by Benjamin Harrison
Victory is the gift of Providence, but the reputation of kings and generals depends on the success or failure of their designs. - Edward Gibbon
Information technology is the way of the future, but the life under the skin is where our story begins. Human progress has always been measured by what the toil of hands and the sweat of the brow can accomplish. Throughout recorded human history, achievements, and the achievers, helped to define an age. Wit as carried forth by the encyclopédistes defined The Age of Voltaire; power and conquest defined The Age of Napoleon. Presently, we live in The Age of Information.
A veritable wealth of knowledge, more fantastic than that of Alexandria, can be carried in the pocket and readily accessed by a 9 or a 90 year old. Even the preferred method of media delivery (first radio, then television) is blurred with online video streaming and satellite radio merging into a single unit, a single soundbite of information. Information is processed so rapidly, it's often a wonder how our senses can keep up with the demands routinely placed on them.
In How The Mind Works, leading cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker writes in-depth on 'modern ingenuity in creating a pleasurable sensory overload.' The whir of hard drives, the blistering speed of a touch-screen mobile device, the aura of led lights canvassing our horizon that is equalled only in speed by the information that our mind processes. Despite this digital landscape, we've remained strongly connected to our basic emotional make-up: hunger causes pain, pain causes sadness, sadness causes grief, ad infinitum. Why is this, one might ask? It's because although we mold our environment with amazing works of art and technological marvels to deliver them, our very nature, the very fabric of our existence, has changed very little over time. Our emotional response to certain stimulus might speed up, but the response itself, hasn't changed. Instead of Shakespearean tragedy unfolding, act by act, in the relatively slow pace of a 16th century theater production, we experience the same feelings in a four minute internet video or a 30 second super bowl advertisement. Instead of the penmanship of unrequited love taking months to reach the lover, we get it almost instantaneously via e- mail or, in most cases, faster with text messaging. While the speed at which communication travels is astounding, perhaps the quality of such instant communication has deteriorated because we only have time to respond before the inbox fills up again. Spellcheckers and templates have replaced the years of study that it used to take to master written communication. Digital editing alleviates the often stressful and time-consuming venture of a dark room or analog tape splicing. While more can be produced faster and as a consequence, cheaper, the quantity doesn't compensate for the quality, or lack thereof as many might argue.
Our story really should begin in what is commonly referred to as the Second Industrial Revolution. A few generations before Henry Ford revolutionized mass production techniques (many of which are still in place today), ingenious inventors and businessmen decided to maximize efficiency in various production processes by harnessing steam and metal as an extension of a worker's hands. Although the work became compartmentalized and repetition was an essential ingredient, profits were increased as assembly lines sputtered to production. This paved the way for the ancestors of many modern conveniences and, while the masses enjoyed luxuries once known only by kings, the owners of these factories became exceedingly wealthy. One of the most riveting accounts of this age of fabrication is Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. Even though it deals specifically with the meat industry, it easily and at times, brutally, provides the reader with a great understanding of how this paradigm shift took place, and what it meant to be 'modern'.
The severe downside to mass manufacturing was felt early on. While humans controlled these mechanical wonders, becoming a skilled artisan looked less and less like a viable job prospect. Why on earth would anyone want to part with their hard earned money for a master woodworker to create a
one-of-a-kind musical instrument, when a factory turned out hundreds per day, and at a fraction of the cost? Who had the time to wait? With the automobile replacing the once 4 mph world of horse-drawn carriages and the telephone making transatlantic communication possible, and thus replacing all but the infamous allure of luxury liners, no one had the time anymore to invest fruitlessly in day-to-day living that earmarks us as humans. What, you might be asking yourself, does this have to do with a Facebook or an iPhone? Superficially, very little, outside of the historical precedents that made such social networks and devices possible. Beyond the surface, underneath the allure of something new, these devices have superseded the way we communicate, work, play, create art, capture ideas & share them.
If you could take all of recorded human history and compress it to a month, the Age of Information represents the last second of the last hour of the last day, and yet the impact of the last 20 years of pushing the technical envelope has happened with greater ferocity than all of the DaVinci's and Michaelangelo's for the last two-thousand years...combined. An amazing feat, by anyone's standards, but yet we still share in the same plight that our ancestors faced, we just feel it much, much faster than they did. While necessity is the mother of invention, do we invent new products out of necessity, or is it rather from a desire to impose our will and shape our world to standards that we can't possibly understand? In other words, how much faster can we process greater amounts of stimulation and volumes of information, when the human mind hasn't changed since Plato warned of such an environment in his Allegory of the Cave?
Only posterity and hindsight can give us a proper answer to that.