Is it just technology?

I am currently reading Lewis Wolpert's book Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast in which he suggests that it was the need to develop tools and feed ourselves that caused the human brain to evolve the ability to think causally rather than the desire to be social as is commonly believed.

Briefly - and over simplifying horrendously - as slime develops into an organism that develops an eye to find food the eye needs somewhere for its signals to be processed. When you start to add ears to hear, mouths to taste and limbs which can touch you need an ever more complex brain to process these inputs to allow food to be found more effectively. Once you get to the stage of understanding causality you are on the way to the capacity for thought, language and social understanding that distinguishes us from the rest of life on the planet.

I started wondering what would happen if we applied these ideas to our assumptions about technology and in particular social computing and Web 2.0. We tend to be a bit squeamish about the technology and subordinate it to the social activities it supports but what if the technology was actually teaching us new behaviours? What if the development of new tools and new technological environments began to actually change the way we think and eventually to alter the way our brains work?

Comments

[Simon]

Good stuff, Euan. I read a recent post on the Lewis360 blog about Jaron Larnier which I think might tie in with what you're saying... could the obsession with causality be linked to what Jaron terms "digital Maoism"?

[Lee Bryant]

Eeentersting...

The computers-should-feed-our-minds point is part of my recent presentations on collective intelligence, but my point there is actually that computers should tap into less causal, linear, front brain thinking and try to feed the older, more established processing powers of the brain that use basic pattern matching.

FWIW, I think computers have already changed some aspects of the way we think. I am quite sure that I organise thoughts in hierarchical trees that look a bit like Windoze 3.1 Explorer (sad, I know) or a DOS folder listing. I tend to think there are areas of the brain that can be re-wired by experience and possibly passed on in that form to future generations.

If you see a kid literally creating synaptic connections through learning and experience then you realise just how much we can alter our wiring after we enter the world.

[Jon Husband]

I have a sense .. that I cannot articulate in any clear way at present .. that the technology, and what we are increasingly using it for (to connect and communicate, over time in some form of relationship) is already teaching us new behaviours.

I am wondering about whether we project ourselves "into" the connection and communication and its sustenance, differently than we have before or do in 3D life, and whether this is beginning to exert behavioural influences on us. And I think there is a ghostly persistence to the conversations we read or type into, such that we think about them in interesting ways whilst moving about when not engaged with the technologies that have carried the source of what we are thinking about.

I think so, I just can't articulate what I think I feel yet.

[Jeremy Francis]

Interesting discussion. I wonder whether we're psychologically or maybe emotionally resilient enough to really benefit from (or even cope with) these emerging behaviours? Equally, on balance are they intrinsically good or bad?

The Crackberry addiction.... the 'Add Me Myspace I'm Popular' disease.... even the 'number of blogs linking here' materialistic currency of the blogosphere. Not a million miles away from substance addiction, the 'famous for being famous' phenomenon and the desire for ever increasing amounts of money.......

No doubt good things happen when you connect people, and technology is making that happen on an unprecedented scale. The unintended consequences could have a social cost that as yet remains an unknown. One to watch.

[Earl Mardle]

I don't even think its a question.

Back in 96 I went to a one day event in Wellington where someone asked what the internet mean to each individual in the room.

When my turn came I had zero hesitation, it is rewiring our brains. It is changing not only what we think about, but what we CAN think about, and how we think it.

Every technology does that. Cars did it, telephones and TV did it and right now Iäm logged in to a free terminal at Stockholm Arlanda airport waiting for a flight to Sydney that will take me via Frankfurt and bangkok and take 25 hours.

And everything about this, from the flights, to the reasons I travel, to this message and the people I have met on this thread, are all down to this technology, all of it except the concept of flying would have been meaningless to me in October 1995.

And the weirdest thing of all is not the material facts but my attitude to it; which is that it is perfectly normal.

I have no doubt that my brain has been significantly reconfigured in the last ten years; I see it as good practise for the rewiring to come.

[Jon Husband]

Earl, thanks for articulating clearly, with examples, what I feel and experience as well.

[joy green]

hi, just found your blog and am loving it, especially as i have an intranet to build at the moment!
this post in particular reminded me of a great blog kevin kelly is currently running as a book-in-progress on what he calls the technium. check out http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2004/11/inventing_our_h.php

[Euan]

Great link Joy - thanks. Glad you are enjoying the blog too.