Changes in the design
The world changes. Do we?
Some years ago one of our consultants read about an archaeological experiment. Now, archaeology is not really an experimental science, dealing almost entirely with evidence of past people as it finds. But at one point a group of scientists recruited some modern people to live the life of Iron Age Britain, to as best they could reconstruct it. That meant raising crops and building houses, cooking food and working according to the methods of centuries ago. These were venturesome people: life was hard back then. No doubt the knowledge that their term was limited to a year, and that emergency help was on call, helped out a bit.
Unfortunately, our consultant cannot find the particular piece he read. But he remembers something like this: a participant noted that he found himself thinking differently, more slowly in one sense, since he was concerned with the growth of the crops over months and the work of the day over hours, as opposed to driving a car at thirty miles an hour or making an appointment in the next five minutes.
Once stated this is unsurprising. Still, it’s not necessarily something one would have thought of in advance, like many of the insights that came out of the experiment. People do change their behavior when their environment changes. And over time, our environment has changed from that of hunter-gatherers, to agricultural workers and sheep-herders, to insurance salesmen and software writers. How has that changed us?
Take one perhaps extreme example: a taxi-driver (maybe for Uber or Lyft) in a major city. Driving requires multiplexed attention and instant reactions, and making a living at it means maintaining this level of alertness all day. But perhaps modern technology has not made very much difference here, since a jungle hunter must be alert to prey and predators continually.
The routine of office-work has its mirror in that of farming, tasks that are unexciting in themselves and sometimes exacting. The major difference, as far as the organism is concerned, is that the physical labor of (virtual) paper-pushing is tiny. We must visit the gym after work regularly or grow unhealthy.
But we can identify an important mental difference: reading. We may complain that kids today simply do not read books, even comic books; that PowerPoint slides have replaced actual English prose, so destroying reasoned communication; that texted tweets have replaced sentences with slogans. And we do. But still reading is being done. Even the dreariest web page contains this code of language. And that has changed the way we think.
For those short moments or long hours that the reader is reading, he or she is elsewhere and elsewhen. (That may not be a good idea, attending to one’s smartphone while crossing a busy street against the light, but it’s still true.) To gather information (true or not) and ideas (valid or not) outside one’s physical experience, or that of one’s acquaintances, is a modern difference.
What others are there?
