engineering tasks, building new modes of transportation, and acquiring vast power across an empire.
Yet carving symbols into stone tablets was painstaking work, and errors were costly. Stone tablets didn’t travel that well either, and if they broke, weeks, months, or even years of work could be lost in an instant. As such, production of this kind of information was largely relegated to a special class: scribes.
Being a good scribe meant holding significant power in Egypt.[15] Not only were scribes exempt from the manual labor of the lower classes in Egypt, but many also supervised developments or large-scale government projects. They were considered part of the royal court, didn’t have to fight in the military, and had guaranteed employment not only for themselves, but for their sons as well.[16] In the case of one scribe of the third dynasty’s chief, Imhotep, it even meant post- mortem deification.[17]
Later, another era in communication began with the creation of the first form of mass media: Gutenberg’s moveable type, fitted to a printing press, which enabled writing to be produced as type-set books, each copy identical to the last, without scribes.
Again, society was transformed. Literacy spread along with printing. As books became plentiful and inexpensive, they could be acquired by any prosperous, educated person, not just by the ruling or religious classes. This set the stage for the Renaissance, the flowering of artistic, scientific, cultural, religious, and social growth that swept across Europe. Next came the revival and spread of democracy. By the time of the American Revolution, printing had made Thomas Paine’s pamphlets bestsellers that rallied the troops to victory. The modern metropolitan newspaper, radio, television—all were based on the same basic idea: that communication could be mass-produced from a central source.
The latest transformational change came in earnest just three decades ago, when the personal computer and then the Internet converged to throw us firmly into the digital age. Today, five billion people have cell phones. A constantly flowing electron cloud encircles and unites a networked planet. Anyone with a broadband connection to the Internet has access to much, if not all, of the knowledge that came before, and the ability to communicate not just as a single individual but as a broadcaster. Smartphones are pocketsized libraries, printing presses, cameras, radios, televisions—all that came before, in the palm of your hand.
The Arguments Against Progress
Technical progress always comes with its critics. The greater the speed and power of this progress, the greater the criticism. Intel researcher Genevieve Bell notes that every time we have shifts in technology, we also have new moral panic. Panic? Here’s just one example: there were some who believed, during the development of the railway, that a woman’s uterus could go flying out of her body if she accelerated to 50 miles per hour.[18]
Electricity came with a set of critics, too: the electric light could inform miscreants that women and children were home. The lightbulb was a recipe for total social chaos.
These Luddite folk tales are funny, looking back. But other criticisms have gained traction over the centuries.
Our connection to the teachings of Socrates, for instance, is through the written word of Plato, because Socrates was vehemently against the written word. Socrates thought that the book would do terrible things to our memories. We’d keep knowledge in books and not in our heads. And he was right: people don’t carry around stories like
Critics of the printing press believed that books would cause the spread of sin and eventually destroy the relationship between people and the church. As author and New York University professor Clay Shirky rightfully points out, the printing press did indeed fuel the Protestant Reformation, and yes, growth in erotic fiction.[19]
Though some critiques of the written word have fared better than others, all have faded over time. There just aren’t that many people today who think the printing press was a bad idea—not if five billion of them are voting with their purchases to carry one around with them all day.
Despite this, critiques of technology on moral grounds look very similar today. The strongest critiques (as Bell notes) tend to be about women and children. As if it were the modern-day critique of electricity, the television show “To Catch a Predator” features sexual predators using the Internet to seduce children—the subtext is that this powerful new tool can be used to steal your babies.
Still, there is a serious trend emerging in digital age critiques. Distinguished journalists, acclaimed scholars, and prominent activists are worried about what the information explosion is doing to our attention spans or even to our general intelligence. Bill Keller, former executive editor of
Nicholas Carr’s book
In his book
These kinds of critiques of the Web are nothing new. They’re as old as the Web itself—older, actually. In 1995, in the very early days of the World Wide Web, Clifford Stoll wrote in
Keller, Stoll, and Carr all point to something interesting: new technologies do create anthropological changes in society. Yet some of these critics seem to miss the mark; the Internet is not some kind of meta bogey man that’s sneaking into Mr. Carr’s room while he sleeps and rewiring his brain, nor did Mr. Stoll’s 1995 computer sneak up behind him and handcuff him to a keyboard.
Moreover, the subtext of these theories—and ones like them—is that there may be some sort of corporate conspiracy to try to, as Jobs put it, “dumb us down.” Somehow I doubt that Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google, woke up one morning with a plan to rewire our brains. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey is probably not a super-villain looking to destroy the world’s attention span with the medium’s 140-character limit. Mark Zuckerberg is likely not trying to destroy the world through excessive friendship-building.
Blaming a medium or its creators for changing our minds and habits is like blaming food for making us fat. While it’s certainly true that all new developments create the need for new warnings—until there was fire, there wasn’t a rule to not put your hand in it—conspiracy theories wrongly take free will and choice out of the equation. The boardroom of Kentucky Fried Chicken does not have public health as its top priority, true, but if everyone suddenly stopped buying the chicken, they’d be out of business in a month. Fried chicken left in its bucket will not raise your cholesterol. It does not hop from its bucket and deep-dive into your arteries. Fried chicken (thankfully) isn’t autonomous, of course, and isn’t capable of such hostility.
As long as good, honest information is out there about what’s what, and people have the means to consume it, the most dangerous conspiracy is the unspoken pact between producer and consumer.
Out of the four critiques—those of Keller, Carr, Pariser, and Stoll— Pariser’s is the one that makes the most sense to me. Personalization today is mostly a technical issue with consequences that the technologists at our major Internet companies are developing in order to keep us clicking. That said, personalization isn’t an evil algorithm telling us what our corporate overlords want us to hear; rather, it’s a reflection of our own behavior.
