Here's a theory:
Technology is ultimately driven by anti-social tendencies.
I don't mean criminal tendencies - I just mean our reluctance to communicate with other human beings. Now, at a fundamental level, this is self-evidently true, because the inevitable alternative to using technology is to use more manpower (I use the term in a gender non-specific way, obviously). Ever since some guys sitting around a dusty river delta on the southern Mediterranean decided that what the skyline really needed was some really big triangles on it, the way to make things happen is either (a) use lots of people, or (b) invent some clever gizmo that means you need fewer people to do the job. If we were a species who genuinely and wholeheartedly revelled in each others' company, then why bother with technology? Every job would be a big party.
This tendency has become ever more obvious as time goes on. The Walkman, of couse, was perhaps the first technology which made the trend explicit, but it was going on for a long time before that. The invention of writing neatly circumvents all that tedious business of sitting around listening to old geezers sounding off about stuff (what overly-respectful anthropologists call the 'oral tradition'). Transport, in general, is devoted to getting you from where you are (where the people are dull) to where you want to go (where the people sound more interesting). Later on, the trend accelerates: the first web cam was invented because a bunch of geeks couldn't keep a coffee pot full - not in and of itself a technically demanding task, but one which required rather more communication than they were willing to partake in.
Now some might argue that certain technologies have enabled us to communicate over long distances - something which must surely be inherently social. I disagree. I would suggest that these technologies actually allow you to talk to people you already know but who are not within shouting distance, thus saving you from the terrible prospect of having to communicate and get along with strangers who happen to be within earshot. Thus you are mercifully spared the prospect of having to make new friends by being able to communicate with your few old ones wherever they may be. What's more, most of the so-called 'enabling technologies' that we're talking about here are ones which enable you to find and talk to people who share a similar view of life to yourself. That's great for making friends quickly; but it also requires considerably less social skill to talk to someone who basically agrees with you, than someone who doesn't. Someone once said, 'each generation is its own secret society'. Communication technologies seem to have the universal effect of exaggerating the barriers which set each group apart as different, simply by allowing us to indulge our anti-social tendency to ignore those with whom we might have differences.
I'm not saying technology is a universally bad thing. I just think we should be honest about our motivations.
15 comments:
I think the driver for technology is the recognition, dating back to apus antropologicus, that it is easier to crack a nut with a rock, and a deer with a club.
True, as the Chairman of any self-respecting Neanderthal Deer Killing Club would tell you.
I don't agree, unless you're being overly generous with the definition of antisocial. It's only fairly recently that technology has evolved into a time-filler; and I think you'll find it's even more recent that entertainment has been the sole driver of technology.
On the other hand, maybe you're being facetious? Anyway, I’m communicating with you, a total stranger. Something unlikely to have occurred without some sort of technology.
Bad theory .... bad bad bad! Very well thought through and presented, nonetheless.
Here's my take: Work time, distance, efficiency, and socialization are all affected by products of technology. (Please add any "obvious" reasons we adopt technology if these occur to you, I'm just entering a stream of consciousness here, pontificating, not standing a dissertation.) Most of these advances from technology have broad social implications that overshadow the implications for any individual user. In other words, work time, distance travelled, and efficient use of resources are important to me, but these are what I am told to expect when I'm presented the technology available and prompted to adopt it. Socialization is intrinsically a global, group function and I'm laying the topic aside for a moment. New products that "do X" quick, fast, and when I hurry are designed to help exactly who? Not me every time, I assure you.
Design changes come about to affect mass markets, because the individual consumer is meaningless in technology adoption dynamics. At the outside, my behavior is important to the mass propagation of technology to the extent that my action and choices lead others. This is a reason why the opinions and behavior of self-actualized people are important, they have many adherants. Similarly, a hoi polli like me has trouble giving away half a popsicle; no one in a product life cycle analysis job really cares if I like their gizmo.
Technological advancement comes from innovators and creators that answer directly to leaders of industries who crave power. The bosses know that they offer nothing special, but they cater to timid individuals who may in a moment of weakness be led to see themselves as special and meaningful. Thus the consumer is exploited by a direct marketing force that is driven by greed, yet more specifically by the greed for power. Technology is not the chimera, it is the tool by which the chimera fills pews with adoring masses while at the same time assuring that each individual wears blinders so that, absent attention, mass migration away from its power is unlikely.
Technology is fundamentally about de-skilling
Can't navigate from A to B because you can't be arsed to spend a few years learning simple geometry and a knowledge of the movements of the Sun, Moon and planets?
Buy the new John Harrison chronometer.
Can't be arsed to tell the time, do a bit of geometry, read a map?
Buy the new Racal radio postioning system.
Really can't be arsed reading a map, and looking at a radio?
Buy the latest Garmin.
Oh I can't let that go. The chronometer solved a problem which was insoluble at the time - no amount of skill on the part of the vessel's crew could have enabled them to work out their longitude. Latitude by comparison, can be cracked via astronomical observation, and indeed that was the way it was done; but longitude is a very different kettle of fish. The only way to navigate, before accurate clocks came along, was to sail north or south until you got to the same line of latitude as your destination, and then do a ninety degree turn and follow that latitude until you arrived. The chronometer allowed ships - and mapmakers - to do stuff they had previously been unable to do. No amount of wisdom or skill was being replaced.
In actual fact, this shows my original point about anti-social tendencies, because there was a way of accurately mapping coastlines, but it involved large numbers of vessels (as the Chinese had shown before Columbus came along). But nobody liked the idea of big, sociable groups of ships, so the anti-social technology won out again.
As for the GPS, well, I partly agree... however, I'd point out that the GPS also dispenses with a certain amount of interpersonal consultation - on a ship, between navigator, pilot and skipper, and in car, between husband and wife ;)
As ever, Paul, I'm just glad I'm not playing Scrabble with you.
I don't agree with your jaundiced view of the product development cycle - from the inside, that's never been my experience of it. Obviously, producers want to make a profit. However, companies who make stuff would much rather offer individual consumers something which improves their lives, because then people will want to buy it. I'm not saying it isn't possible to sell someone something of no benefit to them, because it clearly is - but it is inherently more risky, and companies are generally risk-averse. The ideal is to sell a product which is perceived to be ever-so-slightly better than what you had before - not revolutionary, but marginally better. But once a technology is released, then the genie is out of the box, and nobody ever foresees all the implications of what will happen next. Quite often the perceived benefit is a chimera, or it shifts your lifestyle down a route which is ultimately against your best interests - that doesn't mean that the producers knew it. They almost certainly thought they were offering something you'd like and find useful. Oops. I see cock-up, not conspiracy.
"the individual consumer is meaningless in technology adoption dynamics." That sounds to me a bit like saying that the individual votes in an election are unimportant! Products are successful because people like them. It's no good saying they're told to like them, by bosses and fiendish marketing strategies; the marketing guys at Sony told people to like the Betamax, and much good it did them.
But really, this is looking at the wrong end of the life of a technology. Really, it's not the point where products are sold that I was originally talking about; it's the inventors of the technology. They're generally an anti-social lot. Hence, they invent technologies which are biased towards anti-social uses. Hence, the products which arrive on our shelves have an anti-social bias.
Don't get me wrong, Matt. I love your musing, and your observations are sound. I feel cachetic if I don't at least mirror your ideas, but I find a few of the bits you've discussed to be slightly out of order.
Technology: proved or satisfactory solutions, tools, and design proposals.
Commercial technology: invented either to settle an inventor's dilemma or to serve a technologically incompetent but well heeled patron.
Modern industrial history is full of examples of organized resistance to technology, where it is often seen to be "setting the curve" or "raising the bar" to the detriment of mobs of workers commanded by preindustrial capitalists. In those days, innovators and inventors created things as self-promotion, to prove concepts, in essence because they "could". Today, that frontier spirit still lives, but it lives in corporate boardrooms where (to borrow a Dizzy Dean phrase I really like) the credo is "It ain't bragging if you can back it up." These guys are more anticompetitive than antisocial, but I'm not arguing what they are.
Today you can't tell buyers of technology like me at home, from builders of technology like me at work. In terms of what my personal technology is capable of doing, I have more in my junk drawer than my dad ever owned. My dad and his cronies were more anti-stupid than anti-sense, but I'm not arguing how they would have had things.
My opening rant can be summed up within my personal philosophy about technology -- every technology has a lifetime and becomes either obsolete or an anachronism. The function of product distribution channels is to create desire for technology. Modern distribution and delivery systems have flooded advertising media until we're up to our eyeballs in placement, to the point no one sells anything anymore. Don't get me wrong in thinking that selling method is somehow anachronistic, because sales skill in todays mass markets works better than ever now that fewer people practice it. My central point is that technology propagation models rely on predictable market saturation and hype to place some optimal number of unit in users' hands.
We the people don't even decide which technologies we'd benefit most by adopting, because institutional buying power flicks us off of our choice like taste buds off a frozen pipe. We get what we "need" to "meet regulated standards of minimum competencies plus access to features designed for mass acceptance, as advised by standards review boards to slow obsolescence." Yeah, you know I'm not arguing against technological advantage.
Products aren't designed to have an anti-social bias... unless you count weaponry. They're produced to improve our productivity... unless you count games and entertainment.
Ascribing the motive for development of products to the inherent antisociality of the techs who produce them is equally wrong. Products are usually developed in response to a demand or a percieved need in the market, at the behest of an entrepreneur without the requisite technical skills but with the necessary social skills to see a way to service people and make a dollar in the process. The process then becomes one of consultation and innovation, based on fulfillment of that need... unless it's an entirely new technology (in which case it's possibly about weaponry or simplification of work or development of products to improve people's lives)
Since most inventions are reworks or combinations of existing technologies I would suggest almost all inventions are designed to simplify work or service delivery, or to enhance existing social behaviours and patterns.
I don't see how it could be more social, or socially responsible, than that.
I am with the headless guy with nice nails on this one. It is quite evident that, in terms of R&D and deployment spend, that we sell things that people/consumers like/want/need. Anti-social spend/development would imply more planets found verses less patients healed, more conjectures proved verses people fed, etc. We have to look outside of our scope of reference. Not just war and peace, insular vs popular. War is social, just negatively so. Perhaps your implication is that technology is negatively social. Anti-social implies, in my opinion, no human consequence.
Nope. You're all wrong, it's because geeks can't be doing with people. I'd like to stay and argue the point, but it's late here, and my bed beckons.
My hope is that there is someone in your bed, beside yourself, that could apply a social response. Good luck and Good night.
Few inventors are really geeks. The geeks work for the inventors, who are usually social visionaries.
For those inventions that are really antisocial... they never survive in the market. I like the fact most tech companies invent things for some technical purpose, only to have the punters find a way to use it for sex (witness the internet).
Poppycock! It's because the geek want to be the biggest geek with the coolest toy. Seriously, why build a pyramid with 5,000 people, when 3,000 will do and you can have the other 2,000 tending crops? You're worried the 3,000 will get lonely?
(That was all just an excuse to use the word "poppycock")
Ode to Technology
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