While there’s a risk of deifying our technological progress, I think that the nature of the information age has raised some really interesting commentaries on our view of ourselves as a society.
Interestingly…or, perhaps, strangely, depending on your point of view…this occurred to me by way of a navigation app.
Just before re-locating to New England, I was turned on to a nifty little smartphone application called Waze. If you haven’t heard of it, this is basically a crowd-sourced GPS application that provides turn-by-turn directions just as your GPS would, while also permitting you to report things like road construction, speed traps, and accidents. Waze’s servers then collect this real-time data, determine where traffic is completely clogged, and then anyone navigating with Waze gets re-routed around the pending hazards.
What’s interesting about Waze is that it incorporates a sort of game component: the more hazards you report, the more points you earn, and eventually you “level up.” This keeps people motivated to use the application, which is important, because the more people who use the app, the better the app becomes. Even driving around with the application running in the background and not using it for navigation lets you take advantage of hazard reports from other drivers around you.
So, what does this spiffy little technological innovation say about culture? I didn’t really appreciate this until I moved and got the pleasure of dealing with Boston traffic every day. The sort of traffic that transforms Interstates into parking lots. I’ve always preferred dedicated devices for things like navigation, because, honestly Garmin has always done it the best. Having input about traffic data has become invaluable when dealing with this volume of traffic for my daily commute, though, and being able to get around major traffic jams has saved my punctuality a couple of times.
And, anyone who knows me will tell you, my punctuality needs all of the saving that it can get.
The cultural aspect, though, is that this is bigger than just being about my convenience. Using this application has made me feel a sense of responsibility to other drivers, because I know that my reports are helping them get around the traffic in which I just unexpectedly found myself stuck, or to avoid getting caught in the speed trap that I just drove by. I feel motivated, not by the game aspect of this application, but by the knowledge that I know that I’m helping other drivers, and that other drivers are helping me, with the shared goal of surviving the least attractive two and a half hours of our day.
We are, in fact, our brother’s keeper. As it turns out, there’s an app for that.