I was reminded this past weekend during a trip to a cottage in Notre-Dame-du-Laus, Quebec that although I really do not know much about modern ‘technology,’ how it works or how to define it, I know what I value it most for: it's ability to allow me to obtain and share information instantly. Driving through the petite towns of cottage country and winding around the hills that would get us to our destination, all BlackBerries stopped working. At the cottage, we were without a satellite dish, computers, Wi-Fi and everything that comes with those things. It wasn’t my BlackBerry or laptop themselves that I missed; I felt de-linked; I was literally disconnected from the world.
It was the American astrophysicist, astronomer and author Carl Sagan who quipped that “We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.” That we live in a society that cares not how our devices, gadgets and machines work or how they came to be, but only that they do as we please and nothing else is not a secret. Technology is like air, ubiquitous with dominion over our lives.
Even so, it’s difficult to define or explain what technology is. I can’t for many reasons. For one, technology is like the ‘media’. People often refer to it like it’s a singular definitive thing, even though it’s not at all. Even the definitions found in Oxford’s and Merriam-Webster’s dictionaries don’t quite capture the essence of what technology is and what it can be in our everyday lives. A short definition I’ve warmed up to that comes from an old university textbook goes like this: Technology “is all the ways in which humans use knowledge, experience, and ingenuity to make their environment meet their needs and wants.” My needs and wants include me being aware of my environment, the context I’m situated in and the knowledge needed to move me forward wherever I am. For me, information is key.
On the drive to the lake this weekend, that meant being able to use Google Maps on my smart phone – before we lost reception – to guide us on our trip. And when trying to recall World Cup stats around an evening fire on the beach, any form of computer and an Internet connection was all that was needed to take care of my need – information about my favourite soccer heroes.
But it’s not only me who values information; and it’s not only in the atypical situations I just described.
We live in a country that runs on information services. This excerpt from a Wikipedia entry describes a society like the one we live in:
An information society is a society in which the creation, distribution, diffusion, use, integration and manipulation of information is a significant economic, political, and cultural activity. The knowledge economy is its economic counterpart whereby wealth is created through the economic exploitation of understanding. People that have the means to partake in this form of society are sometimes called digital citizens.
We are all digital citizens now.
Power is no longer reserved for the might of big armies. The most advanced countries not only have manifest (military) power, but a high level latent power – it’s social, economic and cultural influence built out of an informed, engaged and ordered population.
Remember this: Scientia potentia est – translated to mean For also knowledge itself is power, it was first said by Francis Bacon, and it is now often paraphrased as “knowledge is power.” This couldn’t be truer. It is often forgotten that the Internet, the biggest network of networks, has its origins in United States’ military operations. This was before its inevitable commercialization as an international network. And let us remember that the concept of the World-Wide-Web (which people often erroneously use interchangeably with the word Internet), was proposed by Tim Berners-Lee, a computer scientist working at CERN looking to find a better way to store and document information at his particle physics laboratory. It has now become, as Michael Moyer has put it, “the most effective information dissemination platform ever created.” Bang on.
Information becomes knowledge becomes power. Modern technology – whether it be my BlackBerry, television or laptop – has made this reality an instantaneous process. I could live without physical technology, but not without the processes and outcomes that it drives.
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