[This post is a continuation of 'Watch Yourself (Part I)']
I have a memory from when I was a kid of my Aunty’s boyfriend putting the hard sell on my parents to buy his old Sinclair ZX81 (check out the link for a blast from the past). Sure, he was trying to flog it off so he could upgrade, but he also firmly believed – and was trying to convince us – that computers were the way of the future, that one day everyone would have one, and that it would be a good thing for my sister and I to learn how to use them early on. It was a tough sell – not only to a builder and a teacher who hadn’t seen a computer before, but also to a barefooted grubby pikey runabout who spent most of his time riding bikes and keeping grubby.
But the sell was made, and I guess you could say he was right. A childhood or so later and I’m living in a three-bed flat with four computers and a swag of iPods, digital cameras and cellphones to match – a tech junkie’s (and burglar’s) paradise. I’ve earned a living at a keyboard and cursor for the past eight years, and that doesn’t look like it’s about to change. Oh, and I don’t get so grubby anymore…
Since that fateful day in the 80′s when the ZX81 moved in I’ve stumbled through a couple of decades of technology consumption, leaving a dusty trail of discarded beige computer casings and screens in my wake…towards…I dunno…just the next funky little box I guess. Whatever ‘They’ come up with next for me to use, consume and discard. I’m probably a little more addicted to gadgets than the average bear, but I doubt this pattern is too different to most. Looking back, the most interesting and disturbing feature of this acquisition and disposal cycle is that I’ve rarely needed (not wanted – I’m addicted, remember) any of this shit until it’s hit the store shelves. With the torturous exception of the iPhone, of course – that’s not gonna hit any shelves here for months and I need that puppy now. But the point is, I’m a Technology Victim – and I doubt I’m alone.
Don’t get me wrong – these salivating years of accumulation have delivered benefit. Life has grown pleasingly fluid with a cellphone in my pocket, and the web is like looking through the square, round and arched windows to the world all at once. But in the same way that this consumption has been unplanned and undirected except by what is thrown at me, so has been the downside – both on a personal level and in the impact it’s had on the society in which I find myself. Sitting on my arse for days at a time looking at a computer screen isn’t great for my health (or in fact my arse), and every time I’m dining with someone and they take a call I feel myself plunging into my first generation gap – a yearning for the good old days when a meal with a friend was intimate, not interruptible.
I’m not blaming the manufacturers for the myriad of (probably unintended) social consequences of their products. The very nature of invention puts it ahead of a contemporary cultural frame of reference, which is why it’s hard to understand the impact it’s going to have on our lives (and arses) when we adopt it. And there’s no use blaming society itself either – it’s no easier for us to predict the impact technology will have as it is for the people who invent it. That said, perhaps it’s time we paid a little more attention and thought to this future ahead of us. Perhaps we’ve been sleepwalking a touch too long into a world that is becoming more and more submerged in gadgets and what they can do for us, without thinking about what they’ll do to us.
There’s an interesting book about all of this by Susan Greenfield (she’s no slouch) called Tomorrow’s People in which she makes her predictions for a technology-drenched future and its impact on each aspect of human life (work, play, food, clothing, housing etc). She concludes with a view of how culture as a whole might shift and comes up with some fairly grim scenarios. There are a few that stand out as both culturally repellant (for the time being, anyway – generations to come may not think so) and yet technologically feasible, one being a world where the tools of sousveillance discussed in Part I of this article are so common that everyone’s lives are on display for anyone to view and the erosion of privacy over generations makes that ok. Normal even.
But the future is always difficult to predict. Even though the foundations for a scenario like this are in place (socially we’re drooling over watching strangers on Big Brother, and technologically we’re carrying tools to record and project our lives online) who knows where things will head if we let them wander. However, we can choose to influence the impact technology will have on our lives, society and culture through just a little conscious effort. Thinking about the ways we use and adopt technology, letting companies know what we think of their products, teaching our kids the richness of living offline…
But again, the question is – do we care enough to do that?
Well said (he says as he reads an article from on the internet at 11pm saturday night….)
Ha, nice one. It was written over a nip of lagavulan so that’s probably an appropriate time to reading it Bro… I hear there’s a Whisky Festival on back home this weekend – sounds bloody lovely.