In my fiction class, we have been reading each other's short stories. One person wrote his story from the perspective of an alien sent here to warn us about another alien race that was planning to attack Earth. This was twenty or thirty years in the future. He decided that since humans were so overly occupied with technology, that he would get the word out in the form of a blog, so the story was written in blog posts.
Well, when he tried to talk to humans face-to-face, it didn't work. He HAD to use things like social media or no one would listen to him. It was our preoccupation with technology, multiplied by ten. Since no one EVER voted, he was the only one who did, and ended up being president because he, the only voter, voted for himself. As a conclusion to the story, he ended up sending the other alien race iPhones, and they were so endlessly distracted that they forgot all about attacking Earth.
Also, I was on Tumblr last night and saw a pretty long (and, I think, valid) rant about how the person writing it hated "Western culture", because of the very issues about technology that we discuss in our class. I actually think the term "amusing ourselves to death" was used, and the whole idea that "Orwell was wrong; Huxley was right", and a comic illustrating this point. The final panels said, "In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us." I thought the person had some very interesting and valid points.
So what are you arguing? That we truly are wasting away our lives with internet? You bring up some interesting points, but you never really take a stance on the issue (although I assume it has to do with the overwhelming use of technology).
ReplyDeleteI personally don't think technology is a bad thing. It's pretty recent technology so people are so intrigued and fascinated with it that they just want to play with it. Soon they will get tired of it (hopefully) and put it to good use.
Clay Shirky's second book, Cognitive Surplus (we will read his first book in the next few weeks) talks about how in the recent decades we have experienced an overload of freetime. Now that the average person works bout 40 hours a week, we have so much freetime we don't know what to do with ourselves. We occupied our time with TV. Now we switch it up for the web. Shirky saw this as a step forward (as do I) because we are not just mindlessly absorbing images, but we are interacting and able to form opinions and leave comments. Instead of just reading a newspaper, we can comment on newspaper articles online, etc.
Good grief, the idea of a world to have evolved to the point where we don't even talk to people face to face makes my skin crawl. And while we may never see it, our grandchildren might. However, I suppose it places much more meaning on things like handwritten letters. As a person of the first social media generation, I remember when I got a handwritten letter from my grandmother and it meant so much more to me than a message from her would have been on Facebook.
ReplyDeleteCould we have a link to the Tumblr post? One of the most powerful thing about having this blog is that you can hyperlink to your sources.
ReplyDeleteI think that for the most part, technology is really quite good, kind of like how Anne Frank believes that all humans are naturally good. However, we do have to be careful of the attitudes we have about technology and not let it become a monster.