Naivety

Culture & Technology, pp 1-25

Ideas that stuck out to me:

Steam engine, nuclear, electricity

Third world country development

The machine in the garden

After reading this passage all I could think of was a brief conversation that I had over the summer about the future.  I worked as a U.S Embassy Public Affairs intern this summer in Hanoi, Vietnam and had the fortune of meeting a multitude of inspiring people.  One of which was a lady named Val who worked as a secretary in the office. I often saw her while we were working on data sheets for use on U.S – Vietnams 15^th anniversary.  Anyways, we didn’t often talk about our lives to each other but every time we did talk we laughed.  This one particular time she began telling me about her son that had just started their 5^th grade year of school.  She started laughing and told me that her son was given a Google tablet by his school.  The conversation that followed was full of snarky remarks about how kids these days are going to be using holograms while we will be outdated Microsoft Word professionals. Very similar to what the article showed with David Noble’s Mother, the tone of our conversation accepted the fact that the future is going to be on tablets and LCD screens, and that there is nothing we can do about it.  I smiled and laughed at all of the statements we made thinking very naively that “that’s just the way things are.”

Only presently do I realize how acknowledging and yet horrified I feel towards the acceptance of progress, in the face of my generations workforce expiration date. The movement of progress as described in the article shows a Janus face of grandeur and horror. Thinking about how mankind has developed from fire to coal and steam, to electricity and nuclear energy, and finally the movement to digital is amazing, and yet I am calmed enough to realize that the “garden” has been spoiled rotten.  Reality is a mixture of progress and quantifications.  The “yard stick” finds itself placed in every part of the world due to the splash in the pond western nations have made in history.  And the reasoning that cultures have made to quantify each other on technology seems outrageously indiscriminate.  The image of lady liberty causing “Native Americans, bears and buffalo” to run into the darkness is immensely disrespectful but a reality all the same.  Technology seems to be a global consciousness that no one can escape.  The people I have spoken with always see America as a technology hub.  I asked around in the Philippines for the best headphones I could find and they said I should just order it up from the U.S.  Many of my relationships in Vietnam were with people who lived their life breakneck studying to make it into the United States for work or education. Like I said before its amazing and yet unsettling.  Amazing and great that my friends can order the best technologies and receive the best education through resources in our tech’d out world but so unsettling that all of these goals are things created by our America, an ideal that seems to have shaped human life. 

Technology shaping our priorities, needs, and wants. 

Does the machine in the garden exist today?

Do third world countries need to progress as America and the rest of the west has?

(*probably because they are trying to compete on the same stage.) -_-

I am on the progress ladder to! And I like it… and I feel very very mixed about it lol.