Technology: Are We Over Reliant?

Photo by Shubham Dhage on Unsplash

Has humanity become over reliant on technology is a good question to explore a little more deeply. As a digital anthropologist working at the intersection of human culture and how we adopt, adapt and use technologies, it’s a question I’m often asked.

The answer is, as you might expect, complicated. And nuanced. At a time when we seem to live in a world where an answer has to be binary, when polarisation seems to be the norm and we are seeing a flood of technologies enter our societies, a binary answer isn’t possible.

At a basic sociocultural level, humans cannot be over reliant on technology because we could not survive without technology. One of the primary means of survival for our species has been technology ever since we started banging stones together to make tools.

We are the dominant tool using species on the planet. Other animals, from birds to some primates, use tools as well. Some species, such as the New Caledonian crow, can combine tools and make tools to use other tools, which requires rather complex reasoning.

For a rather long time, archeologists and anthropologists studying older human (homo Sapiens, us) societies and cultures believed humans discovered tool making along with fire. We are discovering that this is not the case, that for us modern humans, tool and fire use existed in our…