Progress Covers Its Tracks

In his book Utopia Is Creepy, Nicholas Carr included an essay on the generational effects of new technologies. He used electricity as an example. When people lit their homes with candlelight, the wick brought them together. Families sat together in one room, reading or talking by candlelight. The electric light, conversely, sent people into different rooms. It gave individual family members more options and more independence. Carr wrote, “Each person gained more privacy and a greater sense of autonomy, but the cohesion of the family weakened.”

When I was in college, I borrowed a mini cassette recorder and interviewed my 90-year-old great grandma. I had spent a lot of time with her growing up, but it wasn’t until I was in my 20s that I realized there was more to her than just making jello and playing a mean game of Uno. It occurred to me that Grandma Goodman had lived through a lot. She was born in 1902 (“I’m two years younger than the year,” she would tell us), which meant she was born into a world of horse-and-buggy, reading by candlelight, and cold midnight trips to the outhouse. She remembered all of this, as well as the first time she drove a Model T, the first time she heard about air travel, and what she was doing the day Neil Armstrong walked on the moon (making jello, no doubt). My grandma saw a lot of change.

I’ve never once listened to that recording. The microcassette tape sits in my jewelry box with no way to be played, and sadly, no one who’s itching to hear it. Grandma Goodman died in 1999, and with her, the memories of a different world. I was pregnant with my first child when I attended her funeral. The old had gone; the new had come. She was among the last of a generation who had seen such great change over the course of their lifetimes, but her way of life seemed so outdated and stale. Who in the 90s was sitting around relishing the glories of the horse-and-buggy?

But though she had only a high school education, lost numerous babies who today probably could have been saved, and endured two horrendous world wars, I’m less and less sure that my world is superior to hers. Or that hers was the generation that witnessed the greatest changes in the history of mankind. I wonder if those of us born in the 70s might not hold that distinction.

These words in Carr's essay caught my eye:

“All technological change is generational change. The full power and consequence of a new technology are unleashed only when those who have grown up with it become adults and begin to push their outdated parents to the margins. As the older generations die, they take with them their knowledge of what was lost when the new technology arrived, and only the sense of what was gained remains. It’s this way that progress covers its tracks, perpetually refreshing the illusion that where we are is where we were meant to be.”

I was among the very last group of college students who had never heard of the internet. I started my first job the same year it became readily available. I have a complete, full, beautiful memory of a fully offline life--a life with no computers, no cell phones, no Google or texting or social media. I remember discovering and poring over encyclopedias. I remember conversations with friends in which no phones chimed in with an urgent update. I remember eating family meals together every night and watching the 6:00 evening news. I remember exchanging long, handwritten letters with my friends and talking for hours on the phone. I remember playing outside with the kids in my neighborhood every single summer night. I remember when strangers sat in waiting rooms making eye contact and chitchat.

If I take after my Grandma Goodman in longevity, at the end of my life, I will be among the last people alive to hold such memories. And will anyone care?

Progress covers its tracks and makes us think that where we are is where we're meant to be. Something to think about.