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Techno-Anxiety? We've Been Afraid of Disruptions Since the Printing Press

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Is the technology of the future more radical than the technology of the past? Alison Gopnik provides some historical perspective. Gopnik's latest book is "The Gardener and the Carpenter: What the New Science of Child Development Tells Us about the Relationship Between Parents and Children" ().
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Transcript - So, one of the questions that we're all asking now is what effect are the new technologies, the Internet, computers, cell phones, screens going to have on the next generation of children? The answer is we won't know for another 20 years until those children grow up. But I think we can make some guesses based on our past human history. One of the things about human beings is that we've been technological beings from the very beginning. In fact, in a way that's the thing that's most distinctive about us, we use tools. We modify and change our environments. We create new ways of being in the world, both physically and socially. And that's what we've always done and we've always changed. We've always had culture, which enabled us to take the inventions of one generation and then modify or change them to suit another generation. So the fact that we have technology and the fact that that technology changes and it changes across generations, none of that's new. But curiously part of the effect of that cultural change is it always seems as if the technology that we grew up with his eternal, it's just part of nature; it has always been there. And the technology that our children come up with is part of a dystopian Mad Max future apocalypse. And that's also been true for as long as we've been around as human beings.
So, many of the technologies that you could argue really did have transformative effects on us are things like the printing press, the telegraph, the train. We don't think about a telegraph as being an amazingly disruptive new technology, but when telegraphs and trains were introduced there were just as many editorials in the paper saying these are awful ideas. They're going to reshape our lives in ways that are going to be completely destructive of human happiness. Now in some ways that's right. I mean the printing press really did completely change the way that we relinquish the world and related to each other. The telegraph meant that we went from communicating at the speed of a fast horse to communicating at the speed of light. That made an enormous change in the way that we functioned and related to one another. And I think it's quite plausible that things like the Internet are also going to make a change in the way that we think, the way we relate to one another. Read Full Transcript Here: .
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