How Is Technology Changing Society?
Information technologies are playing a key role in how we’re reimagining our societies globally. It’s scary but also exciting!
In the liminal time between night and day, a teen in Tokyo trades cryptocurrencies as her grandad sleeps. A coder in Berlin fixes a bug in some code that will ensure the sleeping residents of Buenos Aires have a smooth commute to work in the morning. We live in a phygital world where the digital and physical merge more everyday. Societies around the world are changing at a dizzying pace.
Societies are dismantling the systems and ways of running our societies faster than ever in history. This isn’t a statement of hype or alarmism. Social norms, power dynamics and structures along with global cultural transmission are all undergoing monumental changes. This is both scary and incredibly exciting at the same time.
While it is turbulent now, what is next is, as history shows us, a newly evolved society. The difference this time is that it means broader changes across more of the globe than in previous periods.
I’m covering some rather large theories and concepts in a short article that could really be a book, or a few, in and of itself.
Perhaps the place to start is to look at bureaucracies, both in the public and private sectors. While the whole idea of bureaucracies invokes thoughts of massive institutions that are opaque at best and somehow mysterious. Both boring and fascinating at the same time. But bureaucracies have played an important role in how we’ve organised our societies going back thousands of years to the Egyptians and Romans and probably further.
The technologies disrupting bureaucracies the most today are social media, mobile devices, global reach for citizens and consumers, blockchain and the growing role of decentralised tools, often called Web3. And the democratization of vast amounts of data.
This then brings us to the concept of technological determinism. Some believe that this means technologies drive social change at a fundamental level. This theory arose during the early stages of the Industrial Revolution, another period where technologies, mostly manufacturing and transportation, fundamentally changed how our societies worked.
How Technology Is Changing Society & How We’re Changing
Today, anthropologists, sociologists and economists are taking a more nuanced view. That the shaping of society is more mutual between technology and society. The early view of technological determinism was largely a Western one. It tended to ignore other cultures and how they influence technology development and integration and overlooked social factors.
Renowned economist Dr. Carlota Perez in her seminal work “Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital” shows how it takes about 50 to 60 years for a revolutionary technology to change societies. If we consider the silicon chip as the revolutionary technology that brought on the digital age, then we’re pretty much right on time with her theory.
The symptoms of the current effects of information technologies on our societies today are complex, sometimes nuanced and sometimes very obvious. One of the more nuanced yet profound ones is the compression of time through what sociologist Dr. Hartmut Rosa calls “social acceleration”. Which means shorter periods of societal stability, the faster evolution of social norms such as through memes and pressure on institutions to adapt faster.
We’re seeing an increase in adaptive behaviours such as digital detoxes, screen-free zones, the creation of digital only communities and digital activism and virtual organisations and increased regulation of social media platforms.
There is increased resistance and social negotiation with technologies and some technology platforms through protests, preserving local communities and governments such as the American FTC and the EU parliament with new privacy and data protection laws and right to disconnect regulations.
We are beginning to see the dangers of mis/disinformation and how they’re creating societal divisions. How governments are using information activities to influence foreign elections. The wild and wooly ways cybercriminals are putting immense stress on legal systems and how laws are struggling to keep up with these changes.
Reasons for Hope
It can all seem a bit overwhelming and dark and in some ways it is. But at the same time, there are some rather wonderful, fundamental societal changes underway that while not likely to deliver a utopia, or dystopia, are influencing the future shape of our sociocultural systems.
The concept of Universal Basic Income (UBI) is being tested in countries around the world. Consumers are pushing back against late stage capitalism and it is undergoing a period of significant changes. We see this in part by the BRICS countries trying to push back against the G7 nations, whether that works or not is yet to be seen.
There are almost weekly groundbreaking advances in healthcare from genetics and drugs to treatments and technologies that fight diseases and enable people with disabilities to live more enriched, participatory lives.
As population decline continues, advances in robotics will be vital to keep our modern societies thriving. Fossil fuels are on their way out and we’re making giant leaps in renewable energy technology and energy storage.
We are in the midst of these social and technological revolutions. It’s messy. But the long arch of history shows us that do end up making progress.