Undeniable Advancement: Technology

Some fifty years ago, people thought imagined fantasies of flying cars and explorations into the furthest depths of outer space by the time the turn of the millennium came around. In those fifty years, it's undeniable that we've developed, except instead of colonizing the universe, we've developed "convenient" gadgets like the "smartphone", and immersed ourselves into virtual media like the television and the computer.  Is the theme of technology that we are currently developing really the direction that inventors of the past have dreamed of? Loss of the values of our very own wisdom and logic through the institutions of writing and numbers, and modern day disconnection from the real word by virtual fantasies seem to cast technology in a negative light. But still, there are ignorant people on both sides, and the fact that the human race seeks progression. In the end, we must realize that these changes are, as a whole, neither good nor evil, they strike out to a delicate equilibrium.

Technology has led to an overall change in how our brains work, and how we treat the world around us. In Plato's Phaedrus, about the King Thamus and his judgment upon various inventions, Thamus mentions at one point about the invention of writing, "Those who acquire it will cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful; they will rely on it … is a receipt for recollection, not memory" (CC, 364). At first this seems to be a ridiculous notion: how could something so integral to human development be a vice in Thamus' eyes? It wouldn't even be possible to read this if not for the invention of writing. However, Thamus continues, "they will receive a quantity of information without proper instruction … very knowledgeable when they are … quite ignorant." (CC, 364) When applied to the modern classroom, Thamus' statement begins to seem quite applicable. Many social studies teachers simply cram students into reading and note-taking on page after page of text. They read, and they write. When they have completed their courses, myself included, they are knowledgeable about fact and detail after detail that they has been rigorously drilled into their heads from their countless hours of interaction with text. But in the end, after the final tests are all said and done, many of us simply forget what we have learned. If we must indeed review history, the first thing we do is revert back to our notes. Most of us are unable to name the year the Magna Carta was signed off the top of our heads, even though we were able to name it in a heartbeat if we were asked back in seventh grade. It could be said that something as basic as writing has become a crutch.

            Though something as simple as writing was able to completely redefine how we valued our education, something even simpler has drastically changed the weight we put on wisdom and knowledge. Even though the "number" was originally meant for use with math, as the article "The Judgment of Thamus" states, "the first instance of grading … occurred at Cambridge University in 1792 at the suggestion of … William Farish." When put this way, as the Judgment of Thamus also mentions, it sounds almost ridiculous to assign a quantitative value to something that we hold so highly: human thought and intelligence. Indeed to scholars who lived in the Golden Age of Rome or the Cosmopolitan Era of the Middle East, such a concept would have come off as absurd. Even so, in the modern day we go as far as to rank someone's entire intelligence as a whole by means of IQ points. The invention of numbers has led us to see everything as a number. Someone living in the modern day would never be able to imagine what life was like before the invention of numbers. We've become engulfed in this craze to quantify.

            Even with harsh criticism on something as basic as writing and numbers, it would be outright mad to deny that we could be living lives as we are right now without either. Without writing and numbers, none of us would have ever read a book, none of us would have been able to receive such knowledge about the world as we have right now, none of us would have any ability to buy anything, and we probably wouldn't have computers. Or at least we wouldn't be able to the way that we would normally expect. Technology is simply the means to an end. Who knows what our bustling human minds could have come up with to spread information around the globe without writing, or to do menial computations for us? This leads me to an important point about technology, also mentioned in "The Judgment of Thamus": when a new technology is produced, it doesn't merely change one aspect of life. Like biologists would treat an ecosystem, or theoretical physicists would treat the butterfly effect and parallel world lines, the introduction of a new technology changes everything. It wipes the common lifestyle of every human and rewrites it, so subtly that we don't notice it. This is where my view diverges from the article. While I believe that technology has made many negative changes to what could have been a promising human future, I stand firm that technology has shaped us into what we are now, and delaying technological advance would have only led to the eventual workaround by us as a human race

            Though I have faith in the human race to make correct decisions, as we have in the past with writing and numbers, modern technology is progressing at a rate that we have never seen in history before. As a result, there are certainly some seemingly negative side effects of this, detailed in Kalle Lasn's Culture Jam.  Lasn strikes especially firmly on how we are falling into a virtual existence where people are unwilling to deal with their real life and every day problems. Indeed, much of Culture Jam's "Autumn" chapter is about how modern technology is causing people to escape into pixelated fantasies and becoming disconnected from the real world. He tells an anecdote about one girl obsessed with online chatrooms: "Sometimes I go out,' she'd say, but she didn't mean 'out' out, she meant 'out' of that chat group and into another site." Lasn mentions another group of people who lose themselves in multiple online identities, especially in video games where you can be immersed into a virtual environment. He wraps up with some harsh questions about whether these virtual identities were really who you were, and asked us to re-evaluate how much technology was influencing the person that we were. Lasn makes some good points. I too have some friends that are obsessed with online gaming and sacrifice their success in school to do well in their virtual personas. Some of them even spend money on pure cosmetic items, eerily similar to how a person would buy clothes in the real world. All set aside, as an avid video game player myself, I do the same, to a milder extent. There are days during the holidays when I can lose myself in a role-playing game for over 12 hours in almost one continuous sitting. In fact, a common feature that gamers look for in video games is "immersion". We throw the term around like it's confetti: this "breaks immersion" and that "enhances immersion". We have game modifications that specifically target voices, sound effects, or even the removal of the heads-up display system, all for the sake of "realism". Technology has developed to the point that some of us strive to be sucked into the virtual world as deep as possible. Indeed, we're throwing money to lose ourselves as deep in the fantasy as we can.

            Still, I find Lasn's commentary leaning on the side of ignorant and overly harsh. His aggressive style of writing subtracts my focus on his actual speaking points. When he quotes the girl about her online chatroom "addiction", it almost seems as if he's somebody who hasn't tried it for himself and is misquoting and twisting words. He doesn't give any context for what she was saying before the quote. This brings up another important point about my personal views on technology: there are too many ignorant people on both sides. While I've already discussed how people are choosing to indulge themselves in the "fantasies" that Lasn considers a "vice" of technology - not limited to just video games but television as well - there are also people like Lasn who are unable to see the stance of the other side. He questions how people are being shaped by technology, and not by their personal "soul", or whatever he was trying to get at. What defines a human anyways? Experiences? Though this may be delving into too far of a radical approach to thinking, it is often acceptable to say "you have to read this book: it's sure changed my life." You could say the same about a college course, or maybe even a movie. Maybe the movie would be pushing it on Lasn's terms, but for even some as radical as him, something like that wouldn't be considered an "evil".  To the King Thamus however, something like that would be an abomination. He'd claim that it would be ridiculous to have some kind of "technology" like writing change someone's entire life. To the scholars of the Golden Age, a graded class changing someone's life would have around the same effect. Except over the course of time, albeit 2000 years, we've come to completely change our views. Who is it then, like Lasn, to tell us that video games or television should be any different? Especially when technologies like writing have come to be one the most influential parts in human advancement, why can't playing video games be a "wholesome activity". I know for myself, I've played video games that have changed how I see the world. As seen by Lasn's statements, it is a hazardous way of thinking to begin to imply that modern day technologies are any less valid in shaping an individual than preexisting, ancient technologies.

            A final article, called "Breaking Down Borders" by Robert Samuels, tells a short story about how a café in the Borders store has changed from technology. The final paragraph sets out the most important point: "Is there anything really wrong with that? We adapt to our new technologies, in fact, by using more technologies. There seems to be now way of escaping from a technologically mediated environment … but … we seem to be coping well enough." Samuels holds a stance that is neither leaning very far for or against technology. Instead, the author seems to hold a very neutral ground, in fact, more along the lines of "acceptance".  At the end his point seems to be very relaxed, almost implying that this will be the natural order of things and that there isn't anything particularly wrong about that. Whether we resist it or embrace it, we've always moved forward, generation by generation. It would be silly to argue that we are better or worse off with new technology. For as long as history has gone on, there have always been those who opposed change, yet we still barge through and create the wonders that we could have never imagined just one generation before. We live in the time that we do now, not before, and not after. If we are content with our technology, then who is to say that we aren't?

            Even with the jarring negatives of the crutches of writing, how numbers have reshaped our perceptive of the world, and how virtual life is taking over, it's important to realize that humanity has always seeked progression, and how this argument is time old and has always included a myriad of opinions, many being very ignorant of the other side. It's important to realize that technology to the human race is neither the greatest good, nor evil. It's a delicate balance between the two, and in this balance we find something far more important. Change, and undeniable advancement.