Beltane Moon of the Summer Solstice
Reading an article in the New York Review of Books about how the internet has hollowed us out and made us habituated phone-impaired dupes of the surveillance society. My reaction to these technology is making us slaves to the machine sort of articles? Meh. This one has an interesting line which rhapsodizes over the old copper-wire enabled linking of two voices one to the other in real time. Well, the bakelite phone discouraged person-to-person visits, leaving us isolated and alone in our television dominated homes. Or so I’m sure some social critic claimed at the time. Likewise television alone. Kill your TV!
The meme here is not the effect of latter day chip-enabled technology but the article propounding the deleterious effects of technology, period. Remember the Luddites? This is an old argument, one simultaneously proven by the current it gadget and invalidated by the next one. The question is not now and has never been about technology, but about humanity.
It is reassuring to find single cause boogeymen (boogeythings?). If only we could remove all smart phones. If only we could rid of cars. If only we could kill our TVs. Very few mentions in this regard of furnaces, stoves, refrigerators, the electric light. That’s because this technology has been integrated into our lives and now serves a purpose most of us can’t imagine doing without.
My point is not that technology has no affect on our lives, hardly. Rather, it has, like so much else junk bonds, jet travel, level roads and government inspected meat for a few examples, differing effects on different people. Some it aids, some it harms. The responsibility for how it affects you is your own.
I think the question is not how technology affects us, but how we use technology to redefine our individual lives. Computing technology, whether in a laptop or desktop, smartphone or tablet, is a tool. When we use a tool, it extends our bodily Self further into the world, often in ways we could not achieve without it. The chainsaw, for example, makes it possible for me to cut down large trees, take off their limbs and cut them up further into fireplace size logs. It makes me sharp and strong, able to move forests.
The computer, whatever its configuration, on the desk or in my hand, extends my reach, enables me to write and save work, research much of the world’s knowledge, communicate easily with my brother and sister, in Saudi Arabia and Singapore respectively, jot notes to friends and family, buy tickets, find services nearby me, plan travel domestic and foreign. In my world these are good things.
What’s really happening is another churning of the sea of human identity, some old ideas will submerge, sink out of sight, others will be transformed and others will be made de nouveau. This is not scary, nor revolutionary, nor sinister. It’s culture at work, shaped and shaping. The future is an extension of the present, as the present is an extension of the past.