for the world’s resources, and terminate humanity. Joy’s Wired article was widely read and cited as an example of how advanced technology might evolve in a dystopian manner during the twenty-first century – without restrictions imposed by world governments.
Joy was attacked after publication of the article as a “neo-Luddite” – one who is opposed to modern technological change. The Luddites were a group of textile workers who attacked the first mechanized weaving looms in the new mills in the Midlands of England in 1811 as a way to forestall mechanization. They were not successful.28 As one who co-founded Sun Microsystems in Silicon Valley and helped create TCP/IP, the fundamental communication protocol for the internet, it is erroneous to cast Bill Joy as a Luddite. In fact, it was due to his reputation as a computer scientist involved in the creation of the internet that people read and seriously considered his vision of possible dystopian futures. In the nineteenth century, coal miners in England and Wales took caged canaries with them deep into the pits to alert them of dangerous mine gases.29 Joy provides a similar advance warning about the potential dangers to civilization of these twenty-first-century technologies.
The digital universe is fundamentally linked to the development of nanotechnology (it is essential for the continued extension of Moore’s law in the next two decades) and the computer-based analysis of complex genetic sequences. Information technology is also central to the evolution of artificial intelligence in robotic systems. However, I am hopeful that the same digital technologies that are supporting development in these areas will also facilitate the communication of the possible consequences, at least those we can foresee. Joy’s Wired article was widely disseminated over the internet (and is easily accessible on its website30) and has led to a lively online debate of its premises.
Ironically, the digital universe that could lead to these possible dystopian aspects of the diffusion of information and communication technology is also the same system that can alert humanity to the dangers of unrestricted development. The canary in the modern “mines” of technology is information. The internet, to no one’s surprise, has emerged as a primary medium of communication about the implications of the development of technology. The work of related organizations such as the Long Now Foundation (focused on long-term thinking) and the Lifeboat Foundation (which has an influential board of scientists advising it on nanotechnology and biotechnology) is facilitated by the internet and, yes, email plays a central role in their communication.
Negotiating the Role of Technology in Modern Life
The role that technology plays in our lives can be negotiated, to a point. People in contemporary networked societies have a great deal of choice concerning their use of technologies to communicate and recreate. We each make daily choices about whether to carry a mobile phone, tablet, or other portable electronic device. When it comes to the working world, we may not have as much choice. Increasingly, employers are requiring that employees be electronically connected to the company 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The numerals 24-7 are universally understood by workers in Bangalore, Beijing, Boston, and Berlin. We are losing the clear demarcation line between home and work that has been in place since workers stopped shopping in company stores and living in company houses in nineteenth-century mining towns. The option of working at home by telecommuting has been a boon to many, especially parents with pre-school children in the house. The downside for telecommuters has been learning where to draw the line between work and home. 24-7 access means that laboring for one’s employer can extend far beyond the traditional 40-hour work week.
Aside from work, we do negotiate with ourselves and our families about whether to adopt a new technology and its use. Parents fret over whether to give a child under age 12 a mobile phone for safety reasons, knowing that its usage will be predominantly social in sending text messages back and forth. For adults, turning off one’s mobile phone can be seen by friends and colleagues as an anti-social act – likewise for the failure to answer an email within a day. We can negotiate with the usage of communication technology, up to a point, where social norms have increasing influence. This process of negotiating the use of technology by both individuals and organizations will be explored in subsequent chapters. It is a multifaceted and continually evolving aspect of the digital universe of information and communication technology. However, one has to marvel at the clueless person in church who takes a mobile phone call in the middle of a funeral – and then reacts in surprise at the angry looks of other mourners.
Notes
1 1. Twitter™ is a registered trademark of Twitter, Inc. of San Francisco, California. Twitter technology is a social networking and micro-blogging service where users can read and post text-based messages (called “tweets”) of 140 characters or less. See Twitter.com.
2 2. Spam statistics and facts. Spamlaws.com. Retrieved from, https://www.spamlaws.com/spam-stats.html.
3 3. Abramovich, G. (2020, February 19). If you think email is dead, think again. Insights from Adobe. Retrieved from, https://blog.adobe.com/en/publish/2019/09/08/if-you-think-email-is-dead--think-again.html#gs.0vj27o.
4 4. An alternate email option is to create and use one of Google’s Gmail accounts with a 7.3 GigaByte storage capacity. With this account capacity, one would probably never need to delete or edit received email. The downside is that one’s email is stored in a Google server in the internet “cloud” with attendant privacy and security issues. See Chapter 12 on privacy and security for further discussion of these topics.
5 5. Friedman, T. (2006, July 5). The age of interruption. The New York Times. Retrieved from, http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E03EFDA1230F936A35754C0A9609C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=print.
6 6. Neiger, P. (2017, November 20). Six jaw-dropping facts about workplace interruptions and what you can do. Training. Retrieved from, https://trainingmag.com/6-jaw-dropping-facts-about-workplace-interruptions-and-what-you-can-do. This article offers five useful options for carving out uninterrupted time at work to think and write.
7 7. Brown, E. (2018, July 23). How website filtering affects workplace productivity. ZDNet.com. Retrieved from, https://www.zdnet.com/article/how-website-filtering-affects-workplace-productivity.
8 8. Merton, R. K. (1936, December). The unanticipated consequences of purposive social action, American Sociological Review, 1(6), pp. 894–904.
9 9. Hafner, K., & Lyon, M. (1996). Where wizards stay up late:
