Can Our Culture Keep up with Technology?

What is it with technology? How can we keep up with technology and do we futilely use technology to fill emotional voids? 

From the 11th hour, Thom Hartmann, author of "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight" asks, "How can we use our understanding of science and technology along with our understanding of culture and how culture changes?"  For planetary sustainability as well as simple mental stability, the two must be joined hand-in-hand, growing and expanding as one.  Sever culture from technology, and vice e versa, and one's life experience becomes wrought with problems.  Take the stone-age Homo habilis 

2 million years ago who simultaneously  to creating fire,  discovers a cell phone, exemplifying a massive schism with the hyper-advancement of technology, leaving culture in it's wake.  Such an anachronism couldn't be utilized.  The cell phone would be utilized as and equated to a the functionality of a colorful rock, because the culture wouldn't yet have the advancements to understand the benefits of global telecommunication.  Hyper-advancements in technology where there isn't the similar level of cultural advancement to support it, are treated as alien. Back then,"technologies" such as exothermic combustion reactions satisfied the current level of cultural reaction.

To be curt, we're way beyond combustion, but we're still interested in anchoring technology with culture to avoid a schism.  Every house comes standard with with countless electronic outlets because our culture has evolved with electrical power, this cultural "installment"  occurred shortly after Edison's successful lightbulb test in 1879.  

So we've got cultural installments that must reflect the current level of technological installments on a global and personal level.  Globally, solar panels technologically serve our current level of culture, but individually, many people aren't ready for solar panels because they may still be trying to figure out how their RCA plugs on the Tivo connects to their flatscreen.  For good sustainable energy practices such as solar panels to become a cultural standard, that technology has to symphonize in unison with the cultural level.

Here's another example: fireplaces.

 Amidst central heating and thermostats, almost anyone today thinks of a fire-place as something "old-fashioned" and out-dated.  Our culture has long-surpassed exothermic combustion reactions of our neanderthal ancestors as "technology".  But relative to those neanderthal brethren, a fire-place that redirects smoke out of an abode is highly advanced technology.  The "fireplace" embodies a technological emblem where culture has "a-okayed" it's placement and utilization.

A microwave oven expedites one area of our life -- cooking food -- by emitting microwavs from a magnetron to excite polarized particles (namely H20).  That type of technology has become "a fireplace" because of it's utilization and freedom from trouble-shooting.

The question is, is there anything other than passage of time that can instantiate technological devices into culture?  In other words, cell phones are becoming a cultural standard because of a)their utilization b)the passage of time that's passed since their initial acceptance into society.  Flash-forward 50 years, take into account the rate of cellular growth, wireless bluetooth headsets, and the like, and some kind of ultra-portable, possibly even biological "cell phone" will be the emerging cultural standard and a blackberry or iPhone will be our "fireplace".  

Technology grows at such an accelerated rate because it a)satisfies the goals of economy -- and economy's goal is  simply to just expand -- and b)it supposedly upgrades efficiency.  But culture is the "container" for technology, Neanderthal brethren. 

 

An author, architect, and just all around brilliant dude who grasps the philosophy, chemistry, and industrial layout for installing a new kind of technology that safely nurtures the cultural pace for global ecology is William McDonough.  He has numerous fellowships and prestigious achievements of accolade, and I encourage you to catch some of his writings on new paradigm and architecture if you hold any interest in the advancement of a safe correlation of technology with culture with proportionate growth ratios.  Future blog posts will likely detail some of his writings.

So let's dash over to the technological marketplace where there exist these technological icons who transgressively push the frontiers of gaming, computers, and internet.

When it comes to gaming entertainment technology, you can't get any further up the ladder than Shigeru Miyamoto

 the guy who created cornerstone games such as Super Mario Bros., Zelda, and Donkey Kong.  

In recent news, on July 1, 2008 the richest man in the world is stepping down from his command post at Microsoft.  What cultural changes will this manufacture from the technological landscape?  JFK reminded us that "a nation may rise or fall, a man may die, but an idea lives on".  Being an all-time Mac-Apple fan and affiliate, it's hard to have sympathy for Mr. Gates, but no doubt his competitive leadership set an indelible notch for business efficacy.

These guys push the technological consumer's concept of "what's fireplace" and what's mind-boggling new.  The greater the immersion in "common place technology" the greater the habituation to that technology.  Time involved with something directly relates to the familiarity with that thing.  That's great...if and only if we immerse ourselves in galvanizing technologies.  Habituating ourselves to maladaptive technologically or inopportune technologies denigrates our cultural peace of mind or shatters the delicate balance of our earth's ecology.  So that's something to obviously keep in check.

Additionally, what happens when there's a schism between technology advancing and cultural peace of mind?  A forest fire of global devastation due to global warming, russian models jumping out of windows, and just general out-of-alignment.  The cognitive dissonance of a culture out of pace with its technology is deadly.  Sure, it might be easier to pinpoint global warming as a consequence of incommensurate cultural and technological levels than a Russian model killing herself, but taking one's life is just a behavior of being "out of sync" and out of touch with one's personal goals and we've got to expand upon the cultural horizons to ensure the pace of technology doesn't get become out of sync with our cultural tier.  

One thing I've recently done is take a break from trying to have the most cutting edge phone or reading the news items 2 minutes hot off the blog press and just reacquaint myself with my long-time hobby of chess.  Reading some theories books on the logic, intuitive, creative, and even psychological vantage points of chess provided EXACTLY the type of technology I needed to create balance in my life.  And yet chess is a 6th century Indian game (derived from chaturanga, which sounds like some kind of yoga pose).  The Knights Templar, made famous in the Da Vincio code, played chess in the 13th century, and "modern" chess kicked in at around 14oo.  Either way it's respectively, 1500, 800, or 600 years old.  It goes without saying that chess is a "fireplace"; it's a technological game so habituated into acceptance that it has been dubbed as something "old-fashioned".  And yet that "fireplace" technology, that oldest of oldest games, was precisely the technology I needed to restore balance and provide emotional well-being to my life.  Technology, therefore, doesn't have to be exist as something "new", it just must have the relationship to our emotional needs to create a fusion of balance and efficiency, instead of merely a "replacement" for some void.  

Basically what I'm saying is in a state of disarray, instead of jumping to the next technological gadget, play a nice game of chess!