The New Science of Human Evolution - Newsweek Technology - MSNBC.com:
New research also shows that “progress” and “human evolution” are only occasional partners. More than once in human prehistory, evolution created a modern trait such as a face without jutting, apelike brows and jaws, only to let it go extinct, before trying again a few million years later. Our species’ travels through time proceeded in fits and starts, with long periods when “nothing much happened,” punctuated by bursts of dizzying change, says paleontologist Ian Tattersall, co-curator of the American Museum’s new hall.
What does evolution have to do with media? There is an internalized belief in the advanced information economies that technology is an inevitable byproduct of the most successful and necessary cultural products of human culture. Part of our culturally biased thinking relates to an institutional attitude that our communication systems are rational, evolutionary progressions of civilization, something that has been thoroughly debunked by anthropology.
The point is that very few people believe what anthropology teaches: that indigenous, small-scale traditional societies are not earlier (or degenerate) versions of our own. They are rather differing solutions to historical circumstances and environmental particulars that testify to the breadth of human intellectual creativity and its capacity for symbolization.
(Eric Michaels, Bad Aboriginal Art: Tradition, Media and Technological Horizons, p. 82)
The Newsweek article quoted above shows that “progress” and “evolution” do not necessarily come together. My desire is for us to consciously choose how we use our tools, and not let them control us (this is the essential anxiety of most sci-fi films). I think this is the lesson we can take away from these evolving concepts of human development. I’m not anti-technology, but I am about perspective, and for positive communication and community building. If our tools are in service of these goals, then I’m all for them.
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