virginia Woolf’s words in the essay How to Read a Book4:
Wait for the dust of reading to settle; for the conflict and the questioning to die down; walk, talk, pull the dead petals from a rose, or fall asleep. Then suddenly without our willing it, for it is thus that Nature undertakes these transitions, the book will return, but differently. Virginia Woof, 1925, "How to Read a Book"
To think differently is to think slowly. Nature works slowly. And so, I too have turned to the natural world for answers, to its never-ending slow-down cycle of creativity and connection. It all happens at an imperceptible pace.
A nature narrative might help to harness the digital detours the world is taking. I think about this while wandering in the bush, amongst the banksias and the boronias. Nature insists we slow down, that we don’t be so quick to judge. Nature is deep thinking and slow reading.
Sherry Turkle, 2011, Alone Together: Why we expect more from technology and less from each other.
Amy Dobson, 2015, Post-feminist Digital Cultures: Femininity, Social Media and Self-Representation.
Michelle Boulous Walker, 2016, Slow Philosophy: Reading Against the Institution.
Virginia Woolf, 1925, “How to Read a Book” in The Common Reader.