Modern technology: It makes you think

by Unhindered by Talent

Is there anything that modern technology doesn’t affect? It was a question prompted by our recent piece on how technology is moulding the modern office [an internal link might be useful here]. I mean, if businesses can be made more efficient, if people can have mechanical hearts implanted in to their bodies, if 3D printers can produce working machines out of thin air, and if anyone who can afford it can enjoy a space holiday (do you get a tan?), it does beg the question: what is there that digital technologies can’t do?

This isn’t a science fiction forum, so I didn’t follow that line of thinking very far, but what it did steer me towards was the idea that modern technologies – and especially digital communications – have had all sorts of effects on areas of our lives that we might never have imagined.

In the same way that Kodak never saw digital photography coming, and the record industry was ambushed by iTunes, some technological turns just creep up on us in a way that makes their cultural effects all the more startling. And what was true of Kodak and the record industry can be equally true for the rest of us. Who’d have imagined that combining a phone and a camera would change the way the news is reported, or that the ‘selfie’ would become the default photograph of an entire generation?

Technology changes everything.

That’s a pretty familiar argument in technology studies – they even talk about ‘socio-technical relations’ as though, like the man with the artificial heart, we’re already some sort of cyborg: half-human and half-machine. But if you start to think about our modern society in those terms there is a point to it. After all, how could we possibly live the lives we do now without the help of all that technology? You wouldn’t be reading this for a start!

And that got me thinking some more.

There have to be some areas of life that are not compatible with modern technologies. Some things are just as they are, timeless, organic and unchanging –surely?

First of all I thought of love, marriage and all that goes with them and quickly realised that the internet is a place that is having a quite profound impact on what once upon a time would have been called ‘romance’. Let’s not go there! This isn’t THAT sort of a website any more than it is a science fiction one!

Then I thought of religion. ‘This is a good one’, I thought. After all, there are religious books that are sacred in their own right. Surely they must be immune from the impact of technology?

It seems not. The Bible the Torah and the Koran are all available online and it turns out there are online churches, Synagogues and Mosques all just the same click away as a quote for car insurance. It turns out that just about anything that people do in the way of communication can be carried out online. And as Marshall McLuhan famously put it, the medium becomes the message. What he meant was that whatever channel you use to communicate, that medium changes what you say, how you say it and how it is received.

‘Aha!’ I thought at that point, ‘Mediums’ – I should say that this was not in the sense that McLuhan was talking about, but in the ancient spiritual sense of the people who might gaze into crystal balls, tell your fortunes, read tarot cards and who have access to ‘the other side’… It seems I was still thinking along spiritual lines – ‘Surely they’ve escaped the technological tide?’

It turns out I was wrong there too. It seems you can have a tarot reading online just as easily as you can find your next car insurance policy, a space holiday or your next spouse.

At this point I was beginning to falter. So I did what just about every other 21^st century citizen would do. I went back to searching the internet.

And that was when I realised that I’d been barking up the wrong tree. The question is not whether there is anything that technology doesn’t affect; it is, instead, how our technology is changing the way we think.

And that really is a game changer!