What has changed in my lifetime : notes on technology & society from an interview with my daughter.
Our daughter, coming to the end of her sophomore year, recently interviewed me for an assigned project. One of those deals where you talk to someone “from the past” about how life has changed in different ways. I told her ahead of time that I was honored she chose me, but that she should be warned I would not keep my answers, brief, as “the way things change over time” is a topic I have spent much time reflecting and considering over my 47 years. Forty-six at that point.
I chose, at that point, to believe she was choosing me because I was a bastion of wisdom and insight, and her mom was not available at the moment. I still choose to believe I was top of her list, as opposed to top of most convenient at the time.
Apple Store in downtown Portland, January 2015
It went largely how I warned her it would go: I did, I honestly did try hard to provide first a concise articulation of the main point, and allow specifics to be pulled out if warranted. It was differing definitions of ‘warranted’ that led this interview to go on for longer than she planned, and shorter than I felt necessary.
Wisdom of the ages, you know. Anyway: I buttoned things up as best I could in de minimus fashion, but felt there was more material she could use from me, so I graciously banged out an addendum to what I had already said and proffered it to her, in the likely scenario she would be asked to provide additional thoughts from her interviewee.
I’ve asked her multiple times since if she was asked to provide these additional notes, but her responses have been vague. I’m guessing she did need them.
This is my addendum below.
File under: how society has changed.
We, as a society, are no longer adept at noticing. As soon as there’s a break, a wait, we pull out our phones, invert our heads, and bury ourselves in the siren-call of the screen.
We have lost our ability, collectively, to go through a cycle of boredom. We have become so accustomed to being instantaneously satisfied and satiated that we turn to the immediate and the obvious and the accessible. The computers we carry in our pockets are logarithmically more powerful than about anything we dreamed of 30 years ago. Look up ‘logarithmic’ and ‘Moore’s Law.’ These two concepts explain a lot about the unbelievably rapid progression of technology.
What it means is that collectively, as a society, are really, really bad at noticing the mundane, the trivial, and the normal. It means that we’re constantly on the lookout for outliers, for the sensational, for happenings or occurrences that we can grab hold of, document, and share with the world. We no longer place value on the process of waiting, on the necessary role of boredom in creativity and the leaps in human innovation that come from noticing, observing, collecting information about the physical world.
So many advances in science, in art, philosophy and and religion and understanding, have come from the simple actions of noticing and observing. We place an enormous importance on productivity, on being busy, on doing something. The irony is that so much of what we do on our phones and our array of digital devices has little to do with actual productivity, aside from the fact that we now blur the lines between productivity and relationship-building.
There’s all kinds of apps for productivity and podcasts on deep focus techniques. But really, we have lost the ability to notice, to wait, to give attention, and to let ourselves and our children and each other discover the deep benefits of fighting through boredom.
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File under: how technology has changed
This is a simple personal observation about human behavior and how it’s affected by technology:
For over two decades, I have been documenting life around in me in different forms. This includes the mediums of writing, video, and photography. For many years I was the nerdy fellow in a space simply taking pictures or filming a few minutes here and there of…everyday life.
That doesn’t sound too weird now, right?
But it WAS. It no longer IS. What has changed? Technology. I am very grateful for the ways technology has improved quality, while also coming down in price and lowering barriers of entry to hardware that enables high-production value images and video.
As these barriers started coming down around 2007, which followed the half-decade earlier rise of social media sites (Facebook, MySpace, etc.) and personal blog proliferation (Blogger, Tumblr, etc.), people suddenly had two things easily available:
An easy way to point, shoot and capture life around them and the instant gratification of digital imagery (no film processing!).
An easy way to almost instantly share it.
The idea of sharing quickly moved from sharing with a friend, a partner, a grandparent, to sharing en masse: voila, social media and the rise of terms such as “content creation,” “celebrity culture,” and “influencer.”
People realized they could monetize their lives - or if not monetize, at least publicize and self-promote their lives as personal brands; pursuing and casually self-identifying with concepts like “authentic” and “expert.” We gave ourselves the tools without considering the implications.
Because a scientist can invent something, should they?
Because a medical procedure can be done, should it?
Because these technologies are available, should they always be ON?
We have embraced the broken utopian vision of techno-maximalists about how technology will fix society, fix relationships, fix our problems, fix our social issues, ad infinitum, without stopping to fully examine the implications of what new and bigger problems are simultaneously being created by their ubiquitous adoption. When everybody at an event is shooting and capturing it with their phones, how does that affect the experience itself, and the way people participate in the present and remember it in the future, and what does it say about engagement in general when everyone is so anxious to “share” that we absent ourselves from the present?
This is a way in which technology has changed society.
It might sound like a dour note, but it’s not. We can still make technology work for us. But we have hard choices to make. The biggest is weaning ourselves away from our Pavlovian instinct to respond every time a phone dings, a notification pops up, or we feel the urge to share our lives with strangers.
Are we creating experiences for the experience itself and for the relationships, or are we creating experiences for the photo op and the instant sharing; are we manufacturing realities for performative reasons?
There’s a gold standard we can look to as a reality check: if there were no phones or visual documenting taking place, would we still be engaged in the activity we’re doing with the people we’re with?
Or would something change? If it would, then we should keep asking ourselves to ask: in what ways, and why?
To document for the future is a very different thing than documenting for the present.
We have to ask ourselves: what is my motivation for doing this right now? Is this my default setting? To be so programmed to share the present that we constantly miss out on what’s happening in the moment, and the associated sounds, colors, textures, voices, feelings, ephemeral sensations that can’t simply be catalogued and stuck in a nifty playlist to share with our followers?
Do you shoot for yourself and the ability to enjoy a memory in the future?
Or do you shoot for your audience or followers or subscribers and the ability to enjoy an adrenaline rush in the present?
I think we have to learn to respect the act of self-reflection, of honestly asking our motivations for how we use the technology we use, and make decisions based on those reflections as to what we want our relationship with technology to be.
The existence of digital technology is not a CHOICE at this point. We should be grateful for the many ways in which it benefits our lives. But we should not turn the reigns over to unchecked, unreflected-upon technology. We should not lose sight of the self-realization that we have a choice.
We have a choice.
Technology is ubiquitous. It is unavoidable. We can embrace, a la carte, what we want. But we must retain the act of choice.
We have a choice.
We have choices. We have to re-learn how to make tough decisions again and how to exist in the present, in the physical again. We need to resist the idea that algorithms, data science, and social scoring metrics define our lives.
They should not, they do not. Our lives should be defined by our relationships in the present and by what we do with the skills, the knowledge, and the personality and presence we have in this life. Are we bettering the world around us? Or are we not? What is legacy and what do we pass along?
We are defined by our humanity and how we treat the life forms around us. There is no algorithm for that. We must live well in the present, and seek to raise up the lives of those with whom we share this planet, and we must use technology in ways that are subordinate to us and leave us standing tall with the backbreaking gift humanity has been gifted:
Free will.
We cannot, must not ever hand that over.
We are humans and the mistakes and errors we make - and learn from - are sometimes as important as our successes and achievements. Humans are not meant to be efficient: we are meant to be effective.
We need to focus on being effective at what is important versus being efficient. Humans will never be better than machines at efficiency. So we need to stop battling so hard for efficiency and think deeper, longer about the big question:
What does humanity need to be effective at? What do I, as an individual, need to be effective at? What do we, as a society, need to be effective at?
And how can we integrate and relegate technology to a place in our lives that serves us rather than supersedes us?
The primary character traits that different generations value might change, but as long as we fight to understand what bonds and binds each generation to its basic core strengths of being human, we will be fine.
Our core human strengths are also our weaknesses: our vulnerability, our capacity to hurt and heal, our empathy and compassion, our respect for those outside our own circle or paradigm of understanding, our illogical and utterly ridiculous propensity to fall in love and to love deeply and without reason…these are strengths and vulnerabilities,
And they should define every generation of humans, in every decade and every century, regardless of what technology exists or does not.
That is what we should fight for, regardless of what has changed or might change from generation to generation.
