Technological advance and the loss of meaning
The pace of technology, as we know, is rapid. That which was current is quickly history. One thing remains, however, and that is truth. In this article, re-printed from the August 2015 CViE Newsletter, the danger of the vanity of the digital world is discussed, and the observation of the narcissism of modern technology is not diminished by the passage of time. The dangers of ‘video games, social networking and search engines’ has merely been succeeded by chat GPT and TikTok, yet this truth remains:
Then I looked on all the works that my hands had wrought, and on the labour that I had laboured to do: and, behold, all was vanity and vexation of spirit, and there was no profit under the sun. Ecclesiastes 2:11
“It is often said that technology is neutral, it is the misuse of technology that is harmful. We should not underestimate the benefits we have each received through the application of technology, but in today’s digital world we are all influenced by the application of technology to a far greater extent than we would like to admit – and not all of it for good!
A leading UK neuroscientist, Baroness Greenfield, suggests that “digital technologies are leaving their mark on our brains”. She notes that this impact can be broadly broken down into three areas: video games and their effect on addiction, aggression and attention span; social networking with its effect on empathy, identity and communication; and search engines, and the effect these have on our cognitive powers.
Previous generations have been brought up alongside the evolution of the printing press, the telephone, electricity and the motor car. But even if we understand the technology to be neutral, (and accept that there may have been significant harm arising from the misuse of these technologies), yet they have been predominately beneficial.
So why the concern with the digital world?
“Those earlier technologies were a means to an end. They meshed with reality, and were part of three-dimensional life. But now,” says Baroness Greenfield, “we see a world where technology is creating a parallel reality. You can go to work, play games, go dating and shopping – all of which people do in the real world – but do it all in two dimensions in front of a screen. We can argue about whether this is better or worse than real life, but what we can be sure of is that never before has technology offered us an alternative to real living.”
The significance is that today’s ‘digital friends’ – and many people have hundreds of them – are not friends at all, they are an audience. It is not possible to have hundreds of friends in real life. What they are there for is to comment on what you do, and while this may sound like a relatively harmless activity, what is missing is the “handbrake of body language that would normally constrain you from talking endlessly about yourself”.
“We are no longer driving the narrative,” says Greenfield, who remembers with affection how in her youth the tools of learning were passive. “The drawing pad did not ask to be drawn on. The toy soldier or the doll only worked if you wanted to play a game. The tree didn’t ask to be climbed. What this meant was that we were using our imagination. Today’s children are just parked in front of a screen with a second hand imagination responding to fixed menus. After the marginal initiative of turning the device on, the whole thing is about the narrative agenda being set externally. What living in three dimensions also gives us is access to senses such as touch, taste and smell. The parallel digital world robs us of a meaningful life – one where actions cannot be reversed. Everything in a video game can be reversed: you can suspend consequences, the game can be reset, you can have another go. This world without consequences is, by my definition, meaningless. It follows that if you are spending most of your time doing something meaningless, you have to consider what impact this has on identity and self-expression.”
Baroness Greenfield’s summary is “that we should start to think once again that technology is a means to an end, and not the end in itself. In the past a fridge kept your food cold, and a printing press printed your book. Today technology is often an end in itself, and I think that is a sinister thing”.”
The original article was summarised from an interview with Baroness Greenfield by Nick Smith, and a review of her book ‘Mind Change’, published in ‘Engineering and Technology Journal’, Oct 2014.
