Culture And Digital Technologies
I’ve often said that today’s smartphone is the current digital age version of the stone or bronze axe of those distant ages. The stone age axe enabled us to survive in a world where we needed to adapt in a largely physical way. The smartphone enables us to adapt to living in a more information-driven world where digital technologies have become deeply entrenched in all we do.
These two devices are powerful metaphors for humanity’s relationship with technology and culture today, as it did so long ago, is the method humans use to determine when, why and how a technology will be used in a society. Different cultures have adopted technologies in many different ways and this continues today with digital technologies.
Why is it important to take a cultural view of digital technologies and what are the implications at a sociocultural macro view?
Some digital technologies, such as smart thermostats or controlling our lights via our smartphones are relatively benign and have little to no impacts on society as a whole. Other digital technologies, such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and genetic engineering can have profound impacts on sociocultural systems, much as the printing press and railroads have in the past. And as with any technology, there are also unintended consequences along with technologies being adopted for uses the inventors didn’t even plan for, or think of.
By looking at the intersection between culture, humans and technology, we can better understand how it might be adopted (indicators for market success in commercialisation), possible unintended consequences and possible sociocultural impacts. This has become more critical for digital technologies today. Why?
Analog technologies, such as the printing press, writing, steam engines, axes and other working tools, cars and boats, took a fairly long time to move across cultures and sociocultural impacts took a long time to unfold. The printing press was profoundly transformative for humanity, but the changes it brought about took centuries.
With digital technologies, it is exactly the opposite. The impact of the internet on our global sociocultural systems unfolded much faster, going into hyperdrive once it became widely available and global. While many technologies advance faster when combined with other technologies (putting a platform between two wheels to make a chariot or a cart, for example), when digital technologies are combined, they bring together network effects and the compounding effects of combinations of other technologies; the smartphone being a prime example here.
Most of the digital technologies of the past few decades however, have come out of America and of course, Silicon Valley. This has, perhaps, resulted in some cultural issues around how we use and adopt technologies. American culture is more individualistic in nature than Asian and Nordic ones, which tend to be more pluralistic or we instead of me.
One example of the result of more individualistic results with digital technologies is social media. The Silicon Valley thinking was that social media would bring us closer together. In some ways it has, but as research has shown, it has also resulted in greater social fracturing and higher degrees of loneliness. Both unintended consequences, that, could probably not have been predicted. It is not the fault of the creators of social media technologies.
Technology is a part of human culture and it is culture that we use as the knowledge to navigate our lives and the world around us. Digital technologies are fast becoming a vital part of of human culture, necessary for our very survival on earth as they will as we move ever further into space.
Culture will also play a critical role in helping us figure out how to adopt digital technologies, to avoid as many bad unintended consequences and embrace the good ones. To avoid the risks of AI on individual rights and freedoms. To design the future of our relationships with one another (kinship systems), the evolution of capitalism and economic changes. Culture is the the code for humanity’s future with digital technologies.
