Monday, January 30, 2017

The Acculturation of Technology and Ideas

I am writing this, not in the role of scientist or scholar, but rather as that of a thinker exploring new concepts. My usage of 'acculturate' is nonstandard as the word is usually applied to interactions between different cultures but it is the perfect word for the inclusion of new technology and ideas into behavior and narrative and I could find no other suitable term. It is not a neologism, which I deplore, but it is a significantly different usage although describing similar dynamics.
Acculturation, in the sense that I am using it, has been studied. There are theories. The Theory of Diffusion being foremost. There are celebrated and brilliant books such as 'The Structure of Scientific Revolutions' by Thomas S. Kuhn. There are historical and anthropological studies. What interests me however are the limits of acculturation such as the plasticity of the human brain.
Acculturation is a spectrum of behavioral accommodation to new technology and ideas distributed through a given population anchored by childhood exposure and living memory which is governed by brain plasticity, cultural inhibition, and context: database, paradigm, and narrative. There are, as Kuhn found, significant limits to significant change and these limits are in the range of generational transfer. Standards for one generation are fairly set for that generation's flourishing, some twenty to thirty years.
Increasing the rate of innovation pushes that dynamic and the human brain to and beyond their limits. The results are fairly chaotic.

To be continued....