CLAL on Culture Archive
Welcome to CLAL on Culture where you will find the latest thoughts and reflections by CLAL faculty and associates on contemporary culture: high and low, material and ethereal, trendy and retro, Jewish and otherwise. Every other week you will find something new on this page.
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Man Against Machine: Human Nature and the Limits of the High Tech Revolution
By
David Kraemer
Had
we been around a century ago and witnessed the first automobiles making their way over
inadequate roads, would we have been able to imagine the enormous social revolutions these
machines would bring? Would we have looked at
these contraptions and said, “Wow, just imagine how our lives might be changed if
this technology were to be improved only slightly! If
traveling from point A to point B were to become quick and easy, then people would no
longer need to live so close together. They
wouldn’t need to live close to where they work.
People could move away from the cities, away from close-knit communities,
and own their own private homes in the suburbs. As
a result, social scrutiny would ease; social pressure would become less intense. And, in the process, traditional communities that
gain their cohesion through social scrutiny and social pressure would break down. People would cease to think of themselves as
primarily members of a group and begin to give priority to their individual tastes and
preferences. Just imagine what such a society
would look like!”
Well,
we don’t have to imagine, because we already live there. We know the results of the automobile revolution
all too well. But would we have anticipated
that all of this might happen if we had been present when those first cars appeared on our
city streets a century ago? Or would we have
looked on in amusement and failed to appreciate the long-term implications? I suspect most of us would have failed to
comprehend. How many of us, after all, can
look so far beyond our own immediate experiences?
I
ask these questions because, in our day, some have suggested that in the course of the
twenty-first century the computer will transform our culture as profoundly and
irreversibly as the automobile did in the course of the twentieth. Some have even suggested that, in time, the
computer revolution will significantly alter what it means to be human. The computer (meaning, primarily, the Web with
its various capabilities for facilitating communication and transferring information),
they say, already allows people to transcend physical space and time. Through this technology, people can just as easily
communicate with someone twelve time zones away as they can with someone in the next room. Voices and faces can be brought together into the
same “virtual” space, making real physical encounters less important, if not
obsolete. As importantly, people can enter
computer-generated worlds where they can choose who to be and how to be, with no
restraints but those imposed by the limits of their own imaginations. A man can choose to be a woman, a white European
to be Chinese. In the virtual community of
the future, my virtual self will enter into a relationship with your virtual self and, as
a consequence, we will both be freed from the constraints imposed on our identities until
now by the un-chosen and contingent facts of physical and sexual embodiment, nationality
and religion. Relationships, communities and
identities will all change, and everything we have taken for granted about what it means
to be “human” will be transformed. This,
at least, is what some creative analysts were imagining only a few years ago, when the
NASDAQ was approaching 5000.
But
as the tech market has fallen back to earth, so too has the futurists’ wild-eyed
vision of how the tech revolution will transform our human nature and our world. The former, almost messianic, tech-euphoria has
given way to the tech-doldrums, a condition informed by a realistic skepticism concerning
what these technologies can and cannot do. Undoubtedly,
the information technologies have brought about a revolution of sorts, and the full
cultural and social implications of these technologies still remain to be realized. But of one thing we may be sure: as our human
nature is not infinitely malleable, the impact of the tech revolution on the basic
contours of our social life will be limited by this constraint. The tech revolution may change human society in
many significant ways, but not at the most fundamental level.
Why
am I so certain of this? Consider the
following paradox: My daughters commonly spend hours with groups of friends, enjoying
social contact along Broadway or in the park after school, and then come home and find
themselves chatting endlessly with the same friends via “instant messaging.” Now, one might think that the instant messaging
would render the after school gatherings obsolete, or that the online exchanges would cut
down the time spent in the on-street exchanges. But
the evidence I have seen suggests otherwise. Online
chats extend and supplement face-to-face exchanges, allowing the
after school social hour to extend well into the evening.
Face-to-face contact remains as important as ever. Online socializing doesn’t replace, displace
or undermine face-to-face socializing. The
former serves and extends the latter.
Apparently
the screen cannot replace the flesh. The
warmth of eye contact, the unmediated voice, the casual touch, the sexual charge, can
never be equaled online, let alone surpassed. The
human creature thrives on real (not virtual) companionship, and withers in isolation. As persuaded as I am that many of our
characteristics are “socially constructed,” our need for unmediated social
contact seems to be an immutable quality of our species (and individual exceptions do not
disprove the rule). The Torah agrees with
this claim, declaring, from the very beginning, that “it is not good for the human to
be alone.” If the Torah is
correct—and I believe it is—then the social consequences of the technological
revolution will be limited by the social nature of the very humans whom it affects. Consequently, we will continue to live in face-to-face
communities very much like those we know today.
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