Tech Trade-Off: II. Learning to Think Differently

Featured Photo Credit: Steven Weeks on Unsplash

Click here to read Tech Trade-Off: I. Time to Think Differently

II. Learning to Think Differently

A gerund is a verb that ends with “ -ing.”

Gerunds are a verb form that often function as nouns, indicating some specific ongoing action or process underway, e.g. washing, drying, folding.

Generic gerunds are specified by accompanying words, to help fill in the picture:

“Doing… what exactly? Ohh, doing the laundry.”

At a minimum, we might describe ‘doing the laundry’ as a two-step process, the second being when we turn on the dryer. Some people even add a third step: ‘Folding the laundry’.

But whether specific or generic, gerunds do little to convey any sense of the stages or steps to that ongoing process. If anything, a 2–3 word gerund phrase reduces a series of steps – ‘the ongoing process’ – to ‘a singular thing’ or ‘a discrete event’, e.g. “Doing the laundry is such a chore!”

In Part I, I called this manner of thinking “shorthanding,” as we conceive and describe and reduce multi-step complexities into solely singular events, and I wondered whether innovation, progress, and technology might be having a longer-term influence that reiterates this reductive effect upon our outlook and our thinking…

(a) We develop technology for doing Task ‘A’ so that we don’t have to,
which yields surplus time

(b) We develop an accompanying frame-of-mind, which reinforces itself
more and more with each innovation that comes along

For all its efficiency and time saved, Technology teaches us a commitment to surplus. Think Wall-E and all those people buzzing around the Axiom spaceship in loungewear and e-chairs.

We can depend on A.I.!

Down here, closer to Earth, think ‘Gen AI’ or ‘self-driving cars’.

As we grow more accustomed to the surplus, our accompanying frame-of-mind more readily reconsiders matters of ‘process’ from being a series of steps to being a singular moment or event – this is shorthanding. This feedback loop is training us to think in ways that are more and more accustomed to shorthanding, and on it goes.

All this I’m deliberately claiming informally – it was me who picked the word, “shorthanding,” with zero empirical science to back it up, so…

Sorry, STEM – blame it on STE(A)M, if you like.

And, sure, shorthanding’s a bit abstract and hard to define. For starters, it might be more akin to Pitlick & Gregg than Pitman & Gregg.

Two minutes for… cross-checking?
Image Credit: Public Domain

And language shorthands like this all over the place – look no further than the gerunds and nouns, already mentioned: ‘vacations’, travelling’, living’, life’.

But we’re not simply trading up on Technology for time and convenience, nor on chores and labour for preferred activities. We’re trading in one kind of living for another, by way of a specific manner of who we are and how we live, which is to say by way of how we think. And we appear to have been doing all this without much concern for the price of the trade-off. Whatever that price might be, I suspect we’ve been the ones left short-changed.

For all its marvellous ease, Technology has been feeling more and more to me like a bad habit none of us can resist, and that gets me wondering where else we’re shorthanding. How else have we been altering some ongoing process into a misleading singular notion or concept, like ‘doing the laundry’? And what might be the nuance of such abbreviated shorthand thinking?

One altered concept, I’m afraid, is the process of ‘learning’.

Image Credit: Gerd Altmann on Pixabay

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Click here to read Tech Trade-Off: III. Thinking Differently about Learning

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