Technology is awesome… or not?
I have a love-hate relationship with technology. On one hand, it fascinates me to no end. I’m endlessly amazed at the way in which it can bring strangers together for positive ends—whether it’s via Couchsurfing or Twitter or Crowdrise. I love the fact that something awful can happen in the lives of one of my volunteers at the studio and within minutes, via email, everyone can be notified and people come to the aid of someone they know very little outside of said yoga studio. I love the fact that we can have a global conversation about political issues such as WikiLeaks or tuition rates at schools and universities worldwide all via Twitter.
What gets me down are the anthropological and cultural consequences of technology in terms of human sociology and abstract thought. On one hand, technology and the internet have the ability to stimulate the brain and expose us to different cultures and ideas. Yet, on the other hand, the internet is becoming the primary source of information dissemination and I can’t help but feel that it simultaneously conditions us to be sheep and is entirely biased when it comes to the search providers. Technology has allowed us to become lazy in using our brains to do simple tasks such as calculate tips or find our way around an unfamiliar city using our memories from the last time we were “here”. Will we retain any of the information we pick up when researching something that interests us or will be trust the computer to be our memory for us? Will that be the future of the human brain—entirely dependent upon technology to exist and function?
Technology Killed the Engaged Listening Star
Okay… I am playing off a certain song by The Buggles. Seriously, however, technology has most certainly made us the most passive information consumers—we don’t even necessarily have to be awake to receive it by our “I-can-do-everything” tracks-everything, super-mega, hyper-cool communication devices. We’re tuned in, turned on, and connected twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year. Technology and its ability to grant access have allowed everything in our lives to become overwhelming oversaturated. We reblog. We retweet. We re-post.
We hear the songs played over and over again on Last.fm, run to Hype Machine to download the “sample tracks” to our heart’s content, and then fail to buy the album and really suss out the details of the lyrics.
We follow dozen of people on Tumblr—most of whom simply recycle the same old posts over and over—but do we ever take the time to read the sometimes exceptionally long or beautifully original posts from Roger Ebert? Or the random blogger we found by accident?
Twitter has conditioned us to hang on the value of the anecdote and the link. Do the majority of us actually click through to read the full story or have we defaulted to Tim Ferriss’s “low information diet” tactic of subsisting on the headlines alone?
If we’re working towards consuming more “quality” in less time, is the consumption itself even worth it? Are we ever truly listening—whether it be to a song, a story, or a moment expressed as an image?
You listen to the words being said, but do you hear what is being said?
Google and New Imperialism
Sometimes it seems that Google is simply a cutesy version of the government with their endless supply of information and their simultaneously endless and ubiquitous supply of funds, which appear to be used for a new acquisition every other week -roughly eighteen this year alone. I mean, seriously, where do they get all of this money? Is this the new, shiny, modern version of imperialism for the 21st century? Instead of racing to take over as many countries as possible, it’s, “Let’s see how many companies we can acquire and add to our media empire!” Google can be the government, Apple can be The Church with Steve Jobs as the Pope and Silcon Valley the new version of Rome, and Facebook is some off-kilter version of the phonebook on steroids.
It begs to note, however, that Google has become the primary information medium. Yes, it’s thorough, but can the lens of Google be entirely trusted? Should it be trusted? Traditional imperialism was about conquering the world through the procurement of land, which led to the concept of certain nations as “world powers”. If Google serves as the example of new imperialism, what does that mean for the classic definitions of government, community, and communication? Information equals power, so what kind of power does that yield for the chief supplier of such knowledge?
