Society & Technology: Awareness
In today’s hyper-connected, always on, instant society, it is not unreasonable to think that we are in a time of phenomenal technological change. In a sense we are. But societal change due to technologies is more often slower than we think. And it all begins with how societies become aware of technologies.
Understanding this can help to give us some perspective in a time where we feel the changes are coming too fast, are causing too much disruption and that there are more negatives than positives. The reality is that we may be perceiving more rapid change than is actually happening.
Today, for example, we think that Artificial Intelligence (AI) is changing everything. It is not. We actually have no idea how AI will change things or how much it will change things, but it is changing far less right now, than we may believe.
Over the next few articles I will be looking at how technologies come into our sociocultural systems, from awareness to how adoption occurs, degrees of change and up to today. And why we are in a time of significant technological change, but less so than we might think. All of this from an anthropological perspective. By the way, we anthropologists study more than old bones.
For the majority of humanity’s existence, new technologies have taken a while to spread around the world. Cultures became…
