Cyber Or 32 Technological Change: Five Ideas

By Rabbi Dr. Moshe Dror

Again, I call on my media mentor Professor Neil Postman to relate to what he and in many ways, I, see as at least five things we need to know about technological Change.

Basically, the idea is to realize that technology is just a tool at all. It certainly is NOT a neutral tool…It is just us, people who use it in certainly ways that make the difference. Not so at all. The Information Technologies bring change and often radical change. The question is how you prepared are and how a particular section of society might deal with radical and constant and incremental change.

1. Technological change is a trade off. It can be seen as a Faustian Bargain.

Technology giveth and technology taketh away.

Basically, for every advantage a new technology offers, there is always a corresponding disadvantage. Sometimes the disadvantage may or may not be worth it. Generally it depends on how you see you vision of society. How it is and how you think it should be. Often, the greater the wonders of a particular technology –the greater can be its negative consequences.

Perhaps the question of:

“What will a new technology DO?”

Should be asked along with:

“What will a new technology UNDO?”

What have been the social and psychic effects of the alphabet, the mechanical clock, the printing press, the telegraph… and a host of other disruptive technologies?

Culture always pays a price for technology. There are NO free lunches.

1. Advantages and disadvantages are NEVER distributed evenly among all groups in a population. Every new technology benefits some and harms others. Who specially benefits from the development and which group, which type of person, which kind of industry will be favored. Since there are winners and losers in any technologically driven social transformation the winners tend to do what they can to have the losers see how wonderful this new technology is and how it will enhance their lives. Otherwise why would they buy into it?

There are always winners and losers in technological change. Who is who depends on your views of society and the human being?

1. In every technology there is embedded a very powerful idea. This a version of the oft quoted idea that :

To a person with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

To a person with a pencil, everything looks like a sentence.

To a person with a TV camera, everything looks like an image.

To a person with a computer, everything looks like data.

To put this in a different way:

The writing person favors logical organization and systemic analysis, not proverbs that are based on memory.

The telegraphic person values speed, not introspection.

The television person values immediacy, not history.

The computer person values information, not knowledge.

Every technology has a philosophy which is given expression:

In how the technology makes people use their minds,

In what it makes us do with our bodies,

In how it codifies our world,

In which of our senses it amplifies,

In which of our emotional and intellectual tendencies it disregards.

These ideas form the basis of what the significant media prophet who is called Saint Marshall McLuhan meant when he coined his most quoted aphorism:

The Medium is the Message

1. Technological change is NOT additive, it is ecological.

A new medium does not add something, it changes everything. In the year 1500, after the printing press was invented, you did not have an old Europe plus the printing press. You had a NEW and different Europe.

After Television, America was not the same America plus TV.

TV gave coloration to every political campaign, every home, every school, and every industry.

In our era we are not talking about the world plus computers. We are dealing with a global, knowledge based, bit/byte organized, and cyber functioning world.

That is why we must be cautious about technological innovation. The consequences of technological change are always vast, often unpredictable and largely irreversible.

If you might ask, who had the greatest impact on American education in this century? If you might suggest John Dewey or any other educational philosopher you would be quite wrong.

The greatest impact has been made by quiet men in grey suits in a suburb of New York City, In Princeton, New Jersey. There, they developed and promoted the technology known as the standardized test such as IQ tests, the SAT and the GRE. These tests redefined what we mean by learning, and have resulted in our reorganizing the curriculum to accommodate these tests. And, we have all bought into them.

1. Media tend to become mythic. By that we mean that we tend to think of technological creations as if they were god-given, that they are part of the natural order of things. When a technology becomes mythic. It is always dangerous because it is then accepted as it is, and is therefore not easily accepted to modification or control.

In conclusion:

1. We always pay a price for technology; the greater the technology the greater the price.
2. There are always winners and losers, and the winners always try to persuade the losers that they are really winners.
3. There is embedded in every great technology an epistemological, political or social bias.
4. Technological change is not additive, it is ecological. It changes everything else it touches.
5. Technology tends to become mythic, it is seen as being part of the natural order and tends to control more of our lives than is good for us.

We need to proceed with our collective eyes wide open so that we may use technology rather than be used by it.