I may have been the first person in the history to find out I was going to be Dad via the Internet. It was 1991 and, at the time, I was a graduate student who made periodic trips to study in the Netherlands. On this trip I had given my soon-to-be wife the password to my university computer account and taught her how to use the email program. None of my non-scientist friends knew about email or telnet or ftp or all the other cool things I had learned how to use. So getting my girl on the Internet just seemed like a fun way fun way for us to stay in touch. A few weeks later I got an email that began with the phrase, “You had better sit down…” (My first thought was “I’m reading email, do you think I do this standing up?”)
This memory comes to me as I consider the 40th anniversary the Internet. 40 years ago (this week) the first packet switched computer network was established between a machine in Leonard Kleinrock’s lab at UCLA and Douglas Engelbart’s lab at SRI. Together these two linked computers became the harbingers of everything that would follow from Facebook to iTunes to Web Porn.
Now you don’t need me to wax profound on the profound changes that this invention of inventions has brought to human life. What is worth considering for just a moment however is the speed at which this revolution has been swept through our lives and what it means for a technology to so completely and profoundly alter a society.
So here is a question: Is the Internet the same or different as, say, the telephone or the automobile. In different ways all these innovations show how the advent of a new technology can quickly and profoundly alter culture in ways as diverse as communication modalities to the organization of public spaces. In 1892 just a decade after its invention 240,000 telephones were in use. By 1914 thousands of miles of paved roads had been added to the landscape to handle the car. Even the printing press spread books rapidly through Europe radically changing the ways information was disseminated. So in some ways this has happened before but has what’s going on now added a new dimension?
It is hard to ignore that speed at which information technology has reinvented itself and in the process altered the behavior of entire sub-domains of culture (usually the sub domains of youth as first adopters). There have been those who argue that the use of the internet in relentless searches through the now omnipresent cloud of information changes the way we think, changes our cognitive processes on a fundamental level, So while it would be comforting to think that theses kind of whip-snap changes driven by science and technology have happened before I have the sneaking suspicion that something entirely new in the history of our tool making species is going on. If that is true are there real dangers involved in having a technology move faster than cognitive controls? Even if there are no real dangers we still face the general question of how our inventions are reinventing us.
In other words how do the tools effect changes on the toolmaker?
11 comments:
That's a great question; especially because, as the history of science teaches us, our worldview is deeply related to our tools: as they change, our worldview changes and we change. As we weren't the same after cars and telephones, we will not be the same after the internet. Homo Habilis, our old ancestor, the handy man, is now turning, after appearing as Homo Sapiens for a while, into Homo Connectus. My biggest fear, and maybe I am sounding old here, is that as people develop these amazing virtual communication tools, they will unlearn how to actually communicate directly; you know, the old hug and kiss as opposed to XOXO and []s....lol
And that leads to another question. Since science creates these new technologies which then change our cultural evolution is our capacity for science now the principle driver of human evolution?
This can't be the whole story since we can built atomic bombs with their godlike power and then we can choose to act like angry chimps by dropping them on other tribes we don't like. But hoes the technologies science gives us force us to adapt our other conceptual and behavioral structures?
John Ralston Saul, a social thinker that I'm quite fond of, mounts a defense for the Luddites as he shows how they were puprosely misconstrued by profiteering industrialists. Saul demonstrates that there's was not a messege against technological progress, but rather, there's was a question of human complexity and will a technology support rich and complex experience, or will it diminish one's experience of their daily life? Luddites didn't think that a person's experience of their work was being sufficently considered by industrialists who's only concern was profitizing themselves before society.
So we can make atomic bombs: I think this speaks of real human evolution. How far have we evolved past adolescent chimps though? One thing technology has done for sure is that it has lulled us into an illusionment of progress, of thinking of our society the greatest civilization ever.
Science has given us great sight into the world. So how does this amazing seeing also blind us from other aspects of life reqiring our notice?
@Mike this is an interesting question because clearly the hyper-technological society we have built over the last 80 years has led to some true deadening of experience (a subject that numerous novelists have taken on. My new favorite show "MadMen" too). The science fiction utopias imagined during the first half of the last century didn't quite work out.
So what is science/technology for then? What can it do for us that we want in a long term evolutionary sense (increasing lifespan = good, texting while driving = bad)
@Adam Usefulness is its own beauty. But at the human level of life, we incur the aesthetic; something beyond utility. Perhaps its the aesthetic that distinguishes usefulness from the utilitarian; utilitarian connoting the carrying out of tasks that lack creative ground.
I've been wondering of late why I was drawn into theological studies and not science; I certainly have the mind and appreciation for it. I think the main reason might boil down to this: I have always been drawn into the wholeness of things, the context of things if you will. Science seems to be an approach into life through its parts.
When I see the whole of life, the aesthetic is profound- perhaps its our closest connection to life itself. Science on the other hand, as a tool for the utilitarian, has made the aesthetic trivial in our culture: a cheap artifact of an illusiary self trying to feebly follow the mandates of determining genes.
There's a manner of technology that all it has really accomplished in our time, is to make "bread and circus" more cool.
I don't think science has to be utilitarian.
Here, I think we should distinguish between science and technology. In both there is an aesthetic, even if in technology, it is mostly in the design of a product intended to attract consumers or in the beauty of a bridge or building. There is beauty in a pyramid and, I'd argue, in an iPhone. Regardless, science as a search for knowledge of the world, disengaged of utilitarian uses, is very much inspired by an aesthetic of Nature. The search is for beauty, for a beautiful description of physical reality, even though what we call beauty may vary. In this, and when science faces ultimate questions as, for example, questions of origins (of the universe, of life, of mind), I see science embracing the whole of knowledge, and not simply anchored onto a reductionist view of the world. Here, I find that there is a spiritual connection that certainly links with the theological, broadly defined. I couldn't be a scientist otherwise.
I like everything you say here Marcelo. Myself, I'm drawn equally into the "art" of things and the "engineering" of things. And I think science and spirituality are equally paramount to the experience of ourselves. I'm not saying here that science is the engineering side of things; I think that the proper creating of our lives together requires both a skilled sense of science and spirituality. Perhaps we could think of spirituality as our directly felt sense of things and science as our attention paid to the reality that in Adam's words, "pushes back when we push on it": A living interaction between a palpable self unabashedly subjective and a tangible world full of its own identity.
I am not so sure I agree about the seperation between science and technology. What Marcelo is says is true about embracing the whole of knowledge and I think Mike is trying to see how the "engineering" aspect of technical knowledge is one half of an aesthetic or spiritual responce to the world. But I do believe that our material engagement shapes our responce in a profound way. The science -> technology -> science loop may not be so easy to seperate in the way what we make and what we do may fundemental shape how we can think.
I like the phrase, "our material engagement in the world." I sense the spiritual and material as a wholeness that even the symbol of yin-yang doesn't signify; yet if we don't distinguish them, we also distort this wholeness.
What is happening in our society when in something like facebook, a person values a lot of "friends" regardless of any knowing of them...certainly another aspect of a reductionist approach to living...one's felt connection in the world is made substantial by the size of their cache of zeros and ones sent to them from others- treasures used to be buried or locked in vaults; now they're held in trust by clouds.
Compare the high entropic state when friendship entailed raising barnes to the low entropic state now, where friendship entails the firing off of electronic signals....
We're using concepts such as whole, and context. Here's what I mean by context: It exists as an idea, and as an idea, it shapes meaning and orients our understanding or insight into a group of underlying parts. The tricky thing is that I don't know that we can derive a context from underlying parts. There seems to be something innately transcendent in the making of a context.
I'm wondering, can context ever be empirically derived?
Oh- another part to my question here involves the shaping force of context at work along side the shaping force of technology.
Mike, well I might wonder if they are the same in sense that material engagement shapes what we can do in the world. But I agree that a broader context of a cultures total cognitive perspective forms one kind of context.
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