CULTURAL INNOVATION (Posted 2007-06-05 13:49:52 by ArchPaladin) So I've been doing a little thinking lately on a lot of disparate threads, and I came up with a new theory about something that I figured people might find interesting. Back in the 80's there was this great increase in the pace of technological advancements. At the time people were trying to understand just exactly how all this new technology would integrate into their lives, and just how it would change general social interaction. There was a lot of fear that machines would sort of end up dominating society, that social bonds between people would break down and be replaced by business and interaction with other widgets. This was the entire idea behind the cyberpunk genre of literature - exploring the different permutations of technological takeover, and assuming that such a takeover would be negative. As the years have passed those fears haven't exactly gone away, but they have changed a lot. People realized that technology could be used to help bring people together, to foster communication between individuals that would otherwise not know of each other. Business did grow, but it didn't take over any more than it was already doing, and governments have fallen yet. A lot of original cyberpunk fears were replaced with new ideas about how people could use technology to better their lives rather than be dominated by it. Use of technology became something of an identity-establishing thing, rather than a cause of helpless social conformity. So I was looking around at all that and I wondered whether or not any of it was true. Did the growth of technology cause damage to our society? I would argue yes, but in a somewhat insidious manner. By and large, the ill effects of technology aren't very noticeable. We can talk to each other a lot more often than before. We can get breaking news faster. We can compile large volumes of information and collaborate with companies across the globe a lot easier. People in technical circles will sometimes complain about pervasive connectivity brought about by technology, but this can be avoided if you have the self-control to turn your gadgets off. So far, any damages that we might be suffering are easily mitigated. But I think there's something else that we've lost that we haven't yet quite realized, and it has to do with how we innovate. I think the problem begins with our standard of quality in communication. A great increase in the ability to communicate means that we get a lot more useless drivel to filter out - anyone who says, for example, that MySpace is filled with a lot of angsty teenage poetry is basically agreeing with me. People will argue that angsty teenage poetry (or any similar useless drivel) always existed but now it's just more easily available because of technology. I agree, but I think it's more than that. Greater amounts of useless drivel mean that such drivel becomes expected. It becomes normal. It becomes the new average standard that anyone must match in order to interact with others. I think parts of society understand this fact intellectually, but haven't quite grasped what it can fully mean. I think that lowering the average meaningful content in your discourse is effectively contributing to a dumbing of society. People innovate based on the ideas they are exposed to. If people are increasingly exposed to meaningless drivel, then they will increasingly produce meaningless drivel. True innovation will die slowly, because people no longer take the time to fully turn an idea over in their heads before moving on to something new. Instead, they become rushed to keep up with whatever is in the public zeitgeist. As evidence to this, we might consider the decline of innovation in popular music in the past twenty years. We might consider the recently developed business practice of patent trolling and the desire of corporations to spend money in intellectual property fights rather than on actual innovation - a practice that has only really taken off in the past ten years. We might also consider what appears to be an increasing level of ignorance in our schools, universities, and governments. People may look at these things and see separate problems, but I think they all have an underlying root in how we have learned to interact with the technology around us. On the surface we go about our daily lives, but underneath I think parts of our culture have embraced the cyberpunk dystopia of dehumanizing uniformity. I'm not sure how easily fixable this problem is. Of course we can all turn off our gadgets, but I think that might do us more harm than good, and I'm not even sure that would actually fix anything. I think at this point the problem has become cultural rather than technological, and the solution lies in some form of cultural revolution. Some type of new look on history, perhaps? A return to our roots? These are perhaps effective solutions, but might be hard to implement if timed wrong. Cultural decline needs to continue long enough so that there is space for something new to arrive, otherwise all efforts result in assimilation. -------- There are 2 comments on this post: Comment #1 by Texanh ( earl@texanh.com ) on 2007-06-06 08:37:24 Very good points. Another change that might be contributing is attention span. With rapid change and the resultant information overload it becomes increasing difficult to give any particular subject the time it deserves to fully comprehend. On the upside, younger people multi-task much better than older people. But older people can stop and focus much better than younger people. (broad generality alert! :) A shorter attention span makes it harder to: 1) judge decisions for long term consequences 2) have a historical perspective 3) plan for the future Not impossible, just harder... We can also forget that while the world for us and those like us is changing rapidly, not everyone else is experiencing the world as we do. (1st world vs 3rd world disparity) Like every other thing, there is a good side and a bad side to it. It'll be interesting to see what our culture becomes. Comment #2 by ArchPaladin ( blog@archpaladin.net ) on 2007-06-06 13:28:10 I agree to a point. Attention span certainly plays a role in how we interpret what is going on around us, and will certainly impact our long-term prospects as it impacts what kind of information we have to make decisions. However, once you go far enough down the road of societal change, I think attention span becomes irrelevant as collective momentum builds up. Hence, if the only thing you have to expose yourself to is drivel, then it doesn't really matter to what you're attending, as it's all effectively the same. I think part of the issue is how to filter out drivel through correct use of attention, and part of the issue is where our sources of information, entertainment etc. come from in the first place. Here's a thought for you concerning age and attention spans. Studies seem to indicate that younger individuals are actually better at attending to things than older individuals, contrary to your statements. However, younger individuals cannot easily filter out useless information (not the same as attention!) because they don't have the experience to tell if that info is valuable for the task at hand or not, making them appear disorganized. Older individuals are more easily distracted, but have a better capacity to filter out worthless info because they have the experience to tell what is meaningful. Concerning your point about cultural differences, yes. I think I can generalize my statements for large sections of American culture, but outside of that everything is irrelevant. I'm also interested to see how our society changes and deals with these things.