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Another GAMMA project was to develop a Scale of Technophobia for the Department of Communication of the Canadian Federal Government. It soon became clear that what we were really measuring was neophobia. People, who had just told us how they had affectionately named their car Mabel, would say that they hate technology. When the contradiction was pointed out, they would protest that Mabel is not really technology. Turns out that technology refers only to unfamiliar machines. What they hated was unfamiliar things, whether machines or whatever.
Fear of new things makes good evolutionary sense. As long as things remain the same, there is no danger. It's new things which are threatening. However, there is considerable evidence of a need for stimulation, which is satisfied by novel stimuli. This need drives us to explore and manipulate new things to remove the danger or threat of danger. Having explored and manipulated a novel stimulus, it is no longer novel, and we have to seek other novel stimuli to satisfy our need for stimulation. Perhaps exploration becomes functionally autonomous - initially we explore to remove danger but eventually we explore just to explore. Abraham Maslow argues that one of the reasons so few of us are able to realise the full human potential is because the need to know is limited by the fear of knowing [MASLOW]. |
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