Will the Digital Age Destroy Creativity?

I'm not sure I completely understood your sentence between the third and fourth comma, but... So far the major examples of political leaders being threatened by post-industrial technology--to the extent of attempting to censor the internet--are in despotic regimes such as China and Iran. They can hardly be labeled "liberal."

Apparently you've never played a MMORPG. One of the reasons children find them so seductive is that they offer more avenues for creativity and imagination than the environment their parents and teachers provide.

I see that growing up in the pre-digital era was not a great boon to your imagination.

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It took me about ten minutes to figure out how to cable my computer into my stereo, so it's playing through two 48-inch Carver ribbon loudspeakers. I can't get my own bass guitar amplifier to sound that good in a live performance. Wall-size screens are already available, they're just not quite cheap enough yet for home installation, but the price will halve every two years just like every other technology. The pixel density will obviously increase once we all have them and want better resolution. You can see this world on TV shows like "NCIS" and it's hardly far-fetched.

 

Then they go home and play MMORPGs, which require more imagination, creativity and initiative than most of the jobs we adults slave at.

I'm a musician and I've never been bothered by the dynamic reference frame of headphones, although I see your point. It seems to me like a fair tradeoff for the ability to actually hear it clearly without filtering through 70db of ambient noise. I'm sure it wouldn't take much to add an inertial sensor to a set of headphones that could maintain a constant reference frame.

As for the tiny screens, that's a casualty of their multitasking skills which are far superior to ours, especially males.

 

Out of proportion to what?

As I pointed out in another thread, it could be argued that civilization itself is not "natural," since it is the invented technology of "city building."

Many specific aspects of post-Mesolithic human life are clearly unnatural. The Agricultural Revolution with its large permanent villages, and then civilization itself, require the overriding of our "natural" instinct to live in small bands of nomadic extended-family units, regarding other bands as hated competitors for scarce resources. Ain't nothin' wrong with that.

Cooked food, music, weatherproof clothing and houses, companion animals, wheels, written language... there's a list too long to write, of technologies that are, by definition, unnatural. Yet even Baron Max would have a hard time arguing that they have not made our lives immeasurably better.

 

Wolves, cetaceans, probably the majority of the more advanced primates, and in fact by definition every pack-social species form societies. Even the flock- or herd-social species like bison and macaws do it. We could stand to be a tiny bit more precise with our terminology here.

If people mean "civilization," literally the technology of building and operating cities, then they should say so. Otherwise they seem to be objecting to our Neolithic ancestors forming "societies," building houses to survive the next cold wave and raising crops to survive the next poor hunting season.

I guarantee there were a lot of Mesolithic hunter-gatherers who were convinced mankind was doomed, when the first one of them figured out how to cultivate fig trees 11,500 years ago. So the people who still complain about "progress" come from a long and honorable line of ancestors... all of whom were wrong.

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Fortunately the world is not a creature so it has no rights we need to respect. All we have to do is keep it in good enough shape to live here. I certainly agree with the general Western opinion that we should not go around obliterating species and destroying ecosystems, but that's very much like my feeling of not wanting my view ruined. It's a value judgment based partially on aesthetics, partially on the philosophical overlay I put on the world, and partially on the hunch that some day we'll need those missing genes for something really important. Our sun is halfway through its service life and within one billion years this planet will become so hot that all its water will boil. Clearly what we've done to it won't really matter in the cosmic long run.

Fortunately we're not all shortsighted. But I don't just see beyond my own life, I see hope there. Arguably our biggest problem is population increase, and with the steady drop in its second derivative it's predicted to stabilize in less than a hundred years and then start decreasing. The second biggest problem is energy and the means to solve it are already available. (Nuclear power in the short run while we're building orbital solar energy collectors.) It will be fascinating, I'm sure, to see how long humanity puts up with the petro-conspiracy between energy corporations and the Middle East's oil producers before they launch the solar collector project--much less before Americans get off their (oil) cans and get over their little snit about nuclear power.

 

I stated my agreement with you on that. But it's difficult to enshrine it as anything more than a romantic point of view.

I guess you're saying that the truth can be dangerous in the wrong hands... or minds?

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One of the primary reasons for the institution of government, going all the way back to the cusp of the Neolithic Era and the Dawn of Civilization, is that since it has a longer life than its individual constituents, it not only can but should adopt a longer-term view. Unfortunately in America we've entered an era in which our governments focus only on the next election. I think this is the result of the power and influence of corporations, with their focus on the next stockholders' meeting instead of long-term success. As I have noted elsewhere, I believe that the role of those "artificial personss" in the economy, and therefore in politics, will decrease drastically in the Post-Industrial Era. The massive concentrations of capital needed for Industrial Era projects like transcontinental railroads and telephone networks strung on millions of dead trees will not be as necessary, and the ponderousness of large organizations will be a handicap in most endeavors. So we may also see a normalization in the focus of our governments as well, back to the purpose they were supposed to serve.

In the same series of posts I've pointed out that one of the major dimensions of the vector of our negative impact on the environment is our energy appetite. One fourth of America's petroleum consumption is expended directly on commuting, not counting second-order effects like the proliferation of fast food outlets and nannies driving all over town taking care of parentless children. The Post-Industrial Era has already ushered in the age of telecommuting, something an increasing portion of the U.S. workforce could do effectively with a little attitude adjustment, if only their managers could figure out how to manage people they can't see. When the kids with cellphones, chat rooms and MMORPGs grow up and take over leadership of the economy, they'll wonder why their ancestors believed they had to "go to work" every day. Both the decrease in energy consumption and the decrease in travel, with all the infrastructure it requires, will help improve our footprint on the environment.

Remember the ancient Chinese curse: "May you live during interesting times."