The impact of technological change on moral virtues is more than we may sense.

the upside | three trends | reinforcment | sense of loss | lessons

Since the introduction of the clock, the printing press and gunpowder in the middle ages, pastoral & agrarian values are giving and have given way to mechanical and urban measures of worth, appropriate behavior and punctuality.

Some historians argue the roots of modern culture, or modernity lay in the new way of looking at the world that were associated with painting in perspective.

Modernity can be seen as hip, progressive and rational.

Pursell sees a key ingredient in modernity as the European (American and Japanese) attempt to dominate less technically advanced cultures.

But critics like Jacques Ellul, Lewis Mumford, and Langdon Winner have argued that automated technology is as profoundly disturbing on our own culture as industrial mechanization was in the 1790s and which critic Neil Postman said may easily lead to:

Alienation

Misplaced sentiment

Reification

each and all contributing to

Technological autism

Three significant trends in contemporary technological development that affect our behavior, organization of work, society and culture are:

1. Alienation, the removal from something important, such as a land area, or the means of making a living, or some event that makes a person feel that they do not fit in to a larger process or do not belong to a social group.
2. Misplaced sentiment, the confusion of meaning to the extent that the expression of feelings is directed or misdirected to something other than what may really deserve a person's attention. "Mother's Day" was created by greeting card companies at a time (1890s) when women where having far fewer children than their mothers had raised.
3. Reification, to treat something that is not real as if it were. A subtle transformation of nothing into something.

   reify, verb, to make (something abstract) more concrete or real. "The silent majority," the average person, the liberal media, justice, honor, time, purity, freedom, immortality, "the organization", the ether, levity, "phlogiston." Such as.

Reinforcing the contemporary feelings of anxiety over the pace of change, the scale of events and the impending obliteration of familiar ties that bind people to their communities, the confusion that misplaced sentiment and reification can foster, leads to widespread indifference. Such indifference emerges as a reasonable defense against the unexpected, but grows into a willful and even lethal ignorance about how others live, earn a living, or find security.

In many ways this confluence of alienation and misplaced sentiment is what Ralph Waldo Emerson meant when he said "things are in the saddle and ride mankind," or what Thomas Carlyle meant when he suggested that the replacement of skilled workers by machinery had caused people to become "mechanical in head and heart." We have, in the words of contemporary writer Joan Didion become "lost in the mechanics of everyday life."

In this state of loss, suspension of judgment, and widespread confusion people are susceptible to reify those ideals or values that have no actual existence. This is because there are no concrete standards by which to measure important values. Thus, for example, people seek to earn a degree rather than to laboriously learn a body of knowledge. In the sense of experience, the destination supersedes the journey. As novelist Don Delillo satirizes, in his novel White Noise, nothing really important happens unless it is covered on television. And as historian Daniel Boorstin argued nearly forty years ago, in America since the 1880s, imagery has slowly replaced reality as the true measure of our distortion because we have misunderstood the power of technology to alter our perceptions, shift our moral values and erode our capacity to judge the alleged from the actual situation.

Devoid of the vibrance that we derive from doing skillful work the world of shadows creeps cartoonlike over and real and deep expressions of our moral imaginations and reassuring sensitivity. In such a world where dreamscapes replace experience, we trivialize important events because we fail to have a necessary depth perception that comes from knowing how techology works, what are the proper maintenance procedures, and how to effectively repair tools when they fail.

From collapsing bridges, to the space shuttle disasters, and to automatic weapons we may have forgotten that any technology requires us to become smarter and more careful than the power of the tools we rely on, if we are to safely and effectively use new inventions to create a more humane, responsive, and caring society.

Pacey | Pursell | Time

Diamond | Tenner

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