From Collectors Weekly
Don't Panic: Why Technophobes Have Been Getting It Wrong Since Gutenberg
By Hunter Oatman-Stanford
When humans first developed the wheel, there were surely some naysayers who bemoaned the jobs it would eliminate, the unsafe speeds of newfangled carts, or the damage wheels would do to our most cherished relationships. Today, we’re all too familiar with the knee-jerk reactions that accompany every advance in modern technology: Self-driving cars will steal jobs from professional drivers, or social-networking apps will eliminate face-to-face interaction with other humans. The overarching fear is that any popular technology will fundamentally alter a previously satisfying, well-balanced existence and destroy the society we’ve worked so hard to build....
“You can go back to the printing press and find all this rhetoric about the fear that people would no longer need to remember things,” says Coye Cheshire, associate professor at the School of Information at UC Berkeley. “Now, you hear people talking about that with regard to the Internet. What’s old is new again.” ...
“So much of the dialogue just 15 years ago was about how the Internet was going to isolate us and make us mindless creatures just surfing the Web, people with their brains plugged into this machine, mindlessly looking at pages,” Cheshire says. “Internet addiction was imagined as people consuming all this information in a very isolating way. Few were considering the fact that this might actually involve communicating with people at a scale that is unimaginably larger than ever before.”
At a time when most of us are inundated with messaging apps and networking websites, Cheshire has to remind his students that a little over a decade ago, the category known as “social media” barely existed. “One of the human needs that is so critical to a lot of global information technologies, like the Internet, is our desire to be social,” Cheshire says. “It sounds so obvious, right?”...