The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of Technology

I admit it. This post gave me some trouble.

I started it with one concept & conclusion in mind, then flipped to a completely different opinion the more I thought about it and ended up… somewhere in the middle. It was an unusual journey to take for one of my posts but I think there’s value in walking through the process as it highlights how we live in a world with shades of gray and not a lot of clear black-and-white situations.

The origin of this post took place back on Feb 18, 1982 on the Mork & Mindy show. In this particular episode, Mork (the late, great Robin Williams) creates a super computer at home that eventually takes over his family’s lives and even holds them hostage before they ultimately win out in the end. I recently tracked this down the episode and found it to be silly fun… but then I got to the end of the episode where Mork did his usual end-of-episode report to his boss Orsen about the lesson he’d learned that week:

My initial reaction was “Whoa. Adults in the early 80’s sound a lot like adults today, worried about their kids and what technology would do to their desire and ingenuity.” So I thought this post would simply be a reinforcement that technology can be “bad” (or at least has the potential for bad) if we are not vigilant. But that ended up being too easy of an answer and it didn’t sit well the more I thought about it.

The reality is that I was one of those kids Mork was talking about playing “video football” (and, boy, did I play a lot of Coleco’s Electronic Quarterback), but look how we turned out and – more importantly – just how much innovation there’s been in the last 35+ years since this episode aired. If anything, the games we played then inspired the adults we became to do more because suddenly, more things were possible. Personally, I feel like it fanned the flames of my imagination. As a result, I questioned whether we should instead discount any concern that technology was inherently bad for us and we should embrace our love of tech.

And then I sat down for dinner.

I admit it. My family is sometimes guilty of staring at our tablet or phone screens rather than interacting with the people sitting next to us. I know that I can become isolated in my own world with my own interests and so I swung back to thinking that this silly little comedy show was actually on to something. Technology can be trouble, but, like a lot of things, it’s a matter of degrees.

In the last few decades, we have witnessed incredible advances in science, medicine, communication and entertainment, just to name a few. Conversely, our personal information is no longer that – personal – and we have seen the rise of digital fakery (news, videos, posts, etc.) that seem to bring out the worst in people… and there are more potentially dangerous things to come. But the reality is that we’ve faced similar issues throughout out history.

Think about inventions like the printing press, where knowledge and learning were now available to the masses, or how automobiles made us more mobile and drove both commerce and community, or even radio & television where, again, information was much more immediately and consistently available. Like any new tool or invention, it is a question of what we choose to do with it that ultimately determines its value. And, just like every generation before us, we need to be active and thoughtful in deciding how we will use these new tools we keep inventing.

I’d like to think that a slightly more updated version of Mork’s report would recommend a balance. Encourage your kids – and yourself – to use technology as it can stoke the imagination and help to broaden our understanding of our world. But at the same time, we need to remember to set our devices aside from time to time and appreciate the other ways we have to connect with one another.

Know that I’m pulling for you!