technology and social change

This is a kind of a follow-on from one of my recent posts and it’s also inspired by discussions I’ve been involved in elsewhere.

Those of us who are concerned about the massive social changes that have transformed the West since 1945 usually assume that those changes were mostly ideologically driven. In many cases that’s true of course but in fact a lot of social change is driven mostly by technology. Technology has changed social behaviour, sexual behaviour and family life in profound ways.

This has always been the case. Railways changed society. It’s often not appreciated that prior to railways people mostly spent their entire lives in an incredibly restricted geographical area, in some cases never travelling more than twenty miles from their place of birth.

The invention of the automobile changed society. To a large extent it made suburbia possible.

Television changed society. Instead of getting out of the house regularly to go to the cinema or the theatre or to music halls people got their entertainment at home.

Improvements in contraceptive technology made the Sexual Revolution possible. Sex became a recreational activity.

From the early 1970s to the late 1980s several technologies suddenly became mainstream and became major drivers of social change. Cable TV started to take off in a big way. Home video became cheap and readily available (the VHS format hit the market in the late 70s). The World Wide Web was launched in 1989.

We didn’t know it at the time but these technologies were going to have an effect on sexual attitudes and behaviours. By the mid-80s the explosion in pornography on cable TV and home video had begun. When the World Wide Web was launched it took about ten minutes for someone to figure out that this was going to create an immense market for pornography.

Social media and smartphones have created massive social changes.

While ideological forces have been involved there’s little doubt that without these technological changes society today would be very very different. Family life, sex, love, marriage have all been changed and technology has been a very major driver. Perhaps even the most important driver.

Which is a problem because it seems that no matter how useless and destructive a technology is nothing effective can be done to prevent that technology from spreading.

To a considerable extent the Culture War has been a technological war.