In principle, the salubrious word “progress” connotes beneficial development, as in progress in science, medicine, understanding, and civil rights. Individuals who espouse modernity and societal development are properly referred to as “progressives.” The printing press, railroad, airplane, telephone, radio, television, penicillin, and vaccination are but a sample of the cornucopia of human developments, ineluctably deserving of the beneficial noun, “progress.”
The development of the revolutionary digital age caused the thematic word to become equivocal. From a noun irrefutably denoting the development of new and useful phenomena, scientific, medical, mechanical, and otherwise, it has morphed into a more empirically descriptive word for “change”; the latter noun denotes something more ubiquitously nuanced and equivocal.
Readers of this blogspace are familiar with our eternal reservations concerning the “progressive” change from natural interaction, i.e., in person or by telephone, to the impersonal “smartphone.” Unfortunately, our previously expressed concern regarding the loss of individuality, spontaneity, and personal affirmation has borne the worrisomely predicted results, confirmed in subsequent academic studies as causing unhealthy feelings of loneliness, anxiety, and depression, especially among the younger generation. Such universally declared “progress” led to a retrogressive and harmful social debacle by substituting an allegedly facile mode of interaction for the previously traditional, salubrious, and humanistic practice.
An analogous aspiration for “progress” resulted in the curtailment of the profoundly rewarding benefits derived from reading print books, as distinguished from digital replications or from spoken literature. The intimate scenario of a soft light, a comfortable, easy chair, and a hand-held book has no equal in terms of personal and contemplative experience. In this regard, we have even enjoyed the tactile pleasure of holding the book and, serially, turning the pages. The intimacy of such private experience is empirically catalytic to the intimate enjoyment of reading.
We also enjoyed the search for information and particular books in our trips to the public library. The successful discovery of the desired information was always satisfying, at times, exciting. Carrying the universe of information in one’s pocket or purse seems to be far less impactful or personally challenging.
It would seem appropriate to distinguish the broad category of technological “advancement” from the empirically salubrious term, “progress.”
-p.
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