Just as how it was challenging to reflect on how my life has changed in this past decade, it is difficult to describe how our society has changed. Technology keeps advancing, and it’s easy to see improvement in better specs and lowered costs, but these are just market forces and not necessarily real changes in our society. I’m more interested in how our cultural has shifted or adapted to the integration (rather than the advent) of technology in this last decade.
Of course our cultural does not only change in response to technology, for example fashion trends come and go, but I think technology drives faster and more abrupt changes. Going from personal messengers to written letters to phone calls and now email certainly does flatten the world. Diplomatic and political tactics from the Roman days would not work in our world.
It should be obvious that communication and access to information greatly improved in this past decade. This was the decade that the internet took off. The combination of on-demand access to information (i.e., searching) and accuracy (eventually Wikipedia) meant that generally we needed to be more breadth-knowledgeable than depth-knowledgeable. While it is still important to be knowledgeable in one specific area, a 00s person can draw from a wide network of knowledge and information to make quick decisions much easier and thus get more benefit from society.
I like the word network because it also describes how our accessibility has been improved. Before, you would not be able to quickly reach someone out of shouting distance if they did were not near a phone. Now everyone has cell phones! People used to be able to live “off the grid”, for better or worse, now they are not quite able to do so.
Geographic location is an excellent example of both of these ideas. In the 90s, you would need to have maps (which you would need to initially get from the library or store) or a detailed knowledge of the road system if you needed to go to an obscure place. Now you would just look the directions on Google Maps. Better yet, you can delay until the very last minute when you start driving and wait for your GPS to correct your route!
The data has to be there first in order for us to use it, and because now we see that we can use it, there is an increased emphasis on data. I can see this in my personal life where my life is blogged, my social network is stored online, and I have so many photos. Combined with processing capability, we are able to use statistical models to generate conclusions. Again, this might be a for better or worse scenario. It can refine existing procedures (e.g., Sabermetrics), or launch a trend (e.g., climate change awareness). But you also get things like the sub-prime mortgage fiasco.
Older generations complain that technology has made our world fast paced, but I think that is a symptom of technology evolving our thinking to focus on processing more information to make quicker decisions. Compared to the days of researching in a library, it may seem like a monumental change; but telegraph vs mail also drastically minimized information delay. Then I don’t think it’s so much as a change as our society just getting better at what it does.
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