When our technology works on us, not just for us

I think everybody recognizes that we are living in a period when our technology, as useful as it is in many circumstances, is having all kinds of unanticipated effects on our lives. Our constant access to computers and the internet, especially in the form of smartphones and tablets, was intended to allow instantaneous communication, access to information, and the ability to work anywhere, and the technologies have basically delivered on those promises. What we didn’t anticipate were the ways in which these devices would shorten our attention spans, attenuate our personal relationships, make thinking long and hard about a subject more difficult, and activate the same pathways in our brains that addictions to drugs or gambling do. This feels like a new experience — we are struggling with these cutting-edge technologies, and they’re changing us! But the experience of having new technology change us as we use it to change the world is actually not a new one; a look at a very early human technology, writing, can show us that what feels like a new experience is actually a very old one.

In many ways, the invention of writing was very different from the inventions of the technologies that are changing our lives today. One of the most important ways in which it was different is the speed of its invention. Writing took thousands of years to emerge as a fully formed technology (yes, by the way, writing is a technology, which can be defined as the practical application of knowledge to enhance our innate human abilities). It began as a way…