The Gods Of Technology Fetish

An Evolving Culture Of Technology Dependency

A gadget freak, nerd, the buffoon with a screwdriver, Tinker Tom, early adapter, lighthouse customer, techno junkie, techno freak…

The list goes on. These are some of the names that have hung around people like me, more often referring to somebody whom I consider the gods of all things technology. Well, more than the ability to create technology, it is the ruthless pursuance and consumption of technology that these folks are masters of. Had it not been for this technology fetish of theirs, the development of technology would possibly have been affected (pun intended).

The ability to consume technology comes as a result of people’s environment and a certain kink in the sequencing of their polypeptide bonds in their DNA that creates a great curiosity for things that the technology spurns out. The environment offers ready availability of technology while that kink causes the compulsion to consume that technology. Traditionally, it is assumed that it is the boys who are more vulnerable to being such gods. But, time being a great leveller, this is turning out to be a myth. You go on the net and you will find as many ladies mastering the art of consuming technology.

Quite a few of these gods are prosumers — a term coined by the famous futurists, the Tofflers, which refers to those people who consume what they produce. There are garage scientists who have created technological wonders and innovations that the world can’t do without today. But the most impacting attribute of the gods of the technology fetish is their ability to consume technology.

The peculiarities of the technology gods make them think and respond differently. When people look at a car and perceive it to be beautiful in an aesthetic sense, those bitten by technology fetish wonder about the aerodynamic designs first and then maybe the aesthetics. The same is true for almost all things that technology throws up. That is one hell of a list because technology today touches everything that we humans touch and then some more.

Well, humans being humans, everyone feels that he or she is a god of sorts and that they are the masters of technology which is omnipresent in the environment, of course in a limited context. Thus, you have a whole lot of people who will lecture you on the technology they use, the pros and the cons and whatnot. There are TV shows to help the would-be gods to find their paths before they start showing the path themselves! There are books and magazines that offer the latest in technology in every field. There are fans writing blog posts about such gods, for such gods offer wisdom to those who seek to become technology gods themselves.

The internet is flooded with more than enough material to satiate anyone aspiring to be a technology god, from renovating cars to innovation in power management, from software that control robots to machine learning, from big data to Artificial Intelligence, you name it, you have it. Say for example, if we consider personal productivity which was devoid of much technology a couple of decades back, has moved on beyond the simple processes and practices to digital productivity these days. The thin line separating personal productivity and digital productivity has become even more obscure with a whole bunch of productivity apps. David Allen would have never thought that in his own lifetime, his idea of GTD® would be implemented using the software! To quote him from his website, “Your mind is for having ideas, not holding them.®” indicates that it is time to learn something new.

That brings us to another important aspect of technology — producing data. The image below by Raconteur published in a report by World Economic Forum is indicative of what mankind is up to. It is mind-boggling. As per Statista the end-user global spending on wearable devices alone is likely to double from 32.45 billion US Dollars in 2018 to 62.96 billion US Dollars in 2021. With all the data thrown up by fitness trackers, the technology gods have a long and bright pathway to wherever the human race is headed, at breakneck speeds. Then there are Youtube folks publishing videos faster than all the tomato plants producing seeds collectively can ever can. All this is not likely to slow down, in fact, data production is speeding up even more every week.

The speed of evolution driven by technology has been a little too much for people like the old English teacher of mine who feels that she can no longer be considered educated! All her post-graduation degrees and diplomas put together are not able to teach her how to use her smartphone for making an investment through the banking app. The bookshop which once was crowded and used to be an oasis for the people wanting to enhance their knowledge give a deserted look. People love to buy their books online and those like me prefer the digital version and would happily read on Kindle or “listen to ” a book on Audible. It is very difficult to tell my old English teacher that books are now also “listened to”. I do not have the heart to tell her that chatting and talking are two different things, the former has come to mean an exchange of typed messages while the latter still means what she learnt it to be.

Things are changing at a pace far too fast for a single lifetime to adapt without getting sucked into the infinite OODA loop that keeps people glued to some screen or the other. Education itself is losing its shelf life which once used to be a lifetime. Today what you study may not be relevant a decade or two down the line. The following words from Dr Yuval Harari’s essay on what the year 2050 has in store for humankind are more relevant than any wise word that an educator may offer:-

“…in 1018, poor Chinese parents taught their children how to plant rice or weave silk, and wealthier parents taught their boys how to read the Confucian classics, write calligraphy or fight on horseback — and taught their girls to be modest and obedient housewives. It was obvious these skills would still be needed in 1050.”

The world was never meant to provide so many changes in one lifetime, but that has now changed, courtesy, the technology gods and those pushing out technological advancements faster than their predecessors from the Industrial Age could ever even imagine. The cultural shift is not only a surprise but also a rude shock to many who could not adopt. The first computer that I bought in 1999 had a 450MHz P-IV processor with an 8GB HDD. It was the best that was commercially available in the market then. The phone which lies silently next to the laptop, as I punch these lines and is capable of doing things far too much, many times faster and in a much better way. That small piece of beauty from the technology world, which hardly occupies any space on my desk, is a giant compared to the old computer, which occupied most of the workspace on my desk. Some people could never shift on the learning curve due to the inability to do so which could be attributed to any of the many reasons, varying from lack of need to do so or simply lacking the will to learn. While some did not feel the need to shift at all, many amongst them arrogantly so, feeling that they did need not. Two decades back I could hear some people laugh away at the talk of updating, saying, “I have lived half my life pretty comfortably without adapting to the evolving technology. I don’t need to update.” To broach the topic of moving up with technology today, with all those people would mean being rude. Technology has shifted culture that much. Had it not been for technology evolving all the time, the collective response to COVID-19 would have been very different. Concepts like WFH and Video-conferencing would not have become part of everyday language so fast. While a pandemic like that makes people react to take suitable actions to safeguard themselves, the technology adjusts itself to continue to evolve and grow.

The evolving technology has also had its impact on the human mind. There are voids that are getting left out. People do not remember the numbers like the way did back then, albeit those numbers were few. Today that ability is outsourced to smartphones. My mother still remembers all the birthdays and anniversaries of the entire extended family while I would easily forget many important ones but for the calendar which I carry in my pocket. It is synced with my computer and set up to remind me at the best time when I can act to make that phone call or send a greeting through one of the many messaging apps. The difference is that she would remember as a human should and I act more like an automaton wishing more people but with far lesser emotional connect. Humans are changing too. Most humans are sleep deprived, driven by and consequently distracted by the non-stop notifications and triggers that tax their already shortened attention span. The average attention span seems to be decreasing every year. This is in spite of the fact that the work hours have gone down quite a bit over the years as can be seen from the image below. But there is still a shortage of time today for most humans. The kids are easily bored when the continuous alerts that their gadgets send them are removed from their environment, they simply lack the ability to create new games on the go to engage themselves and have fun. In the years gone by, a tree was good enough for a bunch of boys to invent their games and have fun. What has killed the fun of simply living? Is it really a shortage of time or an inability to be at peace with everything that is happening all around? r is it the addiction to catch up and be current? Or maybe it is the fear of being left out, like my old English teacher that keeps people glued to the piece of glass, or rather the virtual world.

The answer could be different for different people. The variation could not only be restricted to age factor but also to what one did to earn a living. The average corporate guy is physically less active but is on the verge of mental burnout, while an average farmer is physically more active and still has more time for recreation and greater mental peace — he may not suffer from being left out as much as a guy who stares at the screen most of the day.

There was a time when we went out to hang with our friends and spent the entire time talking, sharing and remembering good times. Memories were being created as we cracked jokes and laughed away the evening. Today people get together, but actually, hang out with themselves in their virtual world of Instagram and Facebook or Twitter. Memories are still being created but the busyness in capturing them to be shared in the virtual world has probably taken away the warmth of get-togethers. There is less time to listen to the joke and laugh because it has suddenly become more important to announce the fun time on social media than having fun itself. Only the wise make sure that they are insulated from all such distractions which may such away from the warmth that is born of human bonding. But sadly more and more people are falling prey to technology. That is all a consequence of technology moving up very fast. People have not been able to adapt well, having had no time to evaluate and deliberate on what is good or bad of all that technology has to offer.

Some say that this is how we consume technology while producing it. The more sceptic ones say that we are now slaves to technology. People have started talking about the balanced consumption of technology, which some claim, holds the keys to resolving the cognitive dissociation of sorts that most of us suffer from. But the bottom line remains that we are affected by technology and you like it or not we will continue to use it on a regular basis, whatever be our field of work.

Thus, we are either the gods of technology fetish or are impressed by one, even if not aspiring to be one, while the rest of the world remains outdated!