On what technology would you like to depend?
While I was still thinking about technology-dependence last week, I happened to read an assertion in Jonathon Lyons' The House of Wisdom (p. 32) that "Accurate timekeeping would one day free society from the dictates of sunrise and sunset and recast the day or the hour as an abstract notion distinct from daily experience." This seemed a fairly peculiar idea of freedom given that, in Lyons' own words, it resulted in "the regular ringing of monastery bells" and "the tentative beginnings of an organized social order". Did we simply exchange slavery to the Sun for slavery to the clock?
Lyons goes on to claim that timekeeping enabled people to see "the universe as something that could be measured, calculated and controlled." I assume that Lyons was thinking about the "controlled" part when he wrote about the freedom brought about clocks, even though a clock by itself obviously contributes only to the "measured" part.
Kevin Kelly's What Technology Wants makes much of the idea that technology gives us choices. Kelly has some vague idea that technology is important, and I have no clear idea of what he thinks it wants. Nonetheless, I can see the point that the invention of clocks, for example, gives us a choice between organising our days according to the Sun, or according to clocks.
I think "us", as opposed to "me", is an important word here. I like to rise with the Sun and get to work as soon as I have eaten my breakfast. But we Australians have made a social and economic agreement that shops and offices will open at 9am, or thereabouts, irrespective of what the Sun and I like to do. Being part of this society, I have to co-operate with it.
So perhaps Lyons isn't so peculiar, given that he refers to "freeing society" and not necessarily freeing individuals. As much as modern society is dependent on clocks, electricity, telephones and the rest, we at least arguably chose to depend on those technologies rather than the Sun, human muscle and smoke signals. So long as society chooses its technologies, rather than let its technologies choose it, society's freedom seems to be intact.
