I've seen the Greatest Generation, the Baby-Boomers, and even Generation X, ponder the need for the high-tech menagerie that has become our daily lifestyles.
The seemingly innocuous gadgets we spend our waking hours in bordeom, in the bathroom and in between, have rooted themselves in a multi-tasking haven that we must think nest utlilizes are five senses and frontal lobe.
Well, we're right, and wrong.
Right, because the last thing we need to do all day is look for a phone booth, or carry a ripped up organizer, or worse, jot things down on little pieces of paper and crumple them up in our pockets. These are the fruits of a congested society that has overworked itself to who knows what end, but, ahh, we have the Palm Pilot, the Razor and the IPhone, and a whole slew of appliances and furnishings that render obsolete human toil past the point of bending over and pushing buttons. And many of these “toys,” hey have light which is good in emergency.
The wrong things are more obvious, and because you haven't though of them yet, and are trying right now, makes me not of this generation, right? Well, that's good too because I don't want to be part of this generation. I don't want to be part of any generation, neither cosmopolitan or timely. I want to be timeless. Simple.
Okay, here are the wrong things:
First, humans got by for milleniums, scratch that, eons without communication such as this. We grew or evolved out of the bubble, a vast and free species that had no choice but to be completely fearless along the way.
Gadgetry, although a benchmark of human ingenuity, is the ultimate way in which forces larger than us become not so much a responsibility based on basic needs of survival, but of one in which man plays the maker he was never supposed to be.
No, I'm not saying that man has a God complex, I'm saying that man has always had a God complex, and really needs to stop.
Yeah, it pays to expand and conquer, as long as you don't know how large the Earth is or how many people are on it.
Simply stated: We have an obligation to rely on the only thing we came here with, our amazing human body. The technology we possess limits the only things that have kept are species alive:intimacy and morals.
Which gets me to my second mistake.
How easy is it to open a porn page on the internet? How simple is it to download the recipe for crystal meth? Where do child predators go for victims?
I'm not saying that these are the only outlets for the internet, television, radio and cell phones, I'm saying that with them the channels of intimacy our convoluted. Personal relationships are the key to healthy societies. Education, yes, is good, but you don't need smarts to love, and you definitely don't need a chat room to feel special.
The changing screen, which I sit rather hypocritically in front of right now, is not the problem; the internet is not the problem, nor is cable.
The issue is who are people talking to? What are they talking about? A trillion cell phones, a billion pic texts and a million ring-back tones are just allowing people to loosely define themselves. Allowing the advertising and the media to saturate the open source and social networks, is homogenizing a brand of people to be up for one thing: rating their fellow man against impossible standards. Appearance is everything, right? Absolutely wrong! Hatefully wrong!
Now, I'm not ugly, I may speak vain at times, but I believe that the course, not where we are at, because it hasn't become that bad yet, is where we need to steer ourselves clear.
Put down and the iphones and MP3 players and multi-task your hands and legs for longer, and look your parents in the eye and not imagine the people on TV are talking in their voice.
Play the part of the human and we will all get out of this thing with our dignity and less plastic waste products.
