“We’ve got technology, and social media,” said a student to me this week. “We don’t need nature!” I never had to think much to know what my response would be, but I did need to deliberate somewhat as to whether I should respect their opinion, or whether to ‘hit them out of the ballpark,’ or be compassionate in my response. You be the judge.
“Oh dear,” I responded, after due deliberation. “How lightly you cast aside Mother Nature. Don’t you know she has been around for, 4,600 million years? Meanwhile, we humans have only been around for 6 million years, civilisation for about 6,000 years, industrialisation for 300 years, and technology for a mere one hundred and fifty years, even in its earliest forms, while social media is a true five-minute-wonder that has evolved only since 1970, a touch more than fifty years since.”
“Yeah but...” incidentally my most disliked response at any time, she said with a laugh. “That’s all old history. You’ve got to look forward or you’ll get lost in the rush, Sir.”
“I appreciate your compassion, and care for my well-being.” I smiled, “However, I’m not quite ready for the retirement home yet, and I won’t get lost in any ‘techie’ rush. Your advice may be well meaning, but I actually manage the new technologies fairly capably for an elderly citizen. I cannot code, and I don’t do video games, but I’m pretty good at Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, and can navigate my way around the world-wide-web thank you very much.”
“I’m not saying anything, sir. But you’ve gotta admit that everything’s better since we got Facebook, Snapchat and Twitter and that!”
“Well, what I can tell you is that in my lifetime I’ve had the pleasure of writing to, and getting letters from, pen pals around the world. I’ve also experienced the evolution of telephones from not having one, to sharing a ‘party line’ with six neighbouring homes, to having a ‘private’ phone line, to mobile phones, and now smart phones. I think it’s amazing what they have become today, but I think your generation unfortunately sees things on either social media, or your phones, and think that’s as good as it gets. I genuinely feel you are short-changed, because all you are getting are images, when what are valuable, are experiences.”
In fact, the very first social media platform was an institutional one, ‘PLATO,’ an academic site for the faculty at the University of Illinois. ‘SixDegrees.com’ opened in 1997 and closed just three years later, but ‘AmIHotorNot.com’ fired up that year, and apart from rebranding currently as a dating app, has survived. ‘Friendster’ opened and closed in 2002 and 2003 respectively, while ‘MySpace,’ ‘LinkedIn,’ ‘YouTube,’ and ‘WordPress’ all predated ‘The Facebook’s arrival in 2004, and its 1 millionth sign-up as ‘Facebook,’only a year later. ‘Twitter,’ ‘Tumblr,’ and the ‘hashtag,’ all arrived soon after, and social media had arrived to stay.
“What’s a party line?”
I chuckled aloud at that, and explained that a ‘party’ line was in fact the terminology for a shared phone line, which really seemed to be mind-blowing to the youthful student, and to be fair, I could understand why.
“Then there’s the matter of energy to run the new technologies,” I continued, “Ultimately, all energy, for now, is drawn from nature, so what are you going to do for energy?”
“Solar power, and wind power, that’s where the future lies, Sir. You must see that?”
“Hmmmm. Both natural, and renewable, and both products of nature. Yes?”
There is no great satisfaction in a points victory over a student, That’s not at all my ‘thing,’ but as much as technologies are enabling progress, it is nature that can perpetuate the continuing evolution. Until that relationship is recognised, it is not a question of the challenges of the tech industry responding to the need to sustain nature, but rather that mankind itself both recognises, and responds, to its appreciation of an ever so forgiving life partner... Mother Nature.
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