The Machine and Whippets

This is Benson my hound.

The dog lovers amongst you will be able to deduce that he’s a Whippet from his photograph. You can recognise his breed by his bony shape, long legs, pointy head and beautiful curves over his back and under his flattened but enlarged chest. He's quite a goer.

But what you can’t do is hear the whining he makes when he’s desperate for a walk or his "happy growl", which sometimes scares people, but in reality means he’s full of joy and really pleased with you. You cannot feel how soft his ears are, like rose petals, and perfect to stroke during stressful times.

You cannot feel the change in direction of the fur under his neck, where it meets the side of his head and peaks in a small wave crest, or the coldness of his nose when he pokes it at you to sniff and check that all is OK with his human.

This digital image will not enable you to appreciate his smell on a good day - that warm dog smell (and when he was tiny, nothing beat the smell of his puppyness) but also on a bad day when he’s eaten something rotten and decomposing that he's snatched off the ground in the local park whilst my attention is elsewhere. The smell that is the result of this item, digesting, maybe even decomposing in his gut and producing the worst gas that he unselfconsciously farts at inopportune moments or when we have guests with us. That smell may be less fragrant but still it’s a smell that makes my dog who he is, just like the sounds, the sights and the touch. He is not just a photo. He lives in the real world. And the machine cannot replicate that.

The more we engage with real things the more we can remember that we are not machines.

The machine does not want you to have the full set of stimuli or emotions. Real life has such a rich variety of experience. Think back to a moment when you were in a position or a feeling of absolute awe at say a sunrise or something amazing in nature, something that took your breath away. When you think about this, try to think of how all of your senses responded to it. In addition to how it looked, what did you feel, hear, ponder? You will never feel this looking at it on a screen.

The machine does not care for smells. The machine does not care for taste.

The machine takes your senses and emotions and narrows then right down. Take for example, pornography. It is just a shallow, machine made facsimile of intimacy, but stripped away of all the connection and spiritual meeting that should take place in being truly intimate with an actual other person, in one of the most profound ways that we as humans can connect.

An MP3 audio file compresses all of the subtleties of music into something that can be delivered by a machine, whereas watching live music opens up a wide vista of experience and joy, the sound, the vision, the shared experience with your fellow audience members as well as the performers.. A place where all of our senses are tingling. I've recently had the pleasure of watching a gig by Robert Plant. I absolutely loved finally seeing Stevie Nicks. The machine compresses everything, but we need to protect and widen and deepen our experiences of real life.

This may be why analogue things are again so popular. People want to listen to vinyl because it’s sensory and slow and immersive as well as the delivery vehicle for their music. I take many photographs with a camera and film because it’s considered, imperfect and tactile and the film can produce so much more subtlety and nuance the digital image. It also brings me joy.

I do not think that the machine can give you joy, or it's creators even care that it can't.

Be aware of the way that the machine is narrowing down your experience of the world. As once you notice this, you can start to find ways to consciously widen your life's experience again. Go outside in nature to look, listen, feel and smell. Do something joyful that doesn't involve a screen. Maybe even find a whippet, stoke it's ears, listen for a happy growl and smell it's warm doggy scent. These are wonderful things.