When Technology Moves Faster Than Culture | by Giles Crouch | Digital Anthropologist | Dec, 2024 | Medium

When Technology Moves Faster Than Culture

Giles Crouch | Digital Anthropologist

5 min read

2 days ago

With so many new technologies coming at us all at once, culture isn’t keeping up. Can it catch up? Here’s how it might.

Photo by Nerses Khachatryan on Unsplash

When cell phones got small enough, men carried them on their belts, women often hung them on their bags. We’d answer them in the middle of a meal or pop out of meetings. It took us a while to figure out the cultural norms of etiquette. Then along came smartphones and shortly after that, social media, cryptocurrencies, blockchain, and Generative AI like ChatGPT and Claude.

All of these technologies have come along and popped into our social fabric so fast that cultural norms, behaviours and customs have lagged behind so much that we’ve ended up with a sort of compound cultural lag. Or we might call it “Networked Cultural Lag.”

So what does this mean and what does it tells us about why we’re struggling to adopt so many technologies coming at us so fast? For technology companies, this will represent significant challenges for business models. For consumers, it is already showing up in how they’re increasingly seeking ways to mitigate technologies in their daily lives. This is an important social signal.

The symptoms of culture lagging against technological advancement can be seen through the ideas of a digital detox, the rise of digital wellness coaches, no phone zones in bars and…