I recently read a talk by Maciej Cegłowski, The Internet with a Human Face. One analogy he posed resonated with me particularly well. Cegłowski suggests that similar to the way the US rushed headlong into car culture starting in the 1950s, we are rushing into a similarly unpredictable future of the unintended consequences of the Internet.
The consequences Cegłowski focused on primarily were those of data collection on the web, but it's easy to see how the analogy extends to the more general culture towards which the Internet seems to be driving us. Some of the more concerning consequences to me are social isolation, as explored in Gary Turk's Look Up video that recently went viral, and the informational echo chamber, as prophesied in the Epic 2014 video.
More than an analogy, I believe the development of the interstate highway system and the Internet are just two examples of a very common pattern in human society: a disruptive technology enters the scene and is eagerly adopted for its immediate benefit, which causes a dramatic shift in the fabric of society that is not necessarily beneficial. Another example would be the development of agriculture, after which human quality of life arguable diminished greatly (eg. with less leisure time, more disease).
Beware progress! I guess I'm officially a luddite.
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I'm sympathetic to disliking suburbs, social isolation, and the echo chamber, to which I would add loss of privacy, but wouldn't the agriculture analogy point the other way, in that long-term we're clearly better off today than we would be if we'd never discovered agriculture?
ReplyDeleteMaybe you didn't mean to argue that the long-term effects are bad, but just that there are frequently medium-term troughs.