It’s easy to claim the life we live is surrounded by distractions. There’s more stimulus than ever, with technology competing for our attention day and night. It’s not unusual for us to grab our phones first and last thing each day, as we go to and get out of bed. Some argue blue light addiction is what is killing us all. I even wrote about The Digital Divide previously, and how we’ve become farther the more connected we’ve become.
There are pros and cons to everything. The benefits of technology are obvious, allowing us luxuries such as globalism, the internet, social media, smart-technology, and more. We’re on the cusp of incredible technology as well, with nascent developments in artificial intelligence, autonomous vehicles, supercomputers, and more. The obvious downsides of technology are described in aspects such as the digital divide, technology addiction, and old knowledge becoming obsolete.
There’s a much deeper issue than just the pros and cons of technology: it is our cultural behavior and acceptance towards technology. We’ve seen tech companies rise, spawn, and compete with each other for what ideas and apps are valuable and to manifest what they believe to be important to us. We’ve seen pushback from audiences asking for those who grew in prominence to hold more responsibility. As our culture adapts and accepts new avenues, new laws and regulations are placed upon them.
That’s easy to see from the conglomerates point of view. But what about the people using the technology day to day? How have we become affected outside of the direct benefits?
I’ve previously written about the change in our dialogue, and how generations before the internet have different conversation skills with those after the internet; the same goes for smartphones. Communication is just one avenue.
Another is our forecasting of the future. As technology transforms more rapidly in front of our eyes, the amount of lifetimes it requires to see dramatic change reduces. When it once took several generations to go from ocean travel to sky travel, it’s taken remarkably less time to go to space travel. The same goes for our ability to communicate. When it used to be one village, it then went to one country, and now we can speak to anyone in the world quickly.
Rapid changes to developing industries is not a new demon. There’s always been early adapters of technology and there’s always been schools or groups dedicated to honing crafts by any means, including forward-facing technology. Yet as technology grows faster and faster, these changes are harder to implement. In my college days, professors could not teach the most current material but they would at least acknowledge its existence. It was difficult for just a few professors to quickly change the pipeline of education, so no matter how fast technology grew or changed, the academics would be lagging behind, struggling to catch up.
There in lies the most uncertain future we’ve ever seen. I graduated college 10 years ago and life is only changing more quickly. It is true some things never change. Yet it is also true that what works today may not work tomorrow. We’ve seen megacompanies fall to the wayside by refusing to grow with the digital era and we’ve seen companies that are less than 10, 20 years old become the wealthiest and most powerful companies ever. It is already taking less than one generation’s lifetime to see our lives change more than our parents could expect. Soon, it’ll change faster than the current generation can expect. From there, how can we be certain of any future?
Distraction comes from the Latin roots of “dis” meaning apart, and “trahere” to drag. We are dragged apart from our duties when we are distracted. Yet what are our duties if the future is uncertain? All the stimulus we react to may not actually be such a distraction. In times of survival, when our lives were most uncertain, hyper-attention to any stimulus may be the only thing saving us from a tiger in the jungle. The anxieties was face today are boundless by society and boundless by arriving technology. Is it all a distraction? Or are we just trying to survive?
Leadership, Design, Writing 