Shock of the new

Down through the ages, there has always been resistance to change. The infographic on this page bears testament to that fact. Specifically, there has always been opposition to new technologies. Sabotage - a word synonymous with subversion through deliberate destruction, was first coined following the 15th century attempts of Dutch workers to break the newly introduced and very unpopular textile looms. It was rumoured that the workers threw their sabots (wooden clogs) into the machinery to break the cogs, because they feared that the new machines would render human workers obsolete. The same mentality was present when robots were introduced into the car manufacturing industry late in the last century, although less overt kinds of opposition manifested then. Even today, many people still shun the automated teller machines (ATMs) because they don't trust them.

Why are people technophobic? Is it the shock of the new? Is it that people are simply scared of change? Often it's the uncertainty that new technologies bring which seems to faze people into resisting them. Fear of the unknown has a strong effect on our thinking. Some of the warnings are on the surface, quite reasonable, but if you look just beneath the facade of the caveats, there resides a kind of techno-panic - an unreasonable fear of what the technology might really bring to society.

Much of our fear of technology is represented in popular culture. In the Terminator and I, Robot movies for example, our own creations become a threat to our future, our humanity, our very existence. This trope can be traced back at least to Mary Shelly's Frankenstein, and arguably even farther back in time to the myth of Prometheus. Bizarrely, there are strong links from Mary Shelly - via her poet husband Percy Bysshe Shelly - and a holiday they enjoyed with close family friend and fellow poet Lord Byron, to his daughter, the technophile Ada Byron (more commonly known as Ada Lovelace, acknowledged as the first computer programmer). Was there a connection between the two stances? One would surmise that the influences were there and that conversations between the Shellys and the Byrons might have led to discussions around the social implications of the emerging technology of the time.

Health warnings are the most prevalent warnings we hear today about new technology. When mobile (cell) phones were first introduced more than two decades ago, concerns were raised by health experts over the levels of non-ionising radiation caused by the devices. Many articles published during that period expressed anxiety over the long term legacy of using the mobile devices close to the head, and predicted an epidemic of brain tumours and other health problems. More recently, the naysayers are still at it, bad-mouthing those who are pioneering wearable technologies with labels such as 'glassholes'. Contemporary critics of technology such as Andrew Keen, Baroness Susan Greenfield, Nicholas Carr and Tara Brabazon have variously argued that the Internet has negative impacts on education, memory and perception, knowledge representation, scholarship and culture. There seem to be no end to the column inches in the popular press that are dedicated to exposing the failure of education and the role technology may be playing. History has shown us that the technophobes and doom merchants are always among us, and that they will not desist. But we also know this - technology will also continue to be with us, and it is just as resilient as its detractors. Technology does not stand still, but continues to evolve at pace. Yes, we know that introducing technology in education is not the silver bullet. But it is up to us as educators and learners to wisely harness its potential for better learning. Applied in appropriate circumstances and contexts, technology is making a difference to our children's learning. To ignore it or shun it means we are depriving younger generations of opportunities for authentic, real-world learning.

"Every man is a creature of the age in which he lives, and few are able to raise themselves above the ideas of the time." - Voltaire

Graphic source: Fear of the New


Shock of the new by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.