We Live in Strange Times
“Men have become the tools of their tools.” -Henry David Thoreau
How is emerging technology affecting the societal significance of the individual? Our visions of the future are split. Some writers show us futures where, such as in Dave Eggar’s The Circle, the ever increasing value placed on individuality and the cyber showmanship of oneself destroys the last remnants of human privacy. Others give us our classic sprawling dystopias, always gray of course, where the omnipresence of technological institutions and the redesigning of human society as a tailorist fantasy has crushed the individual person. Before we delve too deeply into these fearsome visions we should remember to look backwards. We always nervously anticipate whatever innovations happen to loom on the horizon, building our expectations up to ridiculous proportions. We construct these radically alien visions of the future, where new technologies and scientific advancements have shattered the world as we knew it. Just look at popular visions of the future during the industrial revolution, or any other time of even moderate advancement. Groundbreaking as human innovations have been, I don’t believe they affect the human experience as intensely as we depict. The reality is much less dramatic. I think this is because no matter how quickly we can advance our tools, we ourselves do not change so rapidly. Thus, advancing technologies change how we do, not what we do. On the large scale the general themes and goals of the human experience remain stable.
Do we live in a particularly special historical moment? There will always be pressing current issues, so it will always be easy for a present observer to think we live during a historical tipping point. Unfortunately we are not all so important as we like to think. So how special is our time really? Obviously the so called digital revolution looks like one of the single greatest leaps in human history. It came out of nowhere to sweep across the globe. And on the large part I think our current understanding will stand up historically when this time period is looked back on in 100 years. The one place where I would differ is how quickly I believe our “turning point” is happening. It wouldn’t surprise me if in the future the digital revolution is viewed as a 40 year long period, or even longer. It’s easy to think that we are right on the cusp of something, but realistically this technology has been developing over the course of several decades. That in mind, the best way to examine the current changes in our relationships to technology is to look at it generationally.
How do the younger generations interact with technology differently from those before them? That path of examination should illustrate the direction in which we are heading. So for the sake of a convenient comparison, How does my relationship with digital technology differ from my parents with it? The classic jokes about older generations not knowing how to operate the latest and greatest technologies come to mind. However, I’m trying to think more in terms of technology’s role in our day to day lives, and how it affects our human relationships.The most obvious difference is that my parents notice their technology a lot more than I do. Many of the things that are still comparatively recent to my parents have existed for as long as I can remember, or at the very least for as long as I have been old enough to use them. For example, I have never known a time without cell phones, even iphones have been around since I was 12, so they don’t stand out to me. I don’t even find the technology particularly novel. Smartphones and cellular internet are a basic assumption for me. Of course my parents have this to some degree as well, overtime people can become accustomed to, and come to expect, anything. That being said, there is definitely a difference. What I notice most is the difference in our tolerance for spending time on the computer. If one of my parents spent 3 hours alone in a room entertaining themselves on a computer, they would start to feel a fatigue that I wouldn’t. It’s that feeling of going too long without human contact, when you just burn out on sitting in front of a screen. I just don’t experience that unless I spend at the very least an entire day in front of my computer. Of course some of that could be personal, I am more of a tech guy than my average peers, but I believe there is a significant generational difference here. It seems that digital interactions feel more like genuine human interactions to younger generations. A pattern that illustrates the increasing normalization of these digital interfaces into our lives, and the effects of growing up in the digital age.
Observing the differences in the ability of digital interactions to simulate genuine human interaction based on generation begs a further investigation of the language we use with this topic. What does genuine human interaction mean? The implication I have been making, and it is established convention, is that cyber interactions are inherently cheap, or somehow inferior to other forms of interactions. As different mediums of communication come out they take time to gain social legitimacy, both in our analyses and sentiments. Now that email and text messaging are in widespread usage, phone calls are viewed as more personal than they used to be, and the more communications system we develop the more we cherish the intimacy of paper letters. Imagine the significance and weight we associate with a handwritten letter these days, they feel so personal and “human”. Obviously when handwritten letters were the preeminent form of long distance communication they were not prized so highly. It seems strange to think now, but there was a time when sending a handwritten letter to someone that you could have gone to see in person, someone in your own city for example, was at best distant, and at worst simply rude. As new channels of communication mature they gain legitimacy, so perhaps we should not judge the newborn digital world too harshly. Forms of entertainment and mediums of storytelling follow the same pattern, progressively gaining legitimacy as the mature. Take for example, western theatre or the novel, both are now highly respected forms, and symbols of culture. When they were new, they were both regarded as cheaper, more popular forms of entertainment. Much like video games today. Given enough time I have no doubt that video games will mature as a medium, and gain greater cultural significance.
On Thoreau’s statement, “men have become the tools of their tools” It definitely holds water in a relativistic sense, but I don’t believe it should be taken absolutely. The statement is relevant and relatable at many moments in history. It is a timeless statement that every man can believe to be true about his own time, much like “we live in strange times.” The proof itself is how long ago Thoreau’s statement was made, yet when I think about it, I view it as something that is happening just now. Think of the Sight video, the technology in the video looks completely world warping. To our perspective the tech has completely surpassed the human, but wouldn’t a person living in 1950 have the same reaction if shown a vision of our present? These technologies become less imposing as we are given time to adjust to them, and fold them into our human experience.
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