When Technology Moves Faster Than Culture
With so many new technologies coming at us all at once, culture isn’t keeping up. Can it catch up? Here’s how it might and why it's important to understand.
When cell phones got small enough, men carried them on their belts, women often hung them on their bags. We’d answer them in the middle of a meal or pop out of meetings. It took us a while to figure out the cultural norms of etiquette. Then along came smartphones and shortly after that, social media, cryptocurrencies, blockchain, and Generative AI like ChatGPT and Claude.
All of these technologies have come along and popped into our social fabric so fast that cultural norms, behaviours and customs have lagged behind so much that we’ve ended up with a sort of compound cultural lag. Or we might call it “Networked Cultural Lag.”
So what does this mean and what does it tells us about why we’re struggling to adopt so many technologies coming at us so fast? For technology companies, this will represent significant challenges for business models. For consumers, it is already showing up in how they’re increasingly seeking ways to mitigate technologies in their daily lives. This is an important social signal.
The symptoms of culture lagging against technological advancement can be seen through the ideas of a digital detox, the rise of digital wellness coaches, no phone zones in bars and restaurants, tech-free vacations and cultural terms like “touch grass”. We’re going from FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) to JOMO (Joy of Missing Out.)
Some pundits have defined this as a form of technology backlash, a rejection action. In some ways yes, but I believe this is mostly the result of cultural lag as culture at scale is trying to figure out where, why and how all these technologies come into play.
The idea of cultural lag goes back almost a century to American sociologist William Ogburn who coined the term in 1922. He posited that while technology is the main engine of societal progress, it is tempered by how society responds to technologies. He proposed that technology advances tends to create change faster than non-material culture (values, ideas, norms, social governance.) I think this applies quite well as to where we are today. Except technological change is compounding at ever faster speeds. More than before in human history.
In the past, such as when the railroad came along, wireless radio and telephone, we had some time between these innovations to figure out how to make them work for us. Today however, we are, as a society, dealing with multiple lags at the same time.
Some Silicon Valley leaders, heads of technology giants and venture capital firms are blaming government regulations and rules as stopping the advancement of some technologies. This is only partly correct. More significantly it is culture reacting to an abundance of technologies and trying to figure out how to make them all work. And as always, culture is the ultimate arbiter of all technologies in human societies. Always has been, likely always will be.
The image below is what I’ve come up with as a theory of how cultures adopt technologies at scale. They must move through these layers to the substrate level, which is where a given technology is so pervasive and been finally shaped by culture that we don’t think about it much. Examples would be cars, telephones, radio, television, email etc.
Today, Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools like Generative AI (ChatGPT, Claude, Midjourney etc) are at the interface layer. Rapid adoption across society in an experimental way. AI tools haven’t fully filtered down into the social practice layer and are barely edging into the institutional layer. And AI is a long way off yet from the substrate layer.
Then we have all kinds of other technologies moving through these layers at various speeds such as genetic engineering, nanotechnology, blockchain, Web3 and decentralisation tools, drones, satellites, renewable energy technologies and self-driving cars, virtual and augmented reality and more. As you can see, this has all lead to varying degrees of what I term “differential cultural lag” across multiple societies.
What creates more challenges to all of this are information technologies such as the internet and all the various devices attached to it. Whereas with analog information technologies (writing, books, radio, early telephones) we had time and space to figure out their role and place in culture. Now, digital information technologies means a lot more people all at the same time across a number of sociocultural systems having a lot of debates and discussions around all these technologies at the same time. This is good, but adds a lot pf nuance to how technologies get adopted.
A raucous cacophony of ideas, theories, concerns, joys and other emotions. On the upside it is much easier for a technology to generate awareness at scale. On the downside it means culture can give feedback faster. Often in unexpected ways.
In the technology industry a product is often considered successful when it reaches “product/market fit” meaning the product has been accepted by the market and is generating revenue and thus, profit. With it being much easier to create software products today, this has lead to the challenge of gaining market traction in a crowded space with many a tech company not understanding that the drag they’re facing isn’t “the market” so much as it is cultural reactions and behaviours.
Each new iteration and compounding of a technology creates new forms of lag before the prior ones can resolve themselves in culture. New technologies, like Generative AI tools demand immediate adoption and adaptation, but culture at a meaningful level, like the institutional layer, takes time.
What we end up with is that compounding cultural lag and differential cultural lag. We have unresolved tensions in one layer impacting other layers, creating a sort of cascade filtering through the layers. This makes adaption much harder.
This all means sociocultural systems having to develop means and ways of integrating technologies into society (rules, norms, behaviours etc.) and how we will develop new ways for cultural adaptation of emerging technologies. Enormous challenges for tech companies.
Throughout history, cultures have always figured out how we want to adopt and adapt technologies as we go through cycles of change. Culture, like technologies, is mutable, always evolving. We will figure it out again.
What we are seeing today with reactions to some of these technologies is the emergence of new cultural mechanisms and processes for how we are processing technological change at such a scale and speed.
One might compare this to a healthy immune system learning to process this digital stimuli and creating new ways to require technologies to adapt to us when we feel at scale, like they might change us too much. We want technologies to bring out the best in what means to be us as humans.
What I think we are beginning to see is the emergence of a more thoughtful, meaningful and intentional relationship with technologies. A future that will serve us better.