Technology: Why We Love & Hate It
Some technologies we love. Others we hate. Some we just use and don’t really even think about much. Like the telephone. It’s just there, we know it connects us to other people. But even then, some people prefer to text than talk. Our relationships with technology are deeply rooted in our cultures and have been for hundreds of thousands of years. Today it seems, many digital technologies create a lot of divisiveness. Why?
There are two primary reasons that we decide on whether we love or hate a technology; how it affects our imagined futures and how it impacts our perceived reality. Cultural factors come into play here as well, but are influencing only, not personally decisive.
In a previous article here, I wrote about how we use stories to understand technology. In another, I wrote about how culture ultimately decides how technologies are adopted in society.
Bringing all this together helps us understand why we love or hate a technology. Why is this important and how does it help us individually, societally and economically?
Societally, it helps us in terms of how we govern technologies, the customs, norms and behaviours we develop as new technologies come into our world. It can help us anticipate potential risks and opportunities. We didn’t, for example, really have a framework or methodology to truly assess the way social media would impact our global society.
In hindsight, we can see the good and bad of social media. Now, societies are trying to figure out how we can govern it to mitigate the harms and promote the benefits. This will take a while. Culture tends to move slowly when it comes to technologies.
A significant reason for why we love and hate social media is because it makes managing our realities much harder and it is more complicated to create an imagined future. With social media, we are having to process the perceived realities every day of hundreds, if not thousands of humans. Our brains are not designed to handle that.
Prior to social media, smartphones and such easy, frictionless mass two-way communication, it was much easier for us to make sense of our reality. We can effectively engage with around 150 people in our lives (this is known as Dunbar’s Number). We know from research that this is a number our brains can process and manage. Once we get into much higher numbers, this becomes much harder to do.
We love social media because it can help us communicate, organise and connect with people much faster. We hate it because it can hurt our mental health, our children and tear apart our societies. This is because it impacts our imagined futures and messes with our reality at an unprecedented scale.
It is similar with regard to Artificial Intelligence today. We love it because one line of an imagined future is it can help us fight climate change, detect cancer, find new, better medications. We hate it because it gives us existential fears about our future and could damage our imagined realities. Humans tend to get a bit wonky when we feel like we have no control over our futures and realities.
It is in part why we use stories to explain a potential future and find common ground on how we all perceive our realities.
Companies that are developing new technology products can use this kind of understanding to develop more human-centric products. It means they can explore potential risks and benefits and make their products more human-centric. While they can’t possibly know all unintended consequences, they can be better prepared for them. This is the economic reason to understand why we love and hate technology.
Sociocultural systems love and hate technologies in different ways too. In more individualistic societies where the self comes first (America is the pinnacle of a “me” society), this can mean very divisive and confusing love and hate relationships with technology. In more pluralistic societies, like Asian and Nordic, technologies are viewed in a more “we” context. How it impacts society, then our self.
Digital technologies like A.I., genetic engineering, social media, DNA testing, have a much higher sociocultural impact than a new type of grip for a hammer or cool air fryer. And as they can impact society much faster and at scale they are impacting our imagined futures and how we see our world, our realities.
This makes them so divisive. Especially as the track record for many of these new technologies hasn’t been exactly stellar. The rise of the surveillance economy due to corporate abuse of personal data. The manipulation of human genes by a Chinese doctor on babies. The failure of Meta to address harms to children from Instagram. TikTok’s abuse of data and algorithmic manipulations. And so on.
All technologies are created because the inventor imagines a future state of being that improves our lives or helps us be more productive or survive. Stories are then created to tell us how they should benefit us. Unless a weapon is being invented, we tend towards touting the benefits of a technology and ignoring the negatives.
But we will always love or hate technologies depending on how we see them impacting our desired and imagined futures and how they might impact our realities, good and bad. Being human is quite weird and also wonderful. And complicated.
