Hi I need help for English debate on topic: are we enslaved by technology? In argument the
Debate should be 3 minutes long only
(I will give you 50 points for this)
Answers
cheerleading technology as liberator) – with the possible exception of Princeton philosopher and celebrity debater Peter Singer – presented interestingly nuanced arguments, as did some of the audience members who came to the microphones.
In addition, from my perspective, those who argued in the affirmative (that yes, we are becoming enslaved by technology) offered some illuminating arguments regarding the role of addiction in making the claims of “choice” hollow.
Alastair McGibbon convincingly argued that our increasing dependence on technology for getting us through our days and nights is removing the power of choice. Katina Michael’s amazing long poem then filled in the vast stream of evidence documenting the slowly boiling frog transfer of power and agency from brain, body, and relationship, to an emperor-has-no-clothes mechanism.
Stepping back, one sees that the two sides of the debate can be partitioned into what technology has done and is doing for us (as the technology is liberating side proclaimed), versus what technology has done and is doing to us, as Bernard Keene so aptly pointed out and Nicholas Carr illuminates in depth in his new book, The Glass Cage: Automation and Us [2].
Unfortunately, the two choices, affirmative or negative to the proposition, left out what for me is the reality of our ongoing affair with technology. That is, that technology is the proverbial double-edged sword, both liberating and enslaving. Or to give it an oxymoronic Shakespearean twist – “Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire.” Technology is liberating enslavement – however with the liberation increasingly concentrated in the few and fewer, as McGibbon illuminated in his closing remarks.
My only disappointment was that after the debate the audience swung to the side of liberation, though marginally (49 to 46 percent). I suspect that the prestige of Peter Singer, his getting in the last word, along with his sweeping aside of having to deal with questions of addictive harm – allowing fence straddlers to carry on clicking, flicking, sweeping, swiping, and scrolling, a.k.a., business as usual, sans guilt – might have had something to do with the swing.
Peter Singer’s case was, for me, shallow, almost clichéd, from a technology-as-liberator perspective. His view that, so what if we as a species are eventually replaced, is kind of flippant. I could be wrong, but the feeling that comes across is that he really didn’t devote much time to his presentation, or to taking the debate seriously. I think, interestingly, he appeared surprised by the number of people who raised their hands when he asked whether they had consulted their smartphones. He said they were in the minority, but not very convincingly. Regarding his and Antony Loewenstein’s hard rock case for techno-liberation, the eradication of smallpox – maybe not so fast. (See “Resurrecting Smallpox? Easier than You Think