Is technology killing literature?

Today our world is dominated technology, and technology is dominated by corporate giants like Microsoft and Google. Companies such as these have made the ‘Silicon Valley’ into a not uncommon household phrase. The success stories of the giants who built these companies from the ground up are the fodder for inspirational films the world over. Men like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs are becoming role models for the next generation of business men.

In the society dominated by garage start-ups, the merits of the self-starting genius entrepreneur are highly lauded, and rightly so. These men built their companies from nothing out of sheet genius. However similar to the way in which Hollywood takes the art of acting and turns it into reality TV studded paparazzi madness, Silicon Valley has turned the concept of the genius self-starter into almost a cult. The term ‘college dropout’ has become a badge of honor to be worn around Silicon Valley, along with your little black patent cubes and your Google glasses.

src: xkcd.com/971

This society has built itself up on the ideals that technology is the be-all-end-all answer to all the worlds questions. For every problem, for every issue of modern life, there is an app for that. The more that technology takes over and solves problems for us, the less we feel we need to know. It is no longer important to memorize material, the internet has it right there! We as a society have become obsessed with the quickest, newest, sleekest technology on the market.

There is no end to articles expounding on the virtues of teaching programming and technology in schools today. These arguments are all good and well in the theoretical world, teaching student actual practical skills instead of the archaic knowledge we currently impart on them, but perhaps this is not the case. These days technology is the ‘in’ trend and up-to-the-second real-time information overload is the name of the game, what if classical knowledge is being left behind?

This generation (and those surrounding it) is becoming preoccupied with the merits of technology and determined to dismiss anything not reliant on the latest cloud computing and machine learning as archaic and irrelevant to today’s culture. I admit that I am a child of this very generation, just look at the grammar of this blog post for proof. In all of this rushing towards the future something very important is slowly being left behind

The columnist Evgeny Morozov recently chose to focus his cynical insight onto Silicon Valley recently. He did not write about one of the college dropout phenomenon, nor one of the garage basement startups. He wrote about the well-read-Ezra-Pound-quoting-Harvard-grad Tim O’Reilly.

In his introspective article on Tim O’Reilly, Evgeny Morozov describes what he calls “The most dangerous man in Silicon Valley” having gotten to his position not through ingenious and brilliant ideas (though O’Reilly has both), these things do not set one apart from the masses in silicon valley. O’Reilly used his humanities background from Harvard, his knowledge of classics, his ability to quote Socrates. How many Silicon Valley entrepreneurs do you think could quote The Art of War, arguably the most important treatise on business of all time? 

O’Reilly’s knowledge of subjects outside of the slim field of technology was enough to win him Silicon Valley. Sure this was not all it took, but would he be where he is without it? In all the technological rush it is even more important not to leave classical knowledge behind. We may still technically be ‘taught’ these things in schools and universities, but our society is no longer ‘learning’ them, they are slowly ceasing to recognize the relevance of these things that are now, perhaps more than ever, important to our world.