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technology, change, and stasis

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Greg Gauthier 2022-07-19 22:23:40 +01:00
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@ -21,7 +21,7 @@ Before 1925, there was no such thing as "mass media". If you wanted the news, yo
Music, storytelling, pop culture in general, and even knowledge of the world around us, was *particular to a time and a place*, and your experience of it was direct and personal, not absorbed from a distance through a transmission medium (permanently preserved by that medium, as if in amber). How does this change us, personally and socially? What are the consequences of our cleverness? What do we lose in the abundance of synthetic experiences like this? Is hearing this recording actually coming to *know* what a John Phillip Sousa concert was like? Or is it a sort of deceptive story we tell ourselves, through the artificial stimulation of our senses?
## Exploring The Implications
Our relationship to technology is reciprocal. Each new creation eliminates some degree of the time-and-space limitation within which we each exist, but the elimination of that barrier also induces in us an impulse for even greater detachment from the world. In 1894, it would have taken months for you to be able to read this (if you found it at all). Now, as soon as I push the "Publish" button, it's as good as read. And you will treat it with the requisite amount of value as was present in the effort to publish it.
Our relationship to technology is reciprocal. Each new creation eliminates some degree of the time-and-space limitation within which we each exist, but the elimination of that barrier also induces in us an impulse for even greater detachment from the world. In 1894, it would have taken months for you to be able to read this (if you found it at all). Now, as soon as I push the "Publish" button, it's as good as read. And you will treat it with the requisite amount of value as was present in the effort to publish it. Which is to say, with very limited regard. It will always be here. So, you can always come back to it. And, it is just one of *millions* of blog posts produced every single day.
Everyone says this is a boon. A great benefit. A glorious cornucopia of opportunity. Sure. There's no denying that. But consider the fact that the human being has evolved in, and adapted to, conditions in which his being has been confined by time-and-space barriers that conditioned his psychology, and governed many of his choices. Three hundred years seems like an insurmountable length of time from the place we stand now. But it is a tiny spec of a moment, on an evolutionary scale. What sort of consequence for the human species will there be, in collapsing all of these natural boundaries, and compressing all of these social inputs into one "place" (as it were)?