The relationship between technology and humanity: perspective

Have you ever thought about the relationship between technology and humanity?

Believe it or not, it is part of your everyday lives, and you can start shaping it.

I am personally in the middle of an amazing journey. A journey made of personal and professional experience, local and international cultural contaminations, human and technological considerations. The convergence of all of this— and much more—is causing me to being deeply fascinated by the relationship between technology and humanity and the idea of expanding our Comfort Zones as a result.

My professional life brought me to the US a few years ago. Even though I thought I was prepared to embrace such a new life—a life I strongly wanted—I realized immediately that I was not only stretching but also rather jumping miles away from my Comfort Zone. I was asked to face, understand, and manage too many different things all at once, all without the right preparation (does such a thing exist?), all so far from me.

Me, aka Federica, a girl, a woman from a small town called Moie in the Marche region of Italy who moved to Milan first, where she spent eight years before living in New York. A woman who still has—and wanted to keep—a strong sense of her cultural identity while developing an even stronger sense of openness and curiosity to understand everything that is different from what she knows already.

I am a passionate marketer and I work in technology. I am inspired by the intersection of hardware, software, and artificial intelligence and curious to explore their impact on human lives and consumer behaviors.

That work, coupled with my personal journey facing individual and cultural changes, triggered my interest in exploring what is happening and how we react when faced with change.

That’s the reason this article is on my website called “Comfort Zone Shake-Up”: a platform that represents my endeavor to inspire, motivate, and support the need to embrace change—because change is inevitable.

Change is inevitable

Yes, indeed change is reality. Take a look at the latest video from the World Economic Forum the International Organization for Public-Private Cooperation. The Forum engages the foremost political, business and other leaders of society to shape global, regional and industry agendas and it is a source of great food for thought I recommend.

With the power of just images and sounds, the video conveys a privileged perspective—a macro perspective—on multiple changes and among all of them on the relationship between technology and humanity.

The relationship between technology and humanity is such an enormous and fundamental topic in our lives that sometimes it is not easy to understand from where to start talking about it.

One-way to look at this relationship – a sort of first look – is by using different perspectives: macro and micro perspectives.

Macro and micro perspectives

The concept of perspective is not a new topic for me. If you know my POV on time management, you can probably imagine where I am going with this.

Along the way in my life, I’ve started to be fascinated by the concept of perspective, and I’ve started reflect deeply on it.

If you’ve never thought about perspective, and to clarify what I have in mind when I use this concept, I invite you to think about it in terms of images. The best image I can think of to describe the meaning of perspective is Google Maps.

In Google Maps you can zoom in and zoom out; you can move from a macro to a micro perspective almost instantaneously. And what I really like about this concept is that there is no judgment between macro and micro: we are not saying that one perspective is better than another one. It is just a different way to look at the same reality.

Technology and Humanity

I believe that macro and micro could be an excellent way to look at the relationship between technology and humanity too. What is happening at a macro level – as we saw in the video from the World Economic Forum – is made by what is happening at a micro level in our everyday lives.

Our daily actions, behaviors, and beliefs count. And they count much more than what we think. Every macro situation is made of micro-actions. Micro-steps build up on macro achievement.

We saw that already when we talked about time management or New Year’s resolutions. It’s time to add the relationship between technology and humanity to the list. Technology is a tool that should be mindfully used to augment our lives.

As individuals, we all have great power. We all have – at a micro level – the ability to shape our lives, and in doing so, we have the power to have an impact in the world we live in.

With our behavior, with our daily actions, with how we use technology in our everyday lives, we can actively contribute to shaping our lives and to the overall relationship between technology and humanity.

That is the way I want to look at the relationship between technology and humanity. As I like to point out as a comfort zone shake-up philosophy, we should start with us, expand our comfort zone and find our WOW. And we can do that at the intersection between technology and humanity.

Uncle Ben says to Peter Parker “with great power comes great responsibility” and I believe it’s the way to go.

Photo by NASA on Unsplash