There is a meme that circulates every few months. A picture, black and white, the 1950s perhaps, everyone on a train with their head buried in a newspaper. It comes with a subtitle along the lines of: ‘All this technology is making us anti-social’. Oh the irony. Check mate, old bean. *like*. On to next meme.
(click on PDF icon, above right, if you prefer back script on white)
The fatuous conclusion: technology has always been feared, and those fears have always been proven 
wrong. The further implication is that technological change is always the same in every temporal and cultural context, and is always positive or at worst, benign.
It’s hard to unpack the gross oversimplification of the sentiment behind this meme. Every new mass media device imparts radical changes onto society. From the impact of the printing press (undermining of the authority of the church, codification of language within national borders), television (changes to the family unit, to consumption and marketing), to the way social media has changed the nature of political engagement and activism.
Smart phone technology, the Internet, and how we use them, is fundamentally changing the modern world in numerous ways. I’ll focus on just two: surveillance capitalism and the structure of brain.
Surveillance Capitalism
The first, rather obvious point is this: technology is not value neutral. It is invented for a purpose, invented in a specific political economy, and is mass-consumed within a specific culture. Smart phones are created by the ultra-privileged libertarian elite of Silicon Valley. The most popular applications on our phones and computers are Google, Facebook and Twitter, again created by the princelings of the US west coast.
Google and the like (Google, in particular) discovered somewhere along the line that all the data they were collecting from our online searches was worth money. A lot of money. Because it could predict behaviour, in particular our patterns of consumption, it could also start to shape our behaviour as consumers. If we buy this, then we’ll probably buy that. If we are interested in this subject, we may like that. If this is our sexual preference, or that is our health problem, or this our guilty pleasure: well, a smart megacorp can make money from that knowledge.
The sacred, dark corners of your life (as well as the ones you brag openly about) are monetized by the data collectors and onsold, onsold, onsold. Fitbit, for example, wants to sell Qantas health information about its employees, but has been blocked from doing so by unions. Less unionised workforces don’t have that luxury, and that health data have already been sold.
You consent to all this, by the way, you fucking idiot. The things you’d never tell to your best friend you tell to google. Which they then collect, analyse through an algorithm, put in a file, and sell.
And you give it to them for free.
In your pocket is a mass surveillance device that tracks your movements (sometimes you’re even helpful enough to ‘check in’ when you go to a restaurant or bar), has access to your emails (depending on your provider), and predicts your behaviour.
Shoshana Zuboff, who has spent considerable time researching surveillance capitalism, argues: “The game is selling access to the real-time flow of your daily life –your reality—in order to directly influence and modify your behavior for profit. This is the gateway to a new universe of monetization opportunities: restaurants who want to be your destination. Service vendors who want to fix your brake pads. Shops who will lure you like the fabled Sirens… Small wonder, then, that Google recently announced that its maps will not only provide the route you search but will also suggest a destination.”
Ever read a newspaper that reads you at the same time? Ever had a paper newspaper disclose your movements to national security agencies? Ever had a newspaper up and remind you your anniversary is today, and hey here’s the appropriate gift?
Not the same. Not even close.
We are both the consumer and the product of surveillance capitalism. We are the useful idiots that enrich those that spy on us.
The Structure of the Brain
Another revolutionary change is occurring in our minds. The neural networks of our brains are wonderfully adaptable things. They constantly rewire themselves as we commit new experiences to long term memory, as we counter radical changes to our environments, and as we practice mechanical things like learning the piano.
If you remember anything of this article one week from now, it means the structure of your brain has changed.
Ironically, this has huge implications for the part of our mind that hasn’t really changed in millennia: our Neanderthal mind. This old part of our brain is geared, as a basic survival instinct, to hunt for new information. Where once it hunted for food, looked for shelter, or changes in the weather, now it hunts on the internet. It gives us–the user–an endorphin hit with each new snippet of useless information, with each new connection on social media, with each email alert pinging that phone in our pocket. Large swaths of the population are, literally, drug addicts, albeit to a natural drug.
This addiction rewires our neural pathways. We have – according to some studies – become slightly better at multitasking, sifting through piles of data, and adapting quickly to new information. Though even these mild benefits are strongly disputed.
But this has come at the expense of memory formation.
Eric Kandel, who won the Nobel prize for his work on memory, says very simply: ‘attention must be paid!’ To 
encode new memories, we need to pay attention. Just a few minutes to focus on an idea, and we’ll likely commit it to long term memory.
Kandel argues: “Everyone knows what attention is. It is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seems to be several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. Focalisation, concentration of consciousness, are its essence. It implies the withdrawal from some things to effectively deal with others.”
The problem is the human brain finds it extremely hard to concentrate on a single, vivid, thought for more than a few seconds while connected to the Internet. So the deterioration in memory occurs at the most basic level: encoding. Memory is affected, not because we have trouble storing or retrieving our experiences, but because they were never absorbed into memory in the first place. Studies have found that the more we depend on exo-memory, the more our capacity for natural memory declines.
When I was young, I knew about twenty phone numbers. Today, I know two. Back then, I needed to remember all those numbers, because if I was out and didn’t have that little note book that sat next to the phone, I couldn’t call anyone. Today I have exo-memory. In my pocket, all the numbers of my friends and 
acquaintances. The phone remembers for me. Yet, what seems like convenience is actually an excuse for my memory function to do a lot less exercise, to atrophy.
There are other implications. A growing body of scientific evidence shows that the average attention span is shortening. Reading for fun, and the length of reading sessions, are also in decline, with the days of curling up on the couch with a book for an afternoon becoming less common. The number of children and adults becoming ‘non-readers’, that is, who do not read a single book in a year, is also increasing.
Technological change is never the same in different epochs. In every era, it must be exposed to critical thinking, and its implications debated and tested.
So stop spreading that fucking meme.
