Threatening technology

New technology has been forecast to bring social disaster several times in the past.  We seem to have avoided it; but that doesn’t mean we always will.

Our chief consultant writes:

Having recently found irritation in the smartphone (or at least in a way it’s commonly used), we’d prefer to leave the subject alone for a while.  However, a recent article brought our attention back to it, and the picture is not good.  In summary: a large proportion of current teenagers are, in essence, addicted to their devices, to the detriment of their social development and even mental health.  The author finds the situation more alarming than any other she’s studied.

New technology has always raised alarms.  It’s worthwhile looking briefly at some previous examples, to gain some context.

The internet became widely used among the public about a generation ago.  Suddenly many things became much easier, including scientific and other forms of research (you could just Google an obscure reference, instead of wondering whether it was literary, chemical or mystical).  People could interact with others with shared interests, regardless of where in the world they were.  There were, however, dire predictions of a generation living in their parents’ basements, doing nothing but playing online games.  To some extent this is true, though civilization seems to have survived.

Television has been widely blamed for raising generations of passive couch potatoes, addicted to a simplistic picture of reality.  (Much insightful criticism is found in the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes, one of our favorites, still largely relevant even though it originated in the last century.)  Couch potatoes there certainly are, and the drive to pack a memorable message into a 30-second commercial must have helped the development of the current lamentable state of political discourse.  Looking deeper, we see two epochs in the TV era.  For the first decades there was standardization due to three national networks: from coast to coast, everyone was watching much the same thing.  Different ideas were not so much actively supressed as not heard, due to the very limited choices available.  But with the rise of cable TV and the explosion of the number of channels the opposite happened: tiny segments of society had their own voices, and (crucially) did not have to listen to others.  Perhaps this, rather than the rise of social media, is the origin of the fragmentation of our politics.

We’ll lump together Radio and the phonograph as being roughly contemporary, at least in the time of becoming widely available.  Through these, you no longer had to be physically present to hear a speech or music played by good musicians.  You could hear Louis Armstrong in your own home, whenever you wanted to (an ability extended to films in the 1980s, with the invention of the VCR).  The various forms of self-entertainment found in families and house parties all but vanished.  Much mediocre music disappeared.  But entertainment became largely passive; it’s hard to say just how this affected society, since it was so long ago and we’re quite used to it now.

So we have moved, in several steps, from an active and shared social environment to one that is passive and fragmented.  And what we used to have to wait and plan for is available when we want it.  A crucial feature of the smartphone, as brought out in the article we mentioned, is that it is always available: teenagers sleep with it, runners run clutching it, drivers talk and text while operating cars.  We used to have to get home to watch the TV or listen to the radio, or even surf the net.  Now one can have it literally all the time.

But we are not forced to do this.  As we’ve noted before, new technology only allows us to gratify desires that were already there.  It’s up to you: can you turn off your TV and go outside for a walk?  Can you log off the computer and read a book?  Can you leave your smartphone at home when you go out to dinner?