Technology Old and New
A Language of God reflection
My high school graduation gift from my parents was a typewriter. It’s not because they didn’t like me, or because I had a Tom Hanks fetish with vintage communications devices. Typewriters were still mainstream in those days. And this was a fancy one with an electric cord and a correcting tape built in for when you made a mistake.
My college wasn’t exactly on the forefront of technological innovation, but my dorm had one actual computer in it that we could use for word processing. We thought it was awesome that you didn’t have to hit the Return key at the end of each line of text, and that you could proofread your “paper” before printing it out on the dot matrix printer.
By the time I got to graduate school in the middle 90s, I got my first email address. And by the end of grad school in the late 90s I had a cell phone, which came with 15 minutes per month of calling time (we didn’t know about texting yet). I was on Facebook before 2006 (because I had a dot edu email address), and we subscribed to Netflix when they still sent you DVDs through the mail. Now, of course, we stream everything and are tethered to our smartphones.
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I give this brief tour through some of my history with technology to raise a question we briefly considered on today’s new podcast episode: Uniquely Unique | Technology. There we’re primarily considering whether technology is the marker of what sets us apart from everything else, and the answer we give (like we have to about every other things we’ve suggested) is: kinda sorta. But what I’m interested in here is whether the technological changes of the very recent past (i.e., my lifetime) are somehow different than what every generation faces?
The photo for this post is from my recent hike along the Camino de Santiago in Spain. We took a brief detour one day because the guidebook said we could see one of the most important archeological sites in Europe. I expected there to be some kind of research station and a gift shop, but there was just this open site you could walk out to (on on). It is the ruins of a castro between Portomarín and Palas de Rei, which was a settlement with evidence that it was inhabited from at least the 4th century BCE.
I don’t see evidence of technology like cable TV, but they had walls! It’s funny to think that at some point walls were a technological innovation. What difference must that have made to people’s lives? Did the older people of the time lament, “Those darn kids today spend all their time indoors behind walls, and it’s going to ruin them!”
It seems to me totally plausible that other innovations like the printing press and gun powder and automobiles radically reoriented societies. But it’s hard for me to really understand those changes, because they are just givens in my world. But I have experienced the changes in digital technology across my lifetime. And I can’t help thinking the pace of change here is something quite different (and I suppose I’m the old guy now lamenting how kids spend their time). And it worries me a bit to think about what it is doing to us, to our brains, to our relationships.
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We are tool making organisms. Sure, a few other species have been observed to use tools; Jane Goodall’s first observation of that among chimps was groundbreaking. But sticking a twig into a termite mound, or using a rock to crack a nut, is nothing close to the kind of tool use we engage in these days. I don’t say that as a value statement, that it somehow makes us better than everything else — just that it makes us different. The way we experience the world is mediated through our tools. Consider how much time you spend interacting with things that occur naturally in the world, versus how much time you spend interacting with things we humans have made from the naturally occurring bits (which are now gathered with massive assistance from tools). We live in a different world.
And I’m suggesting that the world we live in today because of our digital technology, is quite a different world than the one our fairly recent ancestors lived in. A bunch of my ancestors came to America in the 18th century. I bet they would feel more at home in the society 2000 years ago that built those funny looking walls in Spain, than they would be in today’s digital world. Those kinds of thoughts always raise for me the question of what’s next. How will yet-undreamed-of technology radically reshape the lives of future generations?
I’ve written recently how I’m not very impressed with Asimov’s view of the future from his Foundation novel written in the 1950s. I’m now half-way through the 1960s sci-fi blockbuster Dune, which also misses the power of digital technology for the future it imagines (but is a much more compelling story, imo). These demonstrate how quickly the digital age came upon us. I wonder if our brains (and the minds that depend on them) can evolve quickly enough to keep up with these changes.
If you give this technology episode a listen, I highly suggest going back then and also listening to the episode with Amy Crouch and her father Andy Crouch about the book they wrote, My Tech-Wise Life (episode 70 on the Language of God feed wherever you listen to podcasts). We discuss our relationship to digital technology and the challenges it presents. And I also pose the question to them about the technology of walls. I really appreciate that my world has walls.