Wednesday, January 27, 2016

Podcast Interview - Is High Tech Turning Turning Us Into the Borg?



I recently had the privilege of being a guest on the Social Network Show podcast. The show is hosted by Dr Jane Karwoski and deals with the impact of technology, particularly social networking technology, on society. Dr Karwoski invited me on to talk about the Borg-likeness of the modern world. Regular readers of the blog will know that this is a topic I am quite interested in, having written a couple of posts about it, and I was pleased to be given the opportunity to talk about it on the podcast.

In the show, I distinguish between two different senses of 'Borg-likeness':

Borg-likeness1 We are increasingly becoming fused with technology (in a physical and metaphorical sense), i.e. we are becoming literal cyborgs.
Borg-likeness2 We are increasingly interconnected with one another and this may be suppressing our individuality and limiting our autonomy, i.e. we are moving towards a collective organism like the Borg on Star Trek.

Then myself and Dr. Karwoski consider the technological and ideological forces that may be driving us toward Borg-likeness (in both senses) and whether this is something we should worry about. You can listen here.


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