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 14 Dec 2002 @ 23:47, by Flemming Funch
It is hard to introduce new ideas when you're dependent on only verbal persuasion and education to change people's minds. Things often don't change that way before the people with the old ideas die out.
But give people a technological device that happens to do something they like, and the world might be changed comparatively instantly.
Devices don't discriminate. Devices are generic. A telephone doesn't care what race, religion, height, weight or gender you are. It is equally present for anybody who wants to use it. It has no feelings about it.
But devices organize people. Or, rather, their presence allow people to self-organize in new ways. And that will typically be ways that are less dependent on emotions or separateness or classification of people.
Devices make you unite with others, not based on some way you in particular are different from others, but based on how you're all connected. The connectedness of technological devices brings things together that previously wouldn't be together. People are connected and united through technology who wouldn't have dreamt of connecting with each other without it. The same phone system, the same Internet, the same water pipes, the same TV standards, the same cars, the same nuts and bolts are used by very different people. And it unites them, without them having to consciously make a decision for or against it.
The spontaneous and voluntary adoption of new technological devices is a force that changes the world faster than anything else. A revolution takes place, meeting next to no resistance.
It rests on the shoulders of technological designers to think up devices that not only are useful and compelling for their prospective users, but that facilitate social behavior that is inherently beneficial for everybody involved, and for their families and communities, and for the planet. Individuals might adopt a new piece of technology because they selfishly like what it does, but it is the social and environmental re-organization that is the most important result.
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Category: Inventions
4 comments
15 Dec 2002 @ 00:13 by strydg : devices
devices are the vices. they condition perception when we need to be whole. they should serve us but we become their servants. for us here and now they are the necessary evil, as it were. they began as a way to be free of nature's whim. but narcisistic as we are, we fell in love. devices mediate our relationships. even words, the root of device, come between us.
15 Dec 2002 @ 00:50 by shawa : See ?
There´s a hole in the NCN device, otherwise people would understand what you mean by the use of "devices" (NCN being one).
15 Dec 2002 @ 01:52 by ming : Device
Yeah, the NCN Device probably has a few holes, being the Sieve it is, heheh.
And, yeah, the whole point is that if we design and use devices well, they might actually help us connect with our wholeness, our inter-connectedness, and might help us evolve faster. Or, if designed less well, they might help us screw ourselves up faster than we might get around to doing otherwise.
15 Dec 2002 @ 09:33 by butterflykiddo : LOL!
Indeed, it is so. But The Holey Sieve is OK, generally :-)
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