Society & Technology: Awareness
Think AI and technology is changing everything? Not as fast as you might believe. A look at how society becomes aware of technology and reacts at first.
In today’s hyper-connected, always on, instant society, it is not unreasonable to think that we are in a time of phenomenal technological change. In a sense we are. But societal change due to technologies is more often slower than we think. And it all begins with how societies become aware of technologies.
Understanding this can help to give us some perspective in a time where we feel the changes are coming too fast, are causing too much disruption and that there are more negatives than positives. The reality is that we may be perceiving more rapid change than is actually happening.
Today, for example, we think that Artificial Intelligence (AI) is changing everything. It is not. We actually have no idea how AI will change things or how much it will change things, but it is changing far less right now, than we may believe.
Over the next few articles I will be looking at how technologies come into our sociocultural systems, from awareness to how adoption occurs, degrees of change and up to today. And why we are in a time of significant technological change, but less so than we might think. All of this from an anthropological perspective. By the way, we anthropologists study more than old bones.
For the majority of humanity’s existence, new technologies have taken a while to spread around the world. Cultures became aware of new tools as explorers came to new lands or as people wandered around the planet, either as migratory groups or as individuals. Anthropological and archeological research is showing that we wandered around a lot more than we thought we did too.
This slow spread meant societies had a fair bit of time to decide whether or not they liked and wanted a technology, how they’d adapt to suit their own preferences or whether they’d resoundingly reject it.
“Indeed, the dilemma of technological determinism is probably a false problem, since technology is society and society cannot be understood or represented without its technological tools.” — Manuel Castells, Sociologist
What Happens When We Become Aware of New Technologies?
Today, societies become aware of new technologies quite rapidly, thanks to the internet and our instant access to screens. Such a degree of awareness however, out of hundreds of thousands of years of technology use, is only about two decades old.
There isn’t a single way or process humans use when encountering new technologies. Individuals will react based on their own biases, cultural backgrounds and social structures. It is much the same for a culture as a whole. But we can make some general assumptions.
When we encounter new technologies as a society, we see them within the context of our current state of sociocultural being. That is, from the point of current social structures like political and economic systems, militaries, values, norms and traditions. Being human, we tend to make fairly quick evaluations about a technology. A kind of fight or flight reaction.
Some in society see opportunities with new technologies, such as entrepreneurs in our current capitalist society. In more egalitarian societies, opportunities are viewed through the lens of how the technology might benefit the whole of society.
“The smartphone is no longer just a device that we use, it’s become the place where we live.” — Daniel Miller, Anthropologist
Those who feel threatened by a new technology may form social movements, public moral panic may occur (such as we’re seeing with Artificial Intelligence today), and some institutions may react quickly out of fear of their system being disrupted, which is a fear of loss of power. The Catholic Church felt the printing press threatened their system. The media industry felt threatened by bloggers.
The Phase of Technology Awareness in Societies
Today, we are facing an unusual situation in human history. We are dealing with several new revolutionary technologies at the same time; Artificial Intelligence, Genetic Engineering, Robotics, Cryptocurrencies, biotechnologies and a hyper-connected world. And they’re all relatively new in terms of human existence.
While we may think that technologies suddenly appear and then all the change happens, it does not. The awareness phase of new technology can last several years to a few decades. The awareness phase includes a period of time from when a society first becomes aware of a technology to when the technology starts to change sociocultural systems. So it can encompass a fairly lengthy time period.
In this phase, we go through a wide range of societal reactions; dismay, fear, hyper-reaction (such as with AI right now), excitement, anticipation and more. These reactions vary in degrees depending on the sociocultural system being impacted.
Awareness takes a while because societies can be quite large and impacts are only guessed and not understood yet.
After awareness comes the evaluation period, where a culture has acknowledged the technology exists and that it has gained a degree of agency in society that means it will continue to exist. That some changes have happened and that more significant changes are likely to unfold. But we’re not clear how, so we begin to evaluate them as we have some period of history of the technology to reflect upon.
This is usually then things start to get a bit bumpy. The technology begins to change us, but we aren’t entirely sure how. We make a lot of forecasts and predictions. They are almost always wrong. But they’re still important as we explore possible futures to help us navigate uncertain times.
Just as culture and societies are always changing, technologies change as well. We tend to think that technologies change culture without our permission or choice. This is not the case. Technologies are shaped by culture far more than we tend to think.
In my next article, I will explore the period of evaluation of new technologies, a time we are going through now with social media. The awareness phase of social media was about twenty years long. Now we’re evaluating its impacts on our society and beginning to adjust for it. There is no technological determinism, but there is sociocultural determinism. Technologies never override societies. That’s a good thing.