TECHNOLOGY AS A CULTURE
CATALYST
We are passing
through a techno-cultural revolution. The impact of technology on individuals and societies, both at the
intrinsic level and at the ephemeral level, has resulted in the modification
and re-engineering of the thought processes, life patterns and the realms of
cohabitation. The access, speed, efficiency and affordability of technology have
facilitated its in-roads to several global corners redefining the parameters of
production, service and consumption. New paradigms of consumerism are emerging edifying
several asymmetric patterns in social relationships and the hierarchy of
culture. Increasing dichotomies in the lateral and hierarchical cultural
thoughts, restructuring experiential frames, mix and synthesis of cultural
models and products beyond economic, social, historical and geographical
contexts have been triggered by the continuous advent of technology. Thus the
cultural capital of the individuals, societies and nations are getting
revamped. Brian carolan of Columbia University in his research paper on
“Technology, schools and decentralization of culture ”comments,“ Technology,
therefore is not an element of unreal salvation and apocalyptic fantasy that is
held at a distance Technology is simply a common cultural tool that does not
exist in isolation from the social system. It intersects with numerous
structural elements and its potency to alter the organization of social
interaction must be considered.” The social scientists are finding it a
Herculean task to interpret the emerging social and cultural structures.
Rightly John Von
Neumann, Institute of Advanced studies, Princeton observes “The technology that
is now developing and that will dominate the next decades seems to be in total
conflict with traditional and, in the main, momentarily still valid
geographical and political units and concepts.. This is the maturing crisis of
technology.” In his paper on scientifically-induced discontinuity with its
entire past, Vector Vinge, (Mathematician) observes “The acceleration of
technological progress has been central to the feature of this century. .. We
are on the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on earth.”
The process of Culture
Given the
seriousness of the above statements, it may be worthwhile to examine how the
individual and social cultures are being transformed by technology and what
would be its consequent implications on the content and processes of
educational systems.
Culture, Swidler
(1998) defines.. “as symbolic vehicles of meaning, including beliefs, ritual
practices, art forms, and ceremonies as well as informal cultural practices
such as language, gossip, stories and rituals of daily life.” The metamorphosis
of culture over the centuries has been the metamorphosis of the relationship of
the individual, the society with their knowledge content and its processes.
Says Aldous Huxley in is article “Culture and the individual” (1963) “Between
culture and the individual the relationship is, and always has been, strangely
ambivalent. We are at once the beneficiaries of our culture and its victims.” He argues “Thanks to the realistic ideas
handed down by culture, mankind has survived and in, certain fields progresses.
But thanks to the pernicious nonsense drummed into every individual in the
course of his acculturation, mankind though surviving and progressing, has
always been in trouble. History is the record, among other things, of the
fantastic and generally fiendish tricks played upon itself by culture-maddened
humanity. And the hideous game goes on.” In the instant context, the question
is: whether technology will lead to new acculturation of mankind that addresses
itself to unexplored domains of progress or will play a fiendish trick that will
devastate the existing cultural capital?
Technology and the individual culture
The impact of
technology on every individual member of the society will be both awesome and
amazing. The criticality of the individual as a potential determinant of one’s
own culture will throw open to more social challenges and the management of
heterogeneity and ambivalence in cultural dynamics. Availability of virtual
modes of experience, and multiple and parallel processing technologies tend to
provide the individual aspirants of learning, the needed time and space for
assimilation, processing and management. Management of a multi-window
processing and communication at the global level from one central terminal has
opened both synergy as well as diversification. Thus the realms of time and
space acquire newer meanings with the advent technology at the individual level.
This will facilitate emergence of newer perceptions of words, meanings,
concepts and actions. The constructed images playing the role of reality will
shift the paradigm of experiences to cyber generated emotions and tensions.
Thus the context and perception of culture will acquire new significance. The
social psychologists have to examine the relationship between “concepts and
perceptions” in the technological context.
Says Jean
Baudrillard, “As the metaphysical foundation on which our systems were built
gets pulled from underneath our feet, the stability and fixity of grand
narratives that have been conforming to so many of us leaves us, too. With it
comes a need for new metaphors to describe the experience of living in
postmodern times. It is in this context that we should look at the computer
mediated communication as a potential source of empowerment in terms of giving
us new ways of expression as well as interaction and at the same time provide
us new metaphors to describe the quickly changing world where, as some have
pointed out, future has already happened.” The individual’s perception of
future having happened or happening at the present will be an anticipatory myth
that would emerge in an impoverished stress-prone mind by the winglets of
technology. Arguments that these fantasies will also usher in new inputs to
creative domains of mind is a matter that is to be left to debate.
The conflict
between the material and the digital, the race between them to acquire newer
vistas of power, will seek fresh philosophical interpretations of time and
space. The increasing dominance of networked space will vehemently oppose the
proliferation of material dominance in human mind and activity. The individual
will be in a continuous struggle of coping with redefined value systems of
power and prosperity. The symbiosis between the cultural capital and the
knowledge capital of the individual will raise questions on the economics of
survival mechanisms and their sustenance. The dialogue on the horizons of
reality and virtual, the powers of the Mind and Matter would attract serious
attention of the philosophers and culture architects of several nations. To
find answers for many of these questions, a global perspective would be
necessary rather than the national priorities.
The tangible
space available for corporate communication between the individuals and groups
would result in the emergence of extended virtual communities. The individual
culture will get reengineered by virtual community cultures. Will the evolving
scenario pose a potential threat to human survival? Henry Kissinger. Former
National Security Adviser, USA
In the above
scenario, the consciousness of the individual will be under a great stress revalidating
its role-play both in isolation as well as in context. The in-depth
understanding of the extended meanings of Time and Space, Mind and Matter will
enable questioning of several established norms, traditions, and relationships.
The individual consciousness would tend to play a pro-active role in its
interplay with the social milieu and social consciousness. All these issues
again lead to the question: Whether the advent technology will facilitate the
blossoming of a new culture or will make the mankind victims of a culture born
out of their own innovations? Whether future has happened or is now or is
waiting?
Technology and social culture
The culture of a
society is not a mere algebraic sum of the culture its individual constituents.
More to its vector addition lay the synthesis of thoughts emerging out of the
multifaceted interaction of the several individual components. The legacy and
content of its heritage, the geographical dimensions, the economic variations,
the political thought processes, the security perspectives and many other
relevant issues contribute to the synthesis of the dominant social culture. The
conflict between the individual and social cultures of any set-up is but a
natural reflection of the authority and maturity of the individual in the total
context. The correlation between the two varies at every single individual
level. Reflecting on this relationship,
Aldous Huxley points out, “Thanks to culture, we are the heirs of a vast
accumulation of knowledge, to a priceless treasure of logical and scientific
method, to thousands upon thousands of useful pieces of technological and
organizational know-how. But the human mind-body possesses other sources of
information makes use of other type of reasoning, is gifted with an intrinsic
wisdom that is independent of cultural conditioning.” However, the dominance of
the later over the former is always a record of history.
The pace and facet of technology
The impact of
technological processes both on the individual and the social mind is more than
evidence. The technological interventions of yesteryears were slow and steady.
They percolated into the social milieu at reduced speeds, enabling a reasonable
period for the people to understand and appreciate its impact on themselves and
their native society. The recent trends of technological growth indicate the
speed with which these changes impact the society. Thanks to the extended
connectivity and access, the information of the technological changes permeates
into the knowledge fields of societies much in advance of their hardware. The
enhanced levels of productivity of the hardware, and aggressive marketing
initiatives and strategies usher in products in mind-boggling time capsules.
The tendency of
the market to create a need in the minds of the consumers for their products is
an enabling factor for its proliferation.. The increased levels of the society
to consume information and products have an effect on their body-mind
behaviour, consequently on their culture. This helps the producer markets to
carve a niche for themselves in the consumer markets. This urges the developed
nations to seek a political-economic-cultural dominance over the lesser gods,
just to keep their markets alive. The proliferation of cultural inputs of the
market dominant over the consumer nations is thus a case in the point. Given the connectivity, any society that
seeks to be relevant to the global powerbase, would yield itself to this
phenomenon in their acceptable pace. Thus technology impacts all societies and
their constituent layers.
The future of culture
The cultural
divide within a given society due to differential pace of technology dynamics
and resultant knowledge manifestation and management, is an issue which each
society is grappling with. The challenges to the roots of their native beliefs,
traditions, and life styles are causing not mere concerns, but are demanding an
urgency to preserve them lest they are extinguished. Serious changes in
“perceptions” of people of a society seek development strong defensive
mechanisms from social psychologists. Is there a cause for pessimism? In the
translation of the article “Is Electronic Acceleration of cultural Dynamics the
Death of Aesthetics?” from the book (German) Lehrstuhl fur Aesthetic (1996),
Margaret Berki points out “If we are dead people at call, if the mankind only
strives for the inevitable end of the history of nature the we can only preserve our dignity through
self-sacrifice. If it were true that the collapse of our conventional
orientation in the world is the effect of electronic acceleration then
predictions of bygone days would not have been made because the phenomenon of
accelerations did not yet exist. However
pessimistic predictions were always made, long before the beginning of the electronic
age therefore they cannot be the result of a completely new situation.”
The struggle for innovation and new meanings
go on eternally, given the nature of Mind, be it with or without technology.
The issue is: how does the individual and society cope with them. As William
James describing the waking consciousness of the human mind says “No account of the universe in its totality
can be final which leaves these forms of consciousness disregarded.”
How far does
technology affect the cultural systems and how long would this go on? How far
can we monitor these changes and make them as desirable to us? Possibly the
observations of Prof. J.L. Lemke of Brooklyn college, Brooklyn, New York in his
article “Discourse, Dynamics and Social Change” are quite meaningful “ We are
only beginning to realize that we are not Lords of Creation, but the most
expendable, vulnerable, dependent, recent extension of a far older, non-human
planetary eco-system, and that our survival depends on enhancing, not exploiting,
a system which takes no cognizance of our interests and values, except in so
far as they long ago adopted to its realities. We are also only beginning to
realize that we do not make history, and culture, exactly as we please, but
only within the limits of a vaster, trans-human system, whom we cannot in
principle observe or control.”
An educational response
How will the
educational systems respond to this dynamics both at the individual level and
the social level? Education, as the most appropriate investment of any society
for its future hold, will have to meaningfully but cautiously respond to this
powerful impact. Educational systems have as much responsibility to hold the
heritage of the past as they have to accommodate the designs of the future. It has
an accelerating as well as a moderating role. While discharging the onerous
responsibility of acting as a carrier of the culture of the past to the future
through generations, the educational systems simultaneously have to usher in
the opportunity for the manifestation of the dreams of the present as a vibrant
alternative. Technology can act as an enabler of this critical role in the
educational context. Technology need not be seen as a potential threat to the
cultural dynamics, but as a harmonizer of the Matter and the Mind. As Aldous Huxely puts it “Reality is a
continuum, a fathomlessly mysterious and infinite something, whose outward
aspect is what we call Matter, and whose inwardness is what we call Mind.” Education
has, in the coming years, this purpose to serve.
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