In Walden, Thoreau wrote that “men have become the tools of their tools”
Facebook is a tool- a beautiful way of communicating and sharing, but most of us have, at one time or another, been used by Facebook. We got a ‘notification’ that someone liked our photo, and so we picked up the screen and ignored the face-to-face interaction we were having with someone we love, or we procrastinated the work we really needed to do.
Facebook wants us to check it/think about it all the time (the more time we spend here, the more our attention can be sold as Facebook ads) but that might not be what we hoped to get out of this… It’s the same question with every new technology: how can we use this to make our lives better?
For medicine and most other things we use, the difference between a cure and a poison is the dosage.
Here’s a video I made on an iPod and an iPhone about the things we build and the tools we make called ‘Cracking the Code.’ It’s some video from the studio and a scene from one of my favorite Kubrick films to go along with the song ‘Cracking the Code’ – a song I wrote with Gordy Quist – from the new album ‘Stories They Tell’
An experiment on film… uh I mean digital video… with my iPhone and my 9 year old’s iPod.