Is the Relationship Between History & Technology Repetitive?

History repeats itself. One can look into the history books and find many different events that are practically similar. While reading The Atlantic's "Is Google Making us Stupid" by Nicholas Carr for my class I noticed some bits of information that sounded strikingly familiar. I turned to Steven Shapin's The Scientific Revolution and noticed that he brought up a similar point as well. Whenever new technology is discovered, it leaves a permament mark upon society and culture, both positive and negative.

In Carr's article he speaks about how The Internet has changed the way we read, speak, and write. While reading I realized he was completely right. Halfway through reading his story I got up and did something instead of reading it all in one go. As I was typing this blog post I got up and performed another task, and it just went to show me how right Carr's observation was. Even though the Internet may have decreased our attention spans towards reading it has brought us an almost infinite database of informatoin at the access of our fingertips.
He talks about how Nietzsche stared using a typewriter when his eyes began to fail him to write. In Carr's article he qutoes scholar Friedrich. A. Kittler, "Under the sway of the machine, writes the German media scholar Friedrich A. Kittler , Nietzsche’s prose “changed from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style."

Shapin on the other hand discusses about the introduction of the clock to society during The Scientific Revolution. He brings up a similar case to Carr. While the introduction of the clock was able to create a more precise, uniform, and sense of regularity it came with it's downside of as well. While we gained a sense of organization, we lost a sense of natural movements and human life. The clock made the same huge impact on the culture then in the same way The Internet has made a huge impace on our society today. They began to look at the world differently, as Shapin writes, "...the natural world was 'as it were, a great piece of clock-work.'(Shapin 34)"

I ran into another article where it confirmed how technology has made a significant impact to our society, in this case, the younger generations. Renee A. James of TheMorningCall.com wrote the article Youthful Text Messaging is a :( for Conversation. In it she describes how text messaging has changed our society. That people have the need to write emoticons to express the emotion behind their writing instead of relying on the uses of different vocabulary. That kids today can't have a conversation without pulling out their phone and responding to a text message, while they never even speak into it. As James puts it, "They look like they're listening, like they're engaged and interested in the conversation and then, with one little brrrzzz or vibration, they answer their cell phones and text someone even as they're speaking to you." While we have gained a quick way of sending a quick message, we have lost that joy of actually speaking to someone. It is another example of how technology has its benefits and its consequences.

With the introduction of a new technology history repeats itself. We gain a good and better way to perform a task, but in the process lose some of our humanity in the process. It makes you wonder what our society will one day become with all the new technology that will be invented in our worlds future.

Carr, Nicholas. “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Atlantic. July. 2008. 02 Oct. 2008. http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google

Shapin, Steven. The Scientific Revolution, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1996.

James, Renee. "Youthful text messaging is a :( for conversation" The Morning Call. May. 2008. 02 Oct. 2008. http://www.mcall.com/news/opinion/anotherview/all-james5-4.6385886may04,0,2424908.column