Several years ago, actually, do a count back, it was probably around 2006, so twenty years ago. I had a book on my shelf: Asleep at the Wheel by John Nieuwenhuizen. Now, to be honest, I meant to read it. It was by an Australian author and was primarily about Australia on the Superhighway.
Now, in 2026, I have to say that was quite a quaint idea, the superhighway. To be honest, though, it was only ten years earlier, in 1996, that I'd finished my degree, learning to code in Pascal, coding in COBOL, HTML, and the internet was all new.
The truth of it: my eldest, now 18, was born the same year as the iPhone. The reality is that the book I'm talking about pre-existed the iPhone. That is a realisation as I am writing this.
Anyway, I didn't get to read it. But what I have realised is that I had these thoughts in my mind then, twenty years ago. Has technology gotten away from us humans? I think this is what appealed to me about the book. Yes, it was about the superhighway and titled Asleep at the Wheel.
I think I romanticised it, romanticised it in that here was someone else, a kindred spirit, who had some of my beliefs, my considerations. I imagined the book would have been about the blind capitalist leaning into the use of technology in an unregulated way, where corruption and over-inflation were all over the place. This, though fictional, as I had not read the book, I did not know, nor could it have predicted the Dot-com Bomb of the noughties.
A house move later, and some spring cleaning, the book disappeared from my shelves, never to be read by me. Now, its residual is a note on the backlog of story ideas I have for my annual foray into Story-a-Day in the month of May, and there it has rested for the last couple of years. Until now.
Today, I'm trying something a little different, a story of sorts, a story about how the title of one book has been on my mind for twenty years and even today still holds relevance beyond what I believe the original author had in mind.
Since that dusty tome left my shelves, we have had the iPhone, the standard setter for the smartphone, arrive and iterate seventeen times. Yes, seventeen times. We're now on version 17. This device and its clones turned us, and not just Australians, into screen-obsessed automatons.
In my travels around the world, from Vietnam to Spain, New Zealand, and beyond, you see them everywhere, everyone looking at that little two-by-five-inch display. They are everywhere, to the point where I am now self-conscious about using my phone and take paperback books to read on the train.
It's the physicality of these little devices that has enabled things like Facebook, created in 2004, to be mainstreamed into our lives, flooding our brains, before Instagram, Twitter (now X), YouTube, and more. Personally, I no longer use these. I still have a Facebook account, and my daughter had me on Insta the other day, yet living without them makes no difference to me. To the broader society?
The odd thing is, 'Social Media' is comically one of the most anti-social things I have ever come across. In every way. People will sit opposite each other in a restaurant, the glow of their little screens lighting their faces, ignoring the person across from them. Looking into another world that is not physically with them.
How teenagers use this is phenomenal. I remember when bullying occurred at school in the old days; it stayed at school. Now it comes into the home on the invasive little screens, as it knows no boundaries. I was out walking today and watched four very young teen girls walking towards me, phones in hand. As they passed: 'I've pushed Sofie', god knows what she's pushed them into. And what would Sofie push back into them, and would the Sofie pusher simply absorb it or share? Let alone when.
Then we get on to how anti-social these social things truly are. Dating apps. I work in a university, and we struggle to get the kids on campus to connect. They don't. I watch it with my own daughters and the effect of these little two-by-five-inch glowing demons upon them.
It's a bit of a crisis. Don't get me wrong, both the internet, the superhighway, and social technologies have done great things. When the pandemic hit, the organisation I worked for, TAFE NSW, barely missed a beat because of these technologies and was able to play a big role in NSW's community transition through COVID-19.
Yet here we are. If John felt we were asleep at the wheel way back in 1997, that's when it was published; what would he be thinking now? Today, there's a view, and I know there are studies and numbers to support this, that we are living in the most connected society in human history, yet in the most isolated ways ever. We're losing our social ways.
Now, though, AI, artificial intelligence, is here. What and how will that affect us? If we haven't managed ourselves particularly well through the last three decades of technology, how are we going to manage the next ten?
These little devices have taken away our attention and broken our social connections. Is AI simply going to steal our purpose? Knowing the political, community and societal response to everything that has preceded it, we all need to wake up before we veer away.
References/background:
https://www.afr.com/companies/hacking-through-the-hype-of-the-new-19970505-kb1ij Article was May 5 1997
https://www.booksandpublishing.com.au/articles/2022/10/19/222031/vale-john-nieuwenhuizen/
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