When technology shifts, it bends the culture.
Contents contributed and discussions participated by Linda Cranmer
Idea Lab - Becoming Screen Literate - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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This is so true. With the emergence of new technologies come new issues we face in our culture. With cell phones and other gadgets with cameras, we could be being filmed at all times without even knowing it. Our privacy, which we all hold dear, is non-existent.
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Idea Lab - Becoming Screen Literate - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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As moving images become easier to create, easier to store, easier to annotate and easier to combine into complex narratives, they also become easier to be remanipulated by the audience. This gives images a liquidity similar to words. Fluid images made up of bits flow rapidly onto new screens and can be put to almost any use. Flexible images migrate into new media and seep into the old. Like alphabetic bits, they can be squeezed into links or stretched to fit search engines, indexes and databases. They invite the same satisfying participation in both creation and consumption that the world of text does.
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As it becomes easier to manipulate and remanipulate moving images and they look as fluid as words, we will have to be even more careful about being not being fooled by what we see in film. For entertainment, this is fine. But for film put out to be accurate accounts of events, it could be a problem. The old saying of "don't believe anything you hear and only half of what you see" will need to be changed - don't necessarily believe anything you see.
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The Technium - 0 views
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But where did this remarkable harvest of lawful order come from if it was not somehow "built into" that tiny file of physical laws? I claim that the trajectory of the technium was embedded into the fabric of matter and energy. If that is true, then one literal interpretation of that claim is that the 10^29 bytes of information now in the extropic realm were somehow dissolved into the one gigabyte of information of the physical laws, and unpacked over time. By the same logic, the dense leafy information displayed by a huge oak tree was previously dissolved into the microscopic informational packet of a tiny acorn, and unpacked over 80 years.
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I like this analogy of the acorn containing the root information that is needed in order to develop into the great oak tree as it grows and matures into what it is meant to become. Just like our iinitial cells at conception contain the dna that determines what we will become (adult woman/man and contains our genetic code), the laws of physics contain the intial information that made the universe be created as it is. However, just as our dna may predispose us to have particular personality traits, we are influenced by things around us as to how those traits will evolve and conditions can influence how the oak tree grow. I believe the technium will be influenced not just by those intial laws of physics, but by the way our society evolves through our interactions as well.
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For instance in the age of automation, older hand tools are perfect for working off the grid, or in tight spots, or in countries with little cash. In an urban world, swords are hammered out by blacksmiths for ritual purposes. Quilts are sewn by hand for recreation and community. Fish are caught by hook for sport. Leather is used for the best shoes because the improvements on leather aren't really better. Commonly, the transition to the new appears faster than it is, as the old lingers invisibly behind the glittering flash of the new. For instance, despite the dominance of automobiles on modern culture today, more bicycles are sold each year than cars.
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Even when techology "improves" ways to do things, the old ways do not immediately disappear. The new ways may be faster and even be "improved," but there can still be uses/markets for the old ways of doing and/or making things. Sometimes people value and create a market for things made or done by "hand" or the "old fashioned" way (e.g. hand made jewelry/quilts, etc.); there is something to be said for the nostalgia factor and the feeling of accomplishment by creating someting by hand yourself.
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Now we have the net. While some alarmists claim that Google is making us stupid, in fact Google is making us smarter by again retraining our brains. In a 2009 study Gary Small used MRI scans to demonstrate that sustained internet searching among older adults bestowed their brains with a two-fold increase in activation in several major brain regions compared to non-internet users. Experience web surfers had a significant increase in activity in controlling decision making, complex reasoning, and vision, including the frontal pole, anterior temporal region, and the hippocampus regions of the brain.
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I found this information to be interesting. I, too, thought that by just "googling" for information, we could be creating a generation of people who would not know how to find the information on their own without the internet. However, there really will not be a need to find the information the "old fashioned" way; the way to research information will continually evolve, never requiring to go back to the old ways, and Googling actually had a positive impact on the brain as well.
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Linda Cranmer