Rethinking Technology

The beginnings of something. Maybe just drivel.

Rethinking Technology
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Direction and Usage

Over the past fifty years, the technology boom we have undergone has brought us into territories that were considered science fiction during the youths of our parents, and totally alien during the youths of our grandparents. Technology today is growing exponentially, to the point where one can now fit an entire library’s worth of information into a small plastic card that could easily fit within the change pocket of a pair of tight jeans.

But is this growth sustainable?

Given the current rate of growth, is there a conceivable limit to where this growth will take us?

And ultimately, is this growth healthy for us as a world population?

I recently had the opportunity to attend a meeting of a subset group for our local arts council. We are a small group of writers who get together on a regular basis to talk about writing, read some of our works, and discuss what is going on in the world around us. We range in age from high school to octogenarians.

It would be fair to say that I am one of the more conservative members of this group, and probably the most vocal of those of us who find ourselves in this minority. But that for me is nothing new. I have always been among the more conservative in most of the associations I find myself in.

At this particular meeting the conversation came around to raising the profile of our group. One of our younger members suggested we all get twitter accounts, and repost links to each other’s works. But that’s not exactly the way she phrased it.

“Let’s twit ourselves around town!”

I glossed over.

Now, I know what twitter is, and I know the general premise behind it. It is one of those anti-social networks that allows you to post unfiltered comments out to a wide audience, permitting you to simultaneously prove to the nation that you are incapable of thinking on your feet and willing to make inflammatory statements without facts to back them up.

I have Facebook. That’s bad enough. And I don’t know if I will even keep that much longer.

To be clear, my hesitation to put my faith in the ever growing technological revolution has many facets.

One of the things we have to remember is that for much of the country, and much of the world, these twenty-first century technologies are run over infrastructure built to meet the needs of a nineteen fifties to nineteen seventies world.

There is fiber optic cable supporting the flow of information in many of the larger urban and suburban areas of top tier countries, but this technology can only go so far. Someday, this technology will fail us, and no longer be able to handle the demand we place on it.

The internet is deliverable by satellite, but this is an expensive option, and impractical in many of the poorer and more rural nations on earth. Our world is increasingly dominated by cell phones and laptops, but these technologies have limitations as well.

“Oh, but technology is wonderful” came the reply.

“Yup,” I responded, “until the day it no longer works.”

That got me a funny look.

Since high school, I have had a string of laptops. All have died at some point or another, mostly because their hardware was unable to keep up with the demands of software, their circuits started breaking down, or their ports started to break off from the motherboard.

On the other hand, my 1920’s Stanley Number 5 still trues the face of rough cut lumber. And the teeter tauter I built the kids is still out in the yard, even though they have not used it in three or four years.

Simply put, ancient technologies were designed to last. Modern technologies are designed to patch us through until they get replaced. Fault me for my skepticism, but I think I’ll invest my time and energies from this point out in the ancient, and forgo having to drop cash on the modern unless absolutely necessary.

I’ve also noticed that refrigerators built before 1975 or so run for forty, fifty, sometimes sixty years, where refrigerators built after this point tend to only last ten to twenty years. You can no longer buy gas stoves that run off a pilot light, unless you have seven or eight grand to drop on a single appliance. And even then they are tough to get ahold of. Washer and drier motors are hard to come by too.

But these are the everyday items that should be built to last, and parts for these items should be as easy to get ahold of as swinging into your neighborhood Sears or Wal-Mart. The fact that you have to special order this stuff only encourages us to throw them away.

And much of this technology, although designed to make our lives easier, actually places an undue burden on our lives. Much of this burden is due to cost. Some of it is due to the fact that we have replaced simple human functions with machines, and lost the technology to do for ourselves.