Technomagicology

Technology doesn’t make people mindless. What makes them lose their senses is their obsession with whatever is “new” or “advanced,” their simplistic claims and thinking about it, their disregard of (the complexity of) related issues in life and society.

Technological magic thinking is no better than other types of magic thinking — like fancy new religions, denial of science, or absurdly exaggerated health benefits of exotic fruits. This type of thinking makes people forget, for instance, to do any research on the subject, to test the tool being touted, or the fact that human people have for very long time used highly “advanced” technologies like pencil and paper.

Technomagicology makes people not use basic critical thinking; more insidiously, it makes them consider individuals and societies not using their kind of technology to be “behind” or even “backward”; it makes them forget their trade and focus on the tools. Think about a farmer who loves to get on his tractor trailer and go on the highway, or an artist who produces more self-serving discourse about her art than art itself.

To give you a concrete example that I recently came across, it makes them make arguments (about a “Universal Translator”) as in the story below.

I was reading an article about Microsoft’s attempt to integrate a universal translator with Skype, and the following incidental techno-magic thinking made me think, oh, yeah?:

With 300 million people around the world connecting to Skype every month it makes a lot of sense to remove the language barriers between them. For business users especially, it’s going to make Skype look very desirable for those international calls and video meetings, and eventually much cheaper than actually hiring a translator. / We’re still a long way off clipping a Universal Translator to our shirts, but Microsoft is working hard to ensure that when we do, it has the Skype logo on it.

The author of the article is careful to acknowledge that “we are a long way off…” the promised land. But there is still the assumption that translation is a barrier that can and will be overcome with enough technology. No cultural differences thought about, and no need to worry about nuance and intention and connotation and interpretation and context and poetry and pun and change and confusion and ambiguity — and I could go on — of any blessed human languages involved. The author focused so much on the tool that he forgot the truth about too many silly human people talking in too many tongues all the planet over.

At first, I thought it’s this particular venue, but then we’ve seen a lot of snake oil being pushed as a replacement (not careful adaptation, not just a means of enhancement) for established systems of education. This kind of logic about largely context-free algorithms to “remove” all “language barriers” between everyone is all over much more prestigious venues of publication these days. (In fact, even on much broader and much more complex issue such as cross-border higher education, there are similar news reports that accept and promote thoughtless ideas like “education in a box for the developing world”).

Just to give you a sense, let me compare Bing’s translation of some basic Nepali news into English with my translation.

First, my translation (I used to work as a professional translator, but I don’t claim accuracy because I know how mind-boggling translation can be even at the level of syntax, not to mention when we consider specific contexts and cultures behind language use):

New York, June 1 – Mount Everest Day has been celebrated on the occasion of the 61st anniversary of the first climbing of the peak by humans, amidst a program here on Thursday. / May 29th has been celebrated as Mount Everest Day every year. Sir Edmund Hillary of New Zealand and Nepal’s Tenzing Norgay Sherpa had successfully reached the summit for the first time on May 29th in 1953.

Now, here’s Bing’s translation (the same Bing translator that the writer seems to believe is getting closer to making “international calls and video meetings . . . much cheaper than actually hiring a translator”:

New York by one paper, senior 16-sagramatha shikhrama human arohnako karyakramko pugeko aun avsarma here’s a 61 year planning gardai bihibar sagramatha day manaieko. / Tarikhlai sagramatha divsako rupma manaundai every year to 29 in aieko. Sun tarikhka day nyujilyandaka 29 in 1953, Sir hilary and Tenzing Norgay, the Nepali tenjing amended sherpale gareka thie sagramathako Pinnacle successful ascent was first activated.

Now, that’s not English, is it?

Let us say that Bing misidentified Nepali as Hindi (it shouldn’t), but look at this Hindi translation of a few basic sentences from a news item:

Some time ago Mumbai news was that Salman Khan and katrina Kaif movie kick in two years later, the large screen with will, but now think the audience will remainincomplete at the moment, these aspire. katrina has rejected the news completely.

The real question here is not (as the author of the article I cited says) how far we are from the magic world of technology; it is about the social consequence of technomagic thinking on our social institutions right now.

Sometimes, I just laugh at the absurdity of this technomagicology. But I don’t think we can only laugh at it. At a time when the general public, academic institutions, government policy-makers seem to be listening to and believing the nonsense that is peddled by too many “players” in our education “market,” there is real danger that, metaphorically speaking, in ten or twenty years, the world will have very few flying cars and a lot of given-up highway construction/modernization projects.

Bookmark the permalink.

One Comment

  1. I like the word you coined — technomagicology. While I (as an optimist) want to believe it will make tremendous progress in the days to come, I do agree that the consequences of this absurd mentality will have lots of casualties along its way.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *