Technology and Life: A Love-Hate Relationship

“We are reluctant to admit that we are simply swamped with information and have lost the ability to make sense of it.” – Alain de Botton, BBC News Magazine, 14^th Jan 2011.

Does more information mean we know less? Thus begins the insightful BBC News Magazine article quoted above. In this relentless IT age, information is now increasing at an exponential rate, but can we assimilate it at that rate? After all, our mortal minds can hold only one thought at a time. Unlike Moore’s Law for semiconductors, the number of our thoughts cannot (and should not, for our sanity’s sake) double every two years. Wouldn’t dwelling deeper on a few big ideas be better than whizzing quickly through a plethora of small ones?

We measure computer technology by its clock speed, but should we extrapolate the same measure to ourselves? The pressure of productivity drives us to appropriate all manner of technology to increase our personal performance in today’s emphasis on speed, focus and accuracy. So the PDA phone has become our very tangible enabler, and has replaced the weather as the best conversation starter. We send more emails in the belief that it causes our productivity to increase – in the process we swamp others with information and cause their productivity to decrease.

There is a little book with the title Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered by E. F. Schumacher published in 1973, that is still selling today. Anything that can sell for that long is worthy of attention. Unlike computer hardware which obsoletes within a year, this book has not obsoleted in four decades. In it he quotes another author G. N. M. Tyrell, who put forward the terms 'divergent' and 'convergent' to distinguish problems which cannot be solved by logical reasoning from those that can. Divergent problems are the problems of life that involve the reconciling of opposites which, in logical thought, cannot be reconciled. Examples are freedom vs. discipline, and leadership vs. democracy. These are choices between good and good, not good and bad. Countless mothers and teachers reconcile freedom vs. discipline every day, yet no-one can write down a solution for it. They do it by bringing into the situation forces that belong to a higher level where opposites are transcended – creative and innovative forces such as love, beauty, wisdom, grace, and truth. Convergent problems, on the other hand, are of a logical nature. In this category belong science and technology, where knowledge can be accumulated progressively, and succeeding generations can continue from where the previous one left off. Schumacher makes an astounding statement about this category: “Dealing exclusively with convergent problems does not lead into life but away from it.”

This brings us back to the question of the relationship between technology and life. It is now apparent that the former is convergent while the latter is divergent. When we first courted technology, we loved it for all it did to help us live our lives more efficiently and for the convenience it affords us – in transportation, communications, lighting, sanitation, household appliances, information management etc. So we sealed the deal with technology, but soon discovered it was not the benign helper we had thought it would forever be. It soon grew relentlessly and exponentially, and the convergent began to converge into our lives, filling up all the empty spaces until we are left with no more room, and then its continuously-increasing force starts to squeeze out the divergent, which is life.

Does more information mean we know less? We spend more time downloading e-books into our Kindles and IPads than actually reading them. We have this hazy impression that those hundreds of files sitting dormant on the high-tech solid-state drive are an indicator that we already on the path to knowledge, not fully cognizant of the fact that it is better to carefully select just one of them and read and assimilate its lessons properly for inanimate information to be translated into living knowledge. Technology brings to us much data, but we still need life to bring it to life.

As for productivity, convergent methods and measures used in science and technology have come to be applied to our lives, and we are expected to operate as efficiently and predictably as the machines do. That the ‘results’ out of a machine tells us whether it is working fine or not, has become the standard measure of human study and work too, so we also look for results and measure outcomes by a list of grades on the examination certificate or the fulfillment of KPIs, and then after a time wonder why these indicators no longer indicate.

Another example is our present-day worship of objectivity and contempt for emotions. To admit to having emotional considerations when making a big decision is to admit to weakness. An ‘emotional decision’ is seen to be the worst possible kind of decision one could ever make, as if one could, like a machine, simply switch off one’s feelings when making major life-changing decisions. In the children’s classic The Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum, the Tin Man wanted so much to have a real heart to be complete; today we grown-ups have “advanced” to the point where to be considered a complete professional, we cannot have one.

We love technology for how it gives us greater access to the world and allows us to be more productive, yet we also hate it for crowding out our very lives. How then do we cope with this technology vs. life dilemma? Is it not by reaching high above ourselves to develop those intangible resources with which to consider and decide on this most contemporary of divergent issues?

Dr Teoh Chin Soon

DreamCatcher Technical Training

April 2011