I don't. Neil Postman (the guy the author references) is a pretty notorious technological determinist. He's commented on the dangers of most technology, even going as far to say that the printing press has destroyed social interaction and community in the medieval sense. Perhaps it did; if so, I would argue that shedding those traditions was for the better. He has an often-negative view on technology's impact on society, one in which he conflates the bad ways people use technology, with technology's negative influence ruling our lives. This author, apparently, agrees on many of Postman's common points. I can't bring myself to accept this kind of reactionary argument against technology. Maybe the most obvious reason I find this to be terribly absurd is that this author, who is writing his disdain for people who are so terribly attached to their phones, is posting this to his blog on the Internet, a medium which people before him argued against in the exact same way. When the next big gadget or innovation comes out, people who thought smartphones were fine will start saying "whoa whoa, I think having instant access to information from around the world is great but I don't know about [I don't know, Google Glasses?]" Where are we supposed to draw the line when his own line is shifting? Do we just go ahead and say that "everything up until the last big advance was great, but no more!" I'm sure this guy thinks he's indeed very different and far more polite and creative for not looking down at his phone, and he's free to think whatever he likes about that. But what makes his "look around at the world" any better, more valuable, or more creative than my "have a conversation with my girlfriend" or "read something interesting on my phone"? The way we have conversations and spend our time now is changing - it's true. But why is the old way any better, I wonder? Guys like this never really explain that.
This is well argued. Had I known the author he cites felt that the printing press was an ultimately negative thing for humanity, I would have found the quote he used to be suspect. My personal thoughts on the matter is that a smartphone, or the internet, is a tool used by people. In and of itself, it is neutral. The way people use it is what should be examined (by the people using it) and, as those have said in these comments, if there is an imbalance between it and the other aspects of human life, change should try to be made. I'm trying to separate the fear of technology from the valid points. I still think it's an interesting debate. And while I also felt to dichotomy of reading his indictments against the internet on the internet, I believe we can and should discuss the impacts of this medium while together on this medium. We shouldn't let the absurdity stop us from weighing the highs and the lows of this technology that connects us with so much today, and assessing how much is too much. Individually. That's as far as I'm willing to argue. Others are free to disagree if they believe it necessary to proselytize unaware iPhone users to a more technologically-balanced lifestyle. Lastly, I want to say that I don't think a face-to-face conversation has more value than catching up with someone on the phone. I'm against monocultures, against cutting yourself off from the diverse array of conversations and connections walking past you while you're looking down.
I think it might be a stretch to say that Postman believes the printing press was ultimately negative, but I think what he finds to be the negative aspects of it are dubious. It's not that I don't see value in weighing the positives and negatives of technology, and the ways in which we use it, but I also think that going the complete opposite direction and rejecting ownership of a smartphone on principle, or worse judging those who do own and use one, is also unproductive. (Note that I can completely respect not owning any gadget for basically any other reason - financial, not finding it useful for yourself, not liking the interface or features.) I think in this way, we agree - it's good to look at things in many different lights and be self-aware of our flaws, but we can't be so obsessed with the negative that we can't accept changes. There are a great many issues at play with culture here in the US, and I'd say that things like "looking down" are a symptom of other social realities, including but certainly not limited to our use of smartphones or other gadgets. Consider the fact that Americans almost obsessively lock their doors, even in pretty safe neighborhoods, but in other countries (including Canada, as I'm given to understand) people don't always feel the need to be behind lock and key. They have the exact same technology available to them, but they use it differently - obviously there's something else at work. But it'd be ridiculous to say "I'm sick of everyone locking their doors all the time, so I'm not going to buy a lock for my door." For your amusement, here's a highly relevant comic from yesterday: http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2873#c...
Absolutely. And thank for pointing out that comic!
Now that I think about it, maybe it's just that I want to live in Italy, where strangers are comfortable talking to strangers.
That Postman essay was really quite thoughtful, perhaps you should submit it as its own post. More specifically, he said that the printing press destroyed the: This seems like a valid point to me. People in this very thread have spoken about how great they think it is that they can look up tidbits of information with no context or meaning whenever they want. You may think that's great too. Good for you, but Postman thinks that this may have significant effects on society, and not all of those effects are necessarily good ones:[Postman said] that the printing press has destroyed social interaction and community in the medieval sense.
... coherent conception of ourselves, and our universe, and our relation to one another and our world. We no longer know, as the Middle Ages did, where we come from, and where we are going, or why. That is, we don't know what information is relevant, and what information is irrelevant to our lives. Second, we have directed all of our energies and intelligence to inventing machinery that does nothing but increase the supply of information. As a consequence, our defenses against information glut have broken down; our information immune system is inoperable. We don't know how to filter it out; we don't know how to reduce it; we don't know to use it. We suffer from a kind of cultural AIDS.
Technology giveth and technology taketh away, and not always in equal measure. A new technology sometimes creates more than it destroys. Sometimes, it destroys more than it creates. But it is never one-sided.
I understand the quote about the double-edged nature of technology, I've seen it many times. And I don't disagree - I'm not so blinded in my enthusiasm for technological progress that I can't recognize its faults, large and small. My issue is with what he regards as faults, and I find him to have an often overwhelmingly negative view of science and technology. In response to his suggestion that "We no longer know, as the Middle Ages did, where we come from, and where we are going, or why," I submit that they didn't know either. In fact, I would argue that we know rather more than our Medieval counterparts. The spread of information has dramatically increased our knowledge, our health, and our human rights and liberties, and in fact without the invention of the printing press, many of us would not be aware that we had a choice of these things. By that quote, it seems to me that Postman is suggesting he looks back, with great nostalgia and envy, at a time when we were forced to ignorantly accept whatever we were told, with absolutely no recourse for informing ourselves. I also know that Postman suggests the printing press was only another tool of the elite to find new ways to force their views, en masse, upon the populace, and took away things like poetry and turned them into the art of the high-class. I simply do not see evidence for that, especially when you consider that Paine's Common Sense and Marx's Communist Manifesto, among many, many other revolutionary documents, have been (and still are) in fact printed and distributed. It would take me a full night and many pages to fully and properly respond to his speech here. For brevity, I will argue against his core position. Postman's work mostly serves to point out flaws in how we, as humans, use our technology, and then, seemingly, he lays the blame on that technology, as though every inventor would regret seeing what became of their creations. He is a technological determinist, meaning that he thinks that technology "drives the development of its social structure or cultural values," or put another way, puts technology first as the main controlling factor of society. I can't help but disagree, and see more that our society and economic forces mold the technology we create to better fit the goals of our lives. For example, smartphones developed when there became a demand for multi-purpose devices - a swiss-army knife of electronics. Market forces and social and business demands drove the creation of such devices, and not, as Postman might have argued, the other way around.
I can't find the argument you appear to be responding to in the essay you linked to. However, technological determinism shouldn't be wholly dismissed. It may describe only one aspect of technology, but you can't argue that technology doesn't alter society, nor can you argue that the maintenance and support of that technology doesn't require many, if not most, of us to spend an astonishing amount of time, energy, and resources ensuring that everything our technologies require is provided to them. So it would certainly seem that technology is at least one significant factor which drives our social structures and cultural values. I'm afraid that my reading of the essay was much more like Wikipedia's description of it: In any event, the article originally posted was bemoaning the extent to which Americans pay attention to their phones instead of their environment and each other. I've noticed the same phenomenon and worry about where our technology might be leading us.Market forces and social and business demands drove the creation of such devices, and not, as Postman might have argued, the other way around.
Postman is suggesting he looks back, with great nostalgia and envy, at a time when we were forced to ignorantly accept whatever we were told, with absolutely no recourse for informing ourselves.
He also compares contemporary society to the Middle Ages, where instead of individuals believing in anything told to them by religious leaders, now individuals believe everything told to them by science, making people more naive than in Middle Ages. Individuals in a contemporary society, one that is mediated by technology, could possibly believe in anything and everything, whereas in the Middle Ages the populace believed in the benevolent design they were all part of and there was order to their beliefs.
It is an interesting and well-thought out essay, but while I emphatically agree with the second passage you quoted, I question what it means in the first one for those in the Middle Ages to have "known" where they came from, were going, and why. Can we call this "knowledge" true? He makes statements that their worldview was ordered and comprehensible, and that the inflow of information from the printing press muddled and unraveled things. I say that it is vital to be able to filter all the input we get today, but having a limited amount of input is not the same thing. He says, "there was a scarcity of information but its very scarcity made it both important and usable." So regardless of what the information was, it had value. I don't like that. Information needs to stand on its own merits, or be filtered out. He states that Galileo and Kepler disturbed folks' faith concerning their place in the universe with the heliocentric model. They also revealed truth to us.