I
recently came across an American sociologist whose ideas parallel some of the
ideas that have been discussed in this column.
William Fielding Ogburn propounded the theory of cultural lag. Basically what he said is that in our time of
rapid social change, some parts of our culture evolve faster than others,
creating social adjustment problems. In
particular, he talks about the tension between the materials and products that
humans use and the human adaptation to these products. The assumption here seems to be that it would
be better if humans could keep up with the changes, because then there would be
less friction in the adjustment process.
Ogburn would ideally like to minimize the influence of the cultural lag
between the material culture and the adaptive culture and create more cultural
harmony.
In my
theory of sensory distortion which talks about the lag of human evolution in
relation to technological change, I am much more skeptical of getting rid of
the discomfort of humans in trying to adjust to modern technology. Of course, I am writing in 2015, and the
article I read of Ogburn appeared in a collection of articles on social
thinking called The Making of Society that was published in 1937. From the perspective of the super accelerated
rate of technological change that occurs today, it can be more easily seen that
humans are heading towards increasing robotization and losing many of their
essential traits as human beings. But because
humans can’t change as fast as machines and because the change to humans is
occurring to basic aspects of human nature, the process will not be
comfortable.
Nevertheless,
it would be useful to apply some of the concepts that have appeared in this
column to the notion of participating in a culture as distinct from living and
interacting sensorily in a field of experience.
I want to focus on the cultural distortion that takes place when
different parts of a culture evolve at different rates as opposed to the
sensory distortion that occurs when our nervous system is not adequate for
absorbing the new qualities of stimuli that occur in our modern technological
field of experience.
One
tension that was very pronounced was the tension from the development of the
automobile and its effect on family values in Western societies. With an automobile, a young couple could take
a relatively frictionless trip (compared to a horse and buggy) from point a
(the house of the girl) to point b (some private place in a park or in the
country) and feel totally separated from the implicit moral attitudes of the
family. A new private space in a
separate realm was created by a vacuumized trip in the car, and in the private
space, a couple could engage in sexual activity in the car itself or in the new
private surroundings and nobody would know in the family, unless somehow they
would later accidentally find out. But
there was the pull of traditional values even for the couple, and the tension
continues to exist for some more conservative segments of society today. The car and the birth control pill have
contributed to separating the desire for sex from the desire for deep-bonded
relationships. People focus on making
imprints with sex today without necessarily preserving those imprints with
committed deep-bonded relationships.
Another
example relates to attitudes towards death.
Modern technology as well as modern pharmaceutical products can keep
people alive, even when they are permanently unconscious in a coma. To keep the body functioning when there is no
consciousness is to turn the body into a kind of machine. But traditional moral attitudes say that one
should always fight to keep a person going as long as he is alive. So modern technology has created gray areas
where people are kept in a living death that comes not only from the
understimulation of the ultimate numbness of long-term unconsciousness, but
also from the overstimulation of unbearable pain.
Still
another example relates to attitudes towards work. For most people in traditional societies, as
long and as hard as they would sometimes work, there were usually defined hours
for work. One would work during those
hours and the rest of the time would be used for family bonding, recreation,
and sleep. And most of the time one
worked when the sun was out, and one stopped working when it went down. But nowadays, with electricity, there are night
shifts, when some people continue to work when most of the rest of the people
are sleeping. Furthermore, even when
people have conventional jobs during the day, the smartphone and the computer break
down the barrier that exists between work hours and non-work hours. Workers are expected to answer text messages
wherever they are and even take their work home with them to work on through
the use of their computers. The desire
to be able to have time for bonding with family and friends is invaded by the
obligation to be on call at all hours, to work at night, on weekends and during
holidays. But this goes totally against
the cultural need to dedicate time to maintaining the integrity of family and
community.
We
should not overlook the effect of technology on recreation. When people sit down together to watch a
television program, they are juxtaposed next to each other, but there is no
interaction conducive to strong bonding.
Family television habits have weakened the values of family
togetherness, as people live more and more in their direct encounters with
technologically-created images. Many
times, each member of the family is in a separate room with a separate
television watching a separate program.
And of course, nowadays, people can watch their programs on their
computer and smartphone in an extremely accessible and private experience. People can do this not only in their rooms
but out in a coffee house, in a restaurant, in a park or even while waiting for
a bus. Television has taken people away
from strong interactions with their family and friends, from strong bonding.
In
effect, what all these examples show is how rapid technological change
fragments the organic unity of a culture, destroys its grounding, and breaks up
the fields of experience of its members into different disconnected
free-floating figures of unrelated events.
Organic traditional cultures, more strongly grounded in nature, are what
have given unity and meaning to human life.
Just as when nature gets destroyed by technology, when traditional
culture gets broken by technology, it creates experiential distortion. People’s lives become filled with mechanical
rhythms and mechanical patterns of life.
There
has definitely been a cultural lag between the evolution of technological
change and the evolution of human family and community structures within
different cultures. Technology is
changing so much faster than human society can evolve. But maybe it is just as well. If humans and their cultures evolved as fast
as technological change, they would become robots living in mechanistic
patterns of interaction. I hesitate to
use the term culture for robots, because as smart and sophisticated as robots
are becoming, they still are not able to make and receive organic flowing blendable
continual organic stimuli, still are not able to make and receive organic
imprints, still are not capable of an independent organic sense of self, still
are not capable of initiating and creating the kind of deep-bonded
relationships on which families, communities and many other human social groups
are built.
I am
increasingly beginning to feel that, under the circumstance in which people
live in modern technological society, the sensory distortion that people
experience, however uncomfortable or painful it may be, is at least a sign that
the people are still human. And cultural
lag is at least a sign that people are still clinging to their cultural roots
and don’t fully want to become robots.
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