technology

The world we live in today is a world driven by the engine of technology. Economics taught us the importance of technological advancement in expanding a country's productive capacity. History has shown us how some countries have risen far ahead of their neighbours when operating on superior technology. Mathematics allows us to see that technology enables figures that used to operate on the 'addition' function have now switched to the 'multiplication' function. Everywhere we live in, the disparity in wealth is caused by a marked distinction of the availability and quality of the technology. The North-South divide which demonstrates how the developing countries are falling further and further behind due to a lack of new technology and the availability of institutions to utilize the technology is a clear sign of the potency of technology. Back at home, we can also witness with our own eyes how the burgeoning income inequality in our society is punctuated by similar trends. Thus, is technology a positive commodity after all?

Technology and information are two closely related entities. Technology facilitates the transfer of information and accelerates the process. Hence, based on the assumption that technology is good, more information should, ideally, be better too right? After all, if we have perfect information on market behaviour, we can predict outcomes and anticipate trends, hence allowing us to adjust inputs to find the point of equilibrium. Right?

Wrong. Just as eating too much meat will make us unhealthy, absorbing too much information will be detrimental to us too.

The price elasticity of demand applies to information as well as meat products. Make information free, and we'll become gluttons of information.

As behavioral economists (most vociferously, Dan Ariely) have pointed out, we find the promise of free things hard to resist (even when a little thinking reveals that the free-ness is illusory). So when with very little effort we can accumulate massive amounts of “free” stuff from various places on the internet, we can easily end up with 46 days (and counting) worth of unplayed music on a hard drive. We end up with a permanent 1,000+ unread posts in our RSS reader, and a lingering, unshakable feeling that we’ll never catch up, never be truly informed, never feel comfortable with what we’ve managed to take in, which is always in the process of being undermined by the free information feeds we’ve set up for ourselves. We end up haunted by the potential of the free stuff we accumulate, and our enjoyment of any of it becomes severely impinged. The leisure and unparalleled bounty of a virtually unlimited access to culture ends up being an endless source of further stress, as we feel compelled to take it all in. Nothing sinks in as we try to rush through it all, and our rushing does nothing to keep us from falling further behind—often when I attempt to tackle the unread posts in my RSS reader, I end up finding new feeds to add, and so on, and I end up further behind than when I started.

Information may be free, but, as Horning explains, it exacts a price in the time required to collect, organize, and consume it. As we binge on the Net, the time available for other intellectual activities - like, say, thinking - shrinks. Eventually, we get bloated, mentally, and a kind of intellectual nausea sets in. But we can't stop because - hey - it's free.
http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2008/06/does_my_brain_l.php

haha ever found the aforementioned situation familiar? If it is, perhaps it's time to recognize that too much information may be bad (haha maybe it can be a hint to bio people to not cram too much into your brains too xD).

Associated with technology is the ubiquitous internet. While Google and the many other available search engines are all cool and stuff, it seems like they have negative side-effects too - that is, the gradual erosion of ability to memorize things.

The combination of powerful search facilities with the web's facilitation of associative linking is what is eroding Carr's powers of concentration. It implicitly assigns an ever-decreasing priority to the ability to remember things in favour of the ability to search efficiently.

As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought.

We are not only what we read. We are how we read.

'You are right,' Nietzsche replied, 'our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.'

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/jun/22/googlethemedia.internet

Essentially, what these examples portray is not how good or bad technology and its close associates are. Rather, it proves to us that in this world, black and white are often shades of gray that lightens or darkens under different circumstances. And those circumstances, they are often fashioned by us.