I am much less concerned with whatever it is technology may be doing to people that what people are choosing to do to one another through technology. Facebook's reduction of people to predictively modeled profiles and investment banking's convolution of the marketplace into an algorithmic battleground were not the choices of machines.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes that the consequences of technology stem more from human choices than from the technology itself.
Douglas Rushkoff highlights the impact of human agency in the use of technology, suggesting that the real issue lies in how people choose to interact with one another through technological platforms. Rather than blaming technology for societal issues, he argues that it is the decisions made by individuals that shape our experiences, as seen in the reduction of complex human relationships to simplistic online profiles and the financial market's transformation into a data-driven competition.
In practice
In a discussion about social media's impact on relationships, one could reference this quote to highlight human accountability.
Like most early enthusiasts, I always thought the way the Internet encouraged multitasking made users less vulnerable to manipulation, while simultaneously exploiting even more of our brain's capacity than before. Apparently not.
The faux now of Twitter updates and things pinging at you - all the pulses from digitality that we try to keep up with because we sense that there's something going on that we need to tap into - are artifacts, or symptoms of living in this atemporal reality. And it's not any worse than living in the 'time is money' reality that we're leaving.
Treating an age group as a demographic requires coming up with something that's common to every single one of them. Right?... So it's reductionist in that it reduces an entire segment of civilization down to one person with one habit.
Brains are tricky and adaptable organs. For all the 'neuroplasticity' allowing our brains to reconfigure themselves to the biases of our computers, we are just as neuroplastic in our ability to eventually recover and adapt.
As popular culture becomes more presentist, we move away from entertainment as the vicarious experience of a narrative - as watching someone else's story - and much more toward enacting one's own story. Moving away from myths and toward fantasy role-playing games, away from movies and toward videogames.
The first step toward maintaining autonomy in any programmed environment is to be aware that there's programming going on. It's as simple as understanding the commercials are there to help sell things. And that TV shows are there to sell commercials, and so on.
Somehow in the last 100 years, every time there is a problem of getting more spectrum, there is a technology that comes along that solves that problem.
We must address, individually and collectively, moral and ethical issues raised by cutting-edge research in artificial intelligence and biotechnology, which will enable significant life extension, designer babies, and memory extraction.
From now on, the technology companies that succeed will be those that have developed skills at listening and a sophisticated understanding of their customers' industries.
I recently learned something quite interesting about video games. Many young people have developed incredible hand, eye, and brain coordination in playing these games. The air force believes these kids will be our outstanding pilots should they fly our jets.
Whenever a technology enables people to organize at a pace that wasn't before possible, new kinds of politics emerge.
Before social media, if I, as an individual wanted to publish something to the world, unless I could get some local TV crew to interview me, or I wrote an op-ed or took out an ad, I had no voice.
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