I’ve recently been trying to get my head around what’s happening in our increasingly information-focused digital world. The fact that the average teenager spends up to 7 hours, and the average adult up to 5 hours a day on their phones, is such a huge change of behaviour from when I was a child that it’s bound to have an impact on the way we interact with each other and the world.
A friend recently sent me some pages from Lewis Mumford’s “Technics and Civilisation” published in 1934 about what Mumford called ‘our present mechanical civilisation’. Of course, at that time he was reacting to the inventions of the telephone, the typewriter and the car, but some of the things he said seemed to me extraordinarily insightful about the way technology influences us. Here’s a quote from the book – it’s lengthy but well worth attending to closely:
“One further effect of our closer time co-ordination and our instantaneous communication must be noted here: broken time and broken attention. The difficulties of transport and communication before 1850 automatically acted as a selective screen, which permitted no more stimuli to reach a person than he could handle: a certain urgency was necessary before one received a call from a long distance or was compelled to make a journey oneself: this condition of slow physical locomotion kept intercourse down to a human scale, and under definite control. Nowadays this screen has vanished: the remote is as close as the near: the ephemeral is as emphatic as the durable. While the tempo of the day has been quickened by instantaneous communication the rhythm of the day has been broken: the radio, the telephone, the daily newspaper clamour for attention, and amid the host of stimuli to which people are subjected, it becomes more and more difficult to absorb and cope with any one part of the environment, to say nothing of dealing with it as a whole…. Even the weekly period of cessation from familiar tasks and contemplative reverie, which was one of the great contributions of western religion to the discipline of the personal life, has become an ever remoter possibility… we have multiplied the mechanical demands without multiplying in any degree our human capacities for registering and reacting intelligently to them.”
He writes about how technology has become an end in itself, that progress and acceleration are assumed to be good things. However we have rarely stopped to think about whether this is true.
“Railroads may be quicker than canal boats and a gas lamp may be brighter than a candle, but it is only in terms of human purpose and in relation to a human and social scheme of values that speed or brightness have any meaning. If one wishes to absorb the scenery, the slow motion of a canalboat may be preferable to the fast motion of a motor car; and if one wishes to appreciate the mysterious darkness and the strange forms of a natural cave, it is better to penetrate it with uncertain steps, with the aid of a torch or lantern than to descend into it by means of an elevator and to have the mystery entirely erased by a grand display of electric lights.”
Faster, brighter, more efficient, is not necessarily better. It all depends on what you’re trying to do and what the goal of life is. He puts his finger on the flaw at the heart of our fascination with technology: the belief that “most of the difficulties that had hitherto vexed mankind had a mathematical or mechanical – that is a qualitative – solution.”
On the one hand it’s reassuring that our problems with encroaching technology are nothing new. But he reminds us again that the deeper questions are not technological, but spiritual.
Graham Tomlin
Brislington Community News 