Neophilia
I’ve been traveling for several weeks, and have finally gotten home and back into the swing of doing things like, say, updating my personal blog. While I was away, I had a chance to go to a conference and meet up with a bunch of smartypants techie commentators like Adam Greenfield, Clay Shirky, Jan Chipchase, Ethan Zuckerman, Xiao Qiang, and Genevieve Bell. They all gave great papers, and it was one of those rare occasions where I felt like sitting in an air-conditioned room listening to people for 8 hours was as intellectually stimulating as reading a great book.
Greenfield made a comment that really stuck with me: He said that the United States used to be a country of neophiles, people in love with the new and (implicitly) the futuristic. Since the early 1970s, however, we have shied away from this tendency, finding comfort in the status quo or even in the past. Interestingly, Alvin Toffler’s wildly popular book Future Shock came out in the early 1970s, and it became such a massive, global bestseller precisely because it captured why people in the West were beginning to fear of newness and change.
Of course the 70s were also the era when the tools of our present-day social mutation got built: home PCs and the internet are both babies of the 70s. So obviously there is some neophilic impulse at work in the US today. But I still think Greenfield is right on some profound level, because the social reaction to Web culture today is so much more paranoid and unhappy than, say, the social reaction to Space-Age culture was in the 1950s. Certainly people in the 50s feared new technologies like the atomic bomb, but that’s quite different from fearing social networks like MySpace, or getting bent out of shape about blogs.
My question is, what could make people in the United States neophiles again? How can we relearn the love of change, the fearless embrace of what’s new, without becoming completely naive about the darker possibilities for biotech and ubiquitious computer networks?
September 18th, 2007 at 1:02 am
I remember seeing “educational” films in school that were always upbeat about how technology and the American Way were going to improve the lives of all humanity. They seemed to have been made in the post WWII period, and were old when I saw them. But “Silent Spring”, the Vietnam War, and the resignation of the US President did a lot to destroy that earlier optimism.
In real terms, incomes peaked in the early ’70s. After that, life began to get harder. Corporations began reducing their investments in R&D, and the government likewise. In the ’80s it looked like Japan would take over the world. In the ’90s the world wide web distracted us up until the dot com crash, and now we are realizing that the rest of the world is bypassing us in mobile technology, thanks to our monopolistic regulations.
The Soviets launched Sputnik 50 years ago while the US rocket industry was still blowing up launch pads. The specter of Soviets putting nuclear warheads anywhere on the planet spooked the US government into getting serious about technological development. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US government has had no great incentive to fund research into surviving all out nuclear war. Now, it is again true that “the business of America is business”, not science.
September 19th, 2007 at 2:54 pm
“what could make people in the United States neophiles again?”
That’s easy: bring back the era of post-war prosperity, when people earned more than their grandparents and kids could expect to earn more than their parents. I suspect that if you look at the US over the course of its history, neophilia has risen and fallen with the GDP. And an irony: It is the periods of most ardent neophilia, such as the 1920s or 1950s, that often appear to us in retrospect as the most culturally reactionary periods (which is probably related to why science fiction tends to be so aesthetically conservative–the shock of the new drives us back into the arms of linear narrative).
September 21st, 2007 at 1:11 am
Lessig’s invocation of “The Awakening†as the basic template of our culture is to be noted.
Actually, I would conjoin this with “Groundhog Dayâ€.
People in “civilized life†seem to hermetically *seal* themselves off(see Robert Greene: “The Art of Seductionâ€).
Most are, in fact, empty shells.
Combine this with the unparalleled and world-historical status of the mythologization and *self-absorbtion* that constitutes the American identity.
http://www.time.com/time/columnist/poniewozik/article/0,9565,699790,00.html
As Paul Saffo says that the U.S. won’t be around in half a century(by probabilities) – I say: just let the husk of “American life†as it now stands(your analysis of developments is well done) go the way of demise and the ashen heap.
And…**out of that**, something can be extracted.
From nation-state to city-state(best example: Silicon Valley).
But no “polyannic†notions of change reign here.
McLuhan thought the same vis a vis his notion of “global village†which was popular immediately in his own day:
“The term never inspired a sense in me of “social harmony†– exact opposite.â€
*
As to your second question about “love of change and the newâ€: A good Socratic spirit of the soul would help.
Teach them the **joie de vivre** of reverse-engineering(ie. hacking) human identity.
I actually have no idea how to do this. Education? Guerrilla street art that challenges notions of “set human identity†as dictated by modern organized society? Trying to blow up the damned Matrix?!
(Anything goes in life save activity that is *clearly unethical* and would constitute “clear and present dangerâ€.)
Let people be enabled to be the “Shapers of their Destiny†– something that “organization manâ€, though “heâ€(rather, “itâ€) has its many virtues, outright proscribes!
And note: what I said above regarding “national life†ought not be fallaciously applied to the individual parts: people – themselves!
Making **social – inroads** is key! (for experts to work out..)
Again, I don’t know how to do this.
I’m sure that there’s some kind of literary thing out there of “personal Redemption†to serve as a template; eg. the film “Metropolisâ€. Whatever.
My recommendation: Have people focus on the debate on the said technologies that occurred in 2000 between Bill Joy(in favor of “top – down†centralization) and Jamais Casio(open – source is integral. Necessary but not sufficient).
That’s accessible enough for the more “average modesâ€.
The key is not to drive the responsible scientists underground – since they vastly outnumber the “evil geniusesâ€.
Doing that would create something of a maldynamic.