is titled "Expanding Consciousness, or Encapsulation. Like the previous chapters, the discussion surveys a large number of studies, referring to each briefly.Nye is concerned that as we live increasingly in a human built environment, we may be losing something that was ours living in a natural environment. It occurs to me that Homo sapiens have been living in a modified environment for a very long time. The settlers who came to America hundreds of years ago found an environment that native Americans had significantly modified. Native Americans and immigrants both lived through the use of technology. Indeed, humans may have evolved into hominid built environments.
Nye may well be tempocentric in his concern for what we are losing as we adapt to new technologies. In the industrial revolution I am sure that people objected to the fact that workers no longer developed great physical strength because machines were increasingly doing the hard work; now values have changed. People who want to develop great strength spend a lot of their free time in the gym and the rest of us are satisfied with the strength we need to cope with our modern human-built environment. Our value towards physical strength is not that of our ancestors who needed it more; our value towards many mental ability is greater than that of our ancestors since those abilities are now more important to success in our society. At one time women developed great manual dexterity spinning and weaving, today lots of us develop a lot of manual dexterity typing.
Nye focuses on the individual and the way the individual thinks. We are social animals, and we think collectively as well as individually. Homo sapiens evolved in small groups, but we today deal with information not only in small groups but in large collective institutions up to the state and intergovernmental organizations. Individually we think differently than once we did. With the Internet at hand, we no longer have to recall all the information we need to use, so we don’t train our memories. My father would have seen that as a loss, while the young generation will not.
Clearly small groups today function better in many situations than the most comparable small groups would have in the past. Small groups form on the Internet although they are not geographically close together, and such groups can bring more and better abilities to bear on a task than would a group constrained to be locally available. They can do so with more knowledge and information at hand, with more data processing ability, not to mention more technology of other kinds that would groups in the past. (A small military unit armed with today’s weapons probably would defeat a large force armed as were Roman legions or troops of the Middle Ages).
I would suggest that not only do large institutions such as global markets and powerful corporations exist because they can and because they are successful where older simpler forms would not be, but new technologies have in my lifetime made such institutions still more effective. Clearly we think better as a civilization as more people work together; thus our knowledge of the world is vastly increased over that of the past.
There is an interesting question as to how people will think in the near future, and whether really major problems will occur. Think of obesity as a result of the change of life style relating to food availability and exercise, leading to increased rates of diabetes, heart disease, etc. So too, the individual in the upcoming technological age may be less successful than he/she might have been in the past.
So too it is possible that as people adapt to new technologies they will prove less able to interact successfully in small groups. Indeed, it is possible that our civilization will not survive the problems created by the way we use technology; technology based threats range from global warming to nuclear winter to a world in which population growth exceeds the growth of food resources.
Alternatively, multi-tasking, plugged in individuals in the future may have evolved more effective ways of living in their evolved technologically-managed environment, while groups, institutions and societies may also live more successfully with the combination of new and retained technologies.
While the observers of evolving technology and human response to that evolution are interesting to read and their ruminations often are thought provoking, it seems to me that such efforts are often not very accurate. Recall the people who thought that printing, by making the bible more accessible to all, would make civilization more saintly, or the failure of the people contemplating the implications of computers in their early days to predict the flood of pornography, spam, and online gambling on the Internet.
This one of a series of postings on
Technology Matters: Questions to Live With:- A thought on reading Technology Matters
- How does an organization learn
- Technology Prognostication
- A Technology and Culture Case Study
- More on "Technology Matters"
- Thoughts on Reading Nye on Technology and Cultural Diversity
- Sustainable Abundance, or Ecological Crisis
- "Work: More, or Less, Better, or Worse"
- Technology Choice
- Technological Progress: Has it made us safer or at higher risk?
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