With the coming of modernity came the possibility of the idea of technology corrupting culture, says Ted Striphas in an interview posted at Medium.com. The time period is what struck me. By illustrating one paragraph from the interview with historical photos from from the Old Pics Archive Twitter feed, I would like to look at how our relationship with technology goes back far longer than Striphas seems to suggest in the interview. The jarring juxtaposition of text and images, of old and new associations below is a useful reminder.

“The face is one of the most culturally-charged aspects of the human body, so it’s little wonder why turning it into a computer would raise difficult questions.

The future will involve not only sophisticated engineering, then, but also efforts to redefine how people make sense our bodies and the specific parts to which we decide to attach computational tools.

That’s largely a social question, however much it may overlap with the technical.”