Junto

Quoth moderator Dave Speers quoth Socrates, “An unexamined life is not worth living”.

Access to the modern extensions of man have made the reflexive deconstruction of the self unavoidable. Or something like that. We can be reached at all hours on mobile phones, by email, overnight Fedex, what have you. We are watched by security cameras with facial recognition software (so someone said). We can google and wikipedia any and all of the world’s collective knowledge.

Has this affected the human condition? Is that effect positive or negative? Can we even answer these questions with so little objective distance from modern technology?

Panelist Reed Gustow’s first awareness of technology’s irrevocable lien on our lives was the Sputnik launch. Fellow panelist Jason Tremblay lives deliberately with a featureless cellphone (he left it in the car during Junto).

Technology has shortened attention spans, it has also exponentially increased our access to information, be it for entertainment, be it for academics. It is the ultimate equalizer and the ultimate privilege. It has created the XO laptop initiative and cell yell. It has the entertainment industry scrambling, could technology afford us the ability to entertain ourselves!? Isn’t youtube great!?

A group discussion yielded consensual gridlock. I like my phone, but hate TV, he likes open wifi, but hates surveillance, she likes documentation, but hates myspace. We agreed that quality is better than quantity, but sometimes the quantity is quality (bandwidth? site traffic? rollover minutes?).

To editorialize, the cost/benefit analysis of increasing, enveloping technology is that it proliferates malevolence (cost) and it proliferates benevolence (benefit). But isn’t it cute to watch Lila navigate contextual menus?

Related topics: MINUTES