The other day, back in England, I took the daily commuter train on the way home from London back to my parents house and noticed that everyone had headphones in, or was buried in their Blackberry, or walking their "dog" on their Nintendo DS and generally not interacting at all.
How is any of that not interacting? The Crackberry, most obviously, is a device used largely for communicating. The iPod and the Nintendo game are devices for listening to music and playing games, both of which are cultural interactions in a broader sense. The fact that the people they're interacting with aren't physically present makes the interaction different, but not less interesting or important.
At the same time as the iPod is a great thing, those telltale white headphones trailing out of your ears might as well be a sign saying "don't even try to talk to me". It's a very effective barrier.
And what's wrong with that? Is there some sort of moral obligation I'm not aware of to be open to conversation with anyone who happens to bump into you?
Good fences make good neighbors, as they say. I don't see why people having more control over whom they interact with when is a bad thing.
I, personally, enjoy random interactions and all that, but not everyone does, and even I don't all the time, so why not allow people more options?
Voicemail, sat nav, text messages are of course very useful, as i think this is the main reason why most technology develops, for functionality, to make every day tasks a bit easier, but then the intention becomes distorted and technology becomes about needing to have it, the materialistic urge, not for pure practicality.
That's sort of an unavoidable part of human nature. Hoarding resources and displaying your prowess at procuring said resources are both urges with deep roots in human psychology.
So I got as far as functionality vs. materialism, the useful vs. what seems to be somewhat alien.
It may seem to be alien, but it's not. It's also very functional - attracting mates, acquiring social status and so on. You've got a false dichotomy going on.
Increasingly people rely on, or are given no option other than technology.
And society is a gazillion times more efficient, which means that, collectively, we're able to achieve more and more and more people are getting access to a better standard of living. Again, this is not a problem.
Booking tickets to a gig, writing e-mails rather than letters, cinema tickets with touch tone phones and no human being is involved at all. Everything is available delivered to your front door without having to leave your home.
100% positive.
My mother told me a story of the days when her bank manager would cycle past her house in the mornings and leave a note on the windscreen of her car along the lines of "you better put some money in your account soon!"
Cute or creepy depending on your take on it, but, really, I would take internet banking over this any day of the week. I don't want to have to interact with another person for something I could do just as well myself.
Impersonal communication is encouraged, and basic knowledge like knowing how to lay out a letter or spell is all done for you with wizards and spell checkers, or letters simply aren't written where an informal e-mail will suffice.
Letters can be nice, but I prefer to think of them as a special sort of project rather than a practical method of communication. When I want to make someone a crafty little gift, a letter written on nice paper can be perfect, but when I just want to actually transmit information and get a response, fuck snail mail.
Will we end up in a world where you never have to talk face to face with anyone?
Here's hoping.
I like talking to people I choose to talk to when I am in the mood to talk to people. I don't like [i]having[/i] to talk to people to get things done.
I suspect many others feel the same. Face-to-face conversations fill different needs than, say, text message conversations do, and most people still feel the need to interact physically and still do so. It's just nice to be able to set boundaries where you don't have to when you don't want to. It's like abortion - every child a wanted child, and every conversation a wanted conversation.
The possible consequences of a world with no interaction are innumerable; but in its most basic form, people will just stop knowing how to interact, their interpersonal skills non existent.
This, frankly, is a load of bullshit. If anything, in my experience, it's the opposite - people who have the whole world opened to them through technological means of communication tend to have better people skills and are more sensitive to things like cultural difference and so on then someone who only deals with people in the face-to-face sense.
Is this already happening? Would living then become about just surviving?
No, the opposite. Most of human history, for most people, has just been about surviving, because between the advent of agriculture and the full flowering of industrialization, no one had much leisure time, few had any education worth speaking of, there was no ability to travel or communicate across long-distances. Most people spent every day of their pitifully short lives trying to scrape a subsistence existence out of the mud, never leaving their immediate area before dying in ignorance and poverty.
And another question that needs addressing: why is it that we are all so reliant on technology that ushers us into our own world, and blocks out the rest?
We're not. We furnish our inner worlds with things from the outer world. Someone who listens to Radiohead on their iPod in London is sharing a cultural connection with someone else who enjoys the same music in Hong Kong or Topeka or wherever, and more often than not they're going and reading and talking about the things they like with other people on an increasingly broad geographic basis. Discussing your favorite band on an internet message board is absolutely a cultural interaction as valid and real as arguing over the price of tomatoes with the old man selling fruits and vegetables from the stand on the corner.
As the world becomes increasingly ugly,
Overall, the world is a better place almost every day. I do not have time for people who want to wallow in pessimistic bullshit.
Technology, the iPod, the PSP, whatever it may be, all encourage blocking out the immediate real world and involving yourself in another world of fiction or fancy.
This is a false distinction. All reality is fiction, because we don't interact with real objects, we interact with the mental contructs our brains assemble out of our sensory input, using various cultural narratives that we've absorbed from growing up in a certain paradigm. There is no "real world" and no experience is more or less "authentic" than any other.
At university a lot more boys played Pro Evo football on the playstation than actual football in the field outside.
Why is that a problem? OK, it could lead to obesity, but aside from that, what's the issue? |
