Technology is advancing at an alarming, almost exponential rate; as human progress increases, so does technology, and its effects on our society become somewhat more truncated. Vincent Mosco, in his article “When Old Myths Were New: The Ever-Ending Story,” notes that human society has a tendency to repeat history when it comes to technological advances; with each new stop, we hail our latest invention to be the be-all end-all for communication technology, ignoring that we have done that many times before. According to Mosco, “there is indeed a remarkably willful, historical amnesia about technology, particularly when it turns to communication and information technology” (Mosco 117). To that end, Mosco effectively argues that we should not get too excited about the possibilities inherent to technology, as it is but the latest in a cycle that has existed as long as we have started making great leaps in technological progress.
Mosco fully understands the compulsion to start hailing cyberspace as the last frontier of human capability and communications potential; he believes that it is the goal of every generation to change the world. “Put simply, we want to believe that our era is unique in transforming the world as we have known it” (Mosco 118). Here, Mosco cuts to the quick in terms of our motivations; our own hubris compels us to get extremely excited about our latest invention, which is natural and understandable. However, we soon start to get less elated with these possibilities, as banality sets in and we start to want more out of our society. “the rise of cyberspace amounts to just another in a series of interesting, but ultimately banal exercises in the extension of human tools” (Mosco 119). Basically, Mosco believes that we must temper our expectations of what cyberspace will bring us, as we have been in this position before of speaking too soon about a new and revolutionary technology (and likely will again).
We have had this kind of reaction to our own technologies many times and in many ways. With the telegraph, we believed that we were at the end of our capabilities with cross-country communication; electrification changed that. The telephone and radio brought about further premonitions of the ‘end’ due to the increased capability to talk to anyone in the world (or everyone, in the case of the radio). With these, we started to use the language of myth to talk about these technologies, ascribing ourselves to mythological figures and creating our own, such as the “mythic computer whiz,” which had precedent in the era of electrification despite being commonly considered a creation of the computer age (Mosco 124). In fact, Mosco notes the importance of youth as a conduit for these new technologies, as they are the first to pick them up and forward them to society (Mosco 130). However, he also notes that banality always and eventually undermines the magic, and we must eventually find something new to replace it.
There are certainly examples of critics and social scholars seeing the rise of cyberspace as the end of both culture and human advancement. As a consequence of this media-savvy culture, people read fewer books on the whole. While many people portray this as a bad thing, citing a potential lack of experience with the written word which can stunt language development and communication, this could not be further from the truth. In fact, children actually write more now with the constant typing of the Internet culture – “Teenagers today read and write for fun; it's part of their social lives” (Goldwasser, 2010). Thanks to instant messaging, blogging, and social media, the written word is a much larger part of their social lives, and as such they have a greater exposure to it. Though some can claim this might dilute language due to new words being formed, and typos being potentially more prevalent, the sheer amount of correctly proofread content on the Internet means that people are given access to a greater amount of immediate professional content than ever before.
Goldwasser claims that the Internet culture makes people even more alienated from themselves, due to the fact that it is much more easy and convenient to respond to people via email and smartphones. Even in mixed company, people tend to take out their phones and check them in lieu of communicating face-to-face with others – “when technology brings us to the point where we're used to sharing thoughts and feelings instantaneously, it can lead to a new dependence” (Goldwasser). However, people still have the choice to have face-to-face conversations with people, and are able to be perpetually present in each other’s lives – no amount of technology will restrict that. This plays in with Mosco’s assertion that the more things change, the more they stay the same – this is an example of the banality he mentions that happens eventually with technologies over time. Given a long enough timeline, another technology will likely come along to provide both a greater sense of optimism and fear about our culture, as Mosco notes.
In conclusion, Mosco’s assertion that cyberspace is not inventive, just another new toy that will eventually lose its luster certainly has merit, particularly in historical precedent and its short-term impact on our society.“The mythic promise of cyberspace is many things, but it is certainly not new. Nor is the historical amnesia that led many people to believe so fervently in a digital sublime that they created one of the greatest stock-market booms in American history” (Mosco 140). Scholars like Goldwasser marvel at the Internet’s ability to educate and entertain, despite the protestations of others that it is setting our society back a step; both of these perspectives are examples of Mosco’s tales of mythologizing technology and overstating its importance, hailing it as the last great achievement we will have. Even as far back as the telephone and radio, generations have argued that kids will read less and have worse social lives, and so this totemic obsession with technology is somewhat overblown in this case. In terms of solutions, Mosco believes that we must focus not on the bright, new, shiny thing itself, but on the importance of the culture that creates it: “It is only when we see cyberspace as mutually constituted out of a culture that creates meaning and a political economy that empowers it that we can fully understand why it is that over and over again, people have encountered and believed in a genuinely living end” (Mosco 118). Eventually, time will pass, some new technology will come along, and we will spend our time hailing it as the last great human achievement before banality sets in.
Works Cited
Goldwasser, Amy. “What’s the matter with kids today?” in They say / I say: the moves that
matter in academic writing. 2nd ed. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2010. 236-40. Print.
Mosco, Vincent. “When Old Myths were New: The Ever-Ending Story.” In The Digital Sublime:
Myth, Power and Cyberspace. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004, 117-40. Print.
