Interview with Mark Curtis - Author of Distraction - Page 3

Digital technology—essentially the bit that deals with communications—is changing our world more than most people remotely imagine. This book is about that change.

Some of it could have been written three or even five years ago. However, the outlines of the impact of mobile technology are beginning to slope out from the mist, affecting the story for better or worse. It is time to give it some narrative form and see if it makes sense.

Our world is changing shape. This should not be a surprise as it has happened before. I do not of course mean something as dramatic as a shift from being a sphere to a cube. In this book, I am more interested in the way we think about our universe. If you define reality as that which we think we experience, then history is well furnished with examples of man's perceptions of the world around him changing fundamentally.

These are very important moments though at the time they happen, it is hard to see what the effect will be.

You'd have to go back to the sixties for another decade when our world has changed (the pill, pop music, drugs, the moon landing) so much as in the last ten years. The changes we are living through now are perhaps less raucous and demanding of our attention as sexual freedom or the rise of the teenager. That does not mean they are less important. In the long term, they may be more so.

This re-shaping of our landscape is happening at the same time as a tremendous shift in the way we structure our social networks, caused and enabled largely by new technology. The world of our friends and acquaintances is mediated increasingly by electronic address books—in sim cards, mail browsers and buddy lists (the address books used by instant messenger services such as MSN Messenger). Are these going to support or disrupt the traditional social networks—or is this an artificial distinction suggesting that there is nothing to worry about?

We do know that social capital—the store of goodwill that helps us have easier relationships with people—is in decline. Will digital halt this or change its course?

We cannot take for granted that all progress is good, as the Victorians did. In Why Things Bite Back, Edward Tenner developed a compelling theory that every technological advance carries with it what he called a "revenge" effect, a kind of unintended consequence. Frequently this is chronic and long term, by which he meant low level and hard to detect, but often much harder to deal with than the problem that was being addressed in the first place.

Article Author: Russell Buckley

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