How Technology impacts our culture

How Technology impacts our culture

Technology has a deep impact on culture and makes us reimagine the way in which human beings organise themselves and interact with each other.

A mobile phone, for instance, has helped reorder space and time, helped individuals get a unique address in life and softened the notions of hierarchy, for its now possible to reach anyone directly without any intermediate screening.

The cascading effects of mobile phones are far reaching and they well go beyond the functional advantages they offer by way of better communication.

They are not merely life-altering devices for individuals but change the nature of society in deep, albeit subtle ways.

The impact of internet is perhaps even more profound, for it helps redefine the very idea of power by giving everyone a voice; the internet is nothing more than a slightly organised babble of individual voices.

The internet allows us to communicate directly with each other, it dismantles the barriers built around informs and knowledge, and disables the very idea of scale.

And yet, because of continuous nature of innovation, we think of technology as a natural process, increasingly aligned with the idea of civilisation. By and large, we don’t think of social change caused by technology as a rupture, but as a form of progression, or in some cases, even as a regression.

For most parts, technology takes us forward into future, evoking an occasional nostalgia about the good old days when life was simpler. In most cases, the social changes caused by technology is seen as being inevitable and its impact is often underplayed. Because culture changes slowly in response to technology, we get time to absorb the technology and make them appear natural.

The structural impact of technology is often deeper than its functional footprint; it is much easier to acknowledge the advantages of a mobile phone( speaking to anyone anytime anywhere) and its disadvantages ( eats up personal time) than to recognise how it shapes ideas of identity, hierarchy and the sense of being an individual.

It is when we focus on things not invented that we can see the relationship between technology and culture more clearly. Technology produces certitude when it should also simultaneously multiply doubt. Cultures are constructed around an understanding of human capability which technology enhances And modifies. If we could, for instance, read each other’s  minds, several founding assumptions of civilisation will get dismantled, for what we call culture is an edifice built on technology called the human body.

As this technology acquires new abilities, culture needs to change. The faster, more discontinuous and fundamental the nature of change, greater is the need for culture to find ways to fill this gap. The ability of culture to change shape and reach a new equilibrium is neither inevitable nor absolute. The urge to believe in stable and continuous world makes us minimise the effects of technological change but we can’t do that forever.