How We Serve Our Creations
How We Serve Our Creations
We use technology, but it uses us back
Writing is something we all take for granted, but it’s worth noting that there’s something magical about it. Silvia Ferarra put it this way in her book The Greatest Invention: A History of the World in Nine Mysterious Scripts:
Writing is sound made visible and tangible, and as such it interacts intimately with our sensory systems, our ears, our eyes, hands, tongue. Which in no way makes it an innate faculty — quite the contrary. It merely makes it human. Writing is bound to perception, yes, our filter on the world, but also to everything the world is made of. To things themselves: concrete things, created things, the things we see around us, and even abstract, imagined things.
Writing fundamentally transformed human life in ways that we mostly can’t see anymore. We’re like the fish that asks, “what the hell is water?” in the famous David Foster Wallace speech.
Unless we’re really looking, we can’t see that learning to read and write — and living in societies that take the ability to read and write as a given — have had all sorts of profound effects on the human experience. Writing made possible the forms of social organization, government, science, storytelling, history, and trade that we take for granted today. Learning to read and write even rewires the human brain; it trains us to focus more fully and think more deeply than we otherwise would be able to. The advantages of writing came with drawbacks, as well — Socrates famously complained that the kids these days (in the 400s BCE) couldn’t develop prodigious powers of memory because they could just write information down instead.
We’ve come to depend completely on the technology of writing, and we have restructured our societies and our minds to, in some sense, serve writing. Take education: We’ve created an entire industry around teaching children to read and write. Schools sort and rank children according to their abilities, chief among them their facility with reading and writing. Children who have a harder time learning these skills often find themselves at a disadvantage in school and life, regardless of their other talents and abilities.
Pretty much every human society is built around writing and the assumption that most people will know how to read and write. Writing has shaped us as much as we have used it to shape the world.
Writing is one of our most ancient technologies, but it’s a good example of the way that we have interacted with most of the important technologies in human history. We create a technology thinking that it can be useful — that it will serve us. And it does. But our interaction with technology is always a two-way street. We use technology to change the world. But our technology usually changes us, as well, and we restructure our world — often in ways we struggle to see — in order to accommodate the technologies on which we depend.
Take two technologies that are integral to modern American society — the car and the smartphone. Both are incredibly useful technologies, but we have changed a lot about our world — and ourselves — in service of them.
Next time you’re out driving, try to imagine what the landscape through which you are traveling would look like without the automobile. Try to notice all of the things you usually don’t really see — the parking lots, the overpasses, the traffic lights, the garages, the light pollution. Think about what would be there if the landscape hadn’t been altered for auto traffic — more wildlife, more pedestrians, more quiet, more darkness.
In exchange for the benefits that cars bring, we have agreed to take on immense costs. Because of the suburban sprawl that cars engendered, we’re more isolated and lonelier than we were before. Our streets, once lively sites of pedestrian traffic, trade, and interaction, are now barren, deadly, and polluted. We tolerate over 6,000 pedestrian deaths and more than 36,000 deaths in motor vehicle accidents each year. Almost 20,000 people die every year from the air pollution that comes out of our cars’ tailpipes.
The automobile was a wondrous invention — most of us, me included, drive a car to work every day — but fully utilizing that technology required nothing less than a transformation of our landscapes and our lives. We have altered our world to serve the car as much as the car serves us.
The smartphone hasn’t really transformed the topography of the earth, but it has altered the topography of our minds. Phones are, like cars, incredibly useful, but we’ve also begun to restructure our minds and our lives to cater to the demands of our technology.
If you’re like me (and 73% of the population), you get twitchy if you’re ever out in the world without your phone, even though many of us managed to survive life without a cell phone for decades before they were invented. We are bombarded by a fusillade of notifications every day, each of which requires us to pay attention to a phone rather than what we were doing.
Most of us have no idea how much we interact with our phones — one study found that adults interact with their phones 85 times per day (about once every 10 minutes that we’re awake), for a total of five hours (About a third of our waking life). When asked to guess at their screen time, the subjects in the study guessed that they spent about half that much time engrossed in their screens.
Our phones have changed our physical experiences — ever feel a phantom vibration in your pocket, or experience an event largely through the screen of the phone on which you’re filming it? They’ve altered our brain chemistry. The smartphone is such a powerful instrument of dopamine delivery that the “low-dopamine morning” (basically, not looking at your phone for a half hour after you wake up) has become a trend… on the popular smartphone app TikTok.
Smartphones are excellent servants of humanity, sitting silently ready to show us the weather forecast, our work email, a funny video, or a video game at a moment’s notice. But we have become servants of our phones, as well.
Technological innovation, of course, is not going to stop. We seem to be on the verge of incredible innovations in biotechnology, augmented and virtual reality, and artificial intelligence, to name just a few promising fields.
These innovations will likely make life better for people in all sorts of ways that we can anticipate, and likely in some ways that we can’t. But we should be conscious that these technologies may end up shaping our societies, our lives, and even the earth itself in ways we can’t anticipate.