Technology Is For The Birds

"Truth is One, though the Sages know it as Many."

-- The Rig Veda (Book I, Hymn CLXIV, Verse 46)

I'm not a Hindu, but I've been exposed to a lot of Hinduism. And part of that exposure includes visits to my Uncle while he is learning Hindi from a very good teacher whose name, ashamedly, I don't know how to spell properly. I pick up little pieces of the philosophy in such a manner.

One such piece I learned yesterday is the anecdote of the two birds; one bird eats of the fruit and bustles about tasting the different fruits - some sweet, some bitter. The other bird sits on a higher branch and simply surveys what is happening - a philosopher.

The eating bird is like Arjuna, we were told, and the philosopher bird like Krishna. The idea is that within every person, these two birds reside - and while we worry about day to day living, tasting of the fruits like the eating bird, we also look on as the philosopher bird. In Hinduism, the soul aspires to be the philosopher bird - looking on. And yet, there are practicalities involved.

So I started thinking about this in the context of technology, and in a lot of ways it fits. It's a fairly complicated concept that is explained very simply. And what I thought most cool about the explanation was that it probably evolved over thousands of years, passed on by writing and oral tradition.

And then I started putting it into the context of what I do know.

Society & Technology

Technology these days is based on two things: Making life easier for the users of technology, and profit. The profit is usually financial profit, and has become increasingly so over the years. It's not a good or bad thing, it's just the way it is.

But in either case, technology is a means for making life easier. This is very strange, because in a lot of ways technology has made our life more complicated. The computer was to make paperless offices a reality, and over the last 20 years, this hasn't happened.

In a way, technology is our aspiration to become more like the philosopher bird. We want more time - one would be hard pressed to find someone who did not want more time - and yet we are always the 'eating bird'. We taste the good and bad of technology, we even get paid to use technology to do more with less effort. From the garbageman to a President or Prime Minister, technology allows us to do more with less. And so, we do more. There's a certain irony here, because technology is supposed to make our lives easier - and it does. But the information we get with technology also means that we have more time to use. And because we have more time, we do more instead of less. James Gleick made this point quite well in his book, "Faster". And while we deal with the Digital Divide in it's many incarnations, we're really fighting for people to have the capacity to do more.

Efficiency.

On a global scale - on the scale of all of mankind - we're competing for limited resources, and where we have the capacity to make some of these resources less limited, we make these resources more limited to leverage competition for other resources. In some parts of the world, farmers are paid to not grow food, and in other parts of the world there are people starving.

This is odd, to say the least.

Technology and Media

Media tends to be the bird that looks on, the philosopher turned reporter. But Media also eats of the same fruits, so it's just more philosopher than 'eating bird' - and yet, as media itself changes to more community media, there's less need for the 'eating bird'; more people can participate in media while retaining their individuality.

And then it gets complicated; especially when people get paid to use the new technology to do the same thing. Some people call it selling out, some people see it as a means to an end.

It's the competing birds within... but at the end of the day, even if we wish to be philosophers instead of eater of fruits both bitter and sweet, we must survive to do either. And survival requires us to eat - and that's really the bottom line in this world. If we didn't need to pay for other things in our life, we probably wouldn't look to be paid for the things that we do. So I stand with the Raving Lunatic on this one; he's right. We do what we can with what we have.

Eating and Philosophy

After all, we have to eat. And technically, I get paid to do the same thing at LinuxGazette - and it allows me to do more than that, but this is my choice; I choose to sit around and think/write/share. That's my right, and I do that as much as I can - the little philosopher bird who has to eat to keep up with philosophy. The problem for many, though, is that to eat one has to do more, and to do more one has to eat. It's a vicious cycle.

So has this anecdote brought about any real changes in the way I think? Not really, but it certainly has given me another perspective to explore. So my philosopher bird side decided to share it.