Technology

https://news.google.com/news/section?cf=all&pz=1&topic=tc&siidp=1989...

So is your immersion in technology the right amount? Are there too many smart phones around?

Do you feel the Luddites had it right or maybe that is a term that should be used relatively speaking.

Am I the only one who thinks people are taken over by the technology they buy?

I definitely think there are too many smart phones around. I confess that I do have one now, but the only time I use the "smart" functions is when I am travelling light and don't have a laptop with me, in which case I switch on the wireless function and use the smartphone to check e-mails (and LT). Apart from that it's just a bulkier way to make phone calls and it has a slightly bigger screen to read my text messages than my old Nokia did.

Yes, I do think many people are often taken over by the technology they buy. It becomes almost an obsession or addiction. In addition, I think the use of technology has advanced faster than the development of etiquette governing its use.

All of which gives a hint to the generation to which I belong...

"Am I the only one who thinks people are taken over by the technology they buy?"

Definitely not the only one. This is one of my favorite themes.

Neil Postman
Technopoly : The Surrender of Culture to Technology

Jean-Jacques Salomon (1929–2008)
La civilsation à hautes risques
Le destin technologique

See also my "tag" :

A Reading Course in 'Technology and Society' - main text

Could you possibly do some book summaries for us? Or is that cheating?

Like the early computer game of Pacman

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pac-Man

smartphones seem to be devouring people's attention.

Walking down any street you see the majority of people with smart phones.

I thought it was a fad that would go away but it is getting worse.

Who knows, maybe in quiet little towns like far away Tuscany, they haven't heard of them yet.

And the money to buy one! Yo Dude, these critters are not cheap.

"Could you possibly do some book summaries for us? Or is that cheating?"

It was once allowed. Years ago, I devoted dozens of hours to laboriously typing excerpts from some of these books, citing the page numbers, and thematically cross-referencing books of varied kinds --history, literary criticism, philosophy of science, anthropology, history of technology, sociology--where two, three or more authors, sometimes separated by generations, treated the same idea, point, or theme in ways that were mutually-enlightening and complementary.

There were a dozen long citations of Postman's Technopoly with hypertext-linked cross-references to citations of work by C. Wright Mills, Jean-Jacques Salomon, John Aldridge, John and Barabara Hammond, Eric Hobsbawm, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, David Reisman.

But I guess there were some worries over copyright because when I checked in one day, all these were gone.

Re "Who knows, maybe in quiet little towns like far away Tuscany, they haven't heard of them yet."

As a place overrun with tourists, "all the devils are here." A friend replied, when he heard me laugh at the idea of this place as an oasis spared by the glut of technology, that about week or so ago, a young woman was struck and killed by a train as she was crossing the tracks while wearing a big pair of stereo headphones.

>5 proximity1: a technological oasis

I often find myself in a peace village in South Sudan which has no mobile phone network. Bliss. We can still be contacted via satellite phones, and there is a satellite internet link, but both of those can be quite erratic.

a young woman was struck and killed by a train as she was crossing the tracks while wearing a big pair of stereo headphones

There have been other cases of pedestrians and cyclists being killed by trains for the same reason. I cannot believe the stupidity of people who step out into the dangerous world of roads and rails basically protected by two senses, sight and sound, and then they proceed to negate one of those two senses by wearing earphones. And they often partially negate the other by peering so intensely at their smartphone screens that they clearly are not paying attention to what is going on around them. Very dangerous.

My general rule about tech is that it should work for me, not the other way around. It is supposed to make living life easier, not be a substitute for it.

>4 Urquhart: Walking down any street you see the majority of people with smart phones.

Indeed . . . and we're very conscious of "seeing" those that do. The smart phone is only a decade old, and the behaviors associated with using it still feel odd and eye-catching. They haven't had time, yet, to become part of the visual "wallpaper" of the modern world, the way that (say) the brushed-back sleeve and raised forearm that we associate with reading a wristwatch have.

How long it will take them to cross that threshold . . . I don't know. A decade, perhaps, at the outside?

>8 ABVR: How long it will take them to cross that threshold . . . I don't know. A decade, perhaps, at the outside?

Maybe it's a generational question:

I recall in Chicago wheeling my little child in her baby carriage in Lincoln Park. I was amazed, because a little biplane went over Lincoln Park. Airplanes were not very common in those days. I said, "Isn't it amazing. Here's my child looking up at that airplane and that airplane in the sky is as natural to her as a bird." Because when I was born, the airplane did not exist. It was really the start of the beginning of impossible things happening.

--Buckminster Fuller in an interview with Studs Terkel, 1965

>7 southernbooklady: {tech} should work for me, not the other way around

Amen!

I think, sometimes, that one of the hardest things to do in a discussion of digital technologies -- especially a cross-generational one -- is to take a deep breath and assume that the people who use device/network/website X are be using it because it works for them . . . not because they're fools, philistines, or have the emotional range of a teaspoon.

>9 southernbooklady: Thanks for the quotation -- new to me, but very apt!

Max Planck, the early 20C physicist, thought that something similar was at work in science: that new ideas -- relativity, quantum mechanics, natural selection, the expanding universe -- took hold as older scientists (to whom they were strange and disorienting) retired or died, and younger scientists (who'd grown up with the new ideas and saw them as just another piece of their intellectual toolkit) took over.

Terkel's very last line ("It was really the start of impossible things happening") made me smile, though. His parents might well have said the same about electric light . . . something that Terkel (born in New York in 1912, and raised in Chicago from 1920) would have seen as mundane.

>12 ABVR: electric light

I remember chatting to an Irish friend's elderly mother, born in the very early years of the 20th century and still very clear-minded and independent right up until she died aged 102, about what was the biggest change she had seen in her life. For her it was the coming of electric light to rural Ireland.

>12 ABVR: and younger scientists (who'd grown up with the new ideas and saw them as just another piece of their intellectual toolkit) took over.


The Buckminster Fuller quote is something that stuck with me after listening to a series called "Voices of America" -- a collection of several decades' worth of interviews that Terkel did on his radio show. But rather than finding the place in the recording and typing what I heard, I just did a Google search for something like "Buckminster Fuller Studs Terkel airplane." It came right up. This ability to just ask the internet a question and come back with a range of possible answers strikes me as an incredible gift. It doesn't dispense with the need to think critically, but it does give us so much more to think critically about.

As for sea changes in perception, I grew up knowing what the Earth looks like from space. That's about as profound a change in our reality as it gets.

The earliest technology you remember using?

For me:

1-Cranking up the old farm tractor to start it.

2-Using the party line to make a phone call.

>15 Urquhart: The earliest technology you remember using?

I can remember (not necessarily in this order) when we got for the first time: a car (Ford Consul); a telephone (standing on a small table in the hallway); a TV (a tiny black and white screen encased in a large cabinet with doors, which my dad later converted into a drinks cabinet after the TV itself had caught fire); a fridge; and central heating. We already had a washing machine, a large top-loading affair with a mangle mounted on top.

As the saying goes, everything in moderation.

I don't know if there are too many smart phones, as >9 southernbooklady: and >10 ABVR: note as long as it's working for you not you working for it, but I think that's easier said than done.

I'm back to my feature phone after my smart phone screen broke and I couldn't afford a new one, I'm surviving okay.

I think the trick is to be mindful in our use of technology. This can even extend to online surfing or gaming, if you do it mindfully, with consideration of context and for others around you, we can have our technological cake and eat it too.

I think we're at risk of a society driven by technological determinism. It feels like we're becoming the product when so much of the online economy is driven by advertising. So many industries are being decimated by technology and I'm yet to see their positive replacements. A strong independent media hasn't really yet been replaced by citizen journalists, but it's failing. We just watched the movie Spotlight the other night. A newspaper in Boston with a whole team of investigative journalists that spent months uncovering stories, this was before social media well worth watching
Some recommended books
Program or be programmed
We should know more about what our machines are doing for us lest we become automatons ourselves.

Much more positive
Everything bad is good for you

Fiction
Rainbows end an ultimately positive view of where technology could take us, some interesting ideas on how technology will change libraries and journalism.

Feed YA fiction written before facebook but felt like it could have been written today, what if you could have a computer chip in your head that

My first memory of technology? I remember the first thing I looked up on the internet in the 1990s, a satellite view of my house, it took half an hour and was fuzzy but it was still impressive/scary.

A technology I embraced wholeheartedly is digital cameras. But a brother-in-law was here last Sunday and my wife got out two big boxes of old photos from clearing out her parents' house (her mother now in a care home). Amid the reminiscing we couldn't help remarking that the days of the family photo-album are long gone. And some smartphone users probably think cameras as a separate item are pretty redundant.

PS >15 Urquhart:: Never had a tractor but I remember as a kid we had a car with a starting handle. The windscreen could be wound up to help in the Manchester smog. It also had trafficators - those things that stuck out like a railway signal to replace the human hand - later on dad was pretty sniffy about flashing indicators. Said they'd never catch on. False prophet of the year.

RCA phonograph player.

I remember distinctly the "click" sound as I'd turn the knob to "on" and then wait while the set's vacuum tubes warmed up.

A small red (dot) light (on the front of the set)
glowed dimly at first, then grew steadily brighter until it was bright red, indicating that the phonograph was ready for use.

1) Put record on turntable, 2) place arm on record's edge, 3) open photo picture book accompanying the record and turn the pages as the recorded "jingle" indicated the next page's scene in the action.

I remember learning how to use the rotary dial phone as a small child. Also about the same time the great fanfare of our first microwave. It was I think an anniversary gift and was all wrapped up in a bow for presentation where the TV usually sat.

We got our first PC when I was in second grade (hand me down from a grandfather who started using computers in the 1960s and was an early hobbyist), still wouldn't even use one at school yet. Maybe two years later my old third grade classroom was renovated to be a full computer lab to fit an entire class featuring plenty of Carmen Sandiego time.

These memories are pretty new compared to those who remember earlier 20th century technology, but are already surprisingly old for those born closer to 2000 and even after that take great tech for granted.

Well, I have a cell phone, not a "Smart" phone, and I did give up wearing a wristwatch because the cellphone does serve as a pocket watch. The curmudgeon in me looks at all this quick referencing ability and wondering if my memory was wasted by investing in remembering people rather than just looking them up. But then I remember that I do not interact with technology when conversing with a person actually in front of me...that is only good manners.
So while I believe that I am in control of my technology, I know that it has taught me to type, and connected me to LT. Technology is a tiger to ride...and if one did walk away on someone who considered their technology more important than a person in their presence...I did that once...eventually they understood why I did it!

https://youtu.be/lsrZfGduJ7c

Amusing insights on SpaceX founding because a Russian military man spat on PayPal founder shopping for missiles . The 33 minute and 33:08 mark are funny as.