How Technology Changed Society
Public discussion today of the radical and profound changes being wrought by technology in our lives is inescapable. Newspapers, films, the internet, all abound with musings on the current collapse of children’s intellectual engagements (with nature, books, each other, etc.) and adult’s handicapping reliance on technology’s convenience and ease. Undoubtedly, technology’s rapidly evolving pace means that changes in the human social interaction it brings seem all the more dramatic. Whether it fundamentally changes the nature of human social interaction is unclear.
Perhaps no technological development in human history can be said to have had as much impact on human life as the emergence of the Internet. Putting a vast realm of information at our fingertips, facilitating communication and engendering split second fame, as well as instant social death, the Internet has revolutionized the ways that people connect and communicate. A good example of this is Internet dating, which has become one of the most common forms of meeting new people for many types of relationships. It is different in many regards from previous eras where people met new partners in face to face interactions. While the internet allows people access to a much broader range of people, it also allows people to misrepresent themselves in ways that face to face relationships did not. The questions an internet dater answers in setting their profile and preferences define the pool of people they will “meet,” excluding people who they might have liked in person based on the unexplainables of human “chemistry” in personal interactions. Likewise, the availability of instant information has shifted our expectations: students today don’t reach for an encyclopedia for their research or carve out time to spend at the library; they anticipate that information will be readily available to them through the Internet. Our thinking has shifted in line with the available technology. Today, it is expected that this information and communication will be available at all times, to all people, especially the generation born into this technology.
Another form of new technology often fretted over is the smartphone. The smartphone not only put digital phone communication in our purses and pockets, rendering the landline virtually obsolete in less than a decade, but more importantly brought the power of the internet to our fingertips wherever they are. As noted in a recent New York Times editorial, today, in an instant from our phones, we can order up a car to take us where we are going, a valet to meet us there to park it, a chef to make food for our children while we are out, a driver to deliver it, a maid to clean up after it, and a walker to take our dogs for a spin. All this with the ease of a few touchscreen taps on the appropriate app (if we are able to pay for it, of course). The world is at our fingertips. Surely this is a seismic shift from even a few short years ago. Another aspect of smartphone technology and communication is texting, which has become the prefered method of communication for people in our society. The emergence of abbreviations for commonly used phrases, such as lol, ikr, otw, rn, omg, among others, has led to a shift in language and forms of written expression that generates concerns about the future of the English language. A clear example of this can be seen in the novel A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan, in which she uses a made up, hard to understand, futuristic, text language that all the characters use towards the end of the story. This language is similar to the acronyms we use today. Language specialists express consternation about an increasing lack of formality in communication and anxiety about whether our youth will grow up without learning formal English. They worry that in the future, the English language will be reduced to strings of letters, such as “lol omg ikr wtf.”
Most recently, developments in artificial intelligence have led to further musings about the future of human interactions not only with each other, but with technologically-generated life. This throws a much bigger wrinkle into the already undulating terrain of human life in the era of fast-paced technological change. The recent film “Ex-Machina” explored the potentially devastating implications of love and hate relationships between humans and human-created machines who are ultimately able to think and feel more or better than the humans. The film raises some of the serious existential questions regarding the meaning of “life” and “humanness” that the development of artificial life will imply. While it remains to be seen whether artificial intelligence will develop as portended, if it does it holds the potential to have far more profound effects on human society than any technology that came before it.
Even though it is possible to cite innumerable examples of how rapidly evolving technology has changed the way people think, communicate through language, and develop shared culture, that change is also arguably superficial. Anthropologists, who study humans over the millennia, tend to highlight the continuity of underlying behaviors. People want to communicate with other people, whether it is through petroglyphs, stelae, pen and paper, or computer text. The written English language itself has undergone dramatic enough shifts over time that ancient English is virtually unintelligible to those without expert knowledge of its reading. Nevertheless, the goal of human social communication remains the same throughout history. While Internet dating has notable differences from forms of social interaction that preceded it, it still pursues the same underlying goal. In short, it’s possible that our human behaviors remain largely consistent, just the means we use to enact them have changed. That said, given the rate at which technology is evolving, which is much faster than at any point in previous human history, it seems possible that we may soon achieve technology - such as artificial intelligence - that holds the potential to reshape our understanding of what it is to be human and what it is to engage in human society.
Public discussion today of the radical and profound changes being wrought by technology in our lives is inescapable. Newspapers, films, the internet, all abound with musings on the current collapse of children’s intellectual engagements (with nature, books, each other, etc.) and adult’s handicapping reliance on technology’s convenience and ease. Undoubtedly, technology’s rapidly evolving pace means that changes in the human social interaction it brings seem all the more dramatic. Whether it fundamentally changes the nature of human social interaction is unclear.
Perhaps no technological development in human history can be said to have had as much impact on human life as the emergence of the Internet. Putting a vast realm of information at our fingertips, facilitating communication and engendering split second fame, as well as instant social death, the Internet has revolutionized the ways that people connect and communicate. A good example of this is Internet dating, which has become one of the most common forms of meeting new people for many types of relationships. It is different in many regards from previous eras where people met new partners in face to face interactions. While the internet allows people access to a much broader range of people, it also allows people to misrepresent themselves in ways that face to face relationships did not. The questions an internet dater answers in setting their profile and preferences define the pool of people they will “meet,” excluding people who they might have liked in person based on the unexplainables of human “chemistry” in personal interactions. Likewise, the availability of instant information has shifted our expectations: students today don’t reach for an encyclopedia for their research or carve out time to spend at the library; they anticipate that information will be readily available to them through the Internet. Our thinking has shifted in line with the available technology. Today, it is expected that this information and communication will be available at all times, to all people, especially the generation born into this technology.
Another form of new technology often fretted over is the smartphone. The smartphone not only put digital phone communication in our purses and pockets, rendering the landline virtually obsolete in less than a decade, but more importantly brought the power of the internet to our fingertips wherever they are. As noted in a recent New York Times editorial, today, in an instant from our phones, we can order up a car to take us where we are going, a valet to meet us there to park it, a chef to make food for our children while we are out, a driver to deliver it, a maid to clean up after it, and a walker to take our dogs for a spin. All this with the ease of a few touchscreen taps on the appropriate app (if we are able to pay for it, of course). The world is at our fingertips. Surely this is a seismic shift from even a few short years ago. Another aspect of smartphone technology and communication is texting, which has become the prefered method of communication for people in our society. The emergence of abbreviations for commonly used phrases, such as lol, ikr, otw, rn, omg, among others, has led to a shift in language and forms of written expression that generates concerns about the future of the English language. A clear example of this can be seen in the novel A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan, in which she uses a made up, hard to understand, futuristic, text language that all the characters use towards the end of the story. This language is similar to the acronyms we use today. Language specialists express consternation about an increasing lack of formality in communication and anxiety about whether our youth will grow up without learning formal English. They worry that in the future, the English language will be reduced to strings of letters, such as “lol omg ikr wtf.”
Most recently, developments in artificial intelligence have led to further musings about the future of human interactions not only with each other, but with technologically-generated life. This throws a much bigger wrinkle into the already undulating terrain of human life in the era of fast-paced technological change. The recent film “Ex-Machina” explored the potentially devastating implications of love and hate relationships between humans and human-created machines who are ultimately able to think and feel more or better than the humans. The film raises some of the serious existential questions regarding the meaning of “life” and “humanness” that the development of artificial life will imply. While it remains to be seen whether artificial intelligence will develop as portended, if it does it holds the potential to have far more profound effects on human society than any technology that came before it.
Even though it is possible to cite innumerable examples of how rapidly evolving technology has changed the way people think, communicate through language, and develop shared culture, that change is also arguably superficial. Anthropologists, who study humans over the millennia, tend to highlight the continuity of underlying behaviors. People want to communicate with other people, whether it is through petroglyphs, stelae, pen and paper, or computer text. The written English language itself has undergone dramatic enough shifts over time that ancient English is virtually unintelligible to those without expert knowledge of its reading. Nevertheless, the goal of human social communication remains the same throughout history. While Internet dating has notable differences from forms of social interaction that preceded it, it still pursues the same underlying goal. In short, it’s possible that our human behaviors remain largely consistent, just the means we use to enact them have changed. That said, given the rate at which technology is evolving, which is much faster than at any point in previous human history, it seems possible that we may soon achieve technology - such as artificial intelligence - that holds the potential to reshape our understanding of what it is to be human and what it is to engage in human society.