Earthblog

On Wednesday Sept 30, 2009 I went without.

For 24 hours I refused to answer my cell phone, check my emails or listen to my IPod.

Some said this was crazy talk.

Shaking their heads at me, they sighed as though I had inflicted deep suffering on myself. As far as they saw it, in a world where we are turned on and tuned in 24/7, it is social suicide to cut oneself off from all practical means of communication.

For this reason, all my requests for participants to share this experience with me, went unanswered.

The rationale behind this social experiment was not to inflict social suffering, but to investigate how the absence of these 21^st century technologies would impact interaction with friends and co-workers.

As it turns out, I was making a much bigger decision than just going without technology. I was in fact choosing not to participate in society.

Saul Greenberg, the industrial chair in interactive technologies at the University of Calgary and expert in human- computer interaction, put this technology hiatus into context.

Technology has forever changed how we interact with our world.

Photo illustration by Diane Klaver

“It’s really a choice about ‘Do you want to participate in your culture or do you not want to participate in it,’” said Greenberg. “Technology, just because of the way it’s been taken in by our culture, means that now there is an expectation between people.”

Technologies, such as the computer and telephone, were first utilized to complete work-related tasks. But now, these technologies have become part of a cultural phenomenon.

“It’s about conversation, it’s about communications, it’s about socializing, it’s about having fun, being cool, and fashion,” said Greenberg, “Primarily it’s about technology coming into our world and being part of it. This is a dramatic change over what we saw a few decades ago.”

But if new technology is about socializing and fashion, then like Gucci couture we should be able to survive without it.

Turns out, it’s not that simple.

Culture develops around technology until it is appropriated within mainstream society.

This probably explains the anxiety and panic I faced during my Day Without. In those moments between assignments my hands searched for my cell phone. Or without realizing it I approached a computer to check email. The desire to interact with technology has become like a nervous twitch, a way to occupy oneself between tasks—essentially an integral part of our lives.

We can observe the molding of culture around technology if we look back at things like the landline. It is now assumed everyone has this archaic technology somewhere in their home, hidden under a pile of clutter on the desk or attached to the kitchen wall.

When the phone was invented it was designed to connect villages, not individuals, according to Greenberg. But as people got a hold of the telephone a culture began to develop around it, slowly incorporating it into everyday life.

It took years for culture to establish basic phone etiquette and understand how to carry-on a conversation without face-to-face contact. Today, we don’t even give a thought to conversation over the phone, the mystic of telephone conversation having ebbed long ago.

“So you think about it, could you do without a telephone? Well, of course, but are you cutting yourself off from people? Are you cutting yourself off from a certain way of communicating? Are you changing your expectations on other people on how they can reach you? Well yes,” said Greenberg.

Choosing to "go without" technology is more a choice about participating in our world in a way that is expected of us

Photo Illustration by Diane Klaver

The problem society currently faces is the rapid pace at which technology is developed. Where culture had decades to stabilize around the telephone, new technologies are continuously being added to the mix. Each promising to be faster, better,

more compact, more compatible than the last. Culture cannot keep up with these advances which is partly why society often feels overwhelmed by technology.

“Those things [had] decades and now it’s happening overnight, so there is a lot of culture clashes that is certainly happening between age groups,” said Greenberg.

Which is why parents cannot understand the value in text messaging, and kids find it humorous when parents ask for help in setting up a Facebook account.

Greenburg believes cultural appropriation of technology and the unpredictability of technology assimilation makes predicting our technological future quite impossible.

“First it’s very hard to predict what will become a trend and second the trend that actually comes up may be very different from our expectations,” said Greenberg.
Meaning that often, like the invention of the telephone, the intention and the reality of how people are using it is very different.

“To make it even worse there’s also what I call The Dark Side which is where profit making is done without thought to benefit society,” said Greenberg. “So for example on the Internet the biggest uses of the internet are porn, gambling, those sorts of things, which are not what we normally consider as a societal benefit.”

It would seem our interaction with technology is like the vast World Wide Web itself; unknown.

As for my social experiment, the anxiety produced by not having access to these basic social-networking devices was enough to make 24 hours very grueling. But more than that, technology seems to serve as an extension to our lives as we upload, download, post and paste information into them. So without technology it is as though a part of us, the socially interactive side of us, no longer exists.