He said something like this:
"Today, with so much technology and such ease in getting online to find information, the time between not knowing and knowing has become so short that it removes the excitement and value in actually learning something new."
I am not sure if he realizes how many theorists have written about this exact concept of losing the sense of being human, or alienation (Marx), or anomie (Durkheim), etc, but his example is the perfect description of how technology has contributed to removing people from feeling alive.
To use a more specific example, and to explain some of the rest of his joke which he used to build up to the moment of that truly fascinating comment, I will use my own personal experience of just over a week ago:
I was hanging out outside with a friend when a moth flew by and landed on the wall right beside us. My friend blew the smoke from his cigarette on the moth in the hopes of somehow killing it or scaring it away.
I said: "If you are trying to kill it by giving it cancer, you might need to blow a lot more smoke on it."
We laughed and then wondered: "Do moths have lungs? How do their respiratory systems work?"
My friend pulls out his iPhone and in a matter of seconds we discover that moths breathe by absorbing oxygen from the air through their bodies.
We then move on to talking about something else.
The comedian on the show told a similar story to show the ease in learning brought to us by technology. But then he countered that by imagining how it used to be before the internet.
People used to ask these random questions like the one about the moth and spend days wondering about how they breathe. People walked around asking others, hoping that someone would know the answer. Some time later, they would finally come across someone who happened to put them out of their misery with a suitable explanation.
The people asking the question would feel so reinvigorated and so special because now they knew something they did not know before! They would value that knowledge so much more because the quest for the answer has brought meaning to that information!
And isn't that what it means to be human? To long for things and then conquer them?
Is it better to assign some shallow meaning
to millions of little things?
Or to deepy relate to just a few important experiences?
Could technology be dehumanizing society?
2 comments:
Very interesting observation and questions! Yes, the immediacy of having information at your fingertips is revolutionary. My father said, "I wonder how much smarter I would be if I had grown up with the internet." But his remark looks at the potentiality. Do you think the access to the answers is making us collectively smarter?
I do believe that having access to more info makes us all smarter, yes. By being able to learn just about anything in a matter of seconds does indeed allow for so much potential but on an individual rather than collective level, in my opinion. I guess it makes people smarter in learning about more things, but not necessarily learn more altogether because by learning a little about everything, we miss out on learning a lot about one thing.
But we could also argue that it is easier to learn more because of the speed of acquiring info, so I guess we could argue the internet makes us smarter.
Or is it because now that we are in the "information age" suposedly we place more impotance in learning more anyways as opposed to the times before the internet?
One way or another, we have yet to learn if this all contributes to building our identities as human beings or if it alienates us from our humanitary goals and values...
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