Читать книгу The Digitally Divided Self: Relinquishing our Awareness to the Internet - Ivo Ph.D. Quartiroli - Страница 23

Our attachment to, fascination with, and need for tools has ancient roots. Human beings, unlike other species, do not have a natural specialization which allows them to live in a specific ecological zone. We would have become extinct a long time ago if we did not operate technologically on the environment.

Technology – in the form of fire, hunting tools, or hardware to fix a plow or a tractor – is essential for survival. Mechanical tools involve the whole body, spatial imagination, attention, and concentration to operate them safely. The capacity to remember the characteristics of the territory, the operating modalities, and the location of the numerous tools is needed.

Even the most primitive populations require some tools to extend their power. For instance, humans can survive only in a narrow range of temperatures unless we provide shelter and clothes for ourselves. And very few environments were once without dangerous predators, so we have needed to provide safety – again, through tools.

We can understand why we are so attached to technology and to the power we get from it. It’s about survival. We are also hard-wired to attend to new visual stimuli, in order to discern potential threats. Attending to novel stimuli – which nowadays arrive as pixels changing on the screen – has been evolutionarily rewarded with a pleasurable dopamine shot.