Technology and Society

Vannevar Bush and Nathaniel Hawthorne had two visions of society assimilating technology, and it's tough for them to be any more opposite one another. Whereas Bush had grand ideas for a scheme in which people would use in their every day to improve their condition of life, Hawthorne feared that as technology became more complex the basic constructs of society would slowly be eradicated. So where do we fall, then? Does the internet, including this blog, help our society, or hurt it?

In my opinion, Hawthorne was being a bit paranoid. This kind of paranoia is not uncommon even today. It's natural for people to fear change, especially in this day and age where things can change so rapidly. But not everything brought about by change is necessarily a bad thing, and I think it's important to be brave enough to embrace change and be prepared to accept both the improvements and the consequences, and to react appropriately to both. MySpace, Facebook, and YouTube are among the most visited websites today in the United States, and none of them would have come into being without fairly drastic developments that have, in turn, changed the way we do many aspects of our lives.

Bush's "memex" conception was primitive in design but his ideas in its organization and his methods in its categorization are not hard to find in today's most popular tools. He described and more or less directly inspired the creation of the modern workstation and hypertext technology. In addition, his paper As We May Think predicted many other technologies such as personal computers, the Internet, the World Wide Web, speech recognition, and even online encyclopedias such as Wikipedia. At the beginning of the eighth section, he says

"Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready-made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified."

This describes, nearly exactly, how Wikipedia and other online wikis operate.


Of course, with all the helpful, amazing, and just plain neat things the Internet has brought, there are plenty of ill effects to be felt. The most obvious is the plethora of computer viruses, worms, and Trojans which are surprisingly easy to get ahold of unintentionally. One of the more sinister aspects of the Internet which is harder to spot is the presence of stalkers and other predators, which consistently make headline news and most likely influence most the fears people have about the continued growth of the role of the Internet in society. These are serious threats, and should be treated as such, but with education and some preventative techniques these risks are far outweighed by the benefits.