Re: How is technology changing the way we live?

Description: There's value in Internet chatter, Rojas says.

Transcript: Well there’s always gonna be negative aspects to any new technology.  I mean if you look back, you know, like at . . . . Television is sort of the . . . the . . . the prime example that people talk about.  I mean it brought a lot of . . .  You know it changed the way we entertain . . . we’re entertained.  It changes the way we communicate.  But it also maybe, you know, dumbed down a lot of, like, national discourses on important subjects like politics.  On the other hand, I mean it did bring those . . . that . . .  In some respects it did bring that discourse . . . it democratized that discourse in a lot of respects.  I mean a lot of people didn’t have access to information before.  And the Internet has only really extended that.  And so when I look at somebody like Andrew Keen attacking blogging, saying it’s a lot of amateurs, I say well it’s a lot of amateurs writing and talking amongst themselves.  And even if a lot of that is, you know, pointless gibberish or insane ranting or whatever, I mean there’s still some value in that.  There’s still value in people being engaged.  And I think that that is really important.  And I think, you know, every technology . . . I think the thing that . . . that people don’t realize about a lot of technology is that, like, technology changes . . . a lot of new technologies . . .  Like new technologies are always changing the way that we understand ourselves and the way we think about the world.  But it also changes what our sense of “natural” is.  And that’s something that’s really unspoken a lot.  And that’s one of the things I learned . . .  I’ve taken my critical theory days.  It’s like, “What do we think as natural?”  And you know, what do we think of as . . . as being like just . . .  It’s like an unthink . . . It’s something you don’t even think about, right?  It’s like you don’t even have to think about what’s natural because it just sort of   . . .  It’s when something is unnatural that you really, you know, start to . . . start to think about it.  And so, you know, stuff like . . . you know, having a little . . . carrying a little thing in your pocket which can, like, communicate with anyone on the planet, and send text messages, and access, like, this global Internet, you know, database or whatever.  I mean that seems perfectly natural to us now.  And you know but it also . . .  It really changes the way that we think about information.  And it changes the way that we interact with each other.  It changes the way that we relate with one another.  And you know I . . .  I find . . .  Like for instance, I find myself . . . I . . . I . . . I don’t necessarily write as much stuff down anymore because I know I can access it from my phone.  But I also find that when it comes time to . . . to     . . . to access information, when I have a question about something or when I need a fact or a figure or something like that, I can just pull out my phone and Google it.  And I think that being able to have that sort of augmentation is really important.  And like you know, on the face of it it’s like, oh well . . . when you wanna find out, you know, what year the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock, like it’s great that you have this sort of like reference in your pocket.  But it even goes beyond that.  I mean it really goes beyond . . .  It’s really changing the boundary of where we delineate like, you know, memory . . . like sort of our mental memory and the sort of external memories.  The boundaries are becoming blurry, and it’s reorganizing the way that we start to think about facts and data.  I mean you start not to necessarily think it’s important to remember those dates because you can always look it up.  You know and it’s funny.  One of the things that I wrote for Red Herring when I was there was I sort of wrote a brief history of the handheld, and they said, “Okay.  We want you to do like a, you know, a history of handheld devices.”  And they thought I was gonna start with, you know, like the Palm or maybe the HP calculator or something like that.  And I actually started with like Sumerian tablets, and took it all the way up through like the Middle Ages and . . . and talked about, like, basically the history of like handheld information, and took it all up to the point we’re saying, well you know, it’s not necessarily . . .  It’s no longer about, like, how much information you can fit in your hand.  It’s about how much information can be accessed, you know, from your hand.  And eventually, you know, I mean people talk about brain implants and stuff like that, so I guess eventually that stuff’s gonna happen.  But you know for right now it’s . . . it’s . . . it’s . . .  It’s really changing the way that we think about what is . . .  It’s almost like you don’t even think about it anymore.  It’s like . . .  It’s changing the sort of unspoken assumptions about knowledge, and where knowledge resides, and how we access and interact with knowledge.

Recorded on: 10/2/07