Technocentricity

A scrap of thought I had floating around my documents since some time last year. The idea lead up to the formulation of my Term Paper for my History of Communications class.


"In my day we didn't have any of these modern conveniences"

This is a quote that our generation often associates with the older generation. It is a stereotype which they have perpetuated in which they have had a harder life and in which we, the privelleged new comers, are living a life of laziness with all our new fangled technology. This is an opinion that we ourselves have adopted and perpetuated in our culture to the point where we have developed what I will call a technocentric viewpoint of our world.

That is to say, we believe that any sufficently advanced technology, certainly anything we use daily in our modern lives must have come from our century, or at most the last 100 years. This is an ignorance that we apply because we really don't analyze our past. We think of things like x-rays, hydrogen fuel cells, fiber optics, computers, telephones, even things like radio waves came from scientists and inventors of our century, because how could those primitive 19th century ancestors of ours without any modern convieniences possibly gain such tools of innovation?

In truth all these things were invented in the 1800s...

 that industrial revolution period we seem to associate with factory work rather than technological innovation. It is a dangerous bias of ignorance this technocentricity of ours. We believe that all sufficently advanced technologies came from us and that those without things like the internet would be unable to function in an intellectual society. Though prehaps they are the only ones who truely could.

For they lived in a society less frought with mediation and information overload, corporations, and branding. Though really the only reason we ourselves are any more advanced than they is because of our place in chronology. Humanity improves on the innovations of others. We "stand of the shoulders of giants" as Newton had put it.

Technologies, especially media, are never new ideas created, they are merely inspiried. We build on earlier technologies to further our lives. In truth they are not necessarily more or less intelligent than any of us, for they merely had a different starting point in their knowledge. Were we born with such a knowledge base we would no doubt improve upon it in similar ways, as they would in our position. Though they certainly may not have known what was coming, one must wonder what they thought of their passed generations.