Today’s question seems overly simplistic in hindsight but that didn’t stop me from posing it to a lot of smart people.

“Do you think technology is contributing to an increasing sense of alienation in modern society?”

I put this question to science fiction writers Elizabeth Bear, Robert J. Sawyer, Matthew Cheney and Tom Purdom. I also asked Bob Seidensticker a former program manager at Microsoft and sf reviewer and blogger in arms Shaun C Green.

Elizabeth Bear: I think a sense of alienation is an eternal part of the human condition. If anything, communications technology–such as the internet–has made it easier for (at least moderately wealthy first-world) people to find communities than ever before.

Elizabeth Bear

Tom Purdom: I’m very skeptical about sweeping sociological statements like “increasing alienation”. Increasing compared to when? Do we really know how people felt a hundred years ago? Or fifty? Some technology encourages isolation– we watch movies at home instead of going to a theater. Other technology, like the internet, hooks us up. Attitudes toward society are, to me, mostly a matter of temperament. Some people would feel alienated wherever and whenever they lived. Other people would feel connected if you marooned them on a desert island.

Tom Purdom

Matthew Cheney: Depends on the technology, the society, and individuals. People don’t have equal responses to technologies. Some people, for instance, use the internet primarily as a way to escape their drab, wretched lives. Other people use it as a communication tool. Others to connect themselves to a far wider community than they could otherwise. Others for porn. We often think of particular technologies as having a single effect, but they don’t. Users have agency, they can use things in different, diverse ways. I expect some people have always been alienated from their societies, even back when the most advanced technology was a carved piece of stone. Consciousness creates all sorts of opportunities for alienation.

Matthew Cheney

Bob Seidensticker: I think you can argue it both ways. Computer games seem to be an example of an alienating technology. And yet, newer Internet games allowcollaboration with other people.

The Internet can encourage people to become hermits and get throughlife without interacting with people. And yet, when it’s hard to findnearby people who share one’s interests, and the Internet can allow us tofind like-minded people regardless of geography.

The cell phone and email can be a 24×7 obligation to your company.And yet, they can allow cheap and easy communication (I certainly send more personal emails than I would send personal letters).

We saw this same split with the car close to 100 years ago — did it break up the family, allowing kids to drive off to be with their friends, or did it enable people to connect with friends and family who would otherwise be too far away?

Kranzberg’s First Law says: “Technology is neither good nor bad –nor is it neutral.” That is, a technology isn’t inherently good or bad, but it will have an impact, which is why it’s not neutral. I don’t think there’s a technology small or large that doesn’t have a bad side as well as a good side. And it’s a curious fact that we can see examples of both increased and decreased alienation in the same technologies.

Bob Seidensticker

Robert J. Sawyer: It’s a loaded question; it presupposes most peoplefeel more alienated now than they did in the past. Certainly that’s not true for people who live out inthe country or in isolated places; communications technology has made them way more tied into other people than they ever possibly could have been in the past. We have better, more reliable, and cheaper communication now than we’ve ever had before, and our individual social networks go way farther than the back-fence or the water cooler.

That’s all to the good. To give a personal example, as a guy who has been selling fiction for over a quarter of a century now: early on, I had almost no contact with my readers, because there was no infrastructure by which we could be in touch; now, I interact with them daily, through my newsgroup, my blog and dozens of other online communities. And I thinknothing at all about calling a friend thousands of kilometers away just to say hi. Alienation? Not that I can see.

Robert J. Sawyer

Shaun C. Green: That’s a really complex question. I think certain types of technology can contribute towards social alienation and others can detract from it. I mean, take a social networking tool like MySpace. I think most people in their late teens and above laugh at it, but it’s a great thing for young people. Consider that the general trend over the last decade and probably longer has been for communities to close down any place where kids could go - parkland is “developed”, youth centres are shut down, music venues are sold on and so forth. Then couple that with the increasing availability and speed of Internet connections and new forums where people can meet, converse, socialise and so forth. The answer seems pretty obvious.

But then there’s technology that alienates people; I think of the way that private cars go. It’s all about this little island of peace, calm and power, a stronghold against the chaos outside. So everyone sits in these little fortresses and hides from everyone else. And so few people carpool. You can get loads and loads of isolated people sat in little boxes in close proximity to one another, and they can’t converse and wouldn’t if they could. That’s pretty crazy. There are a lot of SF stories about these dystopian futures where no-one communicates with another, where everyone is alienated, but to be honest there are probably a lot of people who would welcome that with open arms. Anything to get away from the hoi-polloi, right! It’s crazy.

At the end of the day I don’t think it’s right to think of “technology” as some sort of huge block that is definitively one thing or another. You can’t do that with “politics”, or “society”, or “science”, or “culture”. These things are myriad, multi-faceted and not so easily contained. I suppose it’s all about how people use technology, and how it’s offered to them by those that design and build that technology.

Shaun C. Green

Related posts:

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response to this post, or trackback from your own site. Wax-political uses threaded comments so you can reply to any comment directly by clicking on the relevent reply to comment link.