Ancestry Magazine

Society's adaptations, both positive and negative, to the technological world.

Vilar Sêco is a remote village on the periphery of Trás-os-Montes, the poorest district in Portugal. It is a place more suitable to the wolf and wild boar than to its inhabitants, many of whom have emigrated to France. My wife’s father and his siblings were born in a tiny granite house there, but poverty’s yoke eventually led them to Lisbon.

My wife and I recently bought this ancestral home. It has neither plumbing nor electricity. Water must be fetched from the well across the street and the roof keeps out more sun than rain. But it is not devoid of warmth. For my wife, the heavy stone walls remind her of her grandmother and namesake.

The tiniest room, little larger than a closet, was where her father took his first breath and in the kitchen stands an enormous earthen oven in which the entire village baked its bread.

The villagers’ lives were ruled by plantings and harvests, by animals moving to and from pasture, by promises made to saints. Wheat was cut and threshed, grapes stamped into wine, and flax pounded into linen. Women spun and wove. Children fetched wood and water. The earthen oven yielded loaves daily. The oven, the sickle, the loom, and the yoke: these are the simple tools that kept the villagers clothed and fed; they are what tied the community together.

Vilar Sêco now has electricity. Most of its people have radios and television, and now there is a café across from our granite house. When we visited this summer, the villagers gathered to greet us. First they asked us how we were, then they asked us about Michael Jordan. Times have changed. For a moment, the distance we had sought in going there collapsed entirely.

In this century of instant global communication and transportation, the little rivers of i
nventions from every part of the world converge in a vast flood of technology. Ideas and half-finished or unimproved inventions from other ages are part of the torrent. Pasteurization came about in the last century, but it took this century to make it widespread. Da Vinci conceived of flying machines, too, but it took the Wright Brothers to finally get the idea airborne. The number, speed, and potency of new technologies push us down the flood plain of this millennium.

In 1995—the year of the latest available statistics—the U.S. Patent Office had a record 236,679 patents filed (most in the field of new machines or processes), compared with 178,083 in 1991 and 113,000 in 1980. Between 1980 and 1995, each subsequent year topped the previous year’s figures.

More significantly, the time between the invention of a new technology and its widespread use across the population has decreased from a period of decades or centuries to just a few months or years. For example, Nicholas Joseph Cugnot of Switzerland designed a steam tractor in 1765. Yet nearly one hundred and fifty years passed before Henry Ford mass-produced the Model-T.

Today that hiatus is unthinkable. An upgraded modem in 1998 will likely have numerous improvements, several clones, and a thousand purveyors around the world in less than a year’s time. The short turnaround time makes keeping tabs on new products difficult; the deluge of new applications and terminology is nearly impossible to absorb.

Consider how pervasive these 20th century inventions are: nuclear energy, space and air travel, television, satellite phone and video links, genetic engineering and therapy, organ transplants, contraception, the computer and microchips, the Internet and e-mail, mass data storage and retrieval, and scanning and copying. These are just a beginning.

Some would determine an invention’s effect on society by counting minutes saved or dollars shaved off the bottom line. But an invention is not merely a convenience; it is not just a tool with a range of possible uses and abuses. It is the creation of new assumptions, of new ways of seeing and interpreting the world. "The medium is the message," says Marshall McLuhan.

"One significant [technological] change generates total change."In the year 1500, fifty years after the printing press was invented, we did not have the old Europe plus the printing press. We had a different Europe. After television, the United States was not America plus television; television gave a new coloration to every political campaign, to every home, to every school, to every church, to every industry. . . . New technologies alter the structure of our interests: the things we think about. They alter the character of our symbols [i.e., language]: the things we think with. And they alter the nature of community: the arena in which thoughts develop," writes communications theorist Neil Postman (18, 20).

What has made the modern medical community so powerful and so successful in diagnosing and treating disease, is its ongoing investment in medical technology. Stanley Reiser has written how the stethoscope, invented in 1820, "helped to create an objective physician, who could move away from involvement with the patient’s experiences and sensations" (Volti 116). Doctors initially opposed this trend favoring measurements and monitoring over newer means of diagnosis. When a device for taking blood pressure appeared in the late 1800s, doctors worried that it would "dehumanize" their art. But diagnosis now relies almost entirely on such tools.

There is a Hindu tale about a village that had a wishing tree. Anyone could stand under it and make a wish. "You always g
et what you wish for," an old man explained, "but you also get its opposite." Children of the village would stand under the tree and wish for candy. They got their candy, but they also got toothaches and bellyaches. Other villagers wished for gold—which they also received, but they became greedy, no longer knew who their friends were, and lived lonely, bitter lives. Technology is a wishing tree.

A recent Newsweek article reported that a company "sent 840 channels of live TV over a single 60-mile fiber using a single beam of light." This is 50 times faster than today’s fiber-optic capability. Furthermore, "execs claim that they will quadruple that speed by the end of the year." What could be the down side of this?

"The media forms our new community. The electronic village is our hometown…. Parents and children are more likely to recognize Bill Cosby or Jerry Seinfeld than they are their next-door neighbors…. We know celebrities but they don’t know us. The new community is not a reciprocal neighborhood like earlier ones. David Letterman won’t be helping out if our car battery dies on a winter morning. Donald Trump won’t bring over groceries if Dad loses his job…. These vicarious relations help create a new kind of loneliness—the loneliness of people whose relationships are with personae instead of persons," observes Mary Pipher (13).

The widespread use of electronic communication in all forms raises important issues. Control and privacy are among them. Computers, video cameras, cell phones, and pagers give employers or institutions broad powers to track, measure, monitor, and evaluate workers and clients. The federal government’s suit against Microsoft has relied heavily on e-mails intercepted or recovered from employees. Many employees have faced the music when private messages were read by their superiors.

Sometimes control can also be lost in a single keystroke. A friend of mine wrote an e-mail griping about the Dilbertesque nature of his boss, then accidentally sent it to him. There are many similar—and more horrifying—stories.

I once spent three days and nights writing a paper on Spinoza’s The Ethics for a legal philosophy class. I had slept no more than four hours during the process and just before I finished, the hard drive crashed—I hadn’t backed it up.

Although technology has its limitations and dangers, it also has unique strengths and possibilities. While it can alienate and create havoc, it can also build and connect. Even though my hard drive crashed, I still would not have traded the computer for what I had my freshman year of college when I wrote a 20-page term paper on a clunky Smith-Corona typewriter with a missing letter e.

My inventive Swedish great-great-grandfather, Sven Magnus Anderson, settled in Glendale, Utah. One day, a man who ran cattle nearby bet him 100 dollars that he couldn’t flume water from a reservoir he had built to his waterless property on the other side of a steep wash. Sven surveyed the land and built the flume. As the water flowed across the wash, the neighbor, incredulous, paid the 100 dollars and then asked permission to water his cattle with some of the water (Jolley, qtd. in Gibbons 66).

The metaphor of building bridges (or flumes) and sharing water may well be technology’s greatest legacy. Through education—distance learning, the wealth of books and materials, the relative ease of research, and the thrill of entering into partnerships with students and schools across the world, the metaphor is even closer to reality. This century’s inventions have helped make a global village. There is increasing consciousness of human interdependence.

Had Nicaragua and Honduras been flooded in other times, the situation, as terrible as it is, would have been even worse. The media and world governments might not have received word for months, if at all. There would have been no television to take the plight of the people into almost every home in the world, no telephone lines or web sites available to raise relief funds, no helicopters or planes to rescue people or ferry aid, and no medical supplies to minimize outbreaks of cholera and other diseases.

The benefits of technology come close to home, as well. My brothers and sisters and I decided to surprise our parents on their 40th wedding anniversary. By e-mail we contacted each other, made assignments for a program, and exchanged ideas for the writing of a script. The catering for the party and most plane tickets were ordered over the Internet. The gathering of a family that had not been together in years, the ease with which the process occurred, and the success of the surprise, rested largely in technology’s hands.

Largely, but not entirely. The will and goals of my family members brought the effort to fruition. But technology is blind and does not seek human progress and happiness. If it is sought for its own sake, it will be a tool of questionable value. We must attempt to drive technology, rather than be driven by it. If technology is to become a tool—like the oven and sickle and loom—for promoting community, connecting families, and understanding across cultures, it must be yoked more firmly to human hearts than to human minds.

Works Cited

Gibbons, Helen Bay. Just Plain Folks: Memories of Earl and Iola Bay. Salt Lake City: Self-published, 1991.

Johnson, Otto, ed. "Record-Breaking Patents Filed." Information Please Almanac. Bo
ston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997.

Pipher, Mary. The Shelter of Each Other: Rebuilding Our Families. New York: Random House, 1996.

Postman, Neil. Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology. New York: Vintage, 1993.

Stein, Ralph. The Great Inventions. Chicago: Playboy Press, 1976.

Volti, Rudi. Society and Technological Change. 3rd ed. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995.

Andrew Bay is an editor and freelance writer. He and his wife, Ana, have two sons, Miles and Patrick. His interests run from languages and folklore to nighttime hikes on the high desert.