Would we be better off without technology? Chris Hallam weighs up the many pros and cons of modern life
Hurrah for technology! Let’s face it: it’s great. Without technology, you would probably be sitting in a darkened cave now, listening to spiders scurrying about like some prehistoric Robert the Bruce dreaming of some Raquel Welch-like cave girl. Assuming you could even read, you wouldn’t be reading this. You wouldn’t have the internet for one thing. For another, without technology as a subject, this article wouldn’t be here for you to read anyway. You’d probably be reading one about woolly mammoths or something instead.
Thankfully, this isn’t the case. You may even be reading this while on an international flight. Whereas even 50 years ago, foreign travel was a rarity for most of us (unless we had been involved in a world war and were dropping bombs/being dropped somewhere), today, most of us have been abroad and taken almost perpetual advantage of the myriad technologies at our disposal.
But while some technology might be seen as indisputably good, has technology always transformed our lives for the better?
The Internet
Let’s begin with something conceivable. Everyone over 30 who’s reading this can remember a world without the web. In the 80s, it was the norm. Was it better or worse? Would you gladly wake up without the internet tomorrow, or does the thought of the internet being destroyed fill you with terror?
The slow entry of Uncle Internet into everyone’s lives was very gradual. “The information superhighway showed the average person what some nerd thinks about Star Trek,” said Homer Simpson, in an early reference to the web in the mid-90s. And, initially, it might have seemed like the web might mean little more than that.
Email marked the first big change for most people. Most folk, who hadn’t written a letter in years, were soon typing away, much of the novelty coming from the simple ease with which it was possible to write one (no paper, pens, stamps or home addresses required) and, indeed, how easy it was to send the same email to many people at once. With most people texting by the start of the century, the rise of Facebook in the second half of the last decade and Twitter by the end of it, even the simple email soon came to seem as old fashioned as a pager or a fax. That said, the number of emails only overtook the number of letters being sent in 1995. Today, over 200 billion emails are sent every day – and many of them are even sent by real people.
Soon we were tentatively pre-ordering books online, then ordering everything else, then looking at the news, then applying for jobs, then looking up our school friends on Facebook, posting photos of meals we are about to eat, replacing our music and film collections, meeting our partners, booking our holidays and so on. While it is just possible still to ignore the web, it is undeniably everywhere.
How good is all this? The rise of online pornography is regarded by many as a bad thing. 14% of internet searches are related to sites devoted to sex.
On a more positive note, though, one in five relationships now begins online. Internet dating has massively increased the range of dating options available to the average person. On the other hand, both the web and the growth of mobile phones (more on this later) have made both cheating and getting caught cheating easier. The list of pros and cons grows longer all the time.
More crucially, the web is arguably failing in the one area that was supposed to be its chief selling point: the spread of information and knowledge. In the UK, the rise of the web has coincided with a simultaneous collapse in newspaper sales. Perhaps this is simple enough: people are getting their news online instead. But are they? The data is by no means clear. And with ‘dumbing down’ already a concern 20 years ago, it is by no means clear whether the internet has led to a more intelligent, well informed populace than that which existed before. The odd thing about the internet is that it promised to unleash a tidal wave of information. Yet are the populace as a whole genuinely better informed than they were 25 years ago? Does internet learning produce a shallower, more easily digestible but ultimately incomplete range of knowledge than that gleaned from books? It is unclear.
A complicating factor is the fact that the rise of the web has coincided with a decline in print media: instead of relying on newspapers, people are turning to the web for news. But are they? The data is again unclear. There are certainly grounds for concern that for all the news resources now available, many people are not receiving any news at all.
Even ignoring the major concerns raised by the web (namely, that it promotes pornography and potentially facilitates terrorism), there are other issues. The anonymity granted by many online forums seems to bring out a nasty side to people’s character that might otherwise never have been given vent to. There is also concern that the information disseminated on the web is too often either wrong or inadequate, unleashed in digestible, bite-size, quiz-showfriendly chunks rather than providing the all round information books can provide. There is nothing new, for example, about people misdiagnosing themselves, having accessed only a small amount of medical info, but it has certainly escalated with the web.
Much of this, of course, is merely a side effect of the massive extension of freedom of speech, the internet has enabled. So too is the propagation of nonsense: the less believable conspiracy theories have flourished in the age of the web. Easily verifiable but untrue rumours continue to flourish as much as they did before, if not more so.
A black propaganda tool and promoter of pornography the web may be, but are we really a better informed populace than we were before we first went online?
Mobile Phones
Nothing better illustrates people’s ambivalent feelings towards technology than the mobile phone. Most people both hate and love their mobiles.
In 1995, statistically, some people you knew had a mobile phone. By 2000, you had one, even if you hadn’t really wanted one before; they are intrusive, cost us money and are annoying. Yet if we lose or break it, we feel almost as if we have lost a limb.
For a few short years, although both came into vogue at about the same time (the mid to late 90sd), the worlds of the mobile phone and the internet were kept strictly separate. But when the two got together, a formidable combination was created. Today, we can watch films, TV shows and read books on them; the actual calling up of people to talk is increasingly secondary. No wonder people are glued to them. “Everything in the world is on the internet,” the comic Dave Gorman said in his early 21st century Googlewhack Adventure. “And I don’t know about you, but I find everything in the world pretty distracting.”
The recent TV series The Tribe demonstrated how even the poorest Ethiopians now have mobile phones, sometimes travelling to the next village to top them up. These people often live the simplest lives imaginable, yet the world of texting and downloads has even penetrated their existence. It’s not all bad, of course. Mobiles have made communication much easier. The creation of the text message, although only introduced as an afterthought, played particularly well with British users, who often preferred texting to direct verbal communication. Many of us will have witnessed how many people (particularly teenagers) are slavishly fixated on their mobiles. All of us have undoubtedly suffered from the phenomena of having one-to-one conversations endlessly interrupted by the other person stopping to text or check their phone, the implication being that they would rather be talking to anyone else than you.
In fact, this probably isn’t the case, but when there are numerous social alternatives available, it is endlessly tempting to see what’s out there. In many cases, there isn’t much. It’s like enjoying a song on the radio but still switching it over in case there’s an even better one on another station. Despite this, many of us feel compelled to check what’s happening on Facebook multiple times a day. As the comedian Andy Parsons pointed out, this is effectively the equivalent of opening your front door several times a day on the off chance that someone might be there.
Usually, nothing much else is happening.
Travel
Make no mistake: the world is smaller than it used to be. It isn’t, of course, but it feels that way. Maps rarely have a blank area saying only ‘Here be dragons’ on them any more. Few of us would describe the Czech Republic as a ‘far away country’, as the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain did of Czechoslovakia in 1938. Many of us will have been to Prague on stag nights.
New YouGov research asked adults in the US and the Britain whether they had ever travelled internationally, and found that 91% of British people had left the UK for a holiday and only 8% say hadn’t. 50% of Americans said they’d left the US for a ‘vacation’, while 48% said they hadn’t.
Aside from Europe, North America is the most popular destination for Britons, with 44% of British adults saying they’ve been there. Africa (30%) is the second most popular destination, and 27% of Britons have also been to Asia. 14% have been to Australia, and 12% have been to South America.
Generally speaking, this is in many respects a good thing. But fear not! There is always a downside! Constant air travel has, of course, greatly increased pollution and helped facilitate the spread of international terrorism as well as some hideous accidents. It has ensured we can enjoy a mini-break in Turkey today, but we may one day all die because of it.
On a woollier note, while it may have enabled many of us to sample wonders of the world that our ancestors would probably have never seen, some would argue that the shrinking of the world has taken some of the romance out of it. Never mind 80 days; you can travel round the world within a day now (though you wouldn’t see much of it). Although there were never any dragons, in spite of what the maps may have said, it was nice to imagine there could be, wasn’t it?
Irrefutables
Let’s face it: some things are hard to argue for or against. Weapons technology might be generally seen as a bad thing, for example. It was impossible for the human race to destroy itself in 1800. Now, thanks to nuclear weapons, germ warfare laboratories and pollution, we could kill ourselves en masse in numerous ways either deliberately or by accident in the time it would take to watch an episode of Big Bang Theory. That said, some would argue certain technologies have ensured we’re protected from society’s enemies just as many argue atomic bombs were essential in ensuring Allied victory in the Second World War.
Medical advances alternatively seem irrefutably like a good thing. In the past, we were desperately vulnerable to all variety of minor ailments. No wonder people in 19th century novels often ‘die of a broken heart’ or men (as in the case of a character in DH Lawrence’s 1914 book Sons and Lovers) perish after slightly scratching their neck.
Here is a depressing fact: 40% of the entire human race up until this point never made it past the age of one. That’s 40% who never even got to the point of properly realising they actually existed.
Today, as in Star Trek, we live longer and prosper, largely thanks to the appliance of science. But there is a downside to this too: overpopulation. Charlton Heston film fans take note. We are in as much danger of a Soylent Green scenario (catastrophic overpopulation) as we are of The Omega Man (finding ourselves to be the last person on Earth). And let’s not even get started on Planet of the Apes.
The End?
Imagine you fancy seeing the film The Wizard Of Oz. Bad luck: it’s the year 1850. Cinemas haven’t been invented, and even if they had, films have not been invented either (I think this makes sense), and anyway the book it’s based on hasn’t even yet been written. Try going to see the Great Exhibition instead.
Okay, it’s 1950. But The Wizard of Oz isn’t showing at the cinema currently. It came out in 1939. It will probably be shown again soon (this happened more often then), but it’s not on now. Perhaps it’ll be on TV. Statistically, you are unlikely to own a television in 1950, but let’s say you do, as it’s not that unlikely either. There is only one channel. You have no means of taping it, so you’ll just have to hope you can see it when it’s on. And even when it does, it won’t be in colour. Not any of it, not just the beginning and end bits, which aren’t in colour anyway.
It’s now 1975. There are three channels and you have a colour set. Unfortunately, it’s on the same day as your sister’s wedding. Bad luck! I’m sure your sister won’t mind. By the early 80s, you’ll be able to tape the film off TV, and then soon after buy the video and watch it whenever you want. By the start of this century, you can watch it easily on DVD. Today, you can easily download it in moments.
My point? Technology has improved life in many ways beyond our wildest dreams. It has also created unforeseen unimaginable horrors like that nasty bit with the baboon in the teleporter in David Cronenberg’s The Fly (which is also available to download). On the plus side, teleporters haven’t actually been invented yet.
But perhaps there is a downside to everything. Either way, there is no escape. Clipping your heels together and saying “There’s no place like home” over and over won’t help. Technology is here to stay. We are all stuck in an Oz of our own creation…