Closer Together, Further Apart: The Effect of Technology and the Internet on Parenting, Work, and Relationships. Jennifer Schneider
toward which change carries us, rather than the speed of the journey. [But] the rate of change has implications quite apart from, and sometimes more important than, the directions of change.”2 In other words, human society is affected not only by changes, particularly technological changes, but by the speed with which they occur.
A useful concept to illustrate the ever-increasing pace of technological change is that of the 800th lifetime, introduced in Future Shock. There Toffler divided the approximately 50,000 years of relatively traceable human history into “lifetimes” of roughly 62 years, coming up with 800 lifetimes. He notes that the first 650 of those lifetimes were spent in caves. He then tells us that only during the last 70 lifetimes has it been possible to communicate effectively from one lifetime to the next (via written history), and only during the last six lifetimes has a significant percentage of the human population been able to access that written history/communication. He also notes that most of the products we now use on a day-to-day basis were invented very, very recently—during the 800th lifetime.3 For purposes of this book, our focus is the products or technologies that relate to the ways in which humans currently communicate and interact. This means we’re not particularly interested in washing machines. Except we are. Why? Because washing machines have, in their own way, affected interpersonal relationships.
Really?
Yes, really. Before Whirlpool and Tide came along, women took their small children and the family’s dirty laundry down to the river so they could rinse the soiled garments and beat them against rocks to knock out the dirt. While there, the children played together and the mothers had a chance to socialize face-to-face with their peers. And this thousands-of-years-old venue for female and child socialization is completely gone today—all thanks to the washing machine. This does not mean that women and kids no longer socialize and communicate with one another. Obviously they do. They just do it in different ways and different places. Numerous other inventions—too many to list here—have similarly changed how women, men, children, families, communities, and nations connect and communicate. This basic idea, that human-crafted technology impacts the nature of human communication, relationships, and thereby human evolution, is a main theme of this book.
What the Scholars and Philosophers Have to Say
Over the last 150 years, sociologists and anthropologists have created various theories on social and cultural evolution. Among these noted scholars is Lewis H. Morgan, a contemporary of Charles Darwin, who identified technological progress as the driving factor in the development of human civilization. Morgan divided humanity into three major stages—savagery, barbarism, and civilization—relying on technological milestones to separate one from the next. In the savage era we had fire, the bow and arrow, and pottery; in the barbarian era we developed agriculture, metalworking, and domesticated animals; in the civilized era we invented the alphabet.4 In other words, for about 730 lifetimes humans were savages and barbarians, and then we learned to write.
Gerhard Lenski, a later philosopher, stated that the more information a society has, the more advanced it is. He viewed human development as occurring in four stages based on advances in the art/science of communication.
| Lenski’s Four Stages of Human Development | |
| Stage One | Generational information was passed on via genetic material. |
| Stage Two | Humans gained the ability to perceive and develop wisdom, learning through experience and by watching the actions of others. |
| Stage Three | Humans developed logic and started using signs (or pictographs) to represent their experiences. (Example: cave drawings) |
| Stage Four | Humans developed language, abstract symbols, and writing. |
Lenski’s basic theory is that advances in the technology of communication translate into advances in the economic system, the political system, and virtually every other sphere of human existence.5
Both Morgan and Lenski identified the final sociological/anthropological leap based on the ability of human beings to communicate beyond the face-to-face, to interact without having to physically occupy the same space. And, as Toffler eloquently explains in Future Shock, that ability has been with us in a meaningful way for only a very brief period, really only picking up steam in the last two hundred years or so as the printed word became slowly but steadily more accessible.
The Great Leap
Metaphorically speaking, humans got up off of their hands and knees, brushed off the muck and mire, and started not so much walking as sprinting with the advent of telecommunication—the transmission of organized and understandable electric signals over long distances. Happily, telecommunications provide the specificity that smoke signals, drums, and horns lacked. A telegram, for instance, could say, “Meet me in St. Louis at the Atwater Hotel, noon July 21, to discuss the marriage of your daughter to my son. STOP.” No mistaking the meaning of that communiqué.
The first useful telecommunications device, of course, was the telegraph, which Samuel Morse successfully tested in 1838. By late 1861 the first transcontinental telegraph system was established, and by the end of the nineteenth century telegraph cables connected every continent but Antarctica. Seemingly overnight, the transmission of information across great distances no longer relied on the vagaries of ships, carrier pigeons, and pony express riders. News, data, and other information could be transmitted almost instantaneously to virtually any major city. From there, it could be disseminated to others via the written and spoken word. In less than half a century the telegraph managed to connect virtually everyone on the planet.
In a relative flash, other telecommunications technologies arrived via telephone (1876), radio (1896), and television (1927).
Suddenly like magic, someone with the right expertise and devices could communicate with great masses of people all at the same time. Franklin Delano Roosevelt guided a struggling nation through the Great Depression with his inspirational “fireside talks” on the radio. Martin Luther King Jr. broadened the minds of not only the people directly in front of him, but millions of others who heard him on radio and saw him on television. Both of these men would rank highly on any list of “great leaders in history,” not only for their intelligent ideas and personal charisma, but because they understood and capitalized on the power of mass communication.
Toffler wrote in Future Shock about this communications explosion: “In our lifetime the boundaries have burst. Today the network of social ties is so tightly woven that the consequences of contemporary events radiate instantaneously around the world. A war in Vietnam alters basic political alignments in Peking, Moscow, and Washington, touches off protests in Stockholm, affects financial transactions in Zurich, triggers secret diplomatic moves in Algiers.”6 Note that Toffler penned this statement in 1970, decades before the Internet! Amazingly, he was referencing the now seemingly archaic, limited, and slow news sources known as newspapers, radio, and television.
Kenneth Boulding (1910–1993), whose quote we use at the beginning of this chapter, witnessed the rise of the telephone, radio, and television, along with the automobile, the airplane, and rocket ships. One could argue that his comment, “Almost as much has happened since I was born as happened before,” is quite the understatement.
| Time it Took for New Communication Technologies to Enter the Homes of 50 million people (US) | |
| Radio | 38 years |
| Television | 13 years |
| Internet | 4 years |
| Social networking | 16 months |
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