2: INCREASING RETURNS
Technology has become our culture,...
... our culture technology.
Technology is no longer outside, no longer alien, no longer at the periphery. It is at the center of our lives. "Technology is the campfire around which we gather," says musician/artist Laurie Anderson. For many decades high tech was marginal in presence. Then suddenly--blink--it is everywhere and all-important.
Technology has been able to infiltrate into our lives to the degree it has because it has become more like us. It's become organic in structure. Because network technology behaves more like an organism than like a machine, biological metaphors are far more useful than mechanical ones in understanding how the network economy runs.
But if success follows a biological model, so does failure. A cautionary tale: One day, along the beach, tiny red algae suddenly blooms into a vast red tide. A few weeks later, just when the red mat seems indelible, it vanishes. Lemmings boom, then disappear as suddenly. The same biological forces that multiply populations can decimate them. The same forces that feed on one another to amplify network presences creating powerful standards overnight can also work in reverse to unravel them in a blink. The same forces that converge to build up organizations in so biological a fashion can also converge to tear them down. One can expect that when Microsoft's fortunes falter, their profits will plunge in a curve inversely symmetrical to their success. All the self-reinforcing reasons to join a network's success run in reverse when the success turns to failure and everyone wants to flee.
And the same bloom-and-die cycle can happen with technology.
I don't need a 3G system and ugly cell towers to outsmart the gaggles of texting, lane-swerving scatterbrains--I just need a good book, pad and pencil, natural light, and a calm, focused mind. It's more noble to deny technology's claim to life's center, more sane to breathe deeply once in a while in actual reality, as opposed to somebody else's fake pixel representation of it.
It's almost like a fetish, is it not? That's why it's at the center of our lives, one big great meme that has come to dominate us, render us helpless (not totally though) before it.
That's why I like this blog--it's one of the few places that will say what everybody desperately fears is not true. If it all unravels, many so-called Social Media experts will probably be starving on the streets and since this type of person dominates internet communication, so it seems, this is ignored.
What is technology? Is it anything new or is it only the things that advance society?
Because I find myself addicted to gadgets, many that don't improve my life.
CULTS. You know what that means right? Wrong. Look it up. The news media has turned a simple concept into a black PR point.
Ditto on technology. It only means "How to do something." But your usage (i.e. the news media's interpretation) is that of "gadgets".
Technology has always been at the center of man's drive to survive and always will be as long as the psychiatrists continue to fail in their efforts to drug us all into permanent stupidity.
Kevin, I've translated this post to Spanish. Thanks for an interesting concept.
http://abbagliati.blogspot.com/2009/06/la-tecnologia-se-ha-convertido-en.html