Our Technology Surpassed Our Society: The Cost of Progress
While Not “Unprecedented” The Times Are Unpredictable
The cost of progress: our technology surpassed our society. Throughout history, when humans invent new communication tools, society undergoes upheaval as we learn to adapt. Most people of reasonable intelligence and insight accept that we are facing destabilization that is going to make the turbulent 1960’s look like a a hushed teatime disagreement between upper class grandmothers at a toddler’s birthday party. We worry abut what events will befall us next, because no matter how things turn out at the moment; we know the future is going to be difficult. Many events, such as social unrest and a pandemic, are common to the human experience throughout history. But when we look back at the events of history, we are looking back at a much slower societal change.
History Teaches Technology Fuels Changes in Society
Johannes Gutenberg’s 15th century invention ushered the Early Modern Period. Numerous publications identified the printing press as the most important invention of the second millennium. The Renaissance, The Protestant Revolt, even the American Revolutionary War occurred in the context of the societal changes caused by the printing press.. The importance of a sub-technology in the American colonies, pamphlets, helped galvanize people for the Revolutionary War. One person could read a pamphlet and share it with his or her friends, much the way we “share” on social media today. Thomas Paine published his influential writing “Common Sense” not as a book as we read it today, but as a pamphlet; an easily shared pamphlet filled with revolutionary ideas. The ability to share ideas was innovative, but it also had checks and balances: the printers themselves, and a reading public.
Change is Not Always Pretty
It wasn’t easy for those early printers: and in fact, being a printer was quite a revolutionary trade. Those who controlled the means, the printing press– wielded a tremendous amount of power- the means to distribute ideas. The means to distribute ideas meant the means to galvanize the citizens of a country. The rulers knew that.; and freedom of the press became an early issue. T”he Dangerous Lives of the Printers ” It probably comes as no surprise that looking back through his life at his accomplishments, Ben Franklin stated that he considered himself a printer by trade: he was the most proud of his accomplishments as a printer. He was aware of its awesome power. It is no accident that freedom of the press is guaranteed as a first amendment right.
Our Technology Surpassed Our Society
Progress always has a cost, but ancestors were able to pay the price of progress in installments over time. Our bill arrived with the speed of 5G, before we even knew what we bought with it. In his 1998 article James A. Dewar speaks of the speed at which technology is evolving. But that reality was still the “slow to change” reality; what those of us who remember it would call “normalcy.” For example, in 1999, I got my first cellular phone, a large, faux wood paneled Motorola that became extremely hot when in operation. It couldn’t do anything else but make calls: and I didn’t expect it to. Phones were for calling people and computers were for writing and the internet.
It will be decades before we see the full effects of the information age. The important effects of the printing press era were not seen clearly for more than 100 years. While things happen more quickly these days, it could be decades before the winners and losers of the information age are apparent. Even today, significant (and permanent) cultural change does not happen quickly.
https://www.rand.org/pubs/papers/P8014.html
Certainly a reflection of a “turn of the century” mindset; one in which technology would evolve as slowly as it took a video to load at the time. In reality, it only took two decades to go from America Online to America Out Of Its Mind. We went from large desktop computers with CRT monitors that featured the internet, usually through AOL, and were knocked OFF of the internet by the phone, to smartphones that carried the internet. We never dreamed that the phone and the internet would be entwined: why would they? The internet was for email, surfing the (very very slow) web and chat rooms. Why the hell would we even want that on our large, clunky and hot cellular phones?
Social Media: The Cost of Progress
Smartphones were sold to us as “an answer to problems we never knew we had.” Now we could have the internet at our fingertips, and we could text our family and friends, even make video calls! But the smartphone itself wasn’t why our technology surpassed our society: We had no time to digest the presence of the smartphone, nor the time to study the impact of its ubiquitous presence on our lives. Our education system was created to produce good factory workers with respect for authority, and patriotic (school) spirit, rather than self-motivated, autonomous individuals who need to adapt quickly to a changing social and technical landscape. We lack the training to filter discriminate facts from lies; especially when those lies are presented in a just as professional format as facts. We can get good ideas and bad ideas in a matter of seconds, and launch Twitter tirades that we regret and delete later. It feels like you’re writing to no one, but you’re writing to everyone; and the weight of your opinion may sway minds. We are living out the perfect storm of technology driven, pandemic and societal change. We can’t truly comprehend the speed and magnitude of change in our reality. We can’t even comprehend what we see before us: disturbing images of Americans fighting each other, calling each other obscene names, and beating each other up within our Nation’s capital, on a Saturday night, two weeks before Thanksgiving. I spent the early afternoon and evening writing this post with this video . It disturbs me enough that it motivates me to say something. No matter how much you do or don’t “love” this country, it should disturb any human being that their fellow citizens are at each others’ throats in this manner.
Pandora’s Box is Opened
No vaccine could put the genie back in the bottle. Everything as we knew it finally broke down on a chilly day in late January of 2020 when we were making plans for spring breaks, summer vacations, thinking in our comfort bubbles that nothing could just swoop down and stop those plans. We are fighting a culture war that has gone on since the inception of the country-now exacerbated by social media. Then COVID 19 entered our lives: now something that has torn at every society, stable or not has entered; the mix: : a pandemic:. “Pestilence” is one of the scourges upon humanity that has historically destabilized every society it affected. We were already destabilized by this new tech when it hit. We see events in “warp speed” – speeding through the universe into deep, dark, unknown areas of space. We need to hold tight on this little rock of ours, but never forget that it is just that, a little rock. No man, no CEO, no president, is any bigger than the smallest of us. We will survive as a species, even if our individual survival is, necessarily, in doubt. But, we made it to this point for a reason. Society will go through this upheaval and it will survive. Maybe?
References:
The Dangerous Lives of Printers: The Evolution of Freedom of the Press. http://www1.assumption.edu/ahc/1770s/ppressfree.html
The Evolution and History of the Printing Press https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB915764828134990000
