| Refrigerators with IP addresses? Excuse me? The
Playstation 3 (mere conjecture at this point and time) is going to meld
everything into one box? Email on my wireless phone? I'm missing
something here with the globalization of everything...
Humanity has somehow come to the conclusion that because the internet "is
working out so well" that everything else needs to be connected to everything
else too. This is along the similar lines of logic that brought us
those pillars of humanity -- Dollywood and N'Sync. "This worked out
ok, so now what we need is about 80 times MORE of it!".
Everyone connected to everything. Everything connected to everyone.
Why?
I like it that people can't get a hold of me sometimes. I don't own
a cellphone, or a pager. I don't have voicemail. Sure I have
a phone and answering machine, but they hardly ever get used. I'm generally
not concerned about the world in general and what's going on at work. If
you can't reach me, it's for a reason.
It is admittedly a bit ironic, that someone who's been online as long as
I have sit here and write an article about how annoying it is that everything
is becoming connected to everything else and that the personal touch and
feel of humanity is dying. And this is not some great epiphany to me
or anything. I'm not Paul on the road to Damascus blinded by the
overwhelming light.
No, it's just it is now finally starting to really annoy me.
This is several months in the making, this rant. Initially it was meant
with a different purpose in mind but now things have changed slightly and
I feel even more strongly on this point now.
This isn't about sitting on IRC for 6 hours a night. This isn't about
having an ICQ Contacts List the length of of a Stephen King novel. It
has nothing to do with whether or not you spend more time on Slashdot than
reading the local newspaper. It's about the impersonalization, the
genric branding that we as humans seem to be falling into more and more.
This may sound like a stretch to some, but as we're becoming more and more
"wired" (god I hate that word), we're relying less and less on each other
as individuals. Almost to the point of where we can be irritated by
the mere presence of everyone else on this planet. Pull over to the
side of the road to ask for directions? Nawww, let's just consult the
in-car GPS. If someone volunteers you directions? Get away man,
I have my GPS! That's what it's there for... and oh let me tell you
how much I paid for it...
So what happens then when we face a crisis that technology just can't deal
with? Something personal.... something requiring actual human interaction
and co-dependency? We get to wade through the layers of voicemail,
pagers, the Caller ID's, the answering machines, and cellphones. The
"I'm not available right now, but if you'll leave a message I *might* get
back to you. If you're high on my priorities list, and if I come back
and check this message in time".
It's amazing how easily we let things such as these get in the way of basic
human communication. Instead of enhancing our communication, it simply
impersonalizes it, oftentimes to a level we no longer feel comfortable with.
And then it's hard to change things back the way they were, because
it's not just ourselves we have to deal with then, but also others. And
that can make it all the more uncomfortable.
So with that in mind, I can't say as though I really care for all this
technology. A medium is just that -- a medium to be used to convey
thoughts, feelings, etc. And it's not the medium that's to blame, but
rather how we use it, what we do with it, and whether we use it to close
ourselves off, or to build.
Quite franlkly right now, I'm only seeing more and more walls being built,
not bridges. And that doesn't bode well for us, folks.
-- Rik A. Kyser
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