Dan Tofan explores the relationship between technology and humanity and discusses the positive impacts. In Part Two, the negative impacts are explored and discussed.
At this point, humanity has reached the highest level of dependency on technology. This dependency has become so deeply entrenched that it has come to be totally acceptable for some to declare that life might seem meaningless without technology.
According to this study, the average American nowadays spends more than 11 hours per day “watching, reading, listening to or simply interacting with media.” Are we going in the right direction? Are we handling well enough our own development as a species and our dependencies upon technology? What are the good sides and the bad sides of technology and what should we avoid so as to not end up losing our innate humanity?
As humans evolved, one of the overarching distinctions between us and the animals was the ability to use our intelligence to develop technology in its different forms. But first, please allow me, so as to avoid any kind of confusion, to clarify that by “technology,” I refer, in general, to the knowledge of techniques and methods, while I can also refer to machines or structures (e.g. aqueducts) that allow a simplification or enhancement of the work usually done by humans.
Technologies That Made The Difference
While reading the intriguing book The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing to our Brains, by Nicholas Carr, I found out that two of the most influential technological inventions of all time are the map and the clock. These two inventions have definitely impacted our evolution irreversibly.
Just try to imagine how life would look like if the notion of time did not exist and we were mere observers of the cyclical flow of days and nights. Clocks have helped us define periods of the day, and we started better organizing ourselves. Thus, we started thinking in terms of hours and minutes and this approach impacted our lives for the better.
On the other hand, maps, besides being a method of storing geographical data, helped us develop ways of perceiving and making sense of the world, ultimately contributing to the development of abstract thinking. There is a whole part of the brain called the hippocampus that grows along with the use of maps and supports spatial orientation. There is also a famous experiment on London taxi drivers that proved they “not only have larger-than-average memory centers in their brains, but also that their intensive training is responsible for their respective growth. Excelling at one form of memory, however, may inhibit another.” Memorizing more than 25,000 streets led to the over-development of their hippocampus, in defiance of other regions of their brains.
Another influential invention is writing. As banal and widespread as it may seem nowadays, writing faced a lot of resistance in ancient Greece thousands of years ago, in the times of Plato and Socrates. Carr’s book mentions how poetry (oral) and literature (writing) were, at that point, opposing ideals of intellectual life. In an oral-driven society, people had to rely a lot on their memory. That is why poetry was intensively used, as rhymes were helping people easily remember things (imagine somebody reciting an income statement).
The introduction of writing made things easier, but also induced the fear that memory would go weak for those who embraced the new technology. Looking back, writing was a must for the development of modern societies. No matter how good you were at remembering poems, there was always a physical limitation on how much you could memorize. An oral society could not have achieved our level of development.
The introduction of writing has clearly changed our cognitive development, again, irreversibly. As people were able to write, part of the cognitive processing power was freed so that they could take care of something else. Memory did not go weak, as the new system was challenging us to focus on remembering other things and made new, more complex connections. We just got a “hard drive” upgrade.
As our history is replete with wars, weapons have always been technologies that provided strategic world dominance. People have been always, basically, competing for a limited amount of resources, thus, having a technologically advanced army has been an economic and political advantage. The 16th, 17th and 18th centuries’ conquistadors relied a lot on their naval supremacy, firearms, and light equipment to expand beyond Europe to the Americas, Oceania, Africa, and Asia. The atomic bomb clearly leaned the fate of WWII and established a new-world order ever since. After dominating the world for many centuries, the European powers lost their supremacy in favor of the US as the new technological superpower that mastered the new invention.
Extending our Memory
As intellectual technologies became widespread along with the invention of books and printing, the ability to extend our memory capacity through media (such as books) has helped societies evolve faster. Whether we consider science or culture, books and printing have contributed as media for information storage, allowing people to pass important information along to the next generation. Most importantly, writing, books, and printing have completely changed how people think.
The ability to store data outside our memory has allowed us to clear up some of our cognitive resources and start thinking of something else. The change in how people process information leads, ultimately, to a change in how people use their brains. Reading is an intense cognitive experience that introduces readers to an altered state of mind. Humans started developing the ability to express long periods of focus and mindfulness when reading. You’ve probably had similar experiences when plunging into a good book, having forgotten everything else and vividly imagining the experiences you read.
Technology is an extension of human abilities, as it usually allows us to achieve more. Nicholas Carr classifies it into 4 categories, depending on which of our human abilities it extends: physical strength (plow, car, etc.), the sensitivity of our senses (glasses, etc.), reshaping nature to better fit out needs (agriculture), and finally, intellectual technologies (books, computer, cell phone, maps, etc.). As they were introduced to our lives, they considerably changed the way we conceive and act upon the world. But what they have ultimately done is change the way our brains work.
Technology ultimately modifies the way humans behave and this translates into physical changes on individuals (especially how our brain works) that often leads to societal change (the way we act as a society), or better said, it tampers with our culture.
There is no doubt concerning their usefulness and/or positive impact, but technologies’ adverse effects are also present. And it is to these side-effects that we need to pay great attention, as nowadays technology is more widespread than ever, reaching towards all countries and social levels.
_______
This is Part One of a two-part series.
