What Is the Role of Technology in The Evolution of Culture?

The emergence of new technology will likely cause dramatic changes in government and society. To navigate this complex and dynamic field of technological innovation, the government requires a thorough understanding of the possible future effects of new and emerging technologies on defense, security, and other policy areas. A significant part of this is considering evolving contexts that influence the development, use, and regulation of new technologies, as well as the potential cultural changes they may cause.

A multi-method approach was used to explore these challenges, which included literature reviews and expert interviews. It all began by identifying a wide variety of technological breakthroughs that would shape the future information environment through the reviews of literature and existing data on upcoming technologies. This is followed by the evaluation of the cultural implications of the most significant advancements using focused literature reviews and expert elicitation, using a unique framework developed for the study to capture the cultural impacts of technology change.

What Is the Information Environment?

The information environment includes all processes by which people are exposed to, engage, or interact with information. These include material characteristics (such as infrastructure, which improves connectivity), virtual information processes through which society interacts, and cognitive variables that influence how people receive, process, and act on information.

How Can We Understand the Impact of Emerging Technology on The Evolution of The Culture?

Though difficult to define and characterize unequivocally, we conceptualized culture as the dynamic and evolving socially constructed reality shared by members of a social group and reflected in artifacts in the physical environment. As such, we defined cultural change as a transformation of shared societal ideas, values, and behaviors that shape people’s ways of being in the world.

To better comprehend the cultural impact of technological change, a framework that contextualizes the origins and intended purposes of technological innovations, as well as their corresponding impacts on various aspects of a community’s culture. The framework includes four steps:

1. Recognizing the role of technology as an actant: The first stage considers the nature of technology, including its development, intended uses, expected users, and how use cases may evolve. This step helps to characterize a technology’s potential agency in causing societal change, i.e., its role as an ‘actant’. At this stage, it is also critical to analyze a technology’s potential regulatory context, such as its compliance with ethics, regulations, and the legislative environment.
2. Creating a cultural topography: The second step entails understanding the cultural landscape of a population of interest in four key areas: cultural identities (how a population identifies itself), cultural norms (a population’s accepted, expected, or customary behaviors), cultural values (what a population considers desirable, proper, and good), and perceptual lenses (how societies and individuals determine facts about themselves and others).
3. Ecological interactions between technology and culture: The third step examines how technological change may affect the culture at four levels of interaction between people and their lived environment: people as individuals (the self), human-machine interactions or interpersonal, societal domains (e.g., law enforcement or education) and interactions in more expansive environments (the state, or the physical infrastructure).
4. Cultural impact versus integration: The final step evaluates whether a new technology will promote cultural change or be integrated into current cultural frameworks. This consolidates the framework’s prior three steps.

What Does the Information Environment Tell About The Cultural Impact of Emerging Technologies?

Several technologies are expected to substantially impact the future information environment, including those that may change how people access, consume, store, and communicate information with others. To better understand the cultural implications of technological progress, an in-depth analysis of six such technologies was then performed.

Technologies that are expected to impact the future information environment are listed below;

• Automated information systems 
• Virtual metaverses 
• Augmented/mixed reality 
• Advanced connectivity 
• Human augmentation 
• Information security technology

The adoption of technology in the evolution of all fouraspects of culture: cultural identities, norms, values, and perceptual lenses. They are outlined below:

Cultural Identities:

As some technologies advance, the significance of demographic and geographic delineations of identity (for example, nation-state identification) may decrease. In turn, the significance of transnational and subnational cultural identities may increase as technologies enable greater virtual communication and immersive virtual interactions. Developing technologies may also incorporate cultural identities, such as technological enablement, which is observed as a more noteworthy aspect of one’s identity. Furthermore, cultural identities can be influenced by different communities’ norms and values around technology use.

Example: Human Augmentation Technology and Cultural Identities

Human augmentation refers to technology that improves human abilities, whether physically or cognitively. In the future, these technologies may find uses for improving physical and psychological performance (e.g., augmenting memory and other mental functions), improving service quality and accessibility (e.g., workplace assistive technologies), and facilitating human-machine connectivity via brain-computer interfaces. As these technologies become more deeply integrated with human cognitive, physical, and psychological functions, they might fundamentally change concepts of personhood (i.e., ‘what makes us human’) and culture as a human or interpersonal construct. Human identity may become increasingly interconnected with artificial, technology-enabled features, raising concerns about the extent to which technological augmentation represents a human right. As communities develop different ethical and cultural perspectives on this and other issues regarding human augmentation, new cultural divides might emerge between communities that embrace human augmentation to varying degrees.

Cultural Norms and Values:

Technological change poses numerous challenges to cultural norms and values, notably in three critical areas: privacy, equity, and accountability. Some communities are already experiencing increased tension between accepting new technologies and preserving privacy. This is being driven by the increasing collection and sharing of data by and among technology tools that enable connectivity, communication, and other services. From an equity perspective, there are concerns that new inequalities may arise between communities in access to modern technologies. Accountability challenges arise as a result of the obfuscation of end-user identity facilitated by some technologies. This blurs the lines between responsibility and accountability for risks and consequences in digital spaces.

Example: Cultural Norms and Values in Virtual Metaverses

A metaverse is a persistent virtual environment made up of applications that provide end users with real-time agency and completely immersive or simulated realities. These include facilitating immersive digital interpersonal communication via digital twins and avatars. As a result, extending self-representation to virtual identities is a key feature of virtual metaverses, posing both sociocultural challenges and opportunities. While it may assist in reinforcing values such as privacy and freedom of expression, it may also make it more challenging to establish accountability for harmful, violent, or undesirable behaviors. The increasing role of commercial companies in growing online spaces, particularly virtual metaverses, may reinforce these risks. While some technical advancements promise to increase end users’ agency and autonomy, others limit it by enabling leading actors to consolidate greater control over online spheres. This tension creates concerns about holding actors accountable for commercial practices that may conflict with cultural norms and beliefs, such as the right to privacy.

Determining Facts About Society And Culture:

New technologies will likely enhance cognitive biases that impact people’s ability to comprehend information. Both individuals and communities may struggle to identify and agree on facts about themselves, as well as their shared experiences, identities, and cultural touchpoints. This trend stems from multiple factors, including:

1. technology enables increasingly tailored and personalized information environments.
2. barriers to content moderation in virtual or augmented reality spaces
3. closer integration of digital and non-digital realities, which could affect end users’ ability to distinguish between the two
4. the growing prevalence of artificially generated information in an individual’s information environment.

Example: How Automated Information Systems Challenge Determining Facts about Society and Culture

Automated information systems are computer-based systems that collect, process, store, distribute, and produce information on their own. They can autonomously generate information in a variety of formats, including written text and audiovisual formats. These systems present many challenges to a person’s or community’s ability to determine facts. First of all, artificial models can generate information faster, increasing the quantity and complexity of information that a person or the community must navigate in order to discriminate between fact and fiction. Second, as the underlying technologies mature, the information they produce becomes more authentic and, hence, difficult to distinguish from human-generated content. These two aspects make it more difficult for people to distinguish between artificial and authentic information, as well as facts and falsehoods. Without accurate and effective detection and evaluation frameworks, some experts predict a ‘truth crisis’ in which the collective inability to distinguish between genuine and false information significantly reduces the perceived value of objective facts. In this case, people may no longer value whether the information is accurate; instead, they engage with information that aligns with their existing attitudes and ideas. The declining trust in institutions such as the government amplifies this problem.

Technology and Social Movements:

New and developing technologies have the potential to both empower and constrain social movements, which are critical to fostering socio-cultural change (for example, through advocacy). While social movements may be able to use new technologies to effect sociocultural revolution (for example, through digitally enabled activism), political regimes or other actors may also use technologies against social movements, obstructing their ability to facilitate cultural change.

How Might Emerging Technologies Contribute to Cultural Change?

Though new technology may have significant cultural impacts, not all technologies will cause cultural change. Indeed, some technologies will be integrated into existing cultural frameworks, and technology users will draw on existing cultural frameworks (e.g., norms and values) to interact with them. However, there are several potential areas of significant cultural change at various levels of individual and societal engagement with future technologies.

At The Personal Level:

Technological advancements like human augmentation may raise questions about the fundamental nature of human identity and the biological basis of human experience. Some experts especially point to the technological hybridization of human identity, in which perceptions of identity become increasingly intertwined with technological enablement, resulting in disruptive socio-cultural impacts.

Among Or Between People and Technologies:

Cultural change may result from tensions between personalizing human experiences or information flows and a community’s ability to create shared cultural touchpoints. As evolving technologies help tailor information spaces to individual preferences, communities may find it increasingly difficult to identify and agree on facts regarding our physical, societal, political, and economic realities, as well as culture.

Regarding a Person’s Interaction with Their Broader Environment:

Some upcoming technologies are anticipated to change interpersonal interactions from the physical to the virtual world. The widespread adoption of augmented, mixed, and virtual reality, in particular, suggests significant technological mediation of many or all aspects of a person’s interaction with their environment, influencing interactions and relationships with physical spaces and infrastructure. This growing shift of human activity into virtual spaces could erode the cultural value of physical artifacts (e.g., architecture) while also changing the makeup of physical environments such as cities through technological integration and connectivity.

Across Different Technological Areas:

Cultural change might arise from the fast pace of innovation and adoption of new technologies. Cultural integration of technology can become increasingly complicated as social institutions struggle to incorporate technological changes into existing cultural frameworks or adapt norms and rules of behavior to the capabilities and applications of new technologies. This could enhance the chance of new technologies causing technology-mediated cultural transformation.

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