Geekery

Thought piece: Too much tech?

Posted on 13. Jul, 2009 by Jake.

A young fogey of my acquaintance put down his pipe and single malt just long enough to deliver this rant:

Two inventions are responsible for the contemporary inflation of people’s sense of self-importance: the cell phone and 24 hour news.

Everyone now takes for granted that they, at all times, need to be contactable and to know what is happening everywhere in the world the moment it happens. But unless you are a trauma surgeon or the president neither of these is likely to be true.

Seriously, do you need to know the foreign minister of Uzbekistan has moved house? More to the point, do you need to know it now? And because it has to be instant, the networks focus on speed rather than reliability. Because it’s all day, the focus is on impact rather than substance.

And everyone will have at least one experience of planning to meet someone and then running out of batteries/airtime/decent signal and getting completely lost. I say ‘plan’ in the loosest sense. In the pre-mobile era, you’d give clear, precise instructions: ‘meet me at the left side of the fountain at 11.15’ for example. Today it’s more like ‘I’ll be inside in the afternoon sometime, call me when you’re there’, inevitably followed by hours of confusion and frustration.

The world, and our social and intellectual lives, would only be improved if we switched off and tuned out.

My response might surprise you: I agree.

Sort of.

Except instead of less technology, I think we need more.

Yes, the language of texting leaves plenty to be desired. But it’s a symptom of an underlying problem, not the cause.

Look at how rich and sophisticated the more advanced Twitter users have become. Creating nuance out of 140 characters takes tremendous skill; there is, after all, an art to making more out of less.

Blaming texting for the illiteracy of the youth is like blaming the sonnet for junky teenage poetry. (There is, however, no hope for the cell phone novel.)

And social networking, as well as being a medium for posting embarrassing pictures of your friends, opens new ways of speaking, often to people you might not have spoken to before.

What we’ll do with these powerful technologies is another thing altogether, but here again I think freedom of communication triumphs.

Yes, 24 hour network news overloads us with schlock and awe, and every jerk with an opinion has his own website, but the flipside is that every jerk with the opposite opinion also has a blog.

And amongst the tumult, occasionally a fresh thought emerges.

More importantly, there is now oversight – or perhaps we should call it undersight -
with bloggers taking the mainstream media to task. Lazy opinions are scrutinized, partisan columnists are called to account, facts are checked.

FiveThirtyEight was the source some of the most informative, and accurate, polling data during the recent US election, and that’s basically some guy with a head for stats and a laptop.

And shoddy science reporting wouldn’t exist if there were more people doing what Ben Goldacre does.

Yes we might have delegated just a little of our decision making to our electronic devices (don’t tell my friend about SatNav!) but that’s our fault.

Anxiety about the effect of new technologies isn’t new.

It’s what we do with it that counts.

I look forward to hearing why I’m completely wrong.

 

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