To Be or not To Be

Does Technology define who we are, not only as a person but also as a society?

This is at the center of many conversations today, although we may not hear this as such from the very technologies being used as tools to enforce the will of some people over all the people.

The use of tools as a mechanism by which to define a society is no new. Whether we look to how fire or stick and stones helped to progress a society, through force and exclusion. Or through the tools of law and social status stemmed the growth and off spring of many of the cultures and societies through out the history of mankind as well as even the whole of the animal kingdom.

I pose the question today - Has technology the tool moved beyond just being a means to an end, and now become rather who we are, and are we then the tools of technology?

Are we turning over the foundational elements of what makes us who we are to technology and allowing technology drive us in our daily activities, as well the voice within us driving our decision making processes?

Do we intake knowledge for the purpose of formulating our own thoughts or do we take in knowledge for the purpose of knowing not thinking?

Much of my earlier research (Everett M. Rogers published the diffusion of innovation (DoI) model) lends to a understanding that if left to its own accord social media (technology) will eventually define what is a society. 

I end with this: To Be or Not to Be..... should this be left in the hands of the few and their technological influences or do we as an individual still have the fortitude to make this call for our self as well as the society we wish to be associated with? 

"Mobile communications and pervasive computing technologies, together with social contracts that were never possible before, are already beginning to change the way people meet, mate, work, war, buy, sell, govern and create." 

Howard Rheingold - an influential writer and thinker on social media, is the author of Tools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Expanding Technology, The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier (both published by the MIT Press), and Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution.

1 - https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2020/06/30/tech-is-just-a-tool/