Where Is Our Technology Taking Us?

I rarely watch TV. But a Frontline program “Digital Nation” (2 February 2010) caught my eye. One of the narrators was a techie prophet and evangelist of the early 1990′s whose enthusiasm by early 2010 had been tempered significantly. Not entirely, just significantly.

The government in Korea divvies out tax dollars for kids to attend internet rehabilitation camps. Many are addicted to online gaming to the extent that their family life and school performance suffer. To them, the “psychedelic” virtual world is a trip more colorful and worthwhile than the drab real world.

Crème de la Crème multiple multitasking students from MIT have a high regard for their own ability to, say, text message multiple friends while reading and writing to multiple email partners while playing a video game while listening to a lecture on physics while googling on their laptop to answer some question that popped into mind.

But testing–surprise!– shows they are can’t do all that very well. The distractions kill the focus and concentration necessary to do a decent job at any one thing. There is nothing new to that problem with multitasking, and nothing new to the euphoria and belief that one can multitask well. Its just that the problem is more intense now, more distracting, more fragmented with widely available–yeah, ubiquitous– internet devices and access than before. Take laptops and smartphones and the iPad.

So when even the best students try to write a lengthy essay on a single well-developed theme, they come up with pithy, insightful little paragraphs that have little to do with each other … unlike their parents, who did better with that sort of thing pre-PC. Or better at reading a lengthy book.

Of course the news isn’t all bad. One bottom-of-the-barrel school Frontline investigated introduced onscreen and online learning, and the behavior and test scores shot dramatically in the right direction, at least on some measures.

Virtual reality games with multiple players in the same game may help bridge the social gap that technology had formerly widened. To save travel money and hassles, businesses are holding multinational online meetings and online project collaboration where the participants may work together closely for years, but never meet each other face to face. Who needs to go out to lunch with a friend when you can see, talk, and write to each other so easily online from separate places on the planet?

Not to mention all the other things we accomplish and benefits we receive with the internet and our techie devices.

So where is this all going? Are we really serving the next generation by giving them iPhones and laptops? Well, it looks like there will be losses as well as gains. And it looks as if our technology is remaking how we think and how we relate to each other if not exactly what we think about what is real.

I still think, though, that we need to understand better how our technology is changing what our subconscious mind believes. A young child, Frontline illustrated, could not tell that his experience swimming with whales was virtual rather than real. Our subconscious minds (or pieces of it) are like that even in adulthood. People who eat virtual food while wearing those goggle things over their eyes feel full in the stomach even though they have not eaten any real food. We are using our technology to program ourselves.

And when we grow up, we are going to have to learn to make severe use the “off” button during our workday to focus on making our contribution to business.

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Tags: technology trends