Media, Transformation, and Society (2)

Progress and change

Progress is the history of inventions that created the modern world (Williams, 2002, p. 29).

In the movie “The gods must be crazy” a bottle fell from the sky and the Bushmen tribe unaware of the use other societies gave it, used it to complete the same tasks they did everyday. The bottle did not change their ways. But the novelty of it and having only one bottle, made bushmen people mad at each other; suddenly everybody had the necessity to use this new tool the “gods had send them”. Was there progress in their community? Did the impact of having and using this new artifact changed the way they did things? Did live changed when they did not have the bottle anymore or did it go back to the old days, when there was no bottle?

Could we say that the Bushmen were not ready for change? … that they did not have the necessity of a new tool? … that they were not made aware of ways in which they could use the bottle and therefore had not created a necessity for its use?

The inventions of new technologies are many times alien to us (as the bottle was to the bushmen), but it is the media, the propaganda that makes it so appealing everyone wants to have it. People might not have a real need for it, might not even know how to use it, but suddenly they need to have it.

Progress has been defined in the Webster’s Dictionary in the following way: “to move forward, … to develop to a higher, better, or more advanced stage” (p. 912). So, do we really need all the inventions available nowadays “to move forward” or “be better”; or is it the media that makes us vulnerable to wanting to have every new invention? How far away from the essence of being a human are we willing to go, to become superficial and “behave in [the] uniform continuous patterns” demanded by technology (McLuhan, p. 24)? If technology “takes away from culture” (Pierre-Louis, last posting), are we willing to embrace technology as our God?

Certainly, there are inventions that help people communicate better, that could be categorized as positive. But inventions do not appear one day (like it happened with the bottle in the bushmen community), inventions are the result of a long process of discoveries and developments to which a society gets used to little by little. According to Williams (p.39), the development of new tools is a two-step process: they develop technologically speaking first and then the content comes along. This has been the case of instruments such as the TV and the radio (Williams, p. 39) and computers in education (Ringstaff and Kelley, 2002).

At the end of the movie “The gods must be crazy”, it seemed the Bushmen community went back to the way they were, there was no bottle and there was happiness again.


References:

McLuhan, M. (2002). The medium is the message. In K. Askew and R. Wilk (Eds.), The Anthropology of Media (pp. 18-26). Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.

Ringstaff, C. & Kelley, L. (2002). The Learning Return on our Educational Technology Investment: A review of findings from research. Retrieved September 5, 2003, from the WestEd: Improving Education through Research, Development and Service Website: http://www.wested.org/cs/wew/view/rs/619

Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary. (1980). MA: G & C. Merriam Company. p. 912.

Williams, R. (2002). The technology and the society. In K. Askew and R. Wilk (Eds.), The Anthropology of Media (pp. 27-40). Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.