Invasive Technology
(EN: As a reminder, this book was written in 1956, which is likely to date and skew that author's perspective.)
Most considerations of the intrusion of technology on the mind focus on the external - the machines and devices with which we interact. However, technology has invaded the mind in a more subtle and pervasive way, in the form of "technical thinking." This mode of thinking is highly standardized, quantified, and formalized. It is not at all a natural way to think, but is becoming the dominant technique. It is a "peculiar paradox" that this technique was intended to strengthen and liberate the human mind, but instead has weakened and constrained it.
Technology has also been a boon to the totalitarian. It delivers the power to see and know everything, to monitor and communicate to multitudes, to exercise power at the press of a button. It feeds into the desire of the sociopath and the megalomaniac, and encourages such behavior in others who may not have had those inclinations.
Another irony: technology was intended to empower and protect man, but has debilitated and weakened him. People become dependent on technology, incapable of doing without it, and incapable of doing anything that it is not capable of doing. Psychologically, this means the inability to understand anything it does not explain, or think in any way that it does not support.
Technology also makes man into a passive consumer. He accepts what technology offers, as if it were all that is possible. The children of the author's time seemed addicted to television, passively receiving and accepting whatever it had to offer. That is to say, passively accepting whatever the broadcaster has to offer - as television is merely a device used by few to communicate the same message to many.
Technology is also dreadfully practical. A new technology brings new capabilities, but squelches innovation. It provides a "good enough" solution that prevents people from trying to achieve better. And above all, it is sterile and inhuman - it discourages creativity, experimentation, and open-mindedness.
Alienation, Debilitation, and Indoctrination
Radio and television began as ways to communicate and entertain, but have largely replaced reading for children. The ability to understand language and communicate have been diminished, much in the same way that typewriting has led to poor penmanship. Television in particular is junk food for the mind, a steady diet of which becomes debilitating.
These media also "catch the mind directly" and distract from anything else. Where a radio or television is playing, people do not converse or interact with one another, but become entranced by the media. In this way, technology "has taken away affectionate relationships" among people, usurping the attention people once gave to one another, rendering us socially incompetent.
A few random bits:
- The behavior pattern of television consumption is similar to drug addiction in terms of the amount of time spent consuming it and, as a consequence, neglecting other activities.
- Programming focuses on the lurid and sensational, giving viewers the sense that ordinary life and ordinary people are dull and uninteresting.
- Programming appeals to the most base fascinations, mainly sexuality and violence, and makes aggression and perversion seem acceptable.
- Programming is created for the lowest common denominator among the masses - it seeks to be readily accessible to the uneducated and uncultured, rather than promoting education and culture.
- Programming is also very superficial - it depicts behaviors without rationale or context. As such it promotes a general sense of randomness and nihilism.
- Television becomes a substitute for human relationships. It is an individual activity, and even when television is viewed with a group there is no interaction among them.
- Television becomes a substitute for parenting. It is very common for parents to use television to babysit their children rather than interacting with them, and as a result children find television more comfortable and stimulating than other human beings. In the worst of instances, it can be said that television becomes a substitute parent.
- Television is hypnotic. Individuals with no intention of watching will pause before a set, will spend more time than they had intended, and often seem stupefied (they cannot recall what they watched, merely that they "watched television").
- Television creates an appetite for instant gratification, and makes pursuits that take more time and effort to achieve a less dramatic outcome seem less interesting and intolerably boring.
It is accurate to say that we are witnessing a battle between technology and nature for the attention of humankind, and the significance of this should not be underestimated: all human knowledge and thought originates with stimuli from the environment - an increasing amount of which is coming from artificial sources. Considering the degree to which television is used to "entertain" young children, it's plausible that most of the information that they receive during the early formative years will come from technology rather than interaction in the real world.
It's for this reason that children's television programming is of keen interest to those with political agendas. Previously there had been a struggle to control the content of the textbooks used in schools, as it was recognized that they are the instruments through which propaganda is delivered. But television reaches children much earlier, and much more extensively, than the school.
Technology as Coercive
One of the benefits of technology is that work can be accomplished with less effort. This is highly efficient, but at the same time it means that the user fails to develop. Human capacity atrophies from disuse. A person who rides in vehicles finds it difficult to walk a long distance. A student who uses a calculator forgets how to do basic math without one.
It's also somewhat concerning that people have been transformed into machine-operators. While the modern factory is a marvel of efficiency and mass-production, its workers are merely drones. Not one of them has the ability to fashion with hand tools the same products that are made by machines.
And very often, humans are valued less than the machines. In the automated factory, men are expected to work at the pace of machines rather than vice-versa. Their dexterity and stamina, and even their value as a human being, is in their ability to behave in a manner and pace that is required in order to tend to the machine to which they are assigned. And as their work becomes more mechanized, they lose the skill to do anything else. A carpenter whose services are no longer needed by a shipwright can find work elsewhere. A laborer whose only skill is to operate a very specific machine has no skills to offer to any other form of employment.
Even white-collar workers are being mechanized. Just as the laborer becomes a drone feeding material into a machine, so is the executive a drone punching numbers into a machine. Individual thought and judgment are displaced by statistical evaluations, functions and procedures. This is acceptable for routine decisions dealing with what is quantifiable and known, but is often applied when decisions are non-quantifiable and include unknown factors. Technology is particularly inappropriate when making decisions pertaining to human beings, and horrid when it comes to matters of ethics.
(EN: A point of irony is that computers are often programmed to simulate human thinking - but they are programmed by people who don't understand the way people think and often get it terribly wrong. But once the software is written, the inferior and imperfect substitute for human thinking becomes a replacement for it.)
Technology is constrained to the known. A task must be discovered before it can be automated. A human worker can experiment and innovate, and find a better way of performing his work - but a machine never can. It is limited to perform the same basic motions, repeatedly, and is difficult to impossible to reconfigure if a more efficient method is discovered. In this sense, technology initially makes work more efficient - but it is frozen in time to use the most efficient method that was known at the moment.
Technology causes man to be "more distant from, the rhythm of nature." Alarm clocks determine when he wakes, and electric lighting keeps him awake when he is inclined to sleep. The clock, not his hunger, tells him when to eat. In this way technology has intruded into mankind's most basic biological functions, all to make men comply to the needs of technology. His servant is become his master. And it seems unlikely that human beings who live in industrialized nations will ever be able to reclaim dominion over themselves.
Technical Insecurity
Technology was appealing because it offered safety and security - a way of defending against nature and the uncertainty of the future. However, it has become something on which we must depend, and the fact that technology is temperamental creates a great deal of security. The knowledge and skills to survive without it have largely disappeared.
Technology has also created employment insecurity. The laborer is no longer a craftsman, but an organic component of a mechanical contraption that is just as easily replaced as any other machine part. Laborers are also well aware that they are the least valued part of the works, at risk of being unemployed when their task is automated as well. Scientists speak of a future in which factories are fully automated and human beings aren't needed at all, and technologists are working hard to bring that to fruition.
It's also suggested that technology diminishes the meaning of work. A worker is not to credit for a product, merely contributing labor to perform a fraction of the task, and often in a task that seems devoid of meaning: at the end of his shift, the laborer feels he has done a task, not brought something into existence. Technology also provides a uniform product, which is also devoid of any individuality or sense of accomplishment. There is no pride in baking a cake from a box. In this sense, even ownership is devoid of individuality: "your car" is just one of a hundred thousand identical copies, as is the person that drives it.
The majority of a man's time, like that of any creature, is spent in the effort of survival. Presently, technology has made survival very easy - it takes much less time and effort to secure the necessities of life, so man pursues leisure and luxury. But when technology has progressed to the point that he has his fill of luxuries, what then does he do with his time? What then becomes the meaning of his life?
Sociologists find among the wealthy a sense of idleness, laziness, and insecurity. It is the sense of not having anything to do, not as a rest break but as an ongoing condition. They also observe the sense of directionless anxiety in most industrialized societies, where it takes little effort to earn a living as compared to agricultural societies - people who have too much time on their hands and no need to be productive often become self-destructive. It is yet another irony that the technology that makes life easier may in time make life pointless.