Tuesday, April 8, 2003

The progression of the technology age is scaring the shit out of me. I'm all about progress, and I see a lot of great things that come out of computers and cell phones and satellite television and every other object dependent on the numbers 0 and 1. However, as "connected" as they make us, I feel like they can ultimately degenerate the very things we are trying to keep connected - ourselves. I look around the libraries, the internet lounges, the buddy lists and I see more and more people GLUED to a computer screen, more and more people talking on cell phones. In a Matrix-style image it's like we're dependant on these machines for our livelyhood. Wheras people used to supplant visiting each other with calling each other, now we Instant Message each other instead of even calling each other. We talk to people 5 or 500,000 feet away with our fingers instead of our voices. Our vocabularies are diminishing and our ability to have actual conversations, to really listen and think on our feet, is being replaced by our abilities (or frustrated inabilities) to interpret the meaning of a toneless, expressionless, smiley-face accentuated fragment of a sentence.

Progress is important, but how quickly do we forget how content we were before? I love so many things the computer age has brought us (e.g. that you're able to read this right now), but the fact that I cannot turn off my Instant Messenger without feeling like some part of me is missing from the world, is fucking disgusting. And what happened to letter writing? E-mail?! E-mail is great for practical correspondence, but it carries about as much passion as grocery store flowers. A letter can be like a painting of words - expression through texture (paper), color (ink), and shape (handwriting). Really getting to know someone, to really understand how and what they are all about is one of the most rewarding experiences this world has to offer, and I feel like all these methods of "communicating" are ultimately pushing us further apart.