Twentieth International Conference on Technology, Knowledge, and Society

Abstract

I look at the past and present of our use of and our relationship with technology drawing from my own experience in Silicon Valley for 18 years, as well as several written sources. focusing on three aspects of human behavior and perception that shape our current relation to that technology: Habit, Convenience, and Cognitive Overload. Habit as a basic human practice that can have problematic aspects; Convenience as a complex modern conundrum; cognitive overload as a pervasive and detrimental condition. The three are implicated in our current near enslavement in the devices and frustrations of the very technology that was to have set us free. It encompasses everything from the well-documented loss in many young people of the ability to read maps or navigate spaces and landscape without GPS or some other aid, to the loss of the ability to spell one’s own language or read cursive handwriting. Some early developers and designers believed that the personal computer, the internet, and the mobile phone would infinitely improve our lives. But it has been a very uneven and asymmetrical “improvement”, weaponized and monetized by the forces of militarism, commerce and, sometimes, of sheer propaganda. (To name three massively consequential examples: the international rush into an ill-conceived War on Terror, the 2016 presidential election in the USA, and the Brexit referendum in the UK.) I call for a more reflective and skeptical approach to the adoption of new technologies based on ecological, personal, and economic-political considerations.