The advent of personal computers, video games and the internet has not changed human beings on the genetic level. If these distractions seem to have irreparably altered the behavior of the human race almost overnight, it couldn't possibly be because they've planted something foreign in us. More likely, they've activated something in us that was there all along.
The human capacity for vice did not originate with information technology. It has had myriad outlets throughout the centuries, and will undoubtedly find still more in due time. Hence, placing the weight of the whole of human laziness and vanity on something like blogging is exceedingly foolish. If the advent of the blog has enabled the public display of such vices like never before, this says as much about human nature (dare I use that term) as it does about the inherent value of blogging, and as such, we might actually end up being thankful for the opportunity to better understand ourselves (not to mention for any number of constructive purposes blogs might ultimately be able serve).
31 July 2009
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Recently stumbled on this cartoon from the cover of La Baïonnette, 31 August 1916 (in Dreams For Sale: Popular Culture in the 20th Century, ed. Richard Maltby, p. 35). It shows WWI-era newspaper readers behaving as only millennial cell phone users are thought to.
Lewis Mumford
Technics and Civilization (1934)
Ch. VI/9
"Toward the end of his life Herbert Spencer viewed with proper alarm the regression into imperialism, militarism, servility that he saw all around him at the beginning of the present century; and in truth he had every reason for his forebodings. But the point is that these forces were not merely archaic survivals that had failed to be extirpated by the machine: they were rather underlying human elements awakened into stertorous activity by the very victory of the machine as an absolute and non-conditioned force in human life. The machine, by failing as yet—despite neotechnic advances—to allow sufficient play in social existence to the organic, has opened the way for its return in the narrow and inimical form of the primitive. Western society is relapsing at critical points into pre-civilized modes of thought, feeling, and action because it has acquiesced too easily in the dehumanization of society through capitalist exploitation and military conquest. The retreat into the primitive is, in sum, a maudlin effort to avoid the more basic and infinitely more difficult transformation which our thinkers and leaders and doers have lacked the candor to face, the intelligence to contrive, and the will to effect—the transition beyond the historic forms of capitalism and the equally limited original forms of the machine to a life-centered economy."
Nicholas Carr
The Shallows (2011)
"We know that the basic form of the human brain hasn't changed much in the last forty thousand years. Evolution at the genetic level proceeds with exquisite slowness, at least when gauged by man's conception of time. But we also know that the ways human beings think and act have changed almost beyond recognition through those millennia. ... Our new knowledge of neuroplasticity untangles this conundrum. Between the intellectual and behavioral guardrails set by our genetic code, the road is wide, and we hold the steering wheel. Through what we do and how we do it...we alter the chemical flows in our synapses and change our brains. And when we hand down our habits of thought to our children, through the examples we set, the schooling we provide, and the media we use, we hand down as well the modifications in the structure of our brains."
(pp. 48-49)
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