Posted March 16th, 2008, in: Uncategorized

You may be a technophobe.

I don’t mean if you refuse to get a cell phone. Or if you refuse to join FaceBook (or whatever the current trendiest Networking Service is). I don’t mean if you believe electricity is evil or that we should all go back to being hunter-gatherers. If any of those examples describe you, you definitely are a technophobe and that’s fine. You fall into the category of obvious technophobe. You are a proud upstanding member of the Anti-Technology Party. And although you and I may disagree about certain things, I respect your right to have your opinion. I am not concerned with you here.
I want to talk about a different form of techno-hatred here. Hypocritical Closet Technophobia is apparently very common among people my age and older than myself. (I was born in ’76 so…)

If you believe that:

1. Generally, new methods of communication (media) take the place of older ones
2. (more importantly) the quality of human communication is suffering due to the inferiorities of new forms of communication (media),

You are a technophobe. Sorry.

When new media are developed, they do tend to be useful to people already in communication using existing media. So it is true that to a certain degree, new media is used in place of the old. Yes, when new Media are developed, existing conversations do take advantage of them.

But in addition, and this is the important distinction I want to make, new media also inspire communication. In other words, new media make it possible for new kinds of conversations.

It may be true that some of the interactions that take place through Email or Instant Messaging might otherwise take place through Snail-Mail, Telephone, or even in person, but it’s also true that more often than not, the communication that is taking place using the new medium wouldn’t be taking place at all if the new medium didn’t exist.

Imagine the last time you called a local business to see how late they were open. How would that conversation have translated to a pre-telephone world? Perhaps it wouldn’t have happened at all.

The reason I wanted to post this is just because I meet people fairly often that think we’re headed toward a dystopian future where people do not value real human interaction and virtually everything is virtualized.

On the contrary, I want to point out that new media are actually making it easier for people to organize real-world events.

And of course, new media are making it easier for people to find other people in the ‘real world’ with similar interests, needs etc, that often lead to one-on-one interactions.

Anyways… Have a nice day.